100 Books that Changed the World by Scott Christianson

Author:Scott Christianson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Books

The first edition of 1858 was published in black and white under the title Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical. Henry Gray wrote the text, Henry Vandyke Carter created the illustrations, and the dissections were undertaken jointly. Colour illustrations were introduced for the eleventh edition in 1887.

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

(1859)

Decades after returning home from a lengthy scientific expedition across the globe, a distinguished English naturalist, geologist and biologist unveiled his new theory of evolutionary biology, which many historians agree remains the most important academic book ever published – ‘the book that changed everything.’

During a five-year voyage of discovery on board the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin (1809–82) travelled to the remote Galápagos, a small barren cluster of volcanic islands that lie on the equator about sixty miles off the coast of Ecuador. Spanish explorers had named them for the giant tortoises that inhabited them, and each island seemed to have its own distinctive type. After discovering fossils of creatures resembling huge armadillos, Darwin made notes about the geographical distribution of the modern species in hope of finding the species’ ‘centre of creation’. His notebooks from the expedition show him beginning to speculate about the possibility that ‘one species does change into another’; on one page he has sketched a sort of genealogical tree showing how successive forms may have evolved – a sketch that would become the most famous diagram in science.

Carefully studying the birds he encountered in his empirical research, he observed: ‘One might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.’ He began to wonder if the different birds had become transformed by their struggle for existence on their little islands into a series of types particularly suited to their particular niches.

After returning home in 1837, he continued to work up his findings. By December 1838, he had formulated his basic theory, realising that populations gradually evolve over generations through a process he called ‘natural selection’. ‘These facts,’ he would later conclude, ‘seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.’

Yet it would not be until June 1858, when he delivered a paper with Alfred Russel Wallace to the Linnean Society of London, that Darwin began to go public with his discoveries. On November 24, 1859, John Murray published Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, intended for general readers. It immediately attracted intense interest in scientific circles and beyond.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, with its treelike model of branching common descent and environmental adaptation, and branching speciation, became the founding document of evolutionary biology, presenting the unifying concepts of the modern life sciences. The theory explained the diversity of living organisms and their adaptation to the environment, showing how species evolved. It also shed light on many other scientific questions, explaining the world’s geologic record and a host of other mysteries.

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