Darwin (a Norton Critical Edition) edited by Philip Appleman

This is a good collection of primary sources of Darwin himself, his contemporaries, his critics and defenders, and more recent critical encounters. It is interesting and instructive that many current criticisms of Darwinism are unchanged from his early critics and many were anticipated by Darwin himself. The discussion of Darwinism requires an idea about what science is and how it works. Teilhard is interesting and introduces "complexification." His evolution is directional it seems. The book includes essays on evolutionary philosophy, psychology, theology. Spencer applied Darwinism to society and this is fraught with danger. Ethics in a Darwinian world is trapped in the hypothalamic-limbic system, which once invoked seems to make the pen and paper irrelevant. And when the talk turns to Darwinian anthropology and man modifying selection pressures it seems the pace of geological time is forgotten and our short span is overvalued. But if they were consistent and gave the trilobite its just evolutionary weight according to its lifespan as a species, we could stop writing about evolution present and future since we are too close and short-lived to have anything to say.