I know the world has not been waiting with bated breath for 160 years to hear my opinion of this marvelous book, but I wanted to add my praise anyway.I know the world has not been waiting with bated breath for 160 years to hear my opinion of this marvelous book, but I wanted to add my praise anyway. This is such a beautiful read. Darwin makes his argument for descent through modification of all organic life with such patience, eloquence, and clarity that it's awe inspiring, especially when one bears in mind that DNA and its sure-fire evidence of descent had not been discovered yet. It's truly remarkable that Darwin was right about almost every detail, using only the tools he had to work with in the nineteenth century, his formidable intelligence, and his sparkling intuition. I understand completely now why he is considered one of the few dozen greatest minds of all time, since recorded history.
Darwin writes like a dream. He is gracious to and appreciative of his fellow naturalists. He's honest about the limits of what could be known with certainty, and what could be only guessed at. This style of writing in science is a breath of fresh air from a bygone era. I found Darwin's exuberance regarding his subject contagious, and am including some of my favourite passages below, so that I can remember them.
One thing that made the reading a bit tricky is that I do not speak Latin and, even if I did, would not necessarily know the names of plants and animals by their scientific labels; thus, I did not even recognise the names of common animals in my own country: the kangaroo and the platypus! Given that this book was written for Darwin's contemporaries who were laypersons, I wonder how they would have known these names, or if they read Darwin whilst having editions of botanical and zoological binomial nomenclature nearby? I had Google, of course, but found it also helpful to keep charts of geological eras at hand, an excellent globe, and maps of the world reflecting things as they were at the time of Darwin's writing.
"It is a truly wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity—that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold—namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. " (pps. 170-171)
"All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and, in so far, all true classification is genealogical; that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together or separating objects more or less alike.
But I must explain my meaning more fully. I believe the arrangement of the groups within each class, in due subordination and relation to the other groups, must be strictly genealogical in order to be natural; but that the amount of difference in the several branches or groups, though allied in the same degree in blood to their common progenitor, may differ greatly, being due to the different degrees of modification which they have undergone; and this is expressed by the forms being ranked under different genera, families, sections, or orders." (p. 404)
"As all organic beings, extinct and recent, which have ever lived on this earth have to be classed together, and as all have been connected by the finest gradations, the best, or indeed, if our collections were nearly perfect, the only possible arrangement, would be genealogical. Descent being on my view the hidden bond of connexion which naturalists have been seeking under the term of the natural system." (p. 427)
"On the view of each organic being and each separate organ having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable it is that parts, like the teeth in the embryonic calf or like the shriveled wings under the soldered wing-covers of some beetles, should thus so frequently bear the plain stamp of inutility! Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal, by rudimentary organs and by homologous structures, her scheme of modification, which it seems that we willfully will not understand." (p. 452)
"But the chief cause of our natural unwillingness to admit that one species has given birth to other and distinct species, is that we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps. The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the slow action of the coast-waves. The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations." (p.453)
On the imperfection of the geological record: "The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each great fossiliferous formation will be recognised as having depended on an unusual concurrence of circumstances, and the blank intervals between the successive stages as having been of vast duration. But we shall be able to gauge with some security the duration of these intervals by a comparison of the preceding and succeeding organic forms. ... " (p. 457)
This passage is so eloquent, and yet I do not believe mankind, at least, has continued to evolve towards perfection. So sadly optimistic: "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection." (p. 459)
"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." (p. 460)...more
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