Celebrating Darwin

It is now 200 years since Darwin’s birth (February 12th 1809) and almost 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, his ground-breaking theory on the evolution of populations by means of natural selection.

In honor of the anniversary, I have listed some of my favorite resources written by Darwin, about Darwin, and about Darwinian evolution.

Web Resources

Destination: Galapagos Islands
The Galapagos Islands have been central to the study of biological adaptation since Charles Darwin visited there in 1835.

Darwin Correspondence Project
An ongoing project to catalog and publish the letters of Charles Darwin.

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin
All of Darwin’s published works, 20,000 letters, a complete bibliography and more are freely available online here.

Understanding Evolution
A great resource from the University of California Museum of Paleontology with resources for everyone from kids to adults.

Books by Darwin

In the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply held beliefs of the Western world. His insistence on the immense length of the past and on the abundance of life-forms, present and extinct, dislodged man from his central position in creation and called into question the role of the Creator. He showed that new species are achieved by natural selection, and that absence of plan is an inherent part of the evolutionary process.

Darwin’s second landmark work on evolutionary theory marked a turning point in the history of science with its modern vision of human nature as the product of evolution. Darwin argued that the noblest features of humans, such as language and morality, were the result of the same natural processes that produced iris petals and scorpion tails.

This richly readable book is the product of Charles Darwin’s amazing journey aboard the Beagle where he made observations that led to his revolutionary theory of natural selection.

Self-taught and ambitious, Darwin genuinely believed he was `below the common standard in intellect’ and had gained little from formal education. Yet he also knew he had seized his one great stroke of luck - the voyage of the Beagle - and forged a lasting body of knowledge through solitary determination and sheer hard work. His memoir concentrates on his public career and towering scientific achievements, but is also full of lively anecdotes about his family and contemporaries. The figure that emerges from these pages is one who stands isolated, dogged by illness and confined to solitude by his ailing body, with a mind that rejected the arts and the `damnable doctrine’ of Christianity