I re-read The Origin of Species a few years ago, and it's astonishing how powerful the work is, given its publication in 1859. I have a shelf and a half of books on the topic, mostly popular science works and a few textbooks, and it's easier to find questionable statements in a book by a modern author like Dawkins or Gould than Darwin. The fact that he wrote Origin without knowing of even Mendelian genetics/DNA, or any of a host of subsequent geological discoveries makes it that much more amazing.

In my opinion, Origin is the most important and influential work of non-fiction ever written. I believe it was Gould who wrote (may have been citing someone else) that the two most crucial blows to humanity's collective hubris were Copernicus teaching us that our world was not the center of existence, and Darwin teaching us that our species is not the center of our world.

As for the "It's only a theory" crowd, they'd do better questioning the theory of gravity. (Or learning what the word 'theory' means applied to science.) We're definitely wrong about gravity at some level (at very large or very small scales, our current theories make predictions incompatible with observations), but I'm not aware of any serious challenges to Darwin.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com