a bonobo humanity?

Erasmus Darwin, senior, progenitor, from whom Charles got some ideas, and his big nose

It seems I should be quite an expert on Darwin by now – last year I read The Origin of Species for the third time, and I followed that up, at the end of the year, with his Voyage of the Beagle. I’ve even read the first 20 pages or so of The Descent of Man (not quite into it yet), and I’m currently reading, and have nearly finished, Janet Browne’s superlative (and I really do mean that) Charles Darwin – voyaging, the best biography I’ve ever read, of anyone. I’d venture to say that the intimacy with which she deals with just about every aspect of his public and private life is – not quite what only a woman could achieve, but something women generally do so much better than men. And this is only the first volume, leading up to his writing of The Origin. I’ll definitely be buying volume 2, Darwin – the power of place, in the near future. I should also say that Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the barnacle, which I read some 15 years ago, was totally gripping and memorable (except that I can’t recall too much of it now – not her fault, I’d be saying the same about any book after 15 years, sadly. Still, I must read it again…).

So just to further prove my soi-disant expertise, I’ve also read Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s biography, simply called Darwin, and which is described in the back-cover blurbs, as a tour de force, definitive, enthralling, rivetting, compellingly readable and more. I probably found it so at the time, but twenty or so years later I can’t remember a thing about it. And the same goes for David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin & natural selection, bought for me in 2008 by my closest friend, and read more or less immediately, I’m sure. All I remember about it is that I definitely read it, honest. I may even have written about it, and the other books mentioned here, in some of my earlier, long-forgotten blogs. And to round things off I’ve just been given, for my birthday, Matt Ridley’s most recent (2025) book, Birds, sex and beauty: the extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea. I really do love this stuff, honest again. I just this morning watched a video on octopuses and – well I wish I was young and magically proficient at scuba diving so that I could connect with these brilliant creatures.

But thinking about Darwin’s life, activities and achievements (compared to my own, haha), I can’t help thinking about free will and determinism, a long term interest of mine, about which I’ve written a number of times. Darwin was born into a very rich, science-minded family, including a somewhat notorious, larger-than-life grandfather, Erasmus (father of at least 14 children, some of whom were ‘legitimate’, a term I’ve always loathed), philosopher, poet, botanist, inventor, abolitionist and Lamarckian-style evolutionist (before Lamarck). He (Charles) was sent to a couple of Britain’s best universities, Edinburgh and Cambridge, where his family name gave him entrée to a world of intellectuals, leading to an offer to join The Beagle on its round-world voyage of scientific exploration. It was his class rather than any scientific knowledge he’d acquired that recommended him to Robert Fitzroy, the ship’s commander, who felt the need of a ‘gentleman’ to keep him company. But Darwin made the most of this opportunity, which effectively was the making of him as a natural philosopher. His geological researches, and the fossilised specimens he sent home, quite quickly raised his reputation among intellectual and scientific circles in Britain, including the geologist Charles Lyell, the polymath William Whewell, and even one of his own great heroes, Alexander von Humboldt.

So Darwin, in the 1840s, richly married, well-connected, member of the Geological Society and the Royal Society, was basically a privately funded researcher into all, or many, things biological and geological, and in correspondence with professors, cattle breeders, horticulturalists, bug collectors and the like, all the while worreting over the consequences of his increasingly dangerous ideas. And so again, vis-à-vis free will, had I been born in early nineteenth century England, I’d have been more likely, as a pint-sized skinny kid, to die of chimney sweeps’ carcinoma just as I reached my teens, than to have been cosseted and educated and sent as a gentleman’s gentleman on a voyage of exploration around the world. Which doesn’t, I should add, lessen my interest in and admiration for Darwin and his life’s work. I suspect I will indeed reread all those Darwin books I’ve mostly forgotten, and read new ones. In fact, I’m wondering if I’ve actually read Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s dangerous idea. I seem to recall, but I’m not sure….

References

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: voyaging, 1995

Various other Darwin biographies read by me, or not….