Dawkins Reads Darwin

The great, and memeingful, Richard Dawkins provides a six hour reading of Charles Darwin’s seminal book — “On the Origin of Species” — and we are thrilling on the idea of two genius minds blending together across the arc of 150 years of evolutionary thinking.

Dawkins, on the project:

Listen to “On The Origin of Species,” and you immediately find yourself ushered into the presence of one of the finest minds ever to grace this planet. In this recording, which was a true labour of love, I made no attempt to act the part of Darwin, but instead worked hard, as a modern follower of Darwin, to convey the true meaning of every sentence. I even surprised myself: the exercise of reading Darwin’s words aloud and identifying in every phrase the syllable that needed to be stressed, revealed to me subtleties and depths of meaning that I had missed when reading quietly to myself. I hope listeners will be enlightened in the same way.

Of Darwin’s six editions I chose to abridge from the first. Surprisingly, and in many ways, it is the most modern. Moreover, it is of greatest historical interest, as being the one that actually hit the Victorian solar plexus and drove out the wind of centuries. In abridging the book, my priority was to cut those passages that are now known to be wrong, notably those concerned with genetics. I believe it is what Darwin himself would have wished. What takes my breath away as a modern biologist is how much Darwin got right. It has been well said that he worked a century and more ahead of his time. The year 2009 is both the bi-centenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of “On The Origin of Species” and that statement is becoming harder to deny.

We can’t wait to give our ear a listen into the mysterious mastery of two of the greatest minds in our human history.