The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

This unassuming looking little volume is the single most influential scientific work of the 19th century. Darwin’s first publication of his theory of evolution was written for non-specialists and it attracted widespread and immediate interest. Darwin was an eminent scientist; his findings were taken seriously and the evidence he presented generated scientific, philosophical, and religious discussion. Within two decades there was general scientific agreement that evolution, with a branching pattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. With the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin's concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to modern evolutionary theory, and it has now become the unifying concept of the life sciences.