I picked up a second hand copy of Darwin A Life in Science, by John Gribbin and Michael White, in Moonee Ponds last month. Coming in at around 300 pages and written in 1995, it is a relatively recent study that concludes with two very interesting chapters
- a discussion of recent genetic advances which validate Darwin's theory
- details of the subsequent life of all the main players, along with Darwin's children
It is one of 3 Darwin books I have. The others are
a) Darwin by Adrian Desmond and James Moore - the definitive biography, written in 1991 and over 800 pages
b) A 1972 edition (complete and unabridged) of The Voyage of the Beagle, his first best seller.
This is the third collaborative biography by well-known science writers Gribbin and White, coming after Einstein (1994) and Stephen Hawking (1992).
While this book doesn't compare either in scope or in scholarship with recent full-length biographies of Darwin, it admirably fulfills the non-specialist's needs. The authors concentrate on the ways in which Darwin's career led to On the Origin of Species, and they make a special effort to clarify the meaning of his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Yes, it is a strange book that flits back and forth across his life and which duplicates big slabs of information in different chapters. It is almost like a series of different articles, patched together badly into a single volume. Hence it was slightly frustrating to read.
But overall I enjoyed it and knocked it over in a week.
Darwin was the Einstein of the 19th Century. As the authors write on p173
Just at there was far more to the science of Albert Einstein than the theory of relativity, so there is far more to the science of Charles Darwin than the theory of evolution. Even without evolution, Darwin would have been one of the great nineteenth-century biologists, even without biology, he would have gone down in history as a great geologist. It is a measure of the importance of the theory of evolution that these other achievements seem modest in comparison.
It is amazing to realise that Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after returning from his five year voyage aboard HMS Beagle, but it was not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public expression in On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply influenced modern Western society and thought.
He accumulated so much information during the Beagle journey, in areas such as geology, botany, paleontology, etc, that his subsequent books (before his Species book) made him famous and a household name.
His fame was helped by the fact that he was a wonderful writer who presented his books in a way that was understandable to the layman.
A giant of science and a giant of a man, in all ways.
To learn more about Darwin, check out
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