Quammen: The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

From Scienticity

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David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin : An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 304 pages.

This book by one of our favorite science writers is one of what seems to be a new fashion for intimate biographical portraits – it makes me think of James Gleick's Isaac Newton – that places the subject in his or her milieu and mulls over the subject's contribution to the stream of ideas that flows through time, rather than being comprehensively biographical. In this case it is Charles Darwin, his activities, and his attitudes in relation to his book The Origin of Species that are the focus of Quammen's writing.

He writes to good effect. There is a great deal of fable and myth and nonsense that swirls around Darwin and Origin, in the midst of which this book seems like a calm oasis of thoughtful contemplation. At the center is the question: How did Darwin come to the idea of natural selection and then how did he finally publish his ideas about it despite his own misgivings. There's more, too: what were his misgivings! We get a fascinating and remarkably human portrait of Darwin as a reluctant revolutionary.

Quammen's style is graceful and straightforward and his narrative is compelling. The insight that this relatively slim volume offers about Darwin and Origin is much more profound than its size would suggest.

The Origin of Species was instantly recognized as a remarkable and controversial contribution to science. The following excerpt gives some idea of how surprisingly well Origin sold even while Darwin was alive.

Meanwhile the book made him famous—far more famous than he'd been as a conventional naturalist and writer—and profoundly controversial. It was translated (badly and irresponsibly, in some cases, by foreign thinkers with their own agendas), published abroad [i.e., not in England] in authorized and unauthorized editions, widely reviewed, admired, denounced, released in a cheap edition by Murray [its original publisher] for a bigger market, and talked about by many more people than actually read it. It sold roughly 25,000 copies, of the English editions alone, during Darwin's lifetime. "The real triumph of Darwin's book came after his death," according to Morse Peckham, editor of the variorum text. "The profits of the American pirates must have been enormous." Those number are unavailable, as are totals reflecting the book's global reach. A bibliographical checklist, published in 1977, recorded 425 distinct editions of The Origin of Species (not counting reprints of each edition) just to that point, including four in Hungarian, two in Hebrew, two in Romanian, two in Latvian, four in Korean, one in Hindi, and fifteen in Japanese. Darwin himself devoted a sizable share of his energies, over the dozen years following first publication, to revising it, promoting it (he mailed off quite a few complimentary copies), monitoring its reception (yes, he read his reviews, and playing his role (mainly by letter) in the scientific discussion it provoked. The book succeeded hugely in some ways, and failed in others. It made evolution seem plausible. But it left many of Darwin's scientific colleagues—never mind lay readers and religious critics—unwilling to accept natural selection as the mechanism. That idea was still to big, too scary, too cold. [pp. 203--204]

-- Notes by JNS