On the Origin of Species

What It Is

A single sustained argument, published by John Murray in November 1859, aimed at the ordinary educated reader rather than at scientists. The whole print run went to the trade on the first day.

Darwin had held the theory since the late 1830s and kept putting off the reckoning. What forced him was a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, setting out much the same idea. He called the resulting book an abstract of the far longer work he never finished, and abstract is not false modesty: it is a compressed case, without footnotes, laid out for a jury.

Expect no equations and no laboratory: pigeons, barnacles, orchids, bees, breeders, islands and coral reefs, handled by a man who had looked hard at all of them. The prose is Victorian and patient. One chapter, Difficulties on Theory, makes his opponents' case better than they did.

Why It Matters

One idea, worked out with enormous care, explains how complicated living things can arise without anyone designing them. Modern biology, medicine, ecology and genetics all sit downstream of it, and so does a good deal of the intellectual weather we live in.

But there is a second reason to read the actual book rather than a summary of it, and it is the better reason. This is one of the great performances of honest argument in English. Darwin knows exactly where he is weakest. He goes there first, states the objection in its strongest form, and then answers it as far as he honestly can, which is sometimes not far. Nobody argues like this any more.

Human beings are almost entirely absent, which surprises first-time readers who arrive expecting a fight about apes. Darwin left that for later and said only that light would be thrown on the subject. The fight came anyway.

Before You Read

Fifteen to twenty hours. Nothing in it is technically hard; the difficulty is Victorian pace, and the sheer weight of evidence he piles up before he will let himself conclude anything.

Read the first four chapters slowly. Variation under domestication, variation under nature, the struggle for existence, natural selection: that is the argument, and everything after it is defence and elaboration.

The chapters on the imperfection of the geological record and on hybridism are where most first-time readers slow to a crawl. Skim them and come back. The final chapter recapitulates the whole case and is worth reading twice.

Which Edition to Read

The text you choose matters more here than for almost any other book on this list. Darwin revised the Origin five times, and by the sixth edition of 1872 he had padded it with replies to critics, hedged several claims he had been right about, and borrowed Herbert Spencer's phrase survival of the fittest. Most free ebooks and cheap reprints are that sixth edition. It is the weaker book.

• J. W. Burrow (Penguin Classics) — recommended. A reprint of the first edition of 1859, which is the leaner, bolder, better-argued version, with an introduction that places Darwin in his intellectual century without drowning him in it. Cheap, complete and correct. The cost: the notes are light, and if you want the scholarly apparatus you will have to look elsewhere. View on Amazon →
• Gillian Beer (Oxford World's Classics). The best editorial support in a paperback: an introduction by the finest reader of Darwin as a writer, a glossary of scientific terms, and a register of every writer he mentions. It prints the second edition of 1860, which differs from the first only in small corrections. The cost: the introduction is a literary critic's, and some readers want a biologist's.
• The Harvard facsimile, introduced by Ernst Mayr. A photographic facsimile of the 1859 first edition with an introduction by one of the architects of modern evolutionary biology. The cost: it is a facsimile, so the type is small and there is no help with the text beyond Mayr's essay.

Take Burrow to read it, Beer to understand it, Mayr's facsimile to hold the object as it appeared. Whatever you buy, check the copyright page and make sure you have the first edition.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as an argument, not as a monument. Track how Darwin builds: from what breeders can do, to what nature does, to what follows over deep time. He never asks you to take a step you have not been walked to.

Read the closing paragraph out loud. It is the most famous ending in the history of science writing, and it earns it. Then read the introduction, which you sensibly left until now.

The commonest mistake is assuming you already know what is in here because you know what evolution is. You do not. The book is stranger, more tentative and more generous than the idea it launched.