I’ve been reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This was published in 1859, and like many 19th century books, its style is daunting to modern readers (even contemporary reviewers called it dry). It has long sentences with multiple clauses that one needs to pay a bit of attention to. I can only imagine what would happen if Hemingway was given the task of editing the book. Given that Darwin’s message was new at the time, there are concepts are repeated more than necessary for today’s reader. A book written today about this subject would probably take about 150 pages not the 360 plus of the edition I am reading. It is not a professional paper and virtually all the concepts can be readily understood by an educated reader. There is no difficult mathematics in it and only one illustration.
What is fascinating to me is how much detail Darwin gives in addressing this question. There is a wonderful illustration of species variance, that was probably a bit speculative at the time. Today with our understanding of DNA it might be possible to re-do this diagram with specific examples. Darwin goes through the entire subject in an exhaustive manner, one that is not necessary today but which was absolutely necessary at the time, much in the way a lawyer’s discussion of a case is usually over-detailed in order to exclude any possibility of rebuttal.
One question anyone will ask is whether it is worth taking the time today to read such a book. I am reading the Folio Society reprint of the first edition. My basic answer is yes, still I would suggest that people look for an abridged edition rather than the full one, especially if it included good notes. As someone brought up on modern biology, I simply hadn’t grasped the complexity of Darwin’s arguments. (Modern students simply don’t have the reservations of a 19th century reader, the evidence today from DNA and fossils is too obvious.) The 19th century was the great age of observation and Darwin’s ideas arose from years of observation both in the field and back home in his laboratory. With the publication of Charles Lyells’s ‘Principles of Geology’, it was obvious that the Earth was many hundreds of thousands of years old and that the Earth was not static. It was not a large stretch for someone like Darwin to expand that idea to biology and do away with the idea of fixed species.
I doubt if the modern Creationists would learn from their Darwin, but one can only hope. I do think a modern reader can profit from the time spent. Again, an abridged version is probably good enough.
