In the introduction to Almost like a Whale, Steve Jones calls The Origin of Species 'without doubt, the book of the millennium'. Jones is an evolutionary biologist, so this judgment could merely reflect disciplinary bias. But not only did The Origin of Species disabuse us of the notion that we humans are in some way set apart from the natural world, it also provided a mechanism, natural selection, to explain how the exquisite fit of organisms to their environment can arise without divine intervention: man deposed, God disposed of, and all in a single volume.

LRB 3 February 2000 | PDF Download