ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

I tried to read On the Origin of Species a few times in the last decade, but got bored or bogged down and quit. This edition, however, kept me going. The context and extension provided by the letters, journal entries, autobiography snippets, and incredible illustrations made formerly tedious passages fascinating and drew me into parts of the text I may have skimmed over otherwise. I was constantly gasping at the way a single paragraph or aside now represents entire scientific sub-fields. Darwin may not have been the first to propose natural selection or descent with modification, but he had incredible insight into what it meant.

The excerpts from letters, etc. also humanized Darwin - glimpses of his personality, foibles, struggles, humor, admiration of handsome young men - revealed through his own personal writing made me less intimidated by his work and able to engage with it critically, delightedly, warmly. And it gave me more confidence as a scholar - we all struggle, have bad days, get things wrong, and fuss too much over details that probably don't matter.

I also connected with his descriptions of the way his poor health influenced how he lived his life. He came to see it, in some ways, as supporting his scholarly work. This was a revelation for me as I have seen my own illness primarily as a barrier to scientific work, or work of any kind. And while this may be true of academia, I begin to see glimmers of possibility elsewhere.

1) �I am well aware that this doctrine of natural selection, exemplified in the above imaginary instances, is open to the same objections which were at first urged against Sir Charles Lyell's noble views on 'the modern changes of the earth, as illustrative of geology;' but we now very seldom hear the action, for instance, of the coast-waves, called a trifling and insignificant cause, when applied to the excavation of gigantic valleys or to the formation of the longest lines of inland cliffs. Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of a continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure.??

2) �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.??