![]() Browne’s mammoth two volume biography of Darwin is great too, but probably much more than you’d want to bite off for a reading group. It’s a short (readable in a few hours) introduction to the writing of the Origin, the social and scientific context, reaction to the book, etc. I require my students to read Janet Browne’s Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography. But background reading can definitely help you get more out of it. So you can get a lot out of the Origin without doing any background reading. And while the style may not be your cup of tea (though I actually like it, or at least don’t mind it), it’s not difficult reading. ![]() It’s not technical it was written to be read by any educated person. ![]() Another option, which I’ve used in my class in the past, is the famous Harvard facsimile edition first published for the Origin‘s 100th anniversary in 1959, which includes a famous and influential introduction by Ernst Mayr. This is the printing I plan to teach my class from in future. And as the title indicates, The Annotated Origin has extensive and very good marginal notes from biologist James T. It’s a facsimile of the first edition, so it has the original pagination (helpful if you’ll also be reading scholarly articles about the Origin, as they all refer to the book using the original pagination). If you prefer a hard copy (and call me old fashioned, but I really think every biologist should own a hard copy), then I recommend The Annotated Origin. Darwin’s books have long since gone out of copyright, so you can read the first edition for free on various websites, such as this one.
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