Origin of Species

Darwin, Charles

ISBN 10: 1879557002 ISBN 13: 9781879557000

Publisher: Audio Scholar, 1994

Synopsis

Publisher: New York : P. F. Collier Publication date: 1902 Subjects: Evolution Natural selection Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

About this title

Review:

It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable.

To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here.

Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T. H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement. --Mary Ellen Curtin, Amazon.com

Review:

"Why does Darwin's theory matter now? Because it is the basis of modern biology and much medical research; it provides a tool with which to understand the natural world; it offers a deeper, if imperfect, understanding of our behaviour, about where we came from and where we might be going" (Observer)

"The single best idea anybody ever had" (Daniel Dennet, philosopher)

"The most important book ever written" (New Scientist)

"No other book has so transformed how we look at the natural world and mankind's origins" (Sunday Telegraph)

"There are few books that I read more than once but The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin is one" (David Attenborough)

About this edition

• Publisher: Audio Scholar
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1879557002
• ISBN 13: 9781879557000
• Binding: Audio Cassette