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fquadri's picture

What do Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens have in common?

Submitted by fquadri on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 8:56pm.

Both were good story tellers.

 

A few years ago, I was walking in a Barnes and Noble. I noticed a shelf devoted to literary classics such as Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, Frankenstein and more. What struck me was that The Origin of Species was sitting there with the rest of these books. I thought to myself, “How can a “scientific” book be grouped like that with novels?” I figured there weren’t enough “classic scientific books” out there for a whole shelf, so that’s where it was stuck. What do I mean by “scientific” books though? I guess at the time I was expecting The Origin of Species to be dry for non-science people, and full of scientific jargon, tables and figures; all of this as opposed to the beautiful language and descriptions used in novels like the other books on the shelf. So when I started reading The Origin of Species, I was a little surprised.

 

To me, the book was easy to read as a novel. A lot of us in class agreed that Darwin was wordy in some places. He flourished his writing instead of keeping with the rule of conciseness. I liked that. To me, it brought out a scientific story with a more novelistic approach.  Now I can see why this book was grouped with the others. Like the other novels, it tells a story, and a very good one. Sure there is no typical protagonist, antagonist, or conflict, but The Origin of Species is a mixture of literature, history, and science. How many books can you think of that can intermix disciplines like that? That’s what makes it so special to me, as well as the fact that there really is no end. It’s an ongoing story that is being retold all over the world, even 150 years later

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