On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin, 1859
Why is the woodpecker's beak made just right for bark, and why do faraway islands have no frogs but plenty of bats? Charles Darwin spent twenty years gathering facts: he bred pigeons, counted weed seedlings, kept seeds in seawater. His answer: species were not created once and for all, they descend from one another. You will follow his argument step by step and learn which difficulties he himself thought the most serious.
Who it is for
For anyone who wants to understand where the variety of living things came from and how Darwin arrived at his theory, step by step and through his own examples.
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
The mystery of mysteries
Picture a naturalist on board HMS Beagle. In South America two things strike him: how animals and plants are spread across the continent, and how much today's inhabitants resemble the extinct ones whose bones lie in the same ground. Back home, Charles Darwin decides to patiently collect every fact that might throw light on the origin of species. One of the great philosophers of the day called this question the mystery of mysteries.
At the time almost every naturalist believed that each species had been created separately and had not changed since. Darwin thought so too. But that cannot explain the woodpecker: its feet, tail, beak and tongue seem made on purpose to pull insects out from under bark, and to put such a build down to climate or habit is, in Darwin's words, absurd.
Darwin worked on this question for more than twenty years and published the book in 1859 almost under pressure: the naturalist Alfred Wallace, who was studying the Malay Archipelago, had reached nearly the same conclusions and sent him his paper. Darwin's conclusion is this: species change and descend from other species, and the main, though not the only, force of change is natural selection, by which nature keeps whatever gives a living being even a slight advantage.
Darwin himself called his book one long argument. Ahead of you are the pigeons he bred himself, hundreds of weeds on cleared ground, an eye that could have disproved the whole theory, a stone record with pages torn out, and islands where not a single frog lives. About humans the book has just one sentence: light will be thrown on their origin too. Let's start in the pigeon loft.
Every pigeon comes from one wild bird
Darwin decided to begin with something he could test with his own hands. He kept every pigeon he could buy and joined two London pigeon clubs. The English carrier has a long beak and fleshy wattles of skin on its head, while the short-faced tumbler has a beak almost like that of a little finch. The pouter proudly puffs up its enormous crop. The fantail has thirty or even forty feathers in its tail, although all other pigeons have twelve or fourteen. A score of such breeds, Darwin reckoned, would be taken by any ornithologist for separate wild species.
And yet Darwin was sure that they all descended from the rock-pigeon. The wild rock-pigeon is slaty blue, with a white rump and two black bars on its wings. Darwin got the decisive evidence in his own loft. He crossed white fantails with black barb pigeons, another breed, and then crossed their mottled offspring with each other. One of the grandchildren turned out exactly the colour of the wild ancestor, with the same bars. Traits hidden for many generations suddenly showed through again.
The breeders themselves did not believe it: each was sure his breed came from a special wild species. A famous breeder of Hereford cattle, Darwin wrote, would laugh to scorn anyone who suggested his herd was related to longhorn cattle. Breeders see the differences between breeds every day, but they do not add up in their heads the tiny differences piled up over many generations.
And the power lies precisely in that adding up. Nature offers changes one after another, and man adds them up in the direction he wants. The well-known breeder John Sebright used to say of pigeons that he could produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain head and beak.
Even more important to Darwin was unconscious selection. Nobody sets out to change the breed, everyone simply keeps their best animals for breeding. Two flocks of Leicester sheep, both descended from the same flock of the breeder Bakewell, were bred for more than fifty years without any outside blood, and they drifted so far apart that they looked like different varieties. Nobody aimed for this; the differences built up on their own.
Hence the first step of the whole argument. If man has remade pigeons this much in a few centuries, what might nature do over times incomparably longer?
About the author
Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist who sailed around the world on HMS Beagle. On the Origin of Species came out in 1859; later he wrote The Descent of Man and a book on the expression of the emotions.
All books by this author: Charles Darwin
Terms from the book
- Beagle
- Malthus
- natural selection
- Wallace
- Lyell
- sexual selection
- Mocking-thrush
- barb
- Catskill
- Madeira
- Mauritius
- tumbler: A breed of pigeon that turns somersaults in flight.
- pouter: A breed of pigeon with a huge crop that the bird puffs up.
- rock-pigeon: A wild pigeon that nests on cliffs. According to Darwin, every domestic breed of pigeon descends from it.
- Hereford: An English breed of beef cattle, named after the county of Herefordshire.
- Sebright: John Sebright (1767–1846), English politician and well-known breeder of chickens and pigeons.
- Bakewell: Robert Bakewell (1725–1795), English farmer, one of the first to breed livestock by methodical selection.
- variety: A group of individuals within a species that differs noticeably from the rest. According to Darwin, a well-marked variety is an incipient species.
- struggle for existence: Darwin's phrase, used in a large and metaphorical sense: direct rivalry, dependence on other beings and on conditions, and success in leaving offspring.
- Farnham: A small town in the county of Surrey in the south of England.
- heather: A low evergreen shrub with tiny flowers that covers heaths and moors.
- red grouse: A bird of the British moors, coloured to match the heather.
- divergence of character: Darwin's principle: the descendants of one species gain by becoming ever more diverse, because then they occupy more places in nature.
- porpoise: A small toothed whale, a relative of the dolphins.
- rudimentary organs: Undeveloped organs that have lost their work, such as the teeth in the jaw of an unborn calf.
- swimbladder: A gas-filled sac in the body of many fish that helps them stay at the right depth.
- Melipona: A stingless tropical bee from the Americas. It builds combs of wax cells whose shape is halfway between the cells of the bumblebee and the honeybee.
- Weald: A lowland in the south of England between two ridges of chalk hills.
- cirripedes: Small marine crustaceans that as adults fix themselves to rocks, such as acorn barnacles.
- Bosquet: A nineteenth-century palaeontologist, an expert on the fossils of the Belgian chalk.
- Silurian system: In Darwin's day, the name for the oldest known strata rich in fossils.
- mastodon: An extinct relative of the elephants.
- Isthmus of Panama: The narrow strip of land that joins North and South America and separates the Pacific from the Atlantic.
- Galapagos Islands: A volcanic archipelago in the Pacific on the equator, five or six hundred miles from South America.
- Cape de Verde Islands: A volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa.
All terms
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