Darwin’s ideas about Natural Selection were a template for atheism, or at the very least agnosticism. The scientific establishment had yet to fully sever ties with organised religion and found evolution much more palatable when you could throw in a dash of Intelligent Design. It’s no wonder then that the reaction to On the Origin of Species was so hostile. With unique adaptations, skills and abilities, yes, but still just the result of a bunch of biological laws and external stimuli. In fact, and although Darwin didn’t exactly take pains to stress this, his theory pretty much said outright that humans were just another animal. But it wasn’t until November 24th 1859 that the world had a theory of evolution that not only made sense – in that it tallied pretty consistently with our observations of the world – but also successfully negated the need for a designer. And in the introduction to On the Origin of Species Darwin goes so far as to trace the development of Evolutionary Theory right back to Aristotle. Fifty years earlier Lamarck had published Philosophie Zoologique in which, arguably, was first enunciated the question to which On the Origin of Species was the answer. The idea of evolution had, of course, been around before Darwin’s work.

And few books accelerated that process like the one Darwin published in 1859. Humanity’s view of the world was being unhitched from its mooring. And it wouldn’t be long before other revolutionary ideas would crystalize through the work of Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein and others. Even as technology, trade and the emergence of an international media were rapidly shrinking the world, revolutionary ideas were making it an ever-stranger, more complicated and precarious place.Ī decade prior to On the Origin of Species, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had published The Communist Manifesto. The comforting solidity of the past, with its apparently unassailable Truths and Certainties, was beginning to fragment. A time when the modern world as we know it was first taking shape. Change was already in the air just waiting to be unleashed and given form. Though perhaps “produced” isn’t the right word. Although few of you reading this will be unaware of the significance of this remarkable book, it is worth taking a moment to consider the radical cultural shift it produced and the reverberations still being felt. Today we’re looking back to November 24th 1859 and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

On the origin of species 1859