A founding text of the thought of humanity. What a pleasure to immerse yourself in the world of a nineteenth-century naturalist. We touch on daily life by consulting a mass of documents on the insects of Central Asia and the beetles of Paraguay, observing the life of an anthill for days and days every year. Argue in front of a wall of perplexed scholars or conquered on the natural selection and evolution of species and then scrolls in our mind a list of plants and animal species ranging from cab...

Very hard book for me to get through - not really my background. This book really opened my eyes to how balanced everything is; how each form of life on this planet has had to fight to survive. As man'kind' we have shown little kindness to others, animals or Mother Earth...time for us to evolve in our souls. David Case does a wonderful job as reader.

"We are the one creature to whom natural selection has bequeathed a brain complex enough to comprehend the laws that govern the universe. And we should be proud that we are the only species that has figured out how we came to be." ~Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D., University of ChicagoOn the Origin of Species is Darwin laying out his theory of natural selection in precise, laborious detail. He knew quite well many of the objections and arguments this supposition would invoke and he counters every anticipa...

Charles Darwin changed the world when he wrote this book.I mean if you think about it logically, no other book has had such a powerful impact on the way humanity views the earth; yes, we have countless religious doctrine, but never before had there been a book that so drastically alternated our perceptions of the mechanisms that are behind our existence. I’m not talking about on a spiritual level, a level of ideas that cannot be scientifically proven or unproven, but on an actual physical level....

Ah, you can't really review a book like this. It's almost complete transcended its role as a seminal scientific tome and become a legitimate historic artefact. You can't review a historic artefact.This is a fantastic read, even viewed in a completely different way to how it would have been read at the time. It really is amazing how much evolutionary biology Darwin was able to formulate almost a century before Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA. It boggles the mind what Darwin could have been ca...

Dear Carol,Thank you for your mail, and of course I remember meeting you on the flight last month! It was a very interesting discussion and I'm still thinking about it. The semester has now started here at Creationist U and I am working hard, but I found time to read the book you recommended. And I'm glad I did, because it was really a lot better than I thought it would be.I guess I was expecting Darwin to be like Richard Dawkins, but he was respectful of religious ideas. And it was great that h...

Edits for NR because I love him that much. This:"This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection. Variations neither useful not injurious would not be affected by natural selection, and would be left a fluctuating element, as perhaps we see in the species called polymorphic."We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The ...

“One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” ― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species It is amazing to think that this mild, scientific book published a little less than 155 years ago caused (and is still causing) such a complete storm. I'm surprised at how adapted we have become (or at least the segment of those people on the planet who don't reject Darwin's theory of natural selection as counter to their...

I swear I cannot figure what all the fuss is about. This is a science book. It was sometimes a bit tough to read because of the depth into detail. If I were an anthropologist I'm sure I would more appreciate that detail, but as a layman it did at times seem too thick. If I were lost in an uncivilized world and had only two books, I would want a Webster's dictionary and this Origin of Species. The dictionary to learn word definitions and this book to learn about the flora and fauna around me. For...

such a freakin' genius! and the sadest part is, that his "science" literally killed him. if you've read a lot in Darwin (as I have) you come to understand that as a religious man, his studies seriously conflicted with his beliefs. I hate it when I hear someone say that Darwin says, "we come from monkeys." because that is not the case.his theory is on EVOLUTION, not monkeys. all he wanted people to understand was adaptation and survival of the fittest is really a simple concept, and daily life- p...