150 years of the Origin of Species

Sod it. I'm not going to wait any longer. Here it is.




It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.


Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species
by means of Natural Selection
or the preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life


Read By Pino Carafa (rozeboosje)
Music composed and arranged by Scott Crothers (DieselBodine)
Title of the musical composition: "Darwin's Last Paragraph"
Audio mixed by: Scott Crothers
Photography by: Pino Carafa
Video composition, editing and production by: Pino Carafa

© 18 November 2009
Scott Crothers and Pino Carafa reserve the right to be recognised as the creators of this work. You may freely copy, modify and redistribute this work by any means, provided you recognise this right, you include this copyright notice and you state whether you have altered the work in any way. (less info)