Our understanding of Charles Darwin continues to evolve
Darwin: A Biography lifts the curtain on the private life of one of science’s most controversial pioneers
Darwin: A Biography humanizes the famous naturalist that most people know only from science textbooks.
Darwin: A Biography
Janet Browne
Princeton University Press, $35.00
Charles Darwin had it out for the iguanas of the Galápagos Islands.
When the 26-year-old naturalist encountered marine iguanas on San Cristóbal Island in 1835, he repeatedly tossed these “most disgusting, clumsy lizards” into the ocean to test their preference for water. Later, he described yanking the tails of their land-based cousins on Isla Isabela. The landlubbers, he noted, were “ugly animals” that had a “singularly stupid appearance.”
These antics, unbecoming for one of modern biology’s founding fathers, are among many curveballs that historian of science Janet Browne pitches in Darwin: A Biography. The book, an abridged version of Browne’s two longer Darwin biographies, distills the rich, complicated life of the beloved naturalist into 624 pages.
Readers first meet a young Darwin who is enthralled by beetle-collecting and grieving the death of his mother. While his hobby helped Darwin hone the techniques he relied on in his career, losing his mother inspired lifelong hypochondria, Browne suggests.
It doesn’t take long to get to what is perhaps the most pivotal moment in Darwin’s life: his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle. This nearly five-year trip around the world supplied Darwin with the observations, specimens and worldly experience needed to pen his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, decades later.
Browne makes it clear that Darwin’s own origins were steeped in privilege. His affluent upbringing offered him access to people and services that made such a trip possible. The invitation from a Cambridge University professor to join the crew “subtly revealed the power of the old boys’ network,” Browne writes.
Meanwhile, an inheritance from Darwin’s mother put the wind in his sails — paying for food, lodging and specimen preparation. The fact that Darwin could request money orders from his father while abroad, which has at times been overlooked by historians, “was only made possible through the great spread of the financial network of the British Empire,” Browne writes.
In this sense, Darwin’s role as a seafaring naturalist underscores how Victorian England’s obsession with natural history fueled its imperial agenda. This Darwin shot, skinned and dissected his way through the Southern Hemisphere, often relying on hired and uncredited help. “Like other collectors of the time, he considered that he possessed the right to take material as he wished,” Browne writes.
Though a watershed moment, the voyage was a mere blip in the naturalist’s 73 years. Browne goes on to detail how Darwin grew a family and built a reputation in the natural sciences, courting controversy along the way. To prevent his theory of evolution from being scooped, Darwin “coauthored” a paper on the subject with rival naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin added to and published an essay Wallace had written without Wallace’s knowledge. It’s one of the many controversies surrounding the eventual publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.
By the end of Browne’s biography, we recognize the Darwin most people know from textbooks: The heavy-browed, bearded scholar with an impressively long bibliography. Much of the book draws from Darwin’s professional work, but the deepest insights come from his personal correspondence, diaries and notes. These documents reveal the man behind the theories. There’s the agnostic lover at odds with his future wife over her belief in God. The grieving father wrestling with the deaths of three of his seven children. And the bitter author bristling at unfavorable book reviews.
Darwin: A Biography is neither a love letter nor a scathing critique. Instead, it offers glimpses of Darwin the Human, a figure often elbowed out of conversations by Darwin the Scientist. Browne paints a portrait of a man who laughed, wept and struggled his way through the Victorian era as much as he informed it. A dedicated reader will surely find getting acquainted with Browne’s Darwin an enjoyable endeavor. That is, unless they’re an iguana.
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