Darwin+Book+Review

Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist

By: Adrian Desmond & James Moore

This book is not for those of the faint of heart. The authors delve deeply into the life a man rejected by many, accepted by few and praised by all.

The authors start the book at the beginning, during the heyday of Charles’s grandfather Erasmus. Many believe it was Charles who began the ideas of evolution, but his grandfather had begun stating these ideas decades before Darwin* was born. With Charles being the youngest child in his family it was natural for him to be the attention seeker and from a young age he filled into his role as family tormentor. (This will apply later on, as his father never really approves of what Charles is making of himself until his late twenties.) With the early death of his mother, Darwin was mothered by his older sisters. They would be the motherly figures throughout the rest of his life.

Very early on in life Darwin became an avid hunter. As soon as he was old enough to carry a gun he could be found “blasting birds” with the Wedgewoods on their estate. Charles’s father also known as “the Doctor” wanted to send his son off to become a doctor in college, but this was never to be the life of man like Darwin. It was a challenge for the Doctor to find niche in society for Charles. Darwin wanted nothing, but to do his experiments and live the life of luxury. The Doctor couldn’t have this, no son of his would be a mooch. They would each learn the values in life and live by them. His father being the stubborn man he was would try to force upon Darwin the life that he felt Charles should live. He was sent to Edinburgh, but very early on Darwin realized this would not be the life for him, because he could never stand the scenes taking place in the surgery theater. Limbs and blood would be strewn across the room; this forever turned Darwin away from the human anatomy. Being forced to attend medical school, Darwin figured he may as well make the best of his situation and he took up beetle collecting. It became a sort of sport for the students. Of course the Doctor did not approve of such atrocities and voiced his opinion to Darwin telling him to buckle down or he was done for. Charles did meet a life friend during his time at Edinburgh, Robert Edmond Grant. Grant and Darwin became walking companions and Darwin began researching sponges alongside his new friend.

The Doctor had finally given up on his youngest son becoming his vision of a doctor and sent him to Christ’s College. The Doctor figured that Darwin cold become a priest and continue working on whatever his heart desired. His beetle collecting would continue here at his new college. On one fateful day he was collecting beetles and he was holding two in his hands and saw a third. So, as common practice for beetle collectors, he popped one of the beetles into his mouth and it released a fluid into his mouth causing him to release all three beetles. This beetle collecting showed Darwin what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He wanted to become a naturalist or what would be known as a scientist today. Darwin was studying to become a priest, but he was determined to be as unique as they come. He planned on continuing the studies that he had begun in school.

Darwin’s big break came with an invitation to sail a ship as a gentleman companion to the captain. The only problem was convincing his father that this would not be a waste of his money. It took a friends opinion, but eventually Darwin was given permission to go on the trip that would shape the rest of his life. The cabin he would be staying would not be tall enough for him to stand upright in and was only a scarce 10 feet by 11 feet. Darwin would need to get used to life without all of the extravagances that upper class can bring a person. To his personal dismay, Darwin was extremely susceptible to seasickness. This he found out after mere days aboard the Beagle. He knew this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so he wouldn’t let himself be put off by a little sickness. Once Darwin noticed the oyster band on St. Jugo, he realized the implications he could have on the field of geology if he began taking notes on these anomalies along his voyage. Along his travels Darwin began collecting animal samples from different regions around the world. Since he was an avid hunter, this was no task to him. He would shoot and preserve as many species as he could possibly find along his trip. He learned the trick of taxidermy back in his days in Edinburgh and he began to wish he had made it through his anatomy class. He began dissecting and preserving all kinds of animals that he had never seen before and sometimes ones that no one had ever seen. Darwin began questioning how humans could be so different, yet be the same species. The tribes that they met on their travels around the world seemingly lived inhumanly. They seemed to be savages, but when taken in and civilized they could act just as any regular human being. This perplexed Darwin and would be a thinking point for the rest of his life.

As the trip progressed Darwin would begin going on side trips of his own. Often for treks of hundreds of miles he would look for rare animals or fossils of extinct animals. The collections that he was taking in were being sent out to his friend Henslow, who was holding everything until his trip was finally over with. After a few years, Darwin stopped thinking of himself as a “lion’s provider”, instead he was becoming a “philosophical lion”. Now instead of collecting for someone else, he was collecting samples for his own observations.

After years at sea, the Galapagos Islands were finally coming into view. Of course, Darwin had no idea at the time that this would spark many of his ideas on evolution and natural selection, but the information that he found on these islands would be used in his work for many years to come. One of his major discoveries on these islands was different finches on each of the islands. There would never be another time in his life when he would come across such a rich specimen field as he discovered on his voyage with the Beagle. The original plan for the trip to be no more than three years had morphed itself into a five year stint at sea for the crew of the Beagle. After this great expanse of time away from home all were excited to be home to their families. Darwin was as well, but he had been looking forward to his hundreds of collected species that he had sent home and had to attend to these. When he sat down and went over his discoveries again he had to figure out how the finches, mockingbirds and tortoises could vary from island to island.

Everyone was happy of the reform that their Charles had undergone on his trip. Even the Doctor could see how much Darwin had grown and finally saw the fruits of his labor on his youngest child coming through. He had matured into that man that his father had wanted him to become. Of course his father still needed him to figure out how he would make money off of this “job”. Darwin began piecing together parts of his theory soon after his arrival back from his trip on the Beagle. “Sex causes variety, which is necessary to enable species to meet new conditions. If climates alter, species can respond quickly, generating new adaptations automatically.” He was realizing that each species had its own little niche and that’s where it belonged in the animal kingdom. When Darwin came back from his trip he was gaining popularity, but to remain on the up and up he had to turn down well paying jobs.

When he saw his first ape, he couldn’t help but see the resemblance between humans and apes. The way she showed emotion was very human-like. This sparked an idea in his head that seemed very radical at the time, but lead him to delve deeper into how humans and apes could be related.

Soon after he was home, he began thinking about settling down and starting a family. He was getting older and more mature, and he had to soon take the plunge if he ever would. He was debating marrying his cousin Emma. In order help him decide, he made a chart: Marry or Not Marry. Of course he could see the advantages to both sides, but marriage eventually won out. Their marriage took place January 29, 1839.

Two and a half years after the Beagle returned Darwin home, the __Journal__ was published. This was the first book publication for Darwin. His theory was about formed in his eyes and he was bursting at the seams to tell someone what was on his mind. His idea was that of “Natural Selection”. With completion and the best of the species prevailing, then those will be the ones that pass on genes to the next generation. This is what makes the next generation more adept to the environment. Darwin began writing on this topic and low and behold he came up with 189 pages, but he was scared to publish such a radical idea.

Charles was quickly becoming one of the elite geologists in the country. He was just publishing his third geological book from the Beagle trip when he began his natural selection paper. In 1844 he was elected Vice-President of the Geological Society. Along with Darwin’s new found fame came his gut wrenching sicknesses that would last throughout his life. It seemed that they would flare up under occasions of high stress. They prescribed to him many remedies to fix his problems, but none seemed to last long enough to take permanent affect. The best according to Darwin were his ice water showers and bathes. These seemed to cure him for at least a few weeks at a time.

One of the hardest things in Darwin’s life was watching his daughter, Annie, decline in health. It seemed that she had the same problems that he had; only hers manifested at a much younger age. He was by her side the entire time she was ill. He comforted her and did everything the doctor said to try to cure the disease that had bedridden his favorite child, but nothing brought her back. She suffered through horrible bouts of vomiting and had a painful death. This would haunt Charles for the rest of his life. It would also lead him back to wondering whether this was caused by marrying a first cousin. This is what ultimately led him to stop believing in God. He didn’t think that a god could take the life of such an innocent child.

Money was a large part of the Darwin lifestyle, so keeping it in order was key to keeping their way of life going. They were extremely well off, but Charles was paranoid and would always believe that they were over spending their budget. The opposite was actually true, they were banking and reinvesting more than double what they spent annually.

Life had finally come full circle for Darwin. Instead of attending dinner hosted by people that were higher up in society than him, he was the one inviting others to dine at his table. He would regularly invite friends to dinner and have debates over the latest issues in society or the older ideas such as religion.

Finally after years of keeping his true ideas to himself, he told people of his ideas of evolution. Now this was a very controversial topic. With two sides completely set in their beliefs and unable to be swayed by the word of mouth, heated conversations would ensue. Once when in one of these conversations a man told Darwin that, “He was as different from a chimp as the ape from a platypus.” In response Darwin said, “I wonder what the Chimpanzee would say to this?” Once Wallace published his ideas on Natural Selection, Darwin was basically pushed into showing the world what he had known for years. Once the __Origin of Species__ was published there was an oversubscription of 1250 books.

Darwin was never one to stop working. He always had a new experiment he couldn’t wait to do or more species that needed to be cataloged. At one point he had tallied 125,660 specimens in just 6 years. Charles loved what he did and could never get too much of it. Even though it caused the stress that lead to his upset stomachs and uncontrollable vomiting, he would never give it up. In his later years he studied mainly plants and how these adapted to their environments. He figured out how seeds could be transferred over large areas of sea and still germinate. His deductive skills were with him to the end and never let him down.

Eventually though Darwin ran out of things to categorize and experiment with. This made him feel as if his reason to live was gone. Soon after he stopped working, his health began declining rapidly. He was never the same after a stroke at the dinner table one evening. He passed soon after the stroke on April 19, 1882. His body would be buried at Westminster to honor him. Darwin’s legacy may have started in the mid eighteen hundreds, but it will live on forever. With the basis of life swirling around the idea that we all started from one common ancestor we will search to prove this theory.


 * Darwin will refer to Charles only