With my third round pick, Team Discovery Channel is proud to select, in the category of Science:
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
or,
The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
By Charles Darwin.
Published 24 November, 1859
Title changed to
The Origin of Species in 1872.
Arguably the most important book ever published, and unquestionably the most important work of biology. The 1859 publication of
On the Origin of Species rocked the scientific, religious, and popular world simultaneously.
No book has sparked more ferocious debate, nor (with the possible exceptions of Newton's
Principia Mathematica and Einstein's papers on General and Special Relativity) been the basis for more scientific discovery.
One of the first scientific treatise to be readable by the non-expert, this book forever altered our understanding of our place in the universe.
Being raised by an evolutionary biologist, I was drilled young in the importance of this work and have read it twice - once haltingly when in my early to mid teens, and again in my early twenties. I definitely got more out of it the second time, having by then read other works from the period and being more prepared for victorian diction, but it is not a hard read and - even if you choose not to accept the conclusions - the book deserves to be read by everyone the world over.
Natural Selection in a nutshell:
Quote:
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As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
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