Happy Darwin Day!

By JERRY COYNE - WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Added: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:54:39 UTC

203 years ago today, Charles Darwin was born in a manger in Shrewsbury, England, the son of a wealthy doctor and an heiress from the Wedgewood china firm. Although he’s most famous for On the Origin of Species—and let’s recall the full title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life—Darwin wrote about a dozen other books, covering subjects as diverse as earthworms, orchids, climbing plants, sexual selection, and, of course, the evolution of humans and our emotions.

The man was a polymath, and did all this despite a debilitating illness whose nature is still unidentified. It didn’t hurt, though, that he was independently wealthy, for his wife Emma was also a Wedgewood heiress (she was his first cousin, a union that was and is legal in the UK but is considered incest in some American states.)

Darwin at 51, the year after he published The Origin
Read more . . .

FREEBIE UPDATE: Alert reader Chris notes that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences is offering free downloads of some of its evolution books for Darwin Day. This offer, here, is apparently only valid for today.

A reading of an abridged version of the Origin of Species read by Richard Dawkins can also be purchased on Amazon
Purchasing via the links below helps support RDFRS
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

TAGGED: BOOKS, DARWIN, EVOLUTION

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