The field of scholarship loosely known as "the history of ideas" has engaged my lively interest these forty years and more. A book I've returned to more than once during this period is The Death of Adam (John C. Greene, Iowa State University Press, 1959), which examines the tributaries of thought that converged from various fields—history, astronomy, botany and zoology, geology, and a raft of other disciplines—into the mighty current that Darwin navigated, and which has swept all previous contending models away. It's an accessible study, and I'm pleased to see that after an interval out of print, it had a new edition in 2007. Regarding the biological mechanisms of natural selection itself, there have obviously been vast advanced in the six decades since the book was written, but its focus is on the scholarly and philosophical climate in and from which both On the Origin of Species and the spirited (heh-heh) opposition to it emerged, and in this respect it has aged very well. Available on the innertubes for a few dollars, and well worth the read for them as have an interest in such things.

cordially,