Darwin
By Adrian Desmond and James Moore
Penguin. 808 pp, $19.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
How could a wealthy, respectable gentleman of impeccable lineage and reclusive tastes claim in the 1830s that humans are descended from hermaphrodite squids? At a time when England was torn by riots and Chartists were being shipped off to the colonies in chains, the ideas of Charles Darwin were denounced as traitorous to the social order.
Darwin's methodical labours rested on the happy fortune of having accompanied Captain Robert Fitzroy on a coastal survey of South America. In five years aboard the Beagle, Darwin glimpsed a world whose variety demanded explanation.
The prevailing dogmatic assumptions of European zoology, botany and geology failed to account for the motion apparent in natural history. Darwin's keen eye detected evidence of a story to better even that of the Bible.
At journey's end Fitzroy went off to govern New Zealand, while Darwin settled down to sort his collection of flora and fauna. An independent income enabled him to play the Victorian patriarch/scholar while his wife supervised the servants and bore the children. His collection from the Beagle provided sufficient academic sustenance to see him through some early publications on the origins of coral reefs and volcanic islands and the anatomy of creatures such as barnacles.
A man initially destined for Anglican orders, for a full 20 years Darwin was haunted by the heretical synthesis that his studies suggested on the origins of the world's immense variety of species. But each year he resisted going into publication, Her Majesty's ships kept returning to imperial Britain with even more wonders. New creatures were being discovered, extinct ones dug up.
The final rush into print of The Origin of Species in 1859 was as much to beat another to the bookshop as it was to assert Darwin's own studies. After living in purgatory for so long the "Devil's Chaplain", as he called himself, was unmasked.
Today, however, as concern for environmental matters grows, the real import of Darwin's ideas seems curiously neglected. Many assumptions inherent in the ecology movement conceive of a nature forever in balance, frozen in an unending interplay of species. This is simply not true. Darwinian life on earth is a succession of changelings preoccupied with grabbing the main chance.
Understanding the theory of evolution means more than just keeping the creationists at bay. More than a century of neo-Darwinian tinkering has altered our understanding of what this affable naturalist tried to tell us.
Our grand assumption of power in our ability to splice and mutate genes in laboratories coincides with a desire to idealise nature as benevolent and considerate. Ultimately, we are kidding ourselves, much more than just good intentions.
Karl Marx knew this when he offered to dedicate the first volume of Capital to Darwin. He saw his own work in political economy as a parallel to that of Darwin in natural science. It is a pity that socialists now tend to neglect the duality, focusing their 19th century studies on Marx alone while largely ignoring his contemporary.
Darwin, like Marx, is still very much alive. The debates that raged during his lifetime are still with us. Desmond and Moore's immensely readable biography is as much a charting of the sophistication of the capitalist class in Victorian Britain as it is an analysis of its fear of revolution. The literary and scientific professions flocked to Darwin's defence in pursuit of an agnostic club with which to beat the predominant church.
Such intermingling of class and human issues is still with us today, no matter who may lay claim to crude remnants of complex ideas, such as "survival of the fittest".