Written more than 150 years ago, it was a book that upended the way human beings think about where they came from, challenged millennia of religious dogma and left people wondering whether there really was a god. And sometime Republican presidential primary front-runner Ben Carson once felt compelled to point out that it was encouraged by Satan.
Now, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has been voted by a British academic publishing trade group as the academic book that changed the world the most.
“It’s not in the least surprising, and completely right, that On the Origin of Species won,” Alan Staton, head of marketing at the Booksellers Association, which came up with the list, said.
“No work has so fundamentally changed the way we think about our very being and the world around us.”
Ahead of this month’s Academic Book Week in a project sponsored by the British government, 200 publishers submitted candidates. That list was then winnowed down to 20 titles by a committee of experts. Here are the finalists:
l A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
l A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
l Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
l Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
l On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
l Orientalism by Edward Said
l Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
l The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
l The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
l The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
l The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
l The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein
l The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
l The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
l The Republic by Plato
l The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
l The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
l The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart
l The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
l Ways of Seeing by John Berger
Origin of Species turned out to be the best of the best after the public was invited to weigh in, garnering 26 percent of the vote. Darwin even left The Communist Manifesto– Marx and Engels’s critique of capitalism that sparked 19th century revolutions and shaped the course of two world wars and the Cold War – in the dust. Shakespeare, Plato and Kant rounded out the top five.
Washington Post