No one reads Origin of Species either. I’ll bet that there’s a 100 to 1 ratio of people who have heard of Darwin’s book versus those who have read it. Same goes for many important (or at least influential) books. Mein Kampf, Das Capital and Newton’s Principia are a few more that come to mind.
If you're reading Darwin as a biology textbook, you're blowing it from the start, though. It's much more valuable as a primary document in the history of biology. That and from what I understand, it's pretty interesting reading.
Yes, if Charles Darwin would publish a book today, with a focus on a layman reader, and then give interviews, instead of publishing his findings in journals, I would be skeptical.
Well, it took a patent clerk to find the missing pieces to Newton's laws, and that took 150 years , so an "amateur biologist" evolving Darwin's theories? Why not.
But I'll agree it's unlikely. After all, the first comment on this site "I couldn't put it down once...etc" is from Don Burke on Radio 2UE ... well-known to all Australians as the long-running host of our favourite gardening program.
Not sure I disagree overall, but Darwin isn't a very good example. He produced quite a lot of writing throughout a long career, and his most famous book, On the Origin of Species, came somewhat late (he was 50, and it was something like his tenth or eleventh published book).
No I've not read that. My background is in botany and I took coursework in evolutionary biology and evolutionary theory.
Its much more technical than the book you referenced, but I highly recommend:
Absolutely. I found reading A. v. Humboldt absolutely fascinating. (He has the added merit of not only having been a brilliant scientist, but also a gifted prose writer.) And James Watson's "The Double Helix" was an intriguing insight into a period in biology when much of what we take for granted was just being discovered. One gains a deeper understanding for any system of thought when one learns how it came to be.
I noticed that too ... perhaps Darwin and Babbage were going to collaborate on a book (tentatively titled "Computation of the Species by Natural Selection") which dealt with the probability of traits being passed on?
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