"Origin of Species" in Context

A choose-your-own adventure.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is one of those books that has truly changed the world, but it's just so darn hard to get through. History and context really help, so we're going to read the Origin slowly, while also choosing from a menu of tasty books covering evolutionary ideas before, during and after Darwin's time. ...more

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$This is the only figure in Darwin's On the Origin of Species. It depicts an evolutionary tree in which the X axis represents the amount of "resemblance" between organisms. The farther apart two points are along the X axis, the more different from each other they are. The Y axis represents time: number of generations that have elapsed. In <i>Origin</i>, Darwin drew attention to the fractal nature of the process the diagram represents: whether time is in tens, thousands or millions of generations, or whether "resemblances" fall within a species or differentiate groups into categories well above species, the pattern of the process is the same. This diagram presages to a remarkable degree modern <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogenetic_tree> phylogenetic trees. </a>$