You might react to the title of this post with "Who the heck are you to review Origin of Species and aren't you a bit late to the party?!?"
I should say that response is quite valid and this is more of an attempt to pay my homage rather than "review" the book. :-)
More than 25 years back, during my grad school days, a friend of mine and I were walking by a strip mall where I saw an ice cream store. Just for fun I challenged my friend to say something amusing about ice cream. He promptly said, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream"! I thought it was brilliant and didn't realize for the next year or two that it was a popular slogan from an ice cream commercial on TV! Same thing happened with another friend who during a discussion on ethics and religion said, "For all we know, God could be a set of equations". Again I thought it was brilliant until I realized years later that he was restating a quote! Neither one of the friends actually tried to deceive me as they never took credit for those lines and probably presumed I knew that they were not being original. But I realized that they were quotes only years later.
Reading OoS put me through that ride multiple times. Several ideas I had read earlier in books by Richard Dawkins and other Biologists are all discussed in this one, while all along I was presuming that they were original ideas by those authors. Again they never claimed that they were but some how I don't explicitly remember reading that they are just elaborating/explaining Darwin's ideas further. Though it could be just my faulty memory, I can recall many examples. Will stop with just three:
1. The "Intelligent Design" (supposedly a more palatable euphemism for Creationism) crowd used to point to complex biological organs like eyes that have so many intricate components that need to come together for such organs to perform well as evidence that there must have been an Intelligent Creator who designed them as one complex piece at a time as they could not have evolved. Dawkins wrote a book called The Blind Watchmaker to present counter arguments. But Darwin has discussed this notion clearly explaining how a very primitive light sensing ability would have given a marine being a slight advantage over the others that didn't have any light sensing ability and how that sensitivity could have evolved into current level of sophistication we encounter in the human eye over the millions of years. Dawkins had only restated and elaborated Darwin's ideas.
2. Ring species which describes slowly transforming/evolving populations that eventually diverge so much that the populations at the two ends of the ring can't interbreed.
3. There are books like "Independent Birth of Organisms. A New Theory that Distinct Organisms Arose Independently from the Primordial Pond, Showing that Evolutionary Theories are Fundamentally Incorrect" with its author claiming he has come up with a fantastically original theory that proves Darwin wrong, while not supporting creationism. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the author says instead of just one life form created in the primordial pond that lead to all the variations in the living beings found in the universe, a small number of slightly different life forms could have arose originally that will allow for any incompatibility you find between organisms. Even 15 years back I was underwhelmed when I understood this detail since I thought it differed from Darwin's only marginally. This variation having been derived from computer models/simulations and DNA data sounded almost the same. But Darwin discusses even this same idea in this book even though DNA and genes were unknown in his days! He clearly says that there could have been more than one life form that came into existence as progenitors for all the life forms we see today but as long as we support small changes leading to variations in life forms that routinely get pruned out by the survival of the fittest notion, it doesn't matter whether the first life form was just one or a handful. .
For a book that is more than 150 years old, it is not written in Greek or Shakespearean English and so is accessible. There are few notations like &c. (that means etc.) and terms that today's readers won't be familiar with.
Interestingly, individual words Darwin uses to write his book are mostly at the high school level and so it looks like an easy read. But he continues to string them together in really long sentences, in stream of consciousness style writing that requires the reader to pay close attention to the thought process as it evolves. Here is a typical sentence:
It is, no doubt, extremely difficult even to conjecture by what gradations many structures have been perfected, more especially amongst broken and failing groups of organic beings; but we see so many strange gradations in nature, as is proclaimed by the canon, `Natura non facit saltum,' that we ought to be extremely cautious in saying that any organ or instinct, or any whole being, could not have arrived at its present state by many graduated steps.
You get the picture. :-)
Newer rewrites of the book using more contemporary writing style are available for purchase. I haven't read them.
In general when we read a book, developments that have taken place after the book was published may not be that significant to what the book is trying to say. But since this book is 150 years old, I had to remind myself that Darwin didn't have any knowledge about the DNA, genomic structures and its contributions to shaping a life form, that is so relevant to this domain. He does wonder about how when an embryo starts to grow, somehow different parts of the growing embryo knows which part of the body it has to eventually become! These details are explained very well now by digital switches turning on and off on the genomic structure that he didn't know about.
He talks a lot about the quality of fossilized records saying what we have should not be perceived as a perfectly well stocked museum but should be understood as a highly incomplete, record archive of questionable quality. He is correctly convinced that many of the questions he couldn't answer in his days related to how lifeforms morphed could have been answered well if only we have had a full collection of well preserved fossil records.
Way back in the 1980's when I heard US President Reagan giving a speech to religious conservatives saying, "Theory of Evolution is just a theory", I was quite puzzled. As a teenager. I understood Biblical stories and the idea of creation were similar to Greek or Hindu mythologies. In school we have heard of those stories, took them as allegories and had no qualms moving on to the science class in the next hour to learn about the theory of evolution along the lines of learning physics or chemistry. We never thought what was taught in moral/religious classes need to be reconciled verbatim with what was taught in science class! Most of my friends receiving this email might be of similar persuasion irrespective of which continent they grew up in or living currently. But if you do have a different thought, please send them to me.
The volume of research Darwin has done to gather his data is stupendous. He has done studies like scrapping the dried mud off of the feat of migratory birds and then testing the seeds found buried in the mud for their capacity to germinate to assess the viability of seed dispersion across continents! During his famous voyage on board HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1835, he has gathered so many specimens, recorded tons of observations/notes. Many experiments of his were so slow and painstaking, that we can't help but stand up and salute! Only when we read the book end to end, we can appreciate the amount of thought he has put into it. He has analyzed in depth how certain features could have become atrophied due to disuse depending upon which part of the animal's life it would have been useful (i.e. when it was a baby or adult). Thus for example some teeth in calves that are present inside the gums but never come out to serve any purpose can be explained because when it was a baby it would have been of no use but in a progenitor animal in a different habitat, it could have been useful when it is an adult. Since the calf in the current habitat doesn't need it, the embryonic stage hasn't got the message to get rid of it fully yet. So, it is there inside the gum but doesn't grow out as it is not needed in its current species form and habitat! Similarly he presents arguments about continental shifts that could have moved a species from one part of the world to another though now it looks extraordinary. His ability to process so much of information spanning time, species and space to build his arguments is extremely humbling.
Since the book is a fairly large one of about 600 pages, he not only takes the time to build his case but has delved into a lot of arguments he had come across in his days against the theory of evolution. Through slow and detailed arguments, he explains why he is convinced that his theory will stand the test of time and the naysayers will fall by the wayside, while simultaneously conceding that he is not able answer all the questions fully because evidence he needs in terms of fossil records or other scientific results are not yet available.
His friend & colleague T.H.Huxley commented after the book was published as to how extremely stupid of us all not to have thought of this explanation. While it is a beautiful compliment to Darwin, I don't think ordinary human beings could have understood and explained this secret of nature looking at a tiny snapshot of time/space/species, until we evolve to be more intelligent beings in another million years. :-)
In case you haven't seen this documentary related to this topic, it will be worth your while:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HZzGXnYL5I
-sundar.
