Endless forms, endless controversy

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Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography. By Janet Browne. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2006. ISBN 978-0-87113-953-5. 174 pp. Hardcover, $20.95.

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. By David Quammen. Atlas Books, W. W. Norton, New York, 2006. ISBN 978-0-393-05981-6. 304 pp. Hardcover, $22.95.

It is a shopworn joke that there is more than an ocean separating America and England, but there may not be a stronger illustration of this than in the figure of Charles Darwin. He is a revered figure in England--in 2000 he replaced another Great Briton (Charles Dickens) on the ten-pound note (reportedly because his more ornate beard would be harder to counterfeit)--but is a widely reviled figure in the United States in some quarters, being the scapegoat of social inequality and unrestricted capitalism by the political left and blamed for rampant immorality and corruption by the political right.

Two recent short biographies, Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography by Janet Browne and David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, share the same source of inspiration and illuminate the life of one of the greatest of all human minds by focusing on his struggle to formulate and publish his epochal work On the Origin of Species. While neither will rehabilitate him in the eyes of his detractors, both are literate, absorbing, and rewarding portraits, whether read separately or together.

Browne's book is the shorter of the two and, at less than a tenth of the length of her magisterial two-volume biography of Darwin, serves as a handy distillation of that text. Scholarly and sober, it is nonetheless an absorbing retelling of an involving, if familiar, tale. Darwin's life follows the familiar, classic trajectory of a lost youth who finds purpose relatively late in life in the face of much disapproval from an overbearing widowed father--and a famous one at that--who was also the son of a famous man (Erasmus Darwin). It is a treasured irony that the youth that Robert Darwin disdained as nothing more than a "rat catcher" would eventually emerge as one of the towering intellectual figures of world history.

Given the pressures on Darwin to live up to his lineage, it is no wonder that he sought the opportunity to wander by joining the crew of the surveying ship the Beagle, a journey that lasted five years. This voyage not only brought us a marvelous book and Darwin's first recognition as a naturalist, but it also brought forth a singularly great idea which only came to light after great delay. It is this delay that is the centerpiece of both books.

There is a fourteen-year gap between the publication of The Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle and On the Origin of Species, and much has been made of this delay. Both books discuss this in depth, though Quammen's does so with greater drama and psychological insight, finding that the motivations behind it are many and complex. During this time, Darwin married and tried to raise a family but suffered the deaths of some of his children, including his favorite daughter Annie. He did have pigeons, barnacles, and other specimens to study, but he had unexplained spells of nausea and vomiting to endure. All the while, he jotted in notebooks and pondered where his observations and voluminous data would lead. Darwin fretted about the implications of his idea--that this would be an even bigger blow to anthropocentrism than Galileo's--but it certainly did not prevent him from publishing it.

What quelled his procrastination, fittingly enough, was competition. In June 1858, Darwin received a letter and a paper from a younger biologist named Alfred Russel Wallace proposing that evolution was driven by natural selection. This coincidence finally spurred Darwin on, and within a year his masterpiece was written and published. With more than two-thirds of his life passed, Darwin finally made his mark.

Quammen's book gives a rich and colorful account of the impact of Species. Darwin's England was a more enlightened, prosperous place than Galileo's Italy, so while there was no governmental or royal power brought down upon him, there were many heated discussions of the implications of his work. The monumental arguments between Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley were repeated worldwide and echo down the ages, less so now in Europe but still strongly in the United States.

In the last two decades of his life, Darwin no longer procrastinated. With his great and controversial idea out and in continual discussion, he added to its refinement through books and papers, eventually publishing an autobiography. It took him fifty years to reach this pinnacle, and after the difficult birth of natural selection, Darwin settled in to what he really was: a gentleman naturalist on a quiet country estate, growing a memorable beard that matched his quietly monumental contribution to scientific materialism. It was here that he was able to closely observe the world he had changed so irrevocably.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning