classics digests, reflections and reviews
Preface Mark Twain once quipped, “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is a classic. I’m pleasantly surprised that it is not as boring and dry as I expected, but quite the contrary. It’s fascinating to observe how Darwin works, how he collects facts from nature and draws inferences, how he judges between diverse theories and […]
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The Origin of Evolution The word “evolution” came from the Latin word evolutio, meaning unrolling or unfolding, as in unrolling a scroll. Before the codex was developed, the scroll had been the major form of written text in the ancient world. The scrolls were typically rolled up for storage and transportation. So one must first unroll the scroll to peruse the text. For sacred texts revered by adherents of religions […]
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