Series 117
This is a Ladybird Expert book, one of a series of titles for an adult readership. Written by some of the leading lights and outstanding communicators in their fields and published by one of the most trusted and well-loved names in books, the Ladybird Expert series provides clear, accessible and authoritative introductions, informed by expert opinion, to key subjects drawn from science, history and culture.
Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
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First published 2017
Text copyright © Steve Jones, 2017
All images copyright © Ladybird Books Ltd, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-405-92945-5
Nobody can speak a language without understanding how it fits together. Evolution is the grammar of biology. It unites the study of plants, animals and people into a single science. Without it, the subject would be a list of disconnected facts, as it was until 1859, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.
His ideas led to a revolution in science and in humankind’s view of itself. Although creationists still believed that life had sprung into being around 6,000 years ago, and although some biologists had speculated that living organisms could change, they had no real idea how or why, and few facts to back up their ideas. Darwin’s theory, by comparison, was almost brutal in its simplicity. It turns on ‘descent with modification’: the accumulation of errors over the generations. Diversity, its raw material, is refined in the furnace of natural selection: inherited differences in reproductive success in the face of a struggle for existence.
Darwin accumulated so much evidence that he might never have published had he not received a letter pre-empting his idea from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin rushed out a ‘Sketch’ of his theory. He calls The Origin ‘one long argument’ and, like a legal case, it moves from the obvious to the almost unthinkable: from cattle breeding to the claim that ‘light will be cast on man and his origins’. That statement has proved triumphantly correct.
If The Origin is a ‘Sketch’ at 170,000 words, the Ladybird Expert book Evolution is sketchier at a mere 6,000. Even so, I hope that it reveals the bare bones of modern evolution.
Beagle