DharmaLogos says:
I grew up in a very religious environment, and my parents and church leaders always painted a picture of Darwin and his writings as idiotic, rebellious, illogical, and inconsistent. Eventually I actually started reading Darwin, and I realized that his idea of evolution/natural selection is nothing like what the church always said about evolution. I tried to read "Origin of Species" twice and "Descent of Man" once. I never got very far in any of them because it is a difficult read, and I didn't understand much. But everytime I read I had a little better understanding of the world around me that made logical sense, even if I didn't understand a lot of it.

DharmaLogos says:
I recently read renowned biologist/athest Richard Dawkins' (of "The God Delusion" fame) book "The Ancestor's Tale" in which he attempts to trace natural selection from humans back in time to the ancestor of all living life forms on earth. That book caused me to finally start to understand evolution, and now thanks to Daily Lit I am again tackling "Origin of Species", this time in bite-sized pieces.

DharmaLogos says:
It is worth noting that evolution is not based on random chance; nor is it the progression of life from a "lower" to a "higher" form. Put quite simply, evolution is a genetic/biological change over time that results from natural variations in life. Any two specimens of a species will have some biological variation. If one variation helps the specimen to live long enough to transmit its genes to the next generation better than another specimen, then this variation will become dominant through breeding. The group of genes that are most fit for a given environment will have a greater survival rate, which will cause those genes to become dominant and gradually become "greater" or "more" (such as dark skin pigment in a hot environment becoming darker due to the genetic isolation of those genes).

DharmaLogos says:
Over thousands and millions of years a species can diverge into several different species due to the survival advantages of different traits in different environments. We see this take place (for different reasons) every time domestic animals and crops are specifically bred to produce certain traits.

billyev says:
I have just found this site and just begun this and several other books. Darwin has been maligned so badly, but even though evolution makes perfectly logical sense (and other less scientific theories make no sense to me whatsoever), I've never actually sat down and read his work. So it's past time for me to do so! And I think getting it in small doses will help keep me from being overwhelmed.