Reluctant Mr.Darwin

By David Quammen

There are lots of 800 page biographies, but I wanted to pick a short one. This one at 250 pages starts after his famous HMS Beagle journey. The journey ended in 1836, and he had his first draft of the idea by 1842-44. But he took another 16 years to publish Origin of Species in 1859.

This biography deals with Darwin's procrastination in publishing the idea. It deals with Darwin's years of varied experiments to gather enough data to back up his argument. It deals with how Darwin spent free time to learn periphery subjects like geography, plant biology etc.

In these twenty years, he married Emma, fathered ten children, buried two and inherited his dad's wealthy estate. The book also deals with Darwin's lifelong struggle with his digestive system, and losing his 10 year old dearest daughter. Emma and Charles come to grips with the tragedy in their own way. Darwin gradually loses his belief in an all-knowing god. Emma grows more scared of Charles making his argument public.

Quammen goes into interesting details on experiments (some more useful than others) Darwin had to conduct to back up his thesis. He tests how long different kinds of seeds germinate after getting soaked. He also tests if seeds in dead birds germinate. He calculates how far seeds can travel without divine or human intervention.

He runs numerous experiments on pets, and pigeons. He shows how selection can gradually and significantly alter the course of species. His not so useful experiments include 8 years of dissections on barnacles. He becomes the world's best expert on them. But much of it accounts to nothing but making himself confident that he is gathering useful evidence.

Darwin's procrastination continues, until Alfred Russel Wallace sends a draft in 1858. It has a similar idea of natural selection. This forces Darwin's hand. He hurries up and publishes the book the following year in 1859.

The book is almost an instant hit, and is ranked as influential as Bible, Quran, Mahabharata etc. But Darwin keeps private without seeking a lot of fame. Thomas Huxley takes up the cause and fights on behalf of Darwin.

The book ends with Darwin's death and how Wallace, Huxley and Hooker (his publisher) are the pall-bearers.

While the book doesn't say anything about Lincoln, I kept wondering how they came to similar conclusions about human equality and creation in completely different routes. Lincoln learns it from black participation in Civil war, while Darwin spends decades of study, classification and experiments to come to the conclusion.

A good read.