Not actually read anything for a while, other than re-reads of Harry Potter. But a surf around the BBC news site today produced something quite interesting; I discovered that they've made available on the web the complete works of Charles Darwin, so I've just started on 'On the Origin of Species'.
And quite fascinating it is proving, even though I'm still only on the introduction. Having studied ecology, I've obviously come across alot of Darwin's work before, but this is reading it from a slightly different angle: His. I say this because it soon became obvious that he was writing it before certain discoveries were made that are common knowledge now. For instance he talks about heretable traits. They knew they existed, but they had no idea of even the basic mechanisms; this work was published a few years before Gregor Mendel's initial works on Genetics, using Peas.
It is also proving interesting in an etymological sense. Both Darwin and certain of his contemporaries refer to particularly noticeable 'oddities' in a group of offspring as 'Monstrosities'. I thought this was a strange word to use, until I realised that the word we would use, 'Mutants', had probably not been coined then. Useful to remember by anyone writing a Sci-fi type novel based in ~Darwinian times?
His 'alternative title' was quite creepy, considering the events of sixty odd years back:
'On the origin of Species by natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.
There's a lot of it to read, so I may be some time. But as Penny and Co. are, presumably, once more stuck in 'The Station', I've had an idea for a possible title of a more factual book, for which the research at least would be fascinatinhg. Darwin talked of heritable traits, but it was almost a hundred years before we were able to elucidate, on the molecular level, the mechanisms by which they operate, thanks to the work of Watson and Crick, amongst others. A lot of ideas came and went, and a lot of work was done during those hundred years. Hmm..interesting, I might get back on this...
Dave.
