3.0
Charles Darwin
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesCharles Darwin Reviews
3.0
“I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.
Charles Darwin was born in 1809 the son of a prosperous doctor turned banker. His grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin "was not merely a sought-after physician. He was also an inventor. Addicted to ever-faster travel, he invented a steering mechanism for his phaeton which, in essence, still used in motorcars" (22). But not only was he a "medical, technological, and scientific prodigy," he was also arguably the most famous poet in England (23). Charles' mother Sukey was the oldest daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the millionaire known for the pottery that still bears his name. Thus not only did Darwin come by his lifelong pursuits naturally, but he had the means that made it possible for him to do so.
Wilson argues that Darwin had three great preoccupations; one was a passion for the natural world, another dependency on his family (he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and largely only socialized with family), and the third was to promote his own name and greatness. Wilson makes it clear that throughout his life, Darwin had a habit of downplaying or entirely omitting the contributions of colleagues and forebears in order to represent himself as "the pioneer evolutionist" (52). Wilson argues that Darwin had a "genius for self-promotion" (147).
Perhaps most surprising to me, a newcomer to the life of Darwin, was how little of his life was actually spent in the wild. He spent five years exploring the world and collecting specimens. The remainder of his life was spent largely closeted with his wife and children and working and writing on the finds from that trip. In fact, he was a sickly man throughout life and was often in bed with some illness or other. Another shock was reading that the famous finches, whose differences among the Galapagos islands figures strongly in any discussion of Darwin's theory of evolution, was not even mentioned in The Origin of Species. In fact, it was ornithologist John Gould who noted the differences in the finches. Also interesting was Darwin's denial that he had ever read his grandfather's writing that asserted that all life originated "from non-life in the ocean bed" (57), a denial that served to enhance his status as sole father of evolutionary theory. In sum, Darwin was indeed excellent at promoting the myth of his own greatness, the legacy of which is still distorted and made much grander than reality today.
In writing this biography, Wilson argues that he is writing "the biography not merely of a man, but of his idea" (6). Darwin spent years fleshing out and revising his theory on evolution. "It will always be hard to know which caused him the greater anxiety: the fear that his theory might be true - thereby dismissing the God of the Bible, perhaps any God - or the fear that it might be false - thereby diminishing him from the status of greatest scientific mind of the nineteenth century" (187).”
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