Darwin-Adrian Desmond & James Moore

****/*****                                                                                                                 Biography/Science

Darwin

Adrian Desmond and James Moore

Before him, we were slave of a capricious creator on whose inscrutable whim we came into the world. He lay down immutable laws on Good and Evil which could be transgressed only on the promise of eternal condemnation to the fires of hell. He governed our daily lives down to minute details, yet absolved himself of any consequences of those very actions. Yet his self-proclaimed messengers, the clergy, told us that we possessed a free will which lets us choose the course of our life, hence inviting Creator’s wrath or approbation. I can’t fathom night of ignorance and misery darker than this. He, Charles Darwin, liberated men with the publication of his seminal book ‘Origin of Species’, a tour-de-force of unparalleled insight into the history of mankind. He put man in his real place in the order of beings, i.e. just one of the millions of species which had come into existence by the working of the incessant laws of nature. Human beings surely occupy a unique niche in nature, but so do the unicellular bacteria, the shapeless jelly fish, the graceful cheetah, the gargantuan African tusker, and in fact every one of the living species. Species that are extinct now, were no different in being as unique. Each had evolved over millions of years to exploit a suitable environment, yet they perished when a change in their milieu rendered them less fit than their own progenies with better suited variations. And so, might disappear mankind from the face of a changing earth. What a gale of refreshing thought must have been this most ingenious but beguilingly simple theory of origin of species by the working of Natural Selection. No, there is no creator to whom we are to be ever beholden for bringing us forth in to the world. Our mind, the most unique, intricate and endlessly fascinating product of Natural Selection owes its existence to the same laws which are responsible for the origin of our bodies. And thus, the sorrows, the miseries, the ecstasies, the joys, all of which are the products of mind owe their provenance to natural laws and are not gift or punishment of an unknowable entity. We can hold our heads high and look nature squarely in the eyes, marvel at its immense powers of creation and then get on with acts of daily living.

We have been told for years that Charles Darwin was a genius. No genius, notwithstanding his incomparable mental abilities, can conjure path-breaking theories out of thin air. The times he lives in, are ultimately responsible for providing the right soil where he sows the seeds of his intuitive ideas. Adrian Desmond and James Moore in this stunningly lucid and informative biography put Darwin in his social environment. They adroitly bring forth the role of the zeitgeist of the era he inhabited: family influences, social circumstances, personal beliefs, contemporary religious and political thoughts, and financial constraints or the lack of them. Not a small role was played by Darwin’s personal ambition to find acceptance among foremost scientists of the time, his mentors. They in no less terms pushed him towards formulation of the most iconoclastic theory in the world of science, a theory that explains a plethora of phenomena about life on earth. This is a very long book, about seven hundred pages of main body with hundred pages of notes and bibliography. It is to authors’ skill as narrator, that I read the book with unflagging enthusiasm rarely finding even a paragraph that I wanted to skip. Prose is scintillating and elegant, blending imperceptibly with the times and persons being written about. In great depth and details Desmond and Moore describe growth of Charles Darwin as a geologist and natural scientist and his gradual rise to apex in these fields. When writing about towering figures it is difficult to resist the temptation to eulogize. Desmond and Moore assiduously avoid this fault. What emerges from their study is a homely, genial gentleman-scientist, who is a firm believer in the methods of science as a tool to arrive at truth, a scientist with generous independent means of livelihood, who worked extremely hard to unravel the mysteries of life on earth but chose to stay away from public glare, while ironically coveting the fruits that accrue by the exercise of former behaviour. Authors describe ‘Beagles Voyage’ at length, which fostered Darwin’s belief in a world that is changing slowly. They highlight that this voyage was not the ‘eureka moment’ in Darwin’s scientific thought process, as is generally misbelieved. He strove unflaggingly for years to refine his ideas on evolution, to sort out creases in his theory and to answer all the objections he thought his theory would be subjected to. It is thrilling to follow this process and to witness the birth of the profoundest truth about our existence. Desmond and Moore write about other works of Darwin that he pursued and completed even as he underwent immense mental tribulations as he contemplated the wide social & religious implications of his ‘heretical’ theory and the pariah status that its publication might force on him, in the scientific world. Authors do not shy away in describing how Darwin calculatingly cultivated and groomed young men in science who will be his and his theory’s defenders when it saw the light of the day. They narrate the story of the publication of On the Origin of Species with vigour and in great details, the way it shook the world of science and religion and how Darwin astutely but doggedly went about persuading the leading men of science of his times about the truth of his theory.

Authors devote much space to Darwin’s other books too, that are little known to layman; a book on earthworms, travelogue of his Beagle voyage, The Descent of Man, his short Autobiography, his work on the expression of emotions in man and animals, a book on insectivorous plants, another on movement in plants, a book on orchids, geology etc. Darwin was a prolific writer, an indefatigable experimenter who toiled in his domestic garden and on his writing desk ceaselessly to complete a project even as a new idea for a book or a series of experiments started germinating in his fertile mind. All this when he had to fight a debilitating illness almost from the time he returned to England after the Beagles voyage in his late twenties till the day he died. The illness remained vague and seemed as much of mind as of body. No biography is complete without profiling the individuals who shared the social & cultural milieu of the protagonist. Desmond and Moore write in details and engagingly about Darwin’s father, his numerous relatives, his wife who occupied a central role in his life from the time they married till he died, his mentors Charles Lyell, Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Robert E. Grant, his colleagues and protégés Joseph Hooker, T.H. Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace the co-discoverer of the process of Natural Selection, his friend Reverend John Brodie Innes and his adversaries like Charles Owen. They also devote much space to the development of Darwin’s religious ideas or rather his gradual abandonment of Religious faith.

This book has everything to be called a masterpiece in the genre of biography of a scientist. It is not only the biography of Charles Darwin the man, but also of his science, mainly the theory of ‘Origin of Species by Natural Selection’. It is the chronicle of the times Darwin lived, the growth of liberalism, individual freedom, and the age of Enlightenment. It will be irresistible for a Darwin-fan but a person not particularly well-versed with Darwin’s science will succumb to the lure of its masterly prose, wide research and authors’ deep understanding of the subject.