Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist

Rating:
Summary: Darwin the Whig
Review: This is one of the most fascinating biographies of Darwin, and one that puts him in the appropriate context of the nineteenth century. This background is almost essential for grasping the social attitudes that surround the controversies over evolution. These issues influence the debate to such a degree that the actual work of theory and evidence can be lost in the tides of ideology. This work, along with The Politics of Evolution, shows just how difficult a career the idea of evolution had in wake of the radical politics spawned in the generation after the French Revolution. An idea associated with radicalism and the political world of Lamarck comes from its underground to social acceptance in Darwin's conservatizing formulation. The tale is also one of the challenge of emerging institutional science to the establishment Anglican world, wherein the works of Paley were required reading at Oxford well into the twentieth century. This underdog theory becomes the new established paradigm. This influence of culture on the formulation of theory is visible in the thorough and engaging account of this biography, one that x-rays Darwin the man in a fashion that must caution the usual exemption he receives from Social Darwinism. Whatever the issues of evolution, Darwin the man is one of the great studies of this era, and understanding him is impossible without attempting to decipher the nineteenth century transformation of culture in which he lived.

Rating:
Summary: great biography & history
Review: Wonderful book! I feel I have not just read Darwin's life but a social history of Victorian England and the emergence of scientists as a new professional class with all its powers & privileges. I just wish there were more on Alfred Wallace and less Huxley. Of the whole cast of Darwinain characters, it seems Wallace is the most generous and admirable. And he raises the question that challenges Darwin and all his sidekicks up to now - consciousness and mind seem a quatumn leap from the evolution of matter and life that natural selection really can't explain them. Unfortunately, he dived off the deep of spirtiualism and seances.