The Origin of Species

This book gets five stars from me for Charles Darwin's original text and for the impact of his thinking on the world. People in Darwin's time were ignorant of many discoveries taken for granted in modern science, and the fact that he was able to construct such a thorough and nuanced argument for natural selection despite some key pieces of evidence being unavailable to him is truly remarkable. Before reading I was concerned that the language might be inaccessible, but Darwin writes in a pleasurable Victorian style that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has read novels of that era. The book is of course imperfect, with the most regrettable mistake that Darwin makes easily being his repeated use of terms such as “savages” or “lower races” to describe people of color. For a man so ahead of his time when it came to his biological theories, that he was unable to see through the prejudices of the day is disappointing.

The central idea, that of natural selection being achieved through descent with modification, had been proposed before (as Darwin himself makes clear in his appendix). Darwin makes the concept scientifically compelling for the first time in world history by providing mountains of evidence from his own expeditions and experiments. This edition's introduction by George Levine does a good job of placing Darwin's argument into its historical context. Darwin supplies so much evidence, some of which admittedly might be tedious to read, because he is tasked with refuting both creationism (or, as it was known then, natural theology) and the Lamarckian view of evolution. Lamarck accepted that organisms evolved over time, but he thought that use of the body in certain ways was the primary cause of this change—that is, he erroneously thought that a giraffe could stretch its neck over its lifetime, and that the increased length of the neck would be passed on to its offspring. Darwin's approach to these differing points of view is more conciliatory than his detractors might expect: he leaves room for the possibility of limited influence by Lamarckian mechanics, and several passages contain religious language. Darwin sidesteps any discussion of humanity's true genesis, but Origin's implications on the topic were not lost on his contemporaries.

A few words on this particular Barnes and Noble Classics edition: this series of books is B&N's way of eliminating practically all the costs of book publishing apart from manufacturing. B&N achieves this goal by republishing almost exclusively books in the public domain (books old enough that their copyright protection has expired). Unfortunately, this business model means that many seminal works are missing from the series, and that many useful supplementary materials are missing from the books that are included. This deficiency is most glaring in the Comments & Questions section of this edition. The teaching of Darwinian views in public schools was a contentious political issue in the U.S. as recently as the Bush administration, which is when this edition was published. However, the most recent commentary in this edition is from 1892! Barnes and Noble is evidently unwilling to pay to license quotations from any more recent sources, regardless of how relevant that commentary might be to the contemporary reader.

George Levine's introduction is nice, and his notes are helpful enough, though I wish he had written more of them. Rather irritatingly, he leaves several passages of French, quoted by Darwin in the appendix, untranslated. Frankly, it would have been better to have notes from an evolutionary biologist as opposed to a literature professor. Many gaps in Darwin's knowledge are explained by genetics, tectonic shift, evidence of Cambrian and pre-Cambrian life forms, and evidence of mass extinction events. As someone who was obsessed with paleobiology as a child and retains a decent amount of that knowledge, I could recognize where modern science fills in the gaps. However, for anyone who is reading Origin as their introduction to natural selection, I would recommend looking for another edition with notes by a scientist. Presumably, rigorous scientific footnotes were not written for this edition because Barnes and Noble was as parsimonious as possible with this series of books.

Origin is certainly one of the most impactful books in the world, and I would recommend it to anybody interested so that they can grasp the full complexity and weight of Darwin's argument. However, Darwin's first version of the theory is understandably dated. To truly understand the complete corpus of evidence backing Darwin's core idea, any reader would also have to consult more contemporary works.