redfiona99 | Book Review - The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

I can see why some of Darwin's language has to be apologised for, it's very Victorian and of that era where racism tried to use science to justify itself. However, large chunks of the apology and contextualising sound like they should be for 'On the Descent of Man' rather than 'Origin of the Species'. It's a bit odd.

Despite probably agreeing with Wallace's politics, I don't like his attempt to claim evolutionary theory for the left. I can see why it's tempting - see also, counteracting the eugenicists - but the thing about science is, it doesn't belong to either wing. Stephen Jay Gould has a wonderful piece about this in one of his books, about a Soviet scientist who was mocked because he reported on co-operation being a strategy in Arctic tundra, and how he *must* have been misled by his politics, because we all "know" that evolution is always competitive. Except, of course, the Soviet scientist was right, and co-operation between whatever the species were was the better strategy, because evolution is more than just organism vs organism, it's organism vs the environment as well.

Science is, beware of those who distort it to political ends.

Actually about the book -

It's very discursive. You can almost hear Darwin pulling up a chair to the fireplace to discuss this idea he's had. And he's thought about it a lot.

It's also very cleverly written, starting with something the reader knows about (the human breeding of pigeons) then expanding slowly from that to the new stuff, but returning to that base whenever Darwin needs a clear, easy-to-understand example.

It's a complete refutation of the 'one great man makes a giant leap for human understanding' way of looking at scientific progress, with Darwin being very careful to say where and who he has got information from and whose ideas he's building on (even if he's retested as much of the info as he can and tested his theories as best as he can). He's also a lot nicer about his fellow scientists than a look of books today are.

I like that Darwin states the parts where his theory might not explain everything, and that he uses observation to try to plug those gaps.

He might have been able to cover more detail in the book if he stopped apologising for the amount of stuff he couldn't put in.

Looking backwards from what we know now, it's amazing how close Darwin gets to being right about most of it, and a lot of his uncertainties could only have been cleared up once genes and sequencing were discovered.

There's a couple of points where he wanders down paths that turned out to be dead ends (recapitulation theory is bunk) and we've still not got a 'how' of instincts, but given the information Darwin had to work with, he's right more than he's wrong.

It's pretty much a must read for scientists, and it's reasonably accessible to non-scientists, and a fairly straight-forward read once you've got used to certain Victorian writing quirks.

Definitely worth reading.

The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins
Darwinian impacts : an introduction to the Darwinian revolution by D. R. Oldroyd
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins
The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches by Charles Darwin
The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpretation of a Historical Myth by Peter J. Bowler
Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated by Steve Jones

A solid set of suggestions. I've read one of them, but never written it up for LibraryThing and used to own one of the others (The Selfish Gene) until it went missing during one of the house moves.