This book (149 Pages) was crammed with facts, keeping me on the edge the whole time. I never knew how cool Darwin was until I read this book. And like I said, if you need tons of facts on Darwin, this book has so many, its hard to record!

A very useful compilation of most of Darwin's notebooks. Essential for any serious Darwin student. Expensive but good value. Entertaining in parts! Best read in small instalments.

An informative interpretation of the evolution of Darwin's patterns of thought and of his life.

My nine year old grandson found this book interesting and useful. He is already exploring some of the clever, do-able activity/experiment suggestions. I recommend this book to any budding scientist.

"China and Charles Darwin" is an impressive historical monograph, well argued thoughout by the author. Most impressive is the clarity of discription of the ideological dialogue between East and West. Though nearly 500 pages of thickly constructed analysis, the book is very readable thanks in part to a peppering of humor throughout by Pusey.

If you thought you knew all there was to know about Charles Darwin and his evolutionary hypothesis, but you haven't read this book, then think again. Eiseley's research is impeccable, but his findings strike to the very heart of the Darwin legend, revealing a deeply flawed and basically dishonest seeker after self-aggrandisement. No wonder it's out of print! Despite his findings Eiseley remained a Darwinist and an evolutionist to his dying day. This book is no slice of creationist propoganda, it is a carefully written, highly readable review of the facts. If you have any interest in the history of evolutionism - pro or con - this book should be very near the top of your reading list.

Very interesting and readable account of how Darwin's views on religion and evolution developed over the course of his life. As well as being a towering figure in modern science, Darwin was also a highly principled and compassionate person, as this book makes clear. He struggled all his life with the contradiction between the orthodox Christianity he espoused as a young man and the ideas that science inevitably lead him to, and this may have been a factor in his persistent ill health. It is outrageous that a man as brilliant and humble as Darwin has been so villified by ignorant bigots with anti-scientific agendas. Far from being a racist as hypocritical biblical creationsists often claim, Darwin hated racism and slavery, and longed for the day when all men would see each other as brothers:

"As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." (The Descent of Man)

Darwin (and Phipps) also explode the idea that the theory of evolution preaches selfishness and apathy towards one's fellows:

"Darwin thought of humans more as protectors of one another than as predators on one another. When two tribes are in competition, he stated, the one that warns its members of danger and engages in mutual defense is more likely to succeed. The 'fittest' are not necessarily the brawniest, nor even those who sire the most offspring, but those who live cooperatively." (Chapter 6)

The point is also made that a god-magician who must continually interfere with the universe in order to keep it going smoothly is less worthy of worship than one who works indirectly by allowing the full potential of the universe to unfold through scientific law - a point always lost on the biblical creationists. It's a pity that these "creationists" are the people who most need to read this book but are the least likely to do so.

This book and its sister publication Time Gate, though written two decades ago, STILL reads like a revolutionary view of the future. Pellegrino was one of the framers of the US/Soviet Space Cooperation Initiative, advocating and predicting an international space station, as a springboard to Mars and Europa, even before President Reagan announced the building of an American Space Station. He invented the dinosaur cloning recipe used in "Jurassic Park," predicted the discovery of oceans and the possibility of life inside the iceworlds circling Jupiter and Saturn, and even showed how interstellar flight at 92% lightspeed might be possible by the mid-21st century. In this brief history of life on Earth, we can see the first hints of the elegant writing style that we would come to love in his later books, both in his science and his gripping science fiction.

Arnold Brackman's book on the 'delicate arrangement' concerning Darwin and Wallace is an important, now out of print and no doubt too little read, text on the enigma of the sources of the theory of evolution, and the suspicion about Darwin's delay and sudden breakthrough on the principle of divergence. The issues raised are shocking, and keep getting shunted aside by Darwinists in general. Brackman's book is not so easily dismissed. And beyond the specific questions which struggle for correct proof lies the more general picture of Darwin, which is clear and not very flattering, to say the least, irregardless of the actual facts of what skullduggery was occurring here that required such clear stealth tactics abetted by Hooker and Lyell, stretching to the staging of the joint announcement at the Linnean Society.

From Brackman's A Delicate Arrangement

Among Darwin's letters and journals that June morning of 1858 was a relatively thick envelope containing some twenty sheets of a thin 'foreign' stationary, probably rice paper, and probably pale violet in color. The manuscript was accompanied by a note from Alfred Russel Wallace, who had initiated a correspondence with Darwin only some twenty months earlier from Sarawak, Borneo... (Chapter 2)

(Chapter 3) Since the manuscript Wallace mailed from Ternate contained--in complete form--what is today known as the Darwinian theory of evolution, the date of its arrival at Down House acquires profound historical significance.

A quartet of dates is in the running as the date on which the postrider handed Wallace's envelope to Parslow. The first of the four-Friday, June 4--is speculative; the second--Tuesday, June 8--is the day Darwin wrote Hooker that he had suddenly found the missing 'keystone' of his theory; the third--Monday, June 14--is suggested by Darwin's 'little diary'; and the fourth--Friday, June 18--is the date publicly advanced by Darwin himself. Wherever the chronological reality may rest, June 1858 clearly marked for Darwin the moment of truth.
The problem is compounded by the disappearance of the Darwin envelope. The envelope...In all probability it no longer exists. It has either been misplaced or, more likely, destroyed.
The postal history of the period, the survival of a number of other Wallace letters from Ternate, and a consensus among philatelists is that it would take a letter from Ternate some twelve weeks to reach Down. According to the evidence found in Wallace's papers, he wrote out his complete theory of evolution toward the end of February and posted it March 9, when the first available Ductch vessel dropped anchor at Ternate. This is corroborated by a letter Wallace sent that same day by the same ship to Frederick Bates, the brother of Henry Walter Bates with whom Wallace had scoured the Amazon for species some years earlier. H. Lewis McKinney, a memeber of the University of Kansas faculty, was the first to draw attention to the Bates letter....

Wallace's letter to Darwin should have arrived the same day as Bates', June 3, or perhaps a day or two later. "It is only reasonable to assume that Wallace's communication to Darwin arrived at the same time and was delivered to Darwin at Down House on 3 June 1858, the same day as Bates' letter arrived in Leicester," said McKinney. "If this sequence is correct, as it appears to be, we must ask ourselves what Darwin was doing with Wallace's paper during the two weeks between 4 June and 18 June (when Darwin claimed to have received it)."

Two other books, John Brooks, "Just Before the Origin"
and
Raby's recent Alfred Rusell Wallace

Now that we're in the midst of a resurgence of Darwin applied to humans, it's all the more important to have historical perspective on earlier assimilations of Darwinism. Kelly's study is essential reading for understanding the assimilation in Germany. He shows that Darwinism, in its initial phase, was a jolly good blunt instrument for anti-clericism and the promotion of humanist philosophy. Popularizers, who were often scientists, did not typically take sides in the then great agitated question of Capitalism vs. Socialism. The embattled religious establishment tended to interpret any secularist advocacy as a prelude to socialism, but this was merely a bias of perspective. Kelly shows that the big capitalist establishment did not rush to embrace popularized Darwinism. Many socialists were Darwinians, and viewed the 'struggle for existence' as a confirmation of their revolutionary creed, but they also found in Darwin a justification of progress toward a society that transcended the brutal world of animal nature. Kelly corrects previous interpretations (especially Daniel Gasman) of popular Darwinism as a prelude to Nazi Darwinism. The alleged proto-Nazis of the Monist League were in reality humanists of an emphatic anti-clerical stripe.

Kelly's study has not enjoyed the attention that it deserves.

Hiram Caton