How to read Darwin’s ‘Origin’ in 2025

Go into any large chain bookstore in the UK – you know the one I mean. Cast your eyes over the shelves holding the latest non-fiction publications and consider the number that have a ‘How to’ title or sub-title, or a variant on this title. You can choose How Not To Age, by Michael Greger, or This Book May Save Your Life, by Dr Karan Rajan. On a recent visit I found, clustered together: Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis by Nick Bano, Failed State: Why Britain Doesn’t Work and How We Fix It by Sam Freedman, and The Lie of the Land: How a Tiny Group of Landowners Wrecked the Countryside, and How the Public Can Restore It, by Guy Shrubsole. Books in 2025 are increasingly marketed as manuals or guides that will enable you to do or to know a specific thing. Why is this?

My view is that print books are faced with imminent decline, displaced by the new literacies generated by digital and online technology. Of course, booksellers will tell you that the print trade is still flourishing, books still flying off the shelves. But in future this might look like the last efflorescence or parting shot of the book as a curiosity, a singular thing of value distinct from its competitors. As a ‘retired’ (i.e., still writing) Professor of English, one of my cherished voluntary activities is a weekly session in a local Primary School, in which I help Year 5 pupils (ages 9-10) with their reading. The pupils love the excitement of learning to read books, and of discovering language in books as a key to unlock the world. But outside of my single weekly session, virtually none of them encounter or read another book.

Book-declinism may be derided as a mere form of cultural pessimism. Yet I see my pupils’ alienation from print books as hard evidence, of the same kind as the changing reading lists of my latter years teaching and examining literature in universities: these lists were gradually populated with shorter works, to address declining attention spans.  If digital technologies and the addictive power of the mobile phone continue to develop, how will all of this look in twenty years’ time? Already, we are less sure what books are for, and have to be sold them by virtue of a clearly displayed utility or function: buy this, and you will learn that. The idea that book might be process of reflection, an exploratory exercise in the expansion of thought about a subject, for the purposes of explanation and enlightenment perhaps, but not with quantifiable outcomes, becomes more remote. This is the kind of thinking in a book that we might once have called ‘philosophical’. A few years ago, the afore-indicated bookstore chain began to significantly reduce its Philosophy sections, at the same time as it expanded the new presence of something called ‘Smart Thinking’. We can still think and write seriously, as long the thinking is ‘smart’, clever in a way that is imbued with pragmatism and marketability, producing a tangible pay-off. ‘Science’ in this same bookstore also became less visible, as ‘Popular Science’ sailed more largely into view.

If Charles Darwin had arrived at his theory of natural selection in the 2020s instead of the 1850s, he might have entitled his book Life Forms: How They Came To Be What They Are instead of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In writing the Origin, Darwin took for granted the existence, and growth, of an intelligent reading public; and as John Burrow, a twentieth-century editor of the Origin, put it, the book is ‘easily the most readable and approachable of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination’. The Origin was and remains readable and approachable in part because in 1859 what we now know as ‘professional’ science had barely begun. The urgent purpose of the Origin in 1859 was to communicate to Darwin’s peers, the finest scientific minds, the years-long research that had led him to the theory of natural selection, having discovered that fellow-naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace had arrived at virtually identical conclusions and was on the point of publishing before him. But Darwin did not have at his disposal a highly-specialised scientific language, forged in university departments and niche scientific journals (post-nineteenth century phenomena), that would need translating for a general readership. It is true that a glossary of key terms was added to the sixth edition, explaining them in ‘as popular a form as possible’ (378). But it will still be clear to a reader in 2025 that the patient and painstaking narrative of the Origin assumes little distinction between the experts of mid-nineteenth century natural science and an interested general readership.

There is also a ‘smart’ aspect to Darwin’s famous text that would ensure its placement on the ‘Popular Science’ shelves of our 2025 bookstore. What might it look like to completely overturn established ways of thinking about how creatures, including human ones, come to be as they are? The ‘creationist’ way, for example, of thinking about each species as separately crafted and ordained by God? Or, the more contemporary ‘Lamarckian’ way of seeing species as ‘evolving’ (a word certainly not invented by Darwin) through creatures uniformly inheriting the physical changes of their predecessors? What other modes of explanation were possible?

Darwin had to persuade his reader that the origin of species was much more external than either of these options. Natural selection was not concerned with creaturely essence so much as with mathematics and demography, with the probabilities and percentages of populations within geographical areas. Imagine a species of finch that inhabits a certain place. As the life-resources of any area are limited, there will be competition for these resources; not all of the offspring of this species are able to survive. The ones most likely to survive are those that are stronger and fitter than others, however minimal these advantages might be: ‘a grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die’ (352).  These stronger and fitter specimens will be more likely to be able to reproduce, thereby creating similarly stronger and fitter offspring. This mechanism, Darwin maintained, was how species evolve, and it is what he called natural selection.

First edition 1859

When I edited and introduced the Wordsworth Classics Origin in the late 1990s, I did so as a specialist in literary studies. Some years previously I had first read the Origin as part of my doctoral research into the role of science in the work of the English modernist writer D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Another twentieth-century editor of the Origin, Gillian Beer, had led the way in the interdisciplinary study of literature and science, and Gillian’s example had made me at least a little less nervous about editing Darwin as a non-scientist than I might otherwise have been. The Origin is not a literary work; it is made up of Darwin’s exhaustive fieldwork research, one principle source being the 1831-36 expedition to the Southern hemisphere recorded in The Voyage of the Beagle (also in Wordsworth Classics). But the Origin is also made up of language. Lawrence, a working-class intellectual, had read the Origin along with other key works of Victorian evolutionary or ‘materialist’ science, in a formative period as a young man. Reading the Origin over Lawrence’s shoulder, as it were, I was able to think about how this experimental writer would encounter Darwin’s text not just as the repository of scientific research and theory, but as a piece of writing.

The smartness of the Origin is therefore inevitably to some extent a matter of rhetorical ingenuity, and this is what makes the text abidingly fascinating to read. Darwin’s opening strategy was to liken natural selection to the human activities of cultivating plants and breeding animals and birds. This reverses the metaphorical norm: while we usually see human artifice mirroring or aspiring to nature, Darwin presented artificial selection as a metaphor of natural selection. Nature does what we do when we try to breed a finer strain of pigeon, albeit in a far more complex way. But this of course puts the word ‘selection’ under strain. Breeding a pigeon involves a breeder, a human being, making conscious choices. Does nature therefore also ‘select’? In a sense, the whole aim of Darwin’s theory was to say the opposite, that nature evolves automatically, mathematically or, in a term later popularised by Richard Dawkins, blindly. So is this still ‘selection’, or was Darwin using a term that was just too human, too anthropocentric?

A similar tension even surrounds the word ‘origin’. There is a sense in which this word reflects the interests and expectations of Darwin’s 1850s readership more than his own theory. Darwin insisted that the difference between a ‘species’ and a ‘variety’, between a separate category of being and merely a variant one, is not set hard and fast in nature. Rather, it is a decision made by the scientist involved in that particular classification, a decision to label a living form with either one word or the other. This led me in the mid-1990s to the seemingly perverse declaration that the last thing On the Origin of Species is about is the origin of species. Yet this still seems to me to be true. Quite obviously, Darwin was challenging the idea of species ‘origin’ as individual acts of divine fiat. Each species is not an act of will on the part of God. But equally, each species is not a clearly separate entity found in nature. If you really want to find the origin of a species, it is in language; ‘species’ is a word conferred upon a living form by a scientist. When we look at nature, therefore, what we see are not species and varieties; instead, we see a continuum, a state of continual flux.

It’s for this reason that I speculate upon a Darwin in 2025 who would not use the word ‘origin’, and who might prefer the fluidity implicit in the term ‘life form’ over the fixity associated with ‘species’. For me (and call me a literary person if you like), the continuing appeal of the Origin lies in the decisions it makes about words, and in its spectrum of rhetorical persuasion. At one end of this spectrum, there is the revelatory sense of wonder that sees Darwin often announcing his discoveries with an exclamation mark – ! A large number of cats in an area ‘might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!’ (58); ‘How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates!’ (60). Or, ‘What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years!’ (218). ‘Instincts’, in the chapter devoted to this topic, are repeatedly ‘wonderful’, while variations in nature are often ‘beautiful’.

Darwin’s signature on a page from the original manuscript

But if wonder is at one end of the spectrum, the core principle of falsifiability is at the other – not, perhaps, the smartest or sexiest aspect of the Origin for a twenty-first century reader. Any scientific finding is only as sound as its ability to anticipate and disprove the things that might refute it; the awareness of falsifiability must be as comprehensive as possible. Returning to read the Origin in 2025, I am struck, even more than I was 30 years ago, by Darwin’s tenacity in raising as many obstacles to natural selection as possible; he gives them ‘their full force’, and the word ‘grave’ looms large in describing the difficulties faced (346). A whole chapter is devoted to ‘Difficulties on Theory’, trying to deal for example with the vexed question of why, on the logic of his own theory of flux, we do not see ‘innumerable transitional forms’ everywhere in nature (132). The voice is that of an extremely scrupulous and necessarily humble thinker who is only too aware of the potential vulnerabilities of his work. About variations, he will admit to being ‘perplexed’. The laws of inheritance (Darwin wrote before Mendel’s breakthrough in the science of genetics) are ‘quite unknown’ (13). Or, we may often be ‘wholly unable even to conjecture’ how the members of a class of creatures, who must be descended from common parents, manage to be distributed at vast distances from each other across the globe – we remain ‘profoundly ignorant’ of migratory processes (348).

What I find compelling but also, in 2025, deeply poignant about the Origin’s obsessive pursuit of falsifiability is the story it tells us about such ‘ignorance’, another of the text’s key words, and its place  in the fortunes of literacy and intellectual work today. We are, Darwin must remind his reader, in a state of ignorance about the natural world, ‘nor do we know how ignorant we are’ (351). We can, or could, nevertheless safely assume that a book is designed to address this state of ignorance by establishing its truth rigorously, with the most minutely-detailed scrutiny of its evidence and its claims, even at the expense of smartness and elegance. Today’s reader may be amused, not to mention surprised, to find Darwin apologising that the Origin is only a brief and hastily written ‘abstract’ and promising completion only via a longer future work (which never emerged) containing ‘a long catalogue of dry facts’ (36).

1874 caricature of Darwin

But Darwin could afford to assume that his reader would expect no less. This contract between author and reader licenses, in fact, an extraordinary optimism about human intellectual endeavour, a sense that recognising the extent of our ignorance is precisely the basis of the common effort towards enlightenment. ‘It is so easy’, Darwin writes in his ‘Recapitulation and Conclusion’ chapter, ‘to hide our ignorance under such expressions as “the plan of creation”, “unity of design”, etc, and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact’ (363). Working together, as it were, author and reader could gradually overcome the ‘blindness of preconceived opinion’ and ‘load of prejudice’ surrounding the natural world. A vision emerges of grandeur and nobility, of a ‘secure future’ and endlessly ‘open fields’ of human knowledge, in step with a process of natural selection that works only for ‘the good of each being’ and indeed progresses ‘toward perfection’ (367-9).

Really? Today, the technologies that challenge the book simultaneously undermine their own knowledge-claims. Here, ignorance is less a thing to be dispelled than to be proudly displayed; prejudice and the blindness of preconceived opinion are demanding their rights. The voyage of the Darwinian intellect is all very well, and presumably it will still take place in books, like the Origin, that will still do their book-thing, but why should its discoveries have any more authority than any other belief or point of view? Online cultures enable a radical alternative. Rigorous intellect and its critical impulse can be caricatured as ‘woke’, and the right to instead remain (presumably) ‘asleep’, or blind, vigorously championed as an assertion of ‘freedom of speech’. Creationist views are resurgent across what critical theorist Jonathan Crary calls the ‘internet complex’. Of course, a politics is at work. The hard- and extreme-right, deeply invested in restricting education and sustaining ignorance, have enthusiastically embraced online culture and social media from the outset. Such platforms are gift-wrapped for this politics; books, like the Origin, after all, have had an unfair advantage for far too long. It is similarly in the interests of the unthinkably-wealthy corporate owners of the technologies to keep attention spans short, to encourage swift and uncritical consumption, to dismantle sustained critical thought. Both agents in this process have been able to take advantage of the failure to extend and democratise education, and the stigmatisation of educational deficit in increasingly unequal societies: why shouldn’t ignorance be defended, if we are shut out from its alternative, and if it belongs to us? To read the Origin in 2025 is, perhaps, to read an advanced work of Enlightenment in an age dangerously threatened by Counter-  Enlightenment.

Jeff Wallace PhD, FEA, SFHEA
Professor Emeritus
Cardiff School of Education and Social Policy
Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK

Publications include: 

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-abstraction-in-modernism-and-modernity.html

Book series: New Literary Theory (Routledge). Editors: Andy Mousley and Jeff Wallace

https://www.routledge.com/New-Literary-Theory/book-series/NLTH

Our edition can be found here: Origin of Species – Wordsworth Editions

Main image: Statue of Charles Darwin outside the Shrewsbury Library. Credit: Chris Mattison / Alamy

Image 1 above courtesy of Jeff Wallace

Image 2 above: Title page of the First Edition 1859 Credit: Colport / Alamy

Image 3 above: Darwin’s signature on a page of the original manuscript Credit: Sipa US / Alamy

Image 4 above: 1874 caricature of Darwin. Credit: Science History Images / Alamy