The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Selection or partial work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~230,000 words · 1,071 passages
Cite this work
- APACharles Darwin. (n.d.). The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/the-origin-of-species-by-means-of-natural-selection
- MLACharles Darwin. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/the-origin-of-species-by-means-of-natural-selection.
- ChicagoCharles Darwin. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/the-origin-of-species-by-means-of-natural-selection.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
How species arise with no one to design them: natural selection — more offspring than survive, small heritable variations, vast time — as the mechanism of all living diversity.
Context and history
Published in November 1859 and sold out on the first day. Darwin had nursed the idea for twenty years, alarmed by its consequences, and only resolved to publish when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him the same theory from Malaysia. He deliberately avoided the human being — 'light will be thrown on the origin of man' is all he wrote — but everyone understood. No book of science has changed so profoundly the way the human species sees itself within nature, and the debate it opened is not yet closed.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
the nature of the habitat, and the meteoric agencies, these being the ‘adaptations’ of the natural theologian.” The author apparently believes that organisation progresses by sudden leaps, but that the effects produced by the conditions of life are gradual. He argues with much force on general grounds that species are not immutable productions. But I cannot see how the two supposed “impulses” account in a scientific sense for the numerous and beautiful coadaptations which we see throughout nature; I cannot see that we thus gain any insight how, for instance, a woodpecker has become adapted to its peculiar habits of life. The work, from its powerful and brilliant style, though displaying in the early editions little accurate knowledge and a great want of scientific caution, immediately had a very wide circulation. In my opinion it has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views. In 1846 the veteran geologist M.J. d’Omalius d’Halloy published in an excellent though short paper (“Bulletins de l’Acad. Roy. Bruxelles”, tom. xiii, page 581) his opinion that it is more probable that new species have been produced by descent with modification than that they have been separately created: the author first promulgated this opinion in 1831. Professor Owen, in 1849 (“Nature of Limbs”, page 86), wrote as follows: “The archetypal idea was manifested in the flesh under diverse such modifications, upon this planet, long prior to the existence of those animal species that actually exemplify it. To what natural laws or secondary causes the orderly succession and progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed, we, as yet, are ignorant.” In his address to the British Association, in 1858, he speaks (page li) of “the axiom of the continuous operation of creative power, or of the ordained becoming of living things.…