On the Origin of Species Study Guide

On the Origin of Species

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

On the Origin of Species is an 1859 scientific work by Charles Darwin explaining his theory of natural selection, which he arrived upon in the years since his Beagle expedition in the 1830s. Darwin argued that populations would grow if not for limited resources and, as a result, members of a species compete for these resources. Because of hereditary variety within a species, some members receive these resources and others do not. As a result, these members survive and proliferate, causing species to change and diverge over time.

On the Origin of Species Book Summary

Table of Contents

Darwin's theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarised as follows:

  • Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce the population would grow (fact).
  • Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
  • Resources such as food are limited and are relatively stable over time (fact).
  • A struggle for survival ensues (inference).
  • Individuals in a population vary significantly from one another (fact).
  • Much of this variation is heritable (fact).
  • Individuals less suited to the environment are less likely to survive and less likely to reproduce; individuals more suited to the environment are more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce and leave their heritable traits to future generations, which produces the process of natural selection (fact).
  • This slowly effected process results in populations changing to adapt to their environments, and ultimately, these variations accumulate over time to form new species (inference).

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