The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection

Darwin, Charles

ISBN 10: 185958070X / ISBN 13: 9781859580707

Published by Senate, 1994

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged.

Seller Inventory # wbs7865496580

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection
• Publisher: Senate
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 185958070X
• ISBN 13: 9781859580707
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 420 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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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