Download Review6TheOriginABiog

Review No 6
The Origin of Species: A Biography
Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography. By Janet Browne (Crow’s Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2006).
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is an obvious choice for inclusion in a series called “Books that
Shook the World”. As Janet Browne says, Darwin’s writings “challenged everything that had
previously been thought about living beings and became a crucial factor in the intellectual, social
and religious transformations that took place in the West during the nineteenth century”. This
delightfully readable little book is a brilliant work of compression, simplification and explanation for
general readers not versed in the history of science.
The story has all the ingredients so familiar to Darwin scholars: young Charles born into a
professional provincial (Shrewsbury) family, with the early evolutionist Erasmus Darwin on his
father’s side and the industrial Wedgwoods on his mother’s; an education that combined the
medical-scientific traditions of Edinburgh with Cambridge intellectualism; the influence of figures
like John Henslow, Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell, John Hershel, Alexander von Humboldt and
William Paley’s natural theology (whose ideas of Godly design Darwin ultimately denied); the
catalyst of the Beagle voyage (Browne rehabilitates the often demonised Captain Fitzroy – the two
did not quarrel over religion, and Fitzroy was the one who gave Darwin a copy of Charles Lyell’s
provocative Principles of Geology); the early insight of 1837 that matured into the articulation of
natural selection after a reading of Thomas Malthus (she doesn’t mention that Charles had read
Malthus in 1833, with less effect); the uproar over Robert Chamber’s Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation that deterred Charles from premature publication of his 1844 paper on evolution; his
years of research into pigeons and barnacles (rather like doing a PhD thesis, something he felt he
needed to do); the panic over Alfred Wallace’s abstract encapsulating the concept of natural
selection, and the double publication of their papers for the Linnean Society in 1858; the rushed
publication of the Origin by 1859; the sheer power of the book (its cunningly crafted arguments are
carefully explained); its turbulent reception, “one of the first genuinely public debates about society
to stretch across general society”; the triumph of a vigorous lobby orchestrated by younger
Darwinians, such as T. H. Huxley and Joseph Hooker, over a divided opposition (a contrast to today’s
creationist movement)); the later works including the cautiously argued Descent of Man (1871).
It is to be expected that Janet Browne, a biographer of Darwin, should deal well with his life. It is less
expected that she should be so enlightening on post-Darwinian developments and his legacy for
today’s worldview. She covers the decline of natural selection theory after the rise of genetics in the
late nineteenth century. Karl Pearson’s biometricians squabbled with William Bateson’s Mendelians
(an often petty and personal dispute). Other types of evolutionary thought, such as Lamarckian and
teleological, threatened to eclipse Darwinism (Peter Bowler has written well on this). Problems arose
out of C. Lloyd Morgan’s chromosome work, molecular biology and the displacement of naturalist
field studies by laboratory research, problems that were not resolved until the brilliant work of
Darwinians like Ernst Mayr, Sewell Wright and Gaylord Simpson put into place a “modern synthesis”,
publicised by Julian Huxley in 1942.
Browne discusses topics such as the interaction of science, politics and religion, Social Darwinism,
eugenics, palaeontology, atavism, feeblemindedness, criminality and social deviance, race “science”,
ecology, nature versus nurture, evolutionary ethics and socio-biology, down to today’s world of the
“selfish gene”, advertising’s “alpha males”, cloning and creationism.
Of course there are problematic issues where specialists will differ in their interpretations. In my
own areas of interest I would have like more on the industrial and imperial context in which
Darwinism arose. Darwin’s metaphors reflected the world of business, factories and the empire
(“profit and loss”, “workshops”, and ecological niches described as “colonising enterprises”). Browne
is conventional on Social Darwinism and eugenics, ignoring recent revisionist research. The evidence
suggests that Darwinism was surprisingly marginal in discourses such as capitalist ideology,
militarism and the “new imperialism”. There is perhaps too much emphasis on the “revolutionary”
aspects of Darwinism and not enough on the subtle ways in which it was accommodated into
existing paradigms. (I canvass such issues in my book Darwin’s Coat-Tails). Overall however this is a
splendid and enjoyable book.