The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Great Discoveries)

In September 1838, a young Englishman named Charles Darwin hit upon the idea that "natural selection" among competing individuals would lead to wondrous adaptations and species diversity. Twenty-one years passed between that epiphany and publication of On the Origin of Species. The human drama and scientific basis of that time constitute a fascinating, tangled tale that illuminates this cautious naturalist who sparked an intellectual revolution. Drawing from Darwin's secret notebooks and personal letters, David Quammen has sketched a vivid life portrait of the man whose work remains controversial today.

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LibraryThing member nbmars

A somewhat repetitive but nevertheless entertaining account of why Darwin took twenty years to publish his controversial theory of natural selection. Darwin wanted to accumulate as much evidence as possible in anticipation of the critiques his theory might generate. Quammen offers fascinating

accounts of Darwin's field work to answer questions about variation and geographical diversity. (An example: cutting off duck feet, hanging them in a tank until some sea animal latched onto them, then waving them in the wind and floating them in salt water to test how long the sea animal would live.) Some biographical information helps establish how and why Darwin overcame his religious background - difficult but necessary in order to accept a material explanation of evolution (and apparently something which Wallace also tried to overcome, but in the end, could not). (JAF)

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LibraryThing member RavenousReaders

This biography of Darwin, an eccentric and reclusive but kindly man, is informative and fun to read. Quammen focuses on the 20 years that it took for Darwin to gain enough confidence and evidence to publish On the Origin of Species, a book that is still highly controversial and influential.

Reviewed

by: Karen K

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LibraryThing member co_coyote

David Quammen is a wonderful science writer. His book The Song of the Dodo is on my Top Five Science Books of All-Time list. So I would read anything he wanted to write. Even so, this little book is a gem. It picks up after Charles Darwin has returned from his famous journey on the Beagle and tells

the story of what Charles Darwin's life was like when he returned. Why did he wait so long to publish his theory of Natural Selection? What was he up to? It was only when a manuscript from the self-taught Alfred Russell Wallace landed on his doorstep and "scared the bejesus out of him" that Darwin shook off the sommulent attitude and dashed off On the Origin of Species. Quammen, always the journalist, tells why that rushed volume was so much better than the book the cautious Darwin wanted to write. All in all, a good tale, well told.

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LibraryThing member Carlie

I have not read a biography in a long time and for very good reason. In my opinion, they tend to be long and boring. I really don’t feel the need to know the minutiae of most people’s lives; I just want the important stuff, the life changing aspects. So when I ran across a review for The

Reluctant Mr. Darwin, I was intrigued. It is short and to the point, cutting out all of the Beagle years and everything before, focusing instead on what happened when Darwin stepped off the ship and began to think about what he observed.

In spite of its smallness, the book provides a fairly rich treatment of some very big topics. Quammen is able to pontificate on Darwin’s inner thoughts and struggles in dealing with this big idea that was so against the grain of his times. Through other biographies as well as Darwin’s numerous journals, diaries, and letters, the author is able to draw a pretty clear picture of Darwin’s life that seems to be mostly accurate – his chronic illness, his pious wife, the deaths of his children. The major theme, as the title suggests, was his reluctance to publish his theory of evolution, preferring instead to research and observe until he was almost beaten to the punch.

It was fun to think about the theory of evolution and natural selection again, and I particularly enjoyed learning what the people of the day had to say about it and their reactions to Darwin’s arguments. If all biographies were like this one, I would certainly read them more often.

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LibraryThing member Othemts

A readable, intimate history of Charles Darwin and his work that would change the way we view the world. This is a good short biography that gets at Darwin the man and what he hoped to achieve.

“A species wasn’t a Platonic essence or a metaphysical type. A species was a population of differing

individuals.” – p. 108

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LibraryThing member Clif

I felt as though Charles Darwin was a personal acquaintance of mine by the time I finished this book. It is a very readable and colorfully written study of the great evolutionist Charles Darwin. It focuses on the period just after Darwin’s work aboard the Beagle, and sheds light on his work

habits, personal life, and development as a thinker. The author brings to life both the man and his ideas.

Readers who make it all the way to the end of the book will be treated with a heart warming story about correspondence between Charles Darwin and an amateur bug collector from the English countryside. About 100 years later the grandson of the bug collector, Francis Crick, was co-discoverer of DNA's structure. The correspondence took place near the end of Darwin's life, so it was in a sense his symbolic connecting to the future of biological science. A writer of fiction couldn't contrive a more poetic connection between generations of scientists.

Read in January, 2007

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LibraryThing member yankeesfan1

This was an assigned summer reading book for incoming freshman in the honors college at my university. It was an interesting read, but not something I would have picked up by choice. It certainly did provide me more background into Darwin. I foun the section focusing on him and Wallace's approach

to publishing their theory to be quite interesting.

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LibraryThing member danawl

A short account of the life of Charles after his return from voyage on the Beagle until his death. A good description of the creative process that lead to his writing of the Origin of the Species. Mr. Quammen provides a good description of Darwin's theory and of the controversies around "natural

selection" and "survival of the fittest" that occured during his lifetime.

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LibraryThing member eelie

David Quammen's biography of Charles Darwin is written with an almost tender affection for the naturalist, which he portrays as a fragile, bookish sort of man. It mostly eschews discussion of Darwin's scientific works, aside from placing them in order chronologically, and instead focuses on his

personal life and emotional development. He elaborates most notably on his relationships with his wife, children, and father. It is an abbreviated history of Darwin's life and does not delve too deeply into any one event, opting instead to provide a broad overview of goings on.

I found it to be a quick and easy read, though Quammen's tone throughout the book made it difficult for me to feel as though I had been informed. He did not even make an effort to conceal his anti-religious bias, often, and sometimes irrationally, blaming major setbacks in Darwin's work and personal life on his association with the church. He dismisses any discussion of the extremely complex relationship Darwin had with his faith with a statement to the effect of "Darwin, at this point in his life, was still bogged down by his faith; however, signs of his liberation from the oppressive and distinctly anti-scientific motivations of the church are already beginning to show in his works..." -- and this is hardly an exaggeration. This kind of a statement is a bold one to make, especially without any discernible corroborative evidence. This kind of unapologetic bias is difficult for me to swallow, especially in something that bills itself as a non-fictionalized biography.

However, that's not to say that every informative passage in the book was tinged with unreadable partiality. Quammen has an easy, humorous, and almost flippant writing style; if you can make it past his obvious bias (or if you really detest religion and enjoy bashing it self-indulgently with like-minded individuals), you may be able to glean a gem or two of actual information from it. At the very least, you won't waste too much of your time -- at a little under 300 pages and with Quammen's writing style, I had the entirety of the book read in about 4 hours.

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LibraryThing member AsYouKnow_Bob

Pretty good. Conversational almost to the point of breeziness, this is an excellent introduction to the state of the art in Victorian biology, the post-Beagle life of Darwin, and to his work leading up to his "Origin of Species".

LibraryThing member Devil_llama

Oh, no, not another Darwin biography! Yes, it is, but well written and, like many other biographies, seeks to find its own little hook to tell a slightly different story. This one explores the arrangment between Darwin and Wallace, forged by the friends of Darwin, that allowed joint publication of

theory. The book gives some interesting insight into the characters of both men, although there is a great deal that must remain speculation, by virtue of the fact that we can never be sure what others are really thinking. Definitely worth the time to read.

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LibraryThing member Sandydog1

Quammen has written one of the most personable of biographies. Through the author's extensive research, Darwin's personality is described in a well-written, easy-going style. This book was a pleasure.

LibraryThing member themulhern

The tone of this book is a little breezy but the descriptions of the evolution of Darwin's thinking and life after "The Origin" are fascinating. It's sad that some of the characters, like Wallace and Hooker, seem to disappear at the end of the book. The discussion of evolutionary theories presented

as alternatives to natural selection in the years following the publication of the book is intriguing.

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LibraryThing member leonardbast

"[...]nobody's perfect. Charles Darwin certainly wasn't. He had an appendix, he had nipples, none of which served any useful purpose, and he occasionally made mistakes, even in The Origin of Species."

It is really hard for me to find nonfiction books that I end up liking. They are always either too

dry or too lacking in substance and pandering to a current popular interest. However, this book is pretty great. It brings Darwin out in the open as a full human being and reveals the decades of work, dedication to precision, and objectiveness that went into the germ of evolutionary theory.

Darwin didn't set out on the Beagle to start a revolution in science that led to its complete divergence from religion. He was just a lad from a wealthy family on a natural history expedition. But the carcasses and their locations couldn't lie. With some of the eventual evidence collected, he formed a hypothesis and worked on perfecting it for decades before publishing. Only the danger of having his idea owned by someone else first led him to stop hoarding and digesting evidence and get down to the writing. During all of the gestation time he sired a family, coped with a mysterious illness by bizarre water treatments, and lost his faith in God.

This book made me want to read other books by Quammen because he writes with clarity and literary backbone missing from some other nonfiction writers.

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LibraryThing member MarkBeronte

Twenty-one years passed between Charles Darwin's epiphany that "natural selection" formed the basis of evolution and the scientist's publication of On the Origin of Species. Why did Darwin delay, and what happened during the course of those two decades? The human drama and scientific basis of these

years constitute a fascinating, tangled tale that elucidates the character of a cautious naturalist who initiated an intellectual revolution.

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LibraryThing member Eoin

Muscular and amusing prose surround thorough, subtle research. Worth it for the chapter-by-chapter Origin.

LibraryThing member WildMaggie

On a topic that sounds like it will be dry as dust, author David Quammen delivers an engrossing tale of an all-too human Darwin and the circumstances--both personal and professional--that stretched over the many years between his initial inklings of his great theory and its eventual publication in

The Origin of Species. In addition to this main story, we get the history of philosophies and scientific thought on what would eventually be labeled "evolution" and "natural selection." I was particularly fascinated by this history and its relationship to ideas being promulgated today as "Intelligent Design" and "creationism".

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