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1909 On the hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Origin, Cambridge University Press publishes Darwin and Modern Science, a collection of essays by the leaders of modern science on Darwin’s influence. The Foundations of The Origin of Species, edited by Darwin’s son, Francis, is published.

1930 Ronald Aylmer Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is published.

1937 Theodosius Dobzhansky, an architect of evolutionary

synthesis, publishes Genetics and the Origin of Species, the first work to combine the key elements of genetics and systematics.

1942 rnst Mayr, a colleague of Dobzhansky, publishes Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist.

1942- 1944 Two works that consolidate Darwin’s theories and genetics are published: Julian Huxley’s Evolution, The Modern Synthesis (1942) and George Gaylord Simpson’s Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944). In 1944, through the research of Oswald Avery, Maclyn McCarty, and Colin MacLeod, DNA is discovered as the hereditary material responsible for changes in hereditary patterns in bacteria.

1953 James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick publish the structure for DNA in Nature magazine.

1968 Watson publishes The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, a history of the discovery of DNA structure.

1975 Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology initiates a controversy over the use of natural selection to explain human behavior.

1977 Stephen J. Gould, a codeveloper of the theory of punc tuated equilibrium, refutes Darwin’s argument for gradualism in Ontogeny and Phylogeny.

Introduction

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)1 is one of the major books of Western civilization, and possibly the last major scientific text fully readable by nonscientists. It was written before the full force of scientific specialization had created the division we are used to today: science written for scientists, and intelligible only to them, or popular science aimed not at being science but at explaining it, and (usually) making otherwise too difficult scientific ideas attractive to the nonexpert.

Darwin was certainly writing for scientists, but he knew that his book would be read by many nonprofessionals, and by many who were deeply invested in the religious and cultural implications of his ideas. The book is thus a work of real science, offering the strongest possible technical arguments for its ideas, while at that same time it does much of the work of popular science. But Darwin was never a popularizer like his “bulldog” and partisan, T. H. Huxley (also a distinguished scientist), who took upon himself the job of fighting all the fights, particularly the cultural ones, that Darwin’s ideas were to arouse. More than a hundred years later, and despite the triumph of his ideas in the world of science, Darwin continues to need his bulldogs, for the very availability of his text to lay readers makes it particularly susceptible to critique from the whole spectrum of cultural and religious critics, many of whom do not seem really to understand its arguments. The upside of this condition is that the book has survived longer than virtually all other scientific texts—whose usual life span is necessarily very short because science moves so quickly. Its ideas remain important, and they are well and lucidly argued. Evolution, the dominant idea with which Darwin’s name is permanently associated (though he didn’t actually use the word), was promulgated and firmly established in The Origin of Species. And we can still read the book now, even without the help of Huxley or the modern polymath popularizer and scientist Stephen Jay Gould.

This is not to say it is an “easy” book, or one that prima facie will thrill lay readers out for a good read. It really is a good read, despite (or, one might say, because of) the rigor of its argument