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A beautiful book from Easton Press, this one from the 100 Greatest Books Ever Written series. Black leather binding, gilt lettering and blocking on cover, page-end gilt, hubbed spine, attractive red moire endpapers, printed on archival quality acid-neutral paper (won't yellow over time), attached satin marker. From an interview on the Five Best Books on evolution (https://fivebooks.com/best-books/evolution-jerry-coyne/) chosen by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne: ...Your first choice, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species... Tell me why you chose it, when you first read it and why it inspired you. The reason why I chose The Origin is because of all the books that have ever been written on science that are accessible to the layperson, this is the most important. It’s the one book you have to have read if you want to be considered an educated person. An educated person is someone who knows at least a little bit about the major disciplines in human endeavour. And in biology, this is what you need to know – not only historically but also contemporaneously, because Darwin was right, and still is right, about so many things. I first read The Origin as an undergraduate. I’ve read it every year or two since then, so I must have read it 20 times. Each time I read it I get something out of it. I think it was Freud who said that, historically, there have been two great revolutions in human thought spurred by science over history. The first was the [Copernican] discovery that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. The second was the discovery that humans are just animals who evolved, like all other animals. And that was from Darwin. To read The Origin properly, you must put yourself in the position of a Victorian reader – who is religious, who thinks humans have been specially created – and see how your worldview is turned inside out by these 500-odd pages of prose. You actually participate, when you read this book, in the revolution in humanity’s worldview, in its self-image, that took place in the latter part of the 19th century. The Origin came out 150 years ago, and it’s still readable, it’s still accessible. Isn’t it quite hard to get through? It is written in Victorian prose. But if you can read George Eliot or Jane Austen, I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with it. The difficulty comes with trying to unpack what he says about science in some places. His chapters on hybridism are pretty dire. Sometimes he gets deeply confused himself. He wasn’t right about everything, and that’s why I recommend the annotated version... Do all biology students read the original Darwin? No, they don’t. You’d be surprised how many evolutionary biologists haven’t read The Origin. Professionals! None of the biology students at the University of Chicago read it. I tried to make my undergraduates read it in class and they balked. They don’t want to read 500 pages of Victorian prose. So then I give them an abridged version, which is not really satisfactory. They don’t even like that. That’s what led me to write my own book. A lot of the evidence in the book is taken from Darwin, but it’s written in a way that makes it more accessible. What I liked about reading Darwin was this strong sense of him as a working naturalist. He came up with this world-changing theory, but he did so by looking at pigeons. It’s the constant and very detailed observation of animals and plants. He was definitely an inductive reasoner, building up the big picture from details. One thing people don’t realise about The Origin is that the rhetoric is magnificent. It’s built on anecdotes and details, all of which are carefully designed to one single end, and it gradually dawns on the reader that Darwin is right. What he’s doing is assailing you from all sides with evidence from different areas of biology – from animal breeding (to show that natural selection can work because artificial selection does), from geography, from embryology. He didn’t have much of a fossil record, so he doesn’t talk a lot about fossils, but he does talk about vestigial organs. And all that comes together to point to one ineluctable conclusion – that evolution happens and probably by natural selection. All the details are carefully chosen from a much larger series of details that Darwin never published. The Origin was supposed to be an abstract for a much larger book, a bit of which still survives and is called The Red Book. He wasn’t going to write The Origin as it stands, but he was forced to because he had competition. Alfred Russel Wallace had come up with the same idea. So Darwin wrote it quickly – otherwise it would have been even longer. It’s the evidence that convinced people more than anything else. You can’t just say, “This is my theory about how things work” and have it persuade people without supporting data. That’s why Darwin was such a success and Alfred Russel Wallace wasn’t. Wallace published a short note in 1858, and that was it. Darwin supported his theory with all these details. It’s just magisterial. He spent years writing to naturalists, to breeders, to obscure people in different corners of the world and collecting all this stuff. Then he built it into an edifice which changed the world. We’re still feeling the repercussions of it today, particularly in America where people absolutely refuse to believe it, simply because it goes against their religious beliefs. Darwin has this nice line in the conclusion, about how “no one now objects” to gravity but when Isaac Newton first proved its existence, Leibnitz said it was an “occult” force and subversive of religion. I guess it takes a long time for people to accept these things. That was part of his rhetorical strategy as well. If you read the famous last line of The Origin, he goes back to the idea of planets cycling around each other and around the sun according to the law of gravity, and compares that to his law of natural selection causing evolution. But for some reason it has taken people longer to accept evolution than gravity... BCES2/2jg5