Darwin: All That Matters

Why does Charles Darwin still matter? Darwin is hard to escape. His name continually crops up in a range of cultural contexts from novels to films, and he is still constantly in the news. He is one of a handful of scientists so universally known that he has become more a brand than a person. His ideas were game-changers, fundamentally altering how we think of our own place in the natural world, but they are often misunderstood, misrepresented or misapplied. Two events - the Beagle voyage and the publication, more than 20 years later, of his book On the Origin of Species - are so famous that they tend to distort any balanced appreciation of his life and achievements.The difficulty in explaining anything to do with Darwin is where to begin. Darwin: All That Matters separates the man from the myth, explaining how he was able to theorize so effectively about the common ancestry of all living things and arrive at the mechanism for species change that he called 'natural selection'.