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Summary:
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
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Amazing Book!!!
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First you must read the voyage of the beagle by Darwin in which this book is base and it will make much more sense for you to read!!!!
Evolution
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The Origin of Species: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
This is an excellent ebook. Darwin was a great scientist!
Darwinism is alive and good today
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I read this book, here in Brazil.The author, Darwin was an atheist and a racist.Writen at the same time and place, as Francis Galton and Karl Marx, Darwin didn't followed both of these charlatans, to the sewages of history. The theory of evolution began first in Greece and was also supported by another english, Wallace; but Charles Darwin, with this book really put evolution in mankind's mind.This book was read by Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill,Mussolini,etc. Someone will claims that Darwin knew nothing, about the genes and DNA.Fossils found decades after this book be published, also put new evidences to evolution.Even so, the main claim of this book,evolution, was increased in believe, by time.Begined by this book, darwinism is alive and good today.
This edition is poorly formatted.
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Darwin's _Origin of Species_ is a phenomenal work and was truly brilliant and insightful at the time. It's a classic of science and it's one of those books that everyone should read.
That said, this particular Kindle edition of the book is disappointing. Primarily, the text is fully-justified rather than normal left-aligned (right-ragged). (This means that spacing between words varies so that the last characters of each line end up being aligned along the righthand margin, and the first characters are still aligned along the left margin.) It's a well-known principle of typography that justified text is harder to read than ragged text -- the spacing between words is variable, so your eyes have to work harder to move over the text. I don't see why this edition would have made that choice.
If you want to read this excellent book, you might consider a different edition.
Natural Selection to be accepted by Christianity by 2136AD?
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It took 277 years for the Church to accept that the universe did not revolve around the Earth, from the publication of Copernicus' 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres' in 1543 to the Vatican's total repeal of the condemnation of the Copernican doctrine in the period 1820 to 1835. If that's anything to go by as far as the speed with which the Church accepts new truths about the universe, none of us will be around to see the day Darwin is vindicated as one of humanity's guiding lights, as opposed to the Son of Satan. Seldom in history has such a noble person been subjected to such vilification. It reminds one of the ridicule once heaped on supporters of the Copernican theory, and their disbelieving mockery - how could the Earth possibly revolve without the people flying off? Today we all can only laugh at their ignorance, but only some of us can laugh at the ignorance of those 'Flat-Earthers' who still disregard Darwin's theory. Like many have already pointed out, much of the material that fuels the evolution debate is not to be found in this book. There are no claims or even insinuations in the book of descent from apes. Rather, it was disciples like Huxley who really helped focus the debate on man's primate anscestry, and Darwin was far more direct in his beliefs in his later books such as 'The Descent of Man' and 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals', both of which are worth reading as they bolster his theory in countless ways, always combining a penetrating natural observation with intelligent analysis. In fact, I must admit to enjoying them even more than this book, although of course as Darwin's classic, it's a must read for anyone interested in man's evolution, and no open-minded person could possibly remain unconvinced after going through Darwin's evidence and arguments against spontaneous creation. (Creationists still believe that God came down to Earth in 19th century industrial revolution England to create the darker moths which started appearing as the trees gradually darkened from pollution, kindly making sure they did not stick out like sore thumbs on the blackened trees anymore...)
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