July 1– From The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin
Summary:
Commentary: For the first time (and somewhat bizarrely) this one starts with T5FSOB introduction, then proceeds with a "pre-introduction" from the actual book summarizing the study of evolution. Apologies for any typos in the initial section, I don't have any clean/easily copyable copies of T5FSOB itself, just pdfs that're readable, but not perfect.
I think the weirdest thing about the study of evolution (and this is obviously grossly oversimplifying) is that it should be pretty clearly evident that it can/does happen. We've been breeding working animals for desired traits thousands of years ago, and the same with fruit. I guess it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that something could evolve into both an elephant and a mouse, but it makes sense if you think about the billion things that branch in between them. The Aristotle quote in the beginning more or less illustrates this. I don't often nod along with Aristotle, but we're good here.
It doesn't even necessarily rule out some kind of divine intervention. A deity could make a bunch of living things however long ago, and over time they grow and change. A variant of this is mentioned by several of the quoted writers in the text.
Darwin leaves a lot of untranslated foreign text (mostly French) here. I'm really grateful for machine translation, since they're far too long for me to try to force my way through with a dictionary. Although it would be a good excuse to find someone to collaborate and help translate otherwise.
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