Questions About The Origin of Species

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Why isn't the full title ever given? It is: On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life.

Eric Bruen You ask why the full title is never given, yet I see it is right here on goodreads, just above your question - Original Title: On The Origin of Specie…moreYou ask why the full title is never given, yet I see it is right here on goodreads, just above your question - Original Title: On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle For Life. In print, the title page of my folio society edition also gives the full title. So your question is irrelevant. The full title is given, in 2 cases that I have right before me. As to why it isn't always given, I'd guess that its length makes it cumbersome, and perhaps the term 'favoured races' could be misinterpreted and taint the purpose of work.(less)

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WAS DARWIN AN ATHEIST?

Domhnall Maybe the point of the question is to enquire if Darwin arrived at his theory because he was an atheist. The sequence is the other way around. Darwin …moreMaybe the point of the question is to enquire if Darwin arrived at his theory because he was an atheist. The sequence is the other way around. Darwin travelled from religious belief to disbelief as a consequence of his findings, not a cause of them. We even know that this process caused him great distress, not least because he was an admirer of Paley's classic presentation of the argument for Intelligent Design. Creationists like to present ID as their response to Darwin, but historically Darwin was fully aware of the ID argument and tested it to destruction. ID made no sense in the face of the evidence - even less sense if the designer was assumed to be good rather than evil - and he found a powerful alternative, natural selection, that could fully account for all aspects of evolution, including complexity and fitness of design, without requiring any intelligent designer at all. There is design. There is no designer. Natural selection remains a powerful tool in biology, because we can observe it at work in real time, notably in work to manage the spread of disease by rapidly mutating viruses, and the theory enables us for example to understand how bacteria become resistent to antibiotics. In the face of this evidence, even most active Christians (and people of other faiths) are prepared to accept natural selection as reality and adapt their religious beliefs accordingly. The Catholic Church has formally accepted natural selection. There is no inherent need to identify Darwin's scientific theory with atheism unless you set out your religious beliefs in such rigid terms that the conflict is impossible to resolve, but in that case we are not really describing atheism, just rejection of a specific set of religious beliefs and many religious people disagree on specific beliefs with many other religious people without being atheists. (less)

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How challenging is the book for a person with very little education in biology?

Jonne Steen Redeker Challenging, even for me having been fascinated by evolution for years. The challenging part is not the biology itself, he explains it quite thoroughl…moreChallenging, even for me having been fascinated by evolution for years. The challenging part is not the biology itself, he explains it quite thoroughly so that even laymen of his day could easily get it. But that brings us to the crux, his day... Languages change, the way we speak change. While it is relatively contemporary those issues still crop up occasionally. It is understandable but dry. You should not be daunted though.(less)

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which edition is the best to buy and read ?

Nullifidian I prefer the first edition, because you get more of Darwin's original thoughts, as compared to the sixth edition when he revised his original insights…moreI prefer the first edition, because you get more of Darwin's original thoughts, as compared to the sixth edition when he revised his original insights to deal with arguments that often ultimately turned out to be false (such as Lord Kelvin's thermodynamic argument against a long age for the Earth). You don't need to buy the first edition, as there's a free Gutenberg ebook of it, but if you do the Harvard University Press publishes a paperback facsimile of the first edition. The covers are different, but the text inside is just as Darwin wrote and John Murray published it. If you'd like to listen to it an audiobook, Tantor Media's version, narrated by David Case, is also based on the first edition.(less)

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Actually this book was made by Sir Alfred Russel Wallace, but then Charles Darwin claimed that he made the book. So the conclusion is who is the one who made this book?

Nullifidian This is complete nonsense, and whoever told you this had their facts wrong. They clearly misunderstood the fact that Alfred Russel Wallace (no "Sir" —…moreThis is complete nonsense, and whoever told you this had their facts wrong. They clearly misunderstood the fact that Alfred Russel Wallace (no "Sir" — he never received an order of knighthood) and Charles Darwin independently formulated the theory of natural selection and their "combined paper" was presented to the Linnean Society in 1858. I put "combined paper" in quotes because it wasn't a collaboration. Wallace had sent Darwin his essay "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type", which outlined Wallace's thinking on the matter. Darwin was apprehensive about being scooped and having 20 years of work go to waste, so his friends convinced him to submit extracts of an earlier book-length essay he had prepared in 1844, four years before Wallace had even set out on his first collecting expedition, along with Wallace's own essay. Then Darwin wrote his own book to expound on his views, prompted by the scare he had gotten with Wallace's essay. That book came out in 1859, so it was nothing to do with the Linnean Society paper read the year earlier. And Darwin couldn't have written a detailed 500-page scientific book in that time without drawing heavily on his earlier, unpublished manuscripts, which, as I noted, were written before Wallace had embarked on his scientific career. Therefore, Darwin's priority can't be doubted, nor can his authorship of On the Origin of Species. (Among other things, the letters between him and his publisher, John Murray, have been preserved as Darwin steered the book through the publication process in 1859.)

Also, having read both Darwin and Wallace, I have no problem seeing that Wallace didn't understand natural selection quite as well as Darwin. In particular, I'm speaking of Darwin's grasp of the importance of individual variation and his intuition that natural selection was a basically statistical process, although he didn't have the maths background or the background in genetics (which had to await the rediscovery of Mendel and the formulation of population genetics in the 1920s and 1930s) to turn this intuition into anything more concrete. Nevertheless, despite not being able to formulate his theory in precise mathematical terms, his insights proved as disturbing to his contemporaries as Ludwig Boltzmann's statistical thermodynamics. Indeed, we're still not quite over it.(less)

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