isbn-13: 9780393059816
Audible
Interesting account of Darwin’s life after he returned from adventures on the HMS Beagle. The book details Darwin’s struggles to put his ideas and thoughts into a published book. It also gives an account of the prevailing theories of the time - I didn’t realize that the concept of Evolution predates Darwin, although it was then called Transmutation. The novel idea put forward by Darwin was Natural Selection. I also didn’t realize that Natural Selection took decades to gain widespread acceptance and it took the rediscovery of Mandel’s experiments in genetics to finally validate Natural Selection. The book also discusses Alfred Russel Wallace who independently came up with his own theory of Natural Selection, in part forcing Darwin to publish his theory in ‘The Origin of the Species’ much earlier than he had planned to.