This is a book of my wife's that I semirandomly picked off her shelf to read. I picked it because of a combination of 1) the topic was of interest to me (I am, after all, supposedly a Victorianist who studies science), 2) she has spoken in the past of enjoying David Quammen's work a lot (plus I know him as a frequent contributor to Radiolab), and 3) David Quammen went to my high school (albeit some four decades before me).
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution |
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Originally published: 2006 Read: August 2025 |
The book is kind of a biography of Charles Darwin, but not in the birth-to-death sense; rather, it focuses in on a particular period of Darwin's life, and a particular aspect of his life during that time. Basically, David Quammen's central question is this: Darwin first mentally formulated the idea of evolution by natural selection shortly after the voyage of the Beagle, which was from 1831 to 1836, but he did not publish On the Origin of Species until 1859. Why? What caused him to delay so long, and what caused him to finally get off his butt and communicate his big idea?
I found the book highly readable, blowing through it in a day. Quammen gives good insight into Darwin's research and the scientific context for it; we get good information about what people believed leading up to Darwin, and how Darwin thought through the observations he made on the Beagle trip—and why what was going on might make him reluctant to rush into publication. Quammen provides some good explications of the Origin itself; I think the book does a good job articulating its intervention and format to the nonspecialist reader.
I've never read a biography of Darwin cover to cover (I have dipped in and out of Janet Browne's magisterial two-volume one as needed), so many bits of Darwin's life here were new to me. I knew about his marriage, but little about his children, particularly the one who (we can claim from this vantage point) may have have Downs. Most interesting, though, was Quammen's coverage of Alfred Russell Wallace, who independently came up with the idea of natural selection. I knew that story only vaguely: that Wallace came up with the idea, Darwin got wind of it, they jointly published, and then Darwin rushed to write the Origin to get his idea in print. I hadn't known anything about Wallace's tough early life, the difficulties he encountered on his own voyages of scientific discovery (the ship he was on caught fire and sank!), or especially how Darwin got wind of Wallace's discovery, or how the joint publication came about. Wallace actually knew nothing of the joint publication; Darwin's allies put the paper together and had it read while Wallace was out of the country (and Darwin himself wasn't even present for the reading).
Lots of good nuggets in here, which Quammen does a good job of contextualizing in both Darwin's life and nineteenth-century biological science more broadly. Holds up to me as a specialist reader, but I suspect would be a perfectly fine read for the nonspecialist as well.
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