January Books 6) The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin

[nwhyte]

For several years in the 1990s I gave tutorials on Darwin and evolution in support of Peter Bowler's history of science course in Belfast, but I had never actually read the book that started it all. My recommendation to the casual reader would be to skip about half of it. Darwin basically has three startling ideas here, and the chapters where he

Comments

[sashajwolf]

The third new element introduced by Darwin is the enormity of geological time.

Surely he got that from James Hutton, via Lyell, whose books he had read? Hutton famously wrote of the history of the earth, "We find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end." He also had some insight into the principle of natural selection, although he seems to have thought it operated only to produce new races within species, rather than being responsible for speciation itself.

[gareth_rees]

he has precisely one sentence about the relevance of this to humanity

To make up for that, he did write another book (partly) about that subject. Remember that he was under some time pressure with Origin (e.g. lack of proper references).

[nickbarnes]

As I understand it, "evolution", at the time, had a teleological sense: it could be taken to mean the literal "unfolding" of a hidden, existing, design. This meaning is contrary to Darwin's idea.

Many people, for many years, had observed changing forms in the fossil record, and had applied the word "evolution" to it.

Gould - unsurprisingly - has quite a good essay on the pre-Darwinian uses of the word.