Darwin's Origin of the Species on This Day in History

This day in history: Charles Darwin's controversial classic On the Origin of the Species was published, after much hesitation, on this day in 1859. 

While Origin of the Species is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology, it is not the first work to dabble in this area. Various evolutionary ideas had already been proposed to explain new findings in biology.

Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin outlined a hypothesis of transmutation of species in the 1790s, and French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published a more developed theory in 1809. Both envisaged that spontaneous generation produced simple forms of life that progressively developed greater complexity, adapting to the environment by inheriting changes in adults caused by use or disuse. This process was later called Lamarckism. 

Around this time Georges Cuvier published his findings on the differences between living elephants and those found in the fossil record.

From 1830 to 1833, geologist Charles Lyell published his multi-volume work Principles of Geology, where he looked at evolution from the perspective of geology.

Alfred Russel Wallace famously conceived of his idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. Charles Lyell knew about Wallace's work and urged Darwin to publish his work on the subject to establish priority. 

Darwin's book still remains one of the most influential books of all time. Spectator.org puts The Origin of the Species at number 3, behind the Bible and the Koran.

This book, and many others on the topic are freely available online:

Read or download the Origin here.

Download/read: Michael Dowd's Thank God For Evolution! How The Marriage Of Science And Religion Will Transform Your Life And Our World
https://tinyurl.com/u8pdagg

Download/read: Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson
http://maxddl.org/Creation/Darwin%20On%20Trial.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ozxKMbHAQ

Download/read: Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth - How Much of What we Teach about Evolution is Wrong
https://archive.org/details/Jonathan.Wells.Icons.of.Evolution

Life—How Did it Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation?

Evolution Versus The New World

Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer
https://alta3b.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/doubt.pdf

INTELLIGENT DESIGN: A THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS by Erkki Vesa Rope Kojonen
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/135937/intellig.pdf

See also: 300 Books on Darwinism, Eugenics, Creation & Evolution on DVDrom
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2015/09/300-books-on-darwinism-eugenics.html