The Origin of SpeciesCharles Darwin
I picked up the book because I felt compelled to join the hype for the author's 200-year' birthday and for the 150-year anniversary of the book's publication. knowing not too little about modern genetics and biology, i was prepared to read it as something of historical significance but too outdated to enlighten the mind.
how wrong i was. the book has survived because it is still ever so fitting. the evolution theory is essentially the same today, just more vibrating with each new discovery in life science. the book entertains, too, with Darwin's broad and intricate knowledge of everything living or lively. besides "throwing light" on the origin of speices, the author also lights up himself: his intellectual power, his passion, curiosity, patience, thoroughness, ... and his humanity.
it's no exaggeration that Darwin found the truth of life. and as always, with a glimpse of truth -even a much lesser one - stirs the heart in a poetic sentiment. so he ends his book with these lines:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
so true, so profound. :)
