2009 marks not only the bicen­te­nary of Charles Darwin’s birth, but the 150th anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of On the Ori­gin of Species by Means of Nat­ural Selec­tion, a work that needs no introduction.

To hon­our this occa­sion, evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist John Whit­field (who has sur­pris­ingly never read Ori­gin) will be blog­ging Charles Darwin’s On the Ori­gin of Species chapter-by-chapter.

I have two main, and entirely con­tra­dic­tory, aims. First, I want to read Dar­win from the per­spec­tive of some­one rea­son­ably clued up about evo­lu­tion at the begin­ning of the twenty-first cen­tury, and see how the man’s ideas stand up in the light of what we know and think about genet­ics, ecol­ogy, evo-devo, pale­on­tol­ogy and the like.

But I also want to imag­ine it’s the 24 Novem­ber 1859, and that the copy I’ve just picked up at my local book shop (the 1982 Pen­guin Clas­sics edi­tion) is in fact one of the 1,250 first edi­tions pub­lished that day […] That evening, I set­tle in the par­lour, put a taper to the gaslight, toss another urchin on the fire, and begin read­ing. Will I be thrilled? Hor­ri­fied? Scep­ti­cal? Baf­fled? Bored? Let’s use part of our brains to try and ignore all that we now know about Darwin’s biog­ra­phy and legacy, pre­tend that this is our first encounter with his the­ory, and that evo­lu­tion must stand or fall on the qual­ity of the sci­ence and writ­ing in the Ori­gin.