Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ tops list of most important academic books

[IDemo]

Written more than 150 years ago, it was a book that upended the way human beings think about where they came from, challenged millennia of religious dogma and left people wondering whether there really was a god. And sometime Republican presidential primary front-runner Ben Carson once felt compelled to point out that it was encouraged by Satan.

Now, Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” has been voted the academic book that changed the world the most by a British academic publishing trade group.

“It’s not in the least surprising, and completely right, that On the Origin of Species won,” Alan Staton, head of marketing at the Booksellers Association, which came up with the list, said in a statement. “No work has so fundamentally changed the way we think about our very being and the world around us.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/11/darwins-origin-of-species-tops-list-of-most-important-academic-books/?hpid=hp_no-name_morning-mix-story-d%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

[pinboy3niner]

1. Maybe this award news could be printed...

...on the new Starbucks satanic coffee cups.

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. Love the way you think!

[AngryAmish]

2. Not "Grain Storage in Ancient Egypt"??

[HereSince1628]

3. Glad to see "Silent Spring" in that list...

I recognized almost all the titles and read bits of many of them so I'd have to agree those books were woven into my education.

I've seriously read seven of the finalists and handful of Shakespeare...and from my narrow perspective as a biologist, actually studied three of those books pretty carefully.

At my first teaching job after grad school I was at a college that did away with 'western civilization' and had a two semester team taught things called "Common Course" which exposed college freshmen and sophomores to foundations of modern thinking.

I gotta say they got exposed to wonderful books, but much of the older stuff was a pretty hard slogs for them. Writing styles have really moved away from compound complex sentences that often run north of 60 words in length.

[malaise]

4. I have long argued that this should be required reading in every

school, college and university

[kwolf68]

6. Heathen

/eom

lol

[Marr]

7. Agreed completely. Before Darwin, science had no explanation for the

enormous complexity found in the natural world. That's an awfully big gap for gods to live in.

[exboyfil]

8. Newton's Principia was not

on the finals list, but a A Brief History of Time was? That makes no sense.

I am not as familiar with the social science texts, but I have to wonder if Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions should also have been on the finals list.

Also
Galileo?, Copernicus?, Maxwell?

Watson's Double Helix?


I would not argue with Darwin's On the Origin of Species though. It is a masterful book that holds up well today in reading (unlike Newton which is much more difficult). The thing I find interesting is how the Fundies treat it like it is a sacred text for those who accept evolution. Like all scientific literature it had mistakes and holes that were filled by later research.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. I'm Right There With You

I would have thought Principia would be #1