The Origin of Species

On December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin left Plymouth Harbor aboard the H. M. S. Beagle. For the next five years, the naturalist conducted research on plants and animals from around the globe, amassing a body of evidence that would culminate in one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind—the theory of evolution.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: that existing animals and plants cannot have appeared separately, but must have slowly transformed from ancestral creatures. Most important, Origin fully explains the mechanism that effects such a transformation: natural selection, the idea that made evolution scientifically intelligible for the first time.

One of the few revolutionary works of science that is engrossingly readable, The Origin of Species not only launched the science of modern biology, but has influenced all subsequent literary, philosophical, and religious thinkers since.

George Levine, Kenneth Burke Professor of English Literature at Rutgers University, has written extensively about Darwin and science-literature relations, particularly in Darwin and the Novelists. He is the author of many related books, including The Realistic Imagination, Dying to Know, and his birdwatching memoirs, Lifebirds.