Of the many books marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of the father of modern evolutionary theory, two contrasting volumes stand out

A natural selection

Charles Darwin - A natural selection | Culture | The Economist

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CHARLES DARWIN is known to the world for one book. “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, to give it its full, long-winded Victorian title, was published a century-and-a-half ago this year. In truth Darwin was a prolific author. Like a 19th-century David Attenborough, he churned out volume after bestselling volume on earthworms, coral reefs, emotion, orchids, barnacles, insectivorous plants and, of course, human origins.

Darwin would probably forgive the avalanche of books celebrating this anniversary and his 200th birthday, even if it leaves the modern reviewer reeling. There is an edited edition of his letters from his trip round the world on HMS Beagle, an effort to connect his life with that of Abraham Lincoln (who was born on the same day, February 12th 1809), an attempt (surely redundant for supporters and futile for opponents) to explain “Why Evolution is True”, and even a collection of essays on Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin, and bounced him into publishing before he was really ready. “On the Origin of Species”, too, has been republished, complete with a trendy cover by Damien Hirst, a trendy British artist. But in the search for a new angle to tempt the jaded public, the most successful offerings are those of Steve Jones, a geneticist, and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, two historians of science.

Darwin would probably forgive the avalanche of books celebrating this anniversary and his 200th birthday, even if it leaves the modern reviewer reeling. There is an edited edition of his letters from his trip round the world on HMS Beagle, an effort to connect his life with that of Abraham Lincoln (who was born on the same day, February 12th 1809), an attempt (surely redundant for supporters and futile for opponents) to explain “Why Evolution is True”, and even a collection of essays on Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin, and bounced him into publishing before he was really ready. “On the Origin of Species”, too, has been republished, complete with a trendy cover by Damien Hirst, a trendy British artist. But in the search for a new angle to tempt the jaded public, the most successful offerings are those of Steve Jones, a geneticist, and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, two historians of science.

“Darwin's Island”, Mr Jones's book, is not, actually, all that much about Darwin. Instead, each chapter uses one of the naturalist's other books as a point of departure for a meandering, but ultimately enlightening, natural-history lesson. “Insectivorous Plants”, published in 1875, inspires a chapter called “The Green Tyrannosaurs” that shows, using modern genetics, how insectivory has evolved many times in unrelated groups of vegetables in response to a lack of nitrogen in the soil. “The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants” (also published in 1875) gives rise to an exploration of how similar the problems faced by plants are to those faced by animals, and how the former deal with them without being able to move. The four-volume treatise on barnacles (1851-54), is used to investigate the central question of how species originate. And “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” (1871) is the point of departure for the inevitable chapter on human evolution.

Mr Desmond and Mr Moore, by contrast, have written very precisely about the man himself. “Darwin's Sacred Cause” is an exhaustive tome by the authors of an earlier biography, “Darwin” (1992). Their thesis is that, far from arriving at the idea of human evolution from his studies of natural history, Darwin took as one of his starting points the diversification of humanity into “races”.

There are many interesting twists here. That humanity is one and indivisible would have been taken for granted until about the time of Darwin's birth. Christians, at least, would have believed that everyone was descended from Adam and Eve, with what biologists would now refer to as a genetic “bottleneck” at the time of Noah. By the time Darwin was a student in Edinburgh and Cambridge, though, this was being questioned. The idea that the different races had different origins (from different types of monkey, or from different acts of divine creation, depending on the views of the proposer), began as a convenient piece of slave-traders' propaganda, intended to denigrate the humanity of Africans. It rapidly became a matter of scientific debate, challenging the literalist interpretation of the Bible in a manner reminiscent of the questioning of the early geologists with their antediluvian fossils. 

Darwin, brought up among Whiggish abolitionists and then exposed during his circumnavigation both to the horrors of slavery and to people from almost every one of the races into which Victorian science was dividing mankind, became convinced of the opposite. He saw humanity as the product of common descent. The different races were, in his view, branches of a single tree—or, more accurately, twigs of a single branch, for the tree itself was not just the human family tree, but the tree of life. According to Mr Desmond and Mr Moore, it was the unity he saw in humanity's diversity as much as that visible in the different breeds of domestic animals (fancy pigeons, for example), which helped him understand what was going on.

Reader, beware: this book is as much about the anti-slavery movement as it is about the genesis of a scientific idea. It also, unlike Mr Jones's book, presents itself as a work of scholarship; there are 79 pages of notes and bibliography while “Darwin's Island” has none. But, if nothing else, “Darwin's Sacred Cause” shows that there is still new material to be gleaned from the life of a man much picked over, and who turned the world upside down. 

Charles Darwin

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A natural selection

Of the many books marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of the father of modern evolutionary theory, two contrasting volumes stand out

Culture January 24th 2009

From the January 24th 2009 edition

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