The Readable Darwin ─ The Origin of Species, Chapters 1 to 8 from the 1872 Sixth Edition

With the goal of making Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species accessible to high school and college students, as well as other readers, Dr. Jan Pechenik presents the revised, reorganized, clarified, and language-modernized edition of the sixth and final edition of Darwin’s book published in 1872. He includes those issues that Darwin was uncertain about and/or mistaken, as time and science revealed. Pechenik, emphasizing that this volume is still Darwin’s, has eliminated unnecessary words, weak verbs, incorporated definitions into sentences, and used repetition, summary, and appropriate punctuation to link thought and improve the flow of ideas. He also created one-paragraph previews of each chapter and added many illustrations absent from the original book. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Jan A. Pechenik is Professor of Biology at Tufts University. He earned a B.A. from Duke University and an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then completed his Ph.D. in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. He is author or coauthor on more than 125 research and review papers covering a number of areas in marine biology, including larval development, metamorphosis, and behavior. Dr. Pechenik has also authored Biology of the Invertebrates (2014) and A Short Guide to Writing about Biology (2012), and served as Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Tufts from 1998-2001 and 2005-2008.