The Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

One of the ten most significant books. (Sigmund Freud)

No book made a greater impact on the intellectual world of its first Victorian readers nor has had such an enduring influence on our thinking on science, literature, theology and philosophy.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin addresses the crucial question of the origins, evolution and racial divergence of mankind, that he had deliberately left out of On the Origin of Species. And the evidence he presents forces us to question what it is that makes us uniquely human.

'I find an addictive fascination in his Victorian prose style, quite apart from the feeling one gets of having been ushered into the presence of one of the great minds of all time.' Richard Dawkins --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

CHARLES DARWIN (1809-82) was an evolutionary biologist, best known for his controversial and ground-breaking On the Origin of Species (1856). JAMES MOORE is Reader in History of Science & Technology at the Open University. He is currently working on a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace.

ADRIAN DESMOND is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Biology Department at UCL. He is the author of a 2-volume biography of Huxley and is editing Huxley's family correspondence.

'Humanity is the missing guest at the feast of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859. The famous "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is a calculated understatement matched, in the annals of science, only by Watson and Crick's "it has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material".
By the time Darwin finally got around to throwing that light with the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871, it might have seemed a good idea to separate it into two books: Sexual Selection followed by the Descent of Man. But Darwin knew what he was doing.

The distinguished American philosopher Daniel Dennett has credited Darwin with the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind. This was natural selection, the survival of the fittest, of course, and I would include sexual selection as part of the same idea. But Darwin was not only a deep thinker, he was a naturalist of encyclopaedic knowledge and (which by no means necessarily follows) the ability to hold it in his head and deploy it in constructive directions.

He was a master encyclopaedist, who collated huge quantities of information and observations solicited from naturalists all around the world, each gentleman meticulously acknowledged for having "attended to" the subject and sometimes complimented as a "reliable observer". I find an addictive fascination in his Victorian prose style, quite apart from the feeling one gets of having been ushered into the presence of one of the great minds of all time.' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.