the reader to persevere. One of his suggestions: don’t start at the turgid beginning, but start at chapter 3. And be prepared to make an effort; when Darwin appears to be going on at great length about a subject that seems boring or irrelevant, stop and try to work out why he might be doing so. After all, he was writing for a different audience – an audience with different preconceptions from those we have now. In other words, says Ridley, this is not a book for reading passively, but for tackling and interrogating with gusto.
Such gusto is made much easier by Duzdevich’s rendition. For there is no doubt about it: Duzdevich’s Darwin is much easier to read than Darwin’s Darwin. Indeed, it was this realization that made me enthusiastic about the project and led me to conclude that it’s an important contribution, making this fundamental text far more accessible.
So what has Duzdevich done? He has not abridged the text, nor been so crude as to go through it striking out apparently extraneous words. Instead, he has taken the first edition of the Origin – which, as the first presentation of a world revolution in human thought, is of the greatest historical interest – and unfolded the sentences and made the syntax and punctuation more modern. He has also replaced some of the more archaic turns of phrase with modern terms. The insights and meaning are all there; the convolution is gone. In other words, he has made a careful translation of the text from Victorian English into twenty-first-century English. The upshot is that the text is much easier to grasp, appreciate, and think about.
Every time I open the Origin, I learn something new, and discover further reasons to be impressed by Darwin’s breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding. But more than that, the Origin and the worldview it contains have transformed the way I think about the planet, the beings on it, and what it means to be human. I find it a source of awe and optimism, reverence and consolation. I hope that, abetted by this new rendition, it will inspire the same feelings in you.
NOTES
I have drawn the details of Darwin’s life from Janet Browne’s excellent two-volume biography. Volume 1 is called Charles Darwin: Voyaging, published by Knopf in 1995. Volume 2 is called Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, published by Knopf in 2002. Any reference to the Origin is to the first edition.
For Darwin deciding that a wife would be “better than a dog,” as well as some other points in favor of marriage, see Voyaging, page 379. For his marrying Emma Wedgwood, see Voyaging, pages 391–401. For his fleeing the sight of surgery, see Voyaging, pages 62–63. For his father’s gloomy prediction about Darwin’s future, see Voyaging, page 89. For Darwin occupying Paley’s rooms at Cambridge and for Paley being on the syllabus, see Voyaging, page 93. For his lifestyle at Cambridge and his indifference toward his studies, see Voyaging, chapters 4 and 5. For details of the offer to travel on the Beagle (including a full list of his father’s objections to it), see Voyaging, chapter 6.
I have drawn Darwin’s “puzzling facts” from the pages of the Origin.
For Darwin being friends with Robert Grant, and for their discussing Lamarck together, see Voyaging, pages 80–83. For Darwin’s species sketch of 1844 and some of the reasons he did not want to publish it, see Voyaging, pages 445–47. For the impact of Vestiges, see Voyaging, pages 457–65.
Comparison of the relative weights of Great Danes and Chihuahuas assumes that a Great Dane weighs 174 lbs (78.9 kg) and a Chihuahua, 3 lbs (1.4 kg). For the lives of blue tits, see pages 225–48 of S. Cramp and C. M. Perrins, eds., 1993, Handbook of the Birds of Europe and the Middle East: The Birds of the Western Palearctic, Volume 7: Flycatchers to Shrikes (Oxford: Oxford University Press). For the parts of the world where you can find them, see page 227; for the number of chicks in a brood, see page 243, column 1. For annual mortality, see page 228.
Patrick Matthew’s sketch of natural selection, which appears as the appendix to On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, is well worth reading; the text is available free online from Google Books. For Darwin’s irritation with Matthew, see The Power of Place, page 109. For Wallace’s letter and Darwin’s reaction to it, see The Power of Place, pages 14–17; for Wallace formulating natural selection, see The Power of Place, pages 31–33. For details of how the presentation to the Linnean Society came about (and Darwin’s absence from it), see The Power of Place, pages 33–39; for the meeting itself, see The Power of Place, pages 40–41; for the great misstatement by the president of the society, see The Power of Place, page 42. All the material presented to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858 is available at http://wallace-online.org/content/record?itemID=S043.
For Darwin’s account of life on oceanic islands, see the Origin, chapter 12. For his experiments on seeds, and for his feeding fish stuffed with seeds to birds, see the Origin, chapter 11. His description of bumblebees, clover, and cats comes from the Origin, chapter 3. His description of honeybees and their combs comes from the Origin, chapter 7. For sexual selection and natural selection in guppies, see J. A. Endler, 1980, “Natural Selection on Color Patterns in Poecilia reticulata,” Evolution 34: 76–91. For the experiment on E. coli, see Z. D. Blount, C. Z. Borland, and R. E. Lenski, 2008, “Historical Contingency and the Evolution of a Key Innovation in an Experimental Population of Escherichia coli,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105: 7899–7906.
For a full account of the scale of changes between the editions of the Origin published in Darwin’s lifetime, see the introduction to M. Peckham, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).
Many thanks to Jerry Coyne, Daniel Duzdevich, Dan Haydon, Gideon Lichfield, Richard Nash, Jean-Olivier Richard, Jonathan Swire, and especially, Ben Mason for insights, comments, and suggestions.
A NOTE TO THE READER
Daniel Duzdevich
BIOLOGY OF THE VERY SMALL IS WHAT FASCINATES ME. THIS small world is jostled by the motions of water molecules and crisscrossed by intricate chemical reactions. It is a world over which DNA and protein have dominion. And it is a world that unifies life. At the scale of biological molecules, all that is alive proves to be essentially the same. Bacteria swarming in soil, yeast fermenting a lump of moist flour, and humans eating bread are all built from a common cellular machinery. The universalities of molecular biology are explained by a concept central to the Origin: all life on earth is related, every species a branch on a single tree. Darwin was the first to recognize this shared ancestry, which we have since discovered to be written into our very molecular makeup. The Origin is perhaps even more fascinating today, for all we have learned of the natural world, than it was in 1859.
Evolution is so entangled with the most basic elements of biology that I encountered the subject well before discovering Darwin. The underlying sameness of living things shocked me when I first learned about cells and genes. It still shocks me – the implication that life is continuous and interconnected through time. What struck me the first time I read the Origin was that Darwin, through a mass of seemingly disconnected observations, before genetics and before biochemistry, had formulated a theory so powerful that it elegantly accounts for biological universality. It is this insight more than any other – and there are many – that motivated me to pore over Darwin’s writing, to try to understand an idea that transformed biology into a science. My interests soon expanded as I undertook a project to make the Origin more accessible to more people. This book is the result.
It is a clear, modern English rendition of the first edition of the Origin. It is
