　　19世纪30年代，达尔文乘贝格尔号舰进行了历时5年的环球航行，对动植物和地质结构等进行了大量的采集和观察，并于1859年出版了《物种起源》这一划时代的著作。达尔文首次提出了自然选择是演化的机制，并通过《物种起源》这本书证明进化论的真实性。进化论被恩格斯誉为19世纪自然科学的三大发现之一，对后世影响深远。

作者简介

　　达尔文（1809—1882），英国生物学家，进化论的奠基人。1859年出版的《物种起源》是划时代的著作，提出了以自然选择为基础的生物进化论学说，对唯心的神造论、目的论和物种不变论提出根本性的挑战，使当时生物学各领域的概念和观念发生剧变。恩格斯更是将“进化论”列为19世纪自然科学的三大发现之一。

精彩书评

　　达尔文所阐述的进化论是19世纪自然科学的三大发现之一。
　　——恩格斯
　　
　　我认为《物种起源》这本书的格调是再好也没有的，它可以感动那些对这个问题一无所知的人们。至于达尔文的理论，我即使赴汤蹈火也要支持。
　　——赫胥黎

精彩书摘

　　WHEN on board HMS Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me , in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years’ work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.
　　My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr Hooker, who both knew of my work—the latter having read my sketch of 1844—honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr Wallace’s excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts.
　　This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect, I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy. No doubt errors will have crept in, though I hope I have always been cautious in trusting to good authorities alone. I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will suffice. No one can fell more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusion have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this. For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A faire result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this cannot possibly be here done.
　　I much regret that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance which I have received from very many naturalists, some of them personally unknown to me. I cannot, however, let this opportunity pass without expressing my deep obligations to Dr Hooker, who for the last fifteen years has aided me in every possible way by his large stores of knowledge and his excellent judgment.
　　……

前言/序言

　　WHEN Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in November 1859 he presented it as a hasty introduction to his ideas, for which he would present further evidence in the future. So it may have seemed to him: the next was written in thirteen months after a gestation of more than twenty years. It was written in the anxiety of knowing that Alfred Russell Wallace, like Darwin himself earlier, had recently conceived of a process that Darwin would name ‘natural selection’. Instead of all species having been created together at the beginning of time, or even at punctuated intervals through time, the present array of kinds throughout the world had come into being by a gradual process of genetic differentiation and selection under environmental pressures, Slight mutations could advantage individual organisms, and such mutations might then be enhanced over generations. This insight involved extinction as well as proliferation; it was disquieting in a great number of ways, however much each man later sought to palliate the disturbance.
　　The idea grew in both minds through extensive travel as natural historians, through detailed observation of nature phenomena around the world (not always the same parts), and through dream and reflection, in each case it seemed to the thinker that the full force of the theory seized him after reading Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (first edition 1798), probably in the edition of 1826. Malthus argued that human population and population growth will always outrun resources of nutrition and space; therefore competition between those occupying common environments will control population. Scholar have since discriminated the differences between the theories of Wallace and Darwin and have demurred at, or emphasized, Malthus’s role. In 1858, though, the insight the two men shared seemed close enough to drive Darwin at last into a steady frenzy of composition.
　　Darwin wished to marshal sufficient evidence to convince scientists adept in a variety of fields, from geology to botany to taxonomy and morphology. At the same time he wanted to address a very broad spectrum of readers, thus acting as fundamental initiator and popularize at once. That is, the Origin was to speed up the process of reception, so that the ideas it contained could become available simultaneously to Darwin’s fellow-workers in science and to any educated person. In this double task the book was quite remarkably successful, perhaps the more so as Darwin himself made no stable discrimination between the diverse audiences he was addressing. The language of the text is accessible and non-mathematical. Yet evidence is piled on evidence for colleagues to pursue, as the ‘Register of writers referred to in the text of the Origin ’at the end of this edition makes abundantly clear. The continuing fertility of Darwin’s work for scientists is evident in the degree to which it is still a fundamental prerequisite for work in genetics and still a source of controversy in taxonomy.
　　The extraordinary creativity of the writing, and its capacity to lend itself to contradictory social programmes, comes out of this liberal amalgamation of audiences. Indeed, this openness plays into—is part of—the vigour of Darwin’s argument. It declares itself in the novelty of his associative power, and in his ability to pursue small discrepancies to large effect. Different readers can find their hopes and fears confirmed by extending the implications of Darwin’s thought in one direction or another; and, it would later prove, those readers might be individualists, Fascists, Marxists, imperialists, or anarchists—or indeed, quietists. There is something fascinating and perturbing in a text that, while pursuing, in Darwin’s words, ‘one long argument’, ballasted by multiple evidences, can generate such a variety of ideological potentialities.
　　To understand its impact in Western cultures over the pat one hundred and fifty years, it is necessary to track the history of the work and its context. This will help the reader to analyse the process by which Darwin’s ideas (or those associated with his name, not always to be found within the covers of this book) have come to have so dominant a role in the construction of social domains apparently remote from the biological. Darwin himself insisted always on constraining the extra-scientific implications of his work and resisted any overt politicization (itself, of course, a political position). Wallace, on the contrary, became an active socialist who saw evolutionism as caught into that enterprise. But it was Wallace who uncoupled the human from all other species development so as to preserve a 牛津英文经典：物种起源（英文版） [On the Origin of Species] 下载 mobi epub pdf txt 电子书格式