A really good sequel to Origin of Species

I didn't realize how much of Darwin's theory rests on basic observation and consequent philosophizing. He is a lot closer to Plato or Aristotle than people think. He's simply traveled around the world and reported on what he observed, there were no grand experiments or even that many minor experiments to prove any of this. There was no DNA testing or detailed lab work obviously, since there was no such thing at the time.

And whats interesting is that the theory still holds water, it still all makes sense. There is no need for experiments when nature has done them for us, we only need to merely observe the results.
But of course it should be kept in mind, that not all of what Darwin claims is likely to be true simply because the overall fundamental theory makes sense. Even he admits there are many details he is likely to have gotten wrong, after all, this is all just based on observation and educated guesses, like a lot of science is. Especially considering that he was working with way less data than we have now on the topic. For example I wonder how he would react to the fact that we now know that the different races of man have different levels of admixture or even some have exclusive levels of admixture, of entirely different hominid species. Like the Subsaharan Africans having from 4% to 17% of their DNA coming from an ancient extinct ghost hominid species that we dont know much about, aside from the fact that it lived around more than a million years ago and was similar to Homo Erectus, some say it IS Homo Erectus. And the Asians containing Denisovan DNA, and Europeans (and some Asians) containing minor Neanderthal DNA etc.
It is interesting that even without this knowledge Darwin was partial to considering the races of man as different species, and certainly as different subspecies.

The topic of sexual selection in the animal kingdom at large was also eye opening, he states that sexual selection is almost as much of a driver of evolution as natural selection, and that sometimes they go hand in hand.

The narator is good but reads quite a lot slower than he needs to, at the halfway point I started increasing the speed of the naration, and kept it around 1.7 which was as fast as I could listen to it without sacrificing comprehension, at times I even listened at 2.0 though.

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