A new survey of the British public on the “most valuable book to humanity” found the Bible edging out Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (37/35%). The study found that while many chose the Bible because it “contains principles/guidelines to be a good person,” On the Origin of Species was largely selected because it “answers fundamental questions of human existence.”
The Folio Society survey asked 2,044 British adults to list the three books they believed to be the "most valuable to humanity" in the modern world. The respondents were given a list of thirty books and asked to select three and explain why they felt they were the most significant. Out of the top ten, two were religious (the Bible and the Qur’an), five were scientific, two were works of fiction, and one addressed economics. The Guardian provides a breakdown:
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (17%) crept ahead of Einstein’s seminal Relativity (15%) to take third place, with just two novels making the top 10 of the “books voted most valuable to humanity”: Nineteen Eighty-Four (14%) and To Kill a Mockingbird (10%). Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which Isaac Newton derives the laws of classical mechanics, took 12% of the vote, with the Qur’an (9%), Adam Smith’s foundation of modern economics The Wealth of Nations (7%) and James Watson’s account of the discovery of DNA, The Double Helix (6%), rounding out the top 10.
“How different might the survey have looked 100, or even 30 years ago?” asked Folio Society Editorial Director Tom Walker. “How might it look in another 30 years – will Darwin have taken over; will the worrying rise of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s relevance continue; might the Qur’an continue to rise in significance in the UK; or might advances in DNA technology mean that The Double Helix grows in stature?”
Walker also pointed out the surprising lack of importance placed on most works of fiction, noting that the "overtly political message" of both 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird seemed to have increased their significance in the minds of readers, as opposed to other less political works, like that of Shakespeare and Tolstoy.
Some of the survey's other highly-ranked books include The Communist Manifesto (5%), War and Peace (5%), Hamlet (5%), Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (4%), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (4%), and Pride and Prejudice (4%).
Books that received no votes: Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Cicero’s Orations, and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
This article has been expanded.
