On the Origin of Species may be the book of the millennium, but who's actually read it? Geneticist Steve Jones decided to rewrite it for a 20th-century audience. Kam Patel reports

After three years at his word-processor, geneticist Steve Jones finished the mammoth task he had set himself - rewriting Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. His British publisher loved it. His colleagues loved it. His American publisher also loved it - but hated the title. .

Jones was miffed. He had plucked the title, Almost Like a Whale, from a passage in Origin. It describes Darwin's observation of a bear swimming "for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water I we might expect, on my theory, that such individuals would occasionally give rise to new species I" An irritated, mischievous Jones sent a fax to the US suggesting two new titles. The publisher "was not too sure" about his first suggestion, One Continual Puke, Darwin's response when asked in old age about his memory of the voyage on The Beagle. They settled for his second, Darwin's Ghost.

A few weeks later he got a call from an woman who had heard of the imminent publication of Darwin's Ghost: "She kept banging on about the book," recalls Jones. "We were obviously at cross purposes. And then the penny dropped - she thought the book had been channelled through me by Charles Darwin, that I had gone to seances where Darwin composed it, whispering in my ear. I should have been so lucky!" It was one of the lighter moments of the project. First published in 1859, Origin, in which Darwin mapped out his theory of evolution, is arguably the most important book of the millennium. But it is far from an easy read. As Jones notes, he has never met a biology undergraduate who has managed to finish it. Perhaps this is because, while the book's central idea remains as powerful as ever, much has been added to it since 1859. While Darwin made the most of the facts of the 19th century to support his argument (that living things can be traced back to a single origin and that organisms are transformed over time), it is 20th-century science that has filled in the details.

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In Whale, Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, has "updated" Origin, preserving its logic but weaving in the benefits of scientific hindsight. The idea for the book came to him 20 years ago. There were no textbooks on evolution so Jones suggested to a group of colleagues that they pool their expertise to rewrite Darwin's magnum opus. They began but almost immediately the project began to balloon, Jones says: "The problem is there is so much in Origin - geology, animal behaviour, genetics, farming I everything is there and if you were going to write a university text based on it, it would end up 100,000 pages long. We decided it was impossible."

But the idea remained with him, and he is relieved to have finally achieved his dream. "It sounds nauseating but, having done it, I am filled with more admiration for Darwin than when I started. First, because he wrote his book with a pen in a year while I wrote mine with a wordprocessor in three. Second, because his argument is so resilient, the structure of Origin is so robust that it seems an almost ready-made framework for supporting the facts we know today."

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It is hard to appreciate the impact Origin must have had on Victorian society when first published, and people suddenly realised that humans were descended from apes. "I think the initial reaction of the sober-minded was probably, after a certain amount of handwringing: 'OK we give up, humans are not different or special after all'."

More worrying, though, was the seizure of Origin by scientists, sociologists and politicians as a rationale for their views. "Origin is a bit like the Bible," Jones says. "You can use it to justify any pattern of behaviour from genocide to extraordinary self-sacrifice."

One of the key proposals in Origin is that the main process driving evolution is natural selection. According to the 20th-century updating of this theory, evolutionary change comes about through the production of genetic variation in every generation. Those individuals that best adapt to the prevailing environmental conditions survive and give rise to the next generation. Philosopher Herbert Spencer applied a crude version of the theory of natural selection to the study of society, coining the unfortunate phrase "survival of the fittest".

Marxists in their thousands agreed with him. In China they named their children "Natural Selection" or "Struggle for Existence" in homage to the Law of Nature that was to transform society. Karl Marx was a great admirer of the "splendid" Darwin. In a letter to Engels in 1859, he says of Origin:

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"Ithis is the book that contains the basis in natural history of our view". Marx even wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, who politely declined the compliment. As Jones wryly puts it in Whale: "Evolution is a political sofa that moulds itself to the buttocks of the last to sit upon it."

And the bums continue to plonk themselves down on the sofa: "We now have sociobiology, so called," Jones notes. "What has happened in sociobiology is that all possible patterns of human behaviour from altruism to violence and genocide have been justified in genetic terms. It is clearly the case that our behaviour has evolved - it is stupid to say it has not. But to say that is no more profound than to say pigs cannot fly because they evolved without wings - it is just blindingly obvious. The way sociobiology rediscovers the blindingly obvious and then packages it as scientific breakthrough makes me laugh. The great biological 'discovery' in sociology is that stepmothers kill their children more than mothers do. OK, it is good we get the data, but is anybody surprised? You can go back to the Middle Ages and find that is already known."

The chapter Jones found most difficult to write is that dealing with one of the most vexing questions in the field: the nature of species, what species are and what keeps them apart. Darwin called the problem of explaining and defining species the "mystery of mysteries". Jones says: "On the Origin of Species is not really about the origin of species at all because Darwin never really gets straight what makes species happen, why they do not just blend into one another, how barriers to this arise. The short answer is we still haven't got it quite right on that."

The hope has been that molecular genetics will come to the rescue, but Jones is not optimistic. "Molecular genetics is just anatomy plus a massive research grant. The fact that humans and chimps share 98.8 per cent of their DNA is fairly amazing, but it still does not explain the nature of differences between humans and chimps. You have to bear in mind that humans and mushrooms share 60 per cent of their DNA." He says that if creationists - "they do not make me laugh, they make me weep" - really wanted to embarrass evolutionary scientists they would put up their hands and simply ask what a species is. "Every evolutionist would hum and ha and splutter, and I do quite a bit of spluttering on that one in the book," Jones says.

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The project has not been without its spooky moments. The contract from the publisher was for a book of 100,000 words. The wordcount key received many hammerings as Jones, wondering if he was ever going to finish "the damn thing" tapped away. He finally reached 100,000 words but realised it was nowhere near finished. He toiled for another 12 months, finishing with a flamboyant bash on the trusty wordcount key. Whale came in at 147,000 words - within ten words of Darwin's prototype. "It must be the minimum required to tell the story," Jones says. "I thought about making it exactly the same length, but decided against it."