Going into Biology

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I'm always amazed by the number of people that don't start at the beginning for various reasons. I highly recommend starting with Darwin's On the Origin of Species. His style varies and on occasion I found myself slogging through an argument; however, it's highly readable overall.

I started to recommend Origin, but I read it when I was in college, and it was as tedious to me as many of the other too-thick volumes I had to swallow whole and try to digest, back then. He is surprisingly readable, given the density of information he presents and the Victorian writing style (I hate Jane Eyre and most everything else the Bronte sisters wrote, for the same reason), and he has quite a way with words.

I consider his section on "contemplating the tangled bank" to be poetry of the highest order. And yet the quote itself has an interesting history:

The last paragraph to the sixth, and final, edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" summarizes his views as follows:

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling 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."

Interestingly, this same concluding "tangled bank" paragraph did not include the phrase "by the Creator" in the first edition of November, 1859.  This phrase having been inserted, due to popular pressures for mention of divine actions, into the second edition of January, 1860 and subsequently retained.[/quote]