Hoy me acaban de llegar dos auto-regalos de mi cumpleaños, que ya sabéis, Amazon Wishlist. Son un par de libros que llevaba algún tiempo queriendo leer, bueno, en contreto quería The Origin of Species
De la contraportada de The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin’s travels around the world as an independent naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world’s beauty and sublimity which language could barely capture. Words, he said, were inadequate to convey to those who have not visited the inter-tropical regions, the sensation of delight which takes reader from the coasts and interiors of South America to South Sea islands, Darwin’s descriptive powers are constantly challenged, but never once overcome.
In addition, The Voyage of the Beagle displays Darwin’s powerful, speculative mind at work, posing searching questions about the complex relation between the Earth’s structure, animal forms, anthropology and the origins of life itself.
De la contraportada de The Origin of Species
The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the nineteenth century, and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination.
At the age of twenty-two, Darwin -who was a geologist, zoologist, paleantologist, and botanist- was invited to go on a journey around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle. The ship’s captian, ironically, hoped that trained naturalist would return with arguments to counter the new «dangerous» evolutionary views that were beginning to shock European religious fundamentalists. On that now famous trip, Darwin made expeditions hundreds of miles inward, through different countries, ofter risking his life to collect and observe the fauna, flora, and geological formations. The result was The Origin of Species, some twenty-three years later. It took that long for Darwin’s theories to come together and for the impact of all he had seen to fall into place.
In The Origin of Species, Darwin aimed to show the probability that every species is a development from previous species, which clearly implies that humans could have evolved from earlier and different forms of life. Darwin believed that all living things are engaged in a fierce «struggle for existence» and thaht the severe conditions of life tend to kill off those animals or plants thath inherit unfavorable traits, thus ensuring the survival of the fittest. Darwin concluded that there exists a «natural selection» of favorable variations that, in the course of thousands of years, suceeds in producing a remarkable variety of life forms through the process of evolution.
The Origin of Species was the frist mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon this publication, the book began to transform attitudes about society and religion, and was soon used to justify the philosophies of comunists, socialists, capitalists and even Germany’s National Socialists. But the most quoted response came from Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s friend and also a renowned naturlist, who exclaimed, «How estremely stupid not to have thought of that!»
Otros regalos recibidos
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