Yet even in this later work, he had little to say about human origins per se, instead focusing on making the case from comparative anatomy, embryology and behavior that, like all species, humans had evolved. In it, he explained that discussing humans in his earlier treatise would have served only to further prejudice readers against his radical idea. Twelve years later he published a book devoted to that very subject, The Descent of Man. It was not because Darwin thought humans were somehow exempt from evolution. That is all he wrote about the dawning of the single most consequential species on the planet. Of Homo sapiens, Darwin made only a passing mention on the third-to-last page of the tome, noting coyly that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” That’s it. But for all of Darwin’s brilliant insights into the origins of ants and armadillos, bats and barnacles, one species is conspicuously neglected in the great book: his own. Rather life on Earth, in all its dazzling variety, had evolved through descent from a common ancestor with modification by means of natural selection. Challenging Victorian dogma, Darwin argued that species were not immutable, each one specially created by God. On the Origin of Species revolutionized society’s understanding of the natural world. In 1859, 14 years after the founding of this magazine, Charles Darwin published the most important scientific book ever written.
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