قراءات إضافية

أعمال داروين العلمية

For most of Darwin’s scientific books, one copy of the book is as good as another. However, for The Origin of Species, I have a recommendation. Someone reading the book for the first time would do well to read the text of the first edition (1859). After Darwin first published the Origin, it provoked a mass of comment and criticism. Darwin dealt with these criticisms, and added further thoughts of his own, in a series of later editions: he published six editions in all. Darwin scholars love to track his changing thoughts through the six editions, but most readers will want to read only one edition. The first edition gives Darwin’s argument in the clearest and most concise forms. The later editions become increasingly cluttered with replies (explicit and implicit) to critics. Moreover, from a modern perspective, the critics in Darwin’s own time are no longer of major importance. The critics have not been vindicated, and Darwin’s replies to them have proved unnecessary. The version of Darwin’s theory that is accepted by modern biologists does differ from Darwin’s original version, but not in ways that either Darwin or his critics foresaw. You therefore do not get a more modern version of the theory by reading the sixth rather than the first edition; you get the same Darwinian theory but it is harder to follow in the later editions. There are several editions of The Origin of Species in print at present, and I recommend checking that the text is of Darwin’s first (1859) edition.

حياة داروين

Darwin, C. Autobiography. It was originally published, in expurgated form, as a chapter in Darwin’s Life and Letters (1887). The full text is available in several modern editions.
Browne, J. (1995–2002). Charles Darwin. 2 vols. Jonathan Cape, London. There are dozens of biographies of Darwin. This one is authoritative, and as near as any to being the “standard ”modern biography.
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge University Press. A huge scholarly publishing project, as yet incomplete. It will publish all Darwin’s known correspondence, in a large but unknown number of volumes. With its editorial annotations, it amounts to a biography of Darwin in itself.

أفكار داروين: مصادر ثانوية

The following two books are the best scientific commentaries; they both discuss Darwin’s theorizing and its relation to subsequent scientific advances. Cronin concentrates more on social behaviour, Ghiselin more on systematics, but both range widely.

Cronin, H. (1991). The Ant and the Peacock. Cambridge University Press.
Ghiselin, M. T. (1969). The Triumph of the Darwinian Method. University of California Press.

أفكار حديثة حول التطور

Richard Dawkins is a superbly clear popularizer of Darwinian ideas, particularly adaptation and natural selection—though his most recent book The Ancestor’s Tale is about evolutionary history.

Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. W. H. Freeman.
Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene. 2nd edn. Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (2004). The Ancestor’s Tale. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Stephen Jay Gould’s popular essays cover a huge range of evolutionary topics; many of them are about Darwin’s own thinking. The essays were written separately over more than twenty-five years and gathered in a series of books.

Gould, S. J. (1977). Ever Since Darwin. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (1980). The Panda’s Thumb. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (1983). Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (1985). The Flamingo’s Smile. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (1991). Bully for Brontosaurus. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (1993). Eight Little Piggies. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (1996). Dinosaur in a Haystack. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (1998). Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (2000). The Lying Stones of Marrakech. W. W. Norton, New York.
Gould, S. J. (2002). I Have Landed. W. W. Norton, New York.

Jones, S. (1999). Almost Like a Whale. Doubleday, London. Also published (2000) as: Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated. Ballantine Books, New York. In this book, Steve Jones “updated ”The Origin of Species, by keeping the chapter structure of Darwin’s book but rewriting it with modern examples. Steve Jones is a witty and readable popularizer of science.

I have written some educational books on evolution, including a college-level text and an edited anthology of major papers on evolution by “big-name” evolutionary biologists.

Ridley, M. (2003). Evolution. 3rd edn. Blackwell Publishing. The college-level text.
Ridley, M. (ed.) (2004). Evolution. 2nd edn. Oxford Readers series. Oxford University Press. The anthology.

http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin/ contains texts of many of Darwin’s books, papers, letters, and other writings.

http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/ includes full searchable texts of The Origin of Species (1st and 6th edns.), The Descent of Man, and The Voyage of the “Beagle”, together with other Darwinian material, such as Darwin-related holidays.