Exactly how popular science ought to be written

books:

	• The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution ... David Quammen W. W. Norton, 2006 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Procrastinating Charles Darwin

Darwin started writing his Beagle Journal in 1837 in "notebook A." He simultaneously started "notebook B," dedicated to his idea that species were perhaps not so immutable. Then came C, D, & E as he developed and organized his evidence. Midway through notebook C, he noted, "But Man, wonderful Man, is an exception." Three lines later, he recanted "...no, he is no exception." Hidden away in notebook N were metaphysical implications of his theory: Does a bee have a sense of communal responsibility? Do animals have a conscience? Is the human conscience an instinct or a human adaptation for social behavior? Does the idea of God arise naturally from the human mind? Is the human mind just a function of the human body? Might the "love of a deity" simply result from brain structure?

In Victorian England, these were not ideas to discuss in polite company, despite the fairly recent period of the Enlightenment - hence a 20-year procrastination before he published his terrible thoughts. Quammen rhetorically asks why Darwin had to be threatened with being scooped before he finally published. Was he afraid of offending his wife, afraid of estranging himself from pious former teachers and friends, afraid he would be thrown in jail...did he want more evidence so as to make his theory more airtight, was he too busy with other chores, and several other suggestions - and to all the suggested questions, Quammen opines, "The answers to each of these questions, I think, is yes."

All the pertinent data about the making of "Origin of the Species" is here:

1. Timeline of formation and development of the theory.
2. Marriage to his beloved Emma and how she supported his work, despite her theological opposition.
3. Portrait of his meticulous methods of observation, experimentation, thinking, and recording.
4. The Alfred Wallace bombshell and how Darwin's friends worked out a shared credit solution.
5. The writing and publishing of "Origin of the Species," the five revisions, and a brilliant chapter by chapter synopsis by Quammen.
6. The shakey reception of his book - for 50 years - and eventual vindication.

There are some books on Darwin more scholarly and longer, but you won't find one more likely to hold the attention of the general interest reader - complete with an outstanding explanation of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Hopefully high school science teachers will discover this book and add it to their student reading lists. The scientific literacy of our children (and our general population) could stand a little enhancement.

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Exactly how popular science ought to be written

There are several very good titles (as well as a couple of stinkers) in Norton's "Great Discoveries" series. For my money, David Quammen's little book on Darwin is the best. There are several reasons for this.

In the first place, Quammen is simply a very good reader. His style is conversational without lapsing into vapid chattiness, so his book is fun to read. But although his style is friendly, he never dumbs down Darwin's central ideas nor the contemporary responses to them. He does a fine job of focusing on natural selection as the Darwinian mechanism that accounted for variation in and between species as well as for the emergence of new ones, and his overview of The Origin of Species is quite good (as is his suggestion that new readers of the Origin might want to read the original 1859 edition rather than later ones which Darwin laboriously edited in response to his critics). There is no better compliment one can pay a popularizer than to say that his or her secondary treatment makes a reader positively yearn to read the primary literature discussed. Anyone who hasn't read Origin will walk away from Quammen's book resolved to do so.

The penultimate chapter is a whirlwind tour of evolutionary theory and debates from the 1859 Origin to the present day. Especially interesting is Quammen's pointing out that evolution was pretty quickly accepted by Darwin's contemporaries because it could be made compatible (at least in their eyes) with theism. But there was much more resistance to natural selection, which seemed to spell the end of any uberhaupt purposefulness to creation.

Highly recommended. Those who are led by a reading of Quammen to tackle Origin might consider the abridgement by Philip Appleman, also published by Norton. Appleman's condensation of the book is judicious, and his 20-page Introduction is excellent.

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Conversational tone humanizes Darwin

Short, informal biography of Mr. Darwin and his Big Idea. The conversational tone sometimes makes Darwin seem more human, more vulnerable, and conversely more persuasive--and at times is just anachronistic and annoying.

Beware the audio book verson

Be forewarned: the narrator of the audio book version is an unfortunate cross between J. Peterman from Seinfeld, Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes, and the narrator of old elementary school film strips. The content is very good (as described in other reviews posted here) but you should have a friendly warning about the audio version. The narrator will put you to sleep.

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Short, Fast, and Informative

"The Reluctant Mr. Darwin" by David Quammen is a concise, fun, and fast read. If you want to learn the bullet points about Charles Darwin's life and the formative people, events, and intellectual and social climate that surrounded Darwin's publication of the On the Origin of Species, then this book is for you. Quammen does not spend too much time on any one point, but maintains a theme that Darwin was not lazy in publishing his famous book many years after his voyage but reluctant, wanting to make sure his ideas were sound and well evidenced.

An outline of Darwin's life can be found in many places, even Wikipedia, but what makes Quammen's book particularly helpful is the sections he devotes to writing about Darwin's contemporaries and their contributions to natural history and Darwin's work. Quammen writes about Charles Lyell and his advocacy of the idea of uniformitarianism, the idea that was formed by slow-moving processes, which opposed the idea of catastrophism, the idea that was consistent with Christian theology of the times and based on the belief that certain catastrophes shaped the geologic features of the earth as it is today. Quammen also writes about John-Baptiste Lamarck and his idea of the inheritance of acquired traits, an idea that has been found to be incorrect, but one that Darwin uses in his famous book. These sections in "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin" give historical and scientific context to Darwin's work and allow the reader to more completely appreciate the specific and significant contribution that Darwin made in advocating the idea of evolution by natural selection.

Another important aspect of Quammen's book was how Quammen made it a point to show the evolution of Darwin's famous publication from its infancy, where he first wrote his ideas in journals titled Journal A, Journal B, Journal C, and so on to his obsession with writing a tome that covered every possible argument and objection to his idea with as much evidence as possible to his final rushed publishing of On the Origin of Species due to the threat of Alfred Russel Wallace nearly publishing the same theory before Darwin himself.

This book definitely gives the reader a good picture of Darwin and the social and scientific climate in which he lived. I came away from the book having what I felt was a basic yet complete understanding of Darwin's life.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

A fresh look at Darwin's most radical idea, and the mysteriously slow process by which he revealed it.

Evolution, during the early nineteenth century, was an idea in the air. Other thinkers had suggested it, but no one had proposed a cogent explanation for how evolution occurs. Then, 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 Darwin's twenty-one-year delay constitute a fascinating, tangled tale that elucidates the character of a cautious naturalist who initiated an intellectual revolution.

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin is a book for everyone who has ever wondered about who this man was and what he said. Drawing from Darwin's secret "transmutation" notebooks and his personal letters, David Quammen has sketched a vivid life portrait of the man whose work never ceases to be controversial.

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