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Charles Darwin’s  - On the Origin of Species

First published on 24 November 1859, is a seminal work of scientific literature, considered to be the foundation of  the biology of evolution. The full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. For the 6th edition of 1872, the title was changed to The Origin of Species. The book introduced the theory that there is an evolution of populations over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. It presented a full body of evidence that the diversity of life was caused by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that he had gathered on the Beagle expedition in the 1830s and his later findings from research, letters, and experimentation. He wrote a book about that expedition called “The Voyage of the Beagle” (You can find both of these books on the FREE eBooks page)

 During the first 50 years of the 1800’s the English scientific establishment was closely connected to the Church of England, while science was part of natural theology. Ideas about the metamorphosis of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy and that humans were unique, unrelated to animals. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream.

 The book was written for non-specialist readers and attracted widespread interest upon its publication. As Darwin was an eminent scientist, his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T.H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularize science by promoting scientific naturalism. Within two decades there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. During the “eclipse of Darwinism” from the 1880s to the 1930s, various other mechanisms of evolution were given more credit. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin’s concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to modern evolutionary theory, now the unifying concept of the life sciences.