Darwin — from worms to collops

By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours done him during this year’s bicentennial celebrations.

By all accounts a modest and retiring example of his species, Charles Darwin would surely have been more astonished than flattered by the honours done him during this year’s bicentennial celebrations. An avalanche of major exhibitions, international conferences, TV and radio series — everything, indeed, short of a movie starring Brad and Angelina — is accompanied by a perfect tsunami of books made saleable by association with the bald, bearded sage of Down House. In the unfavourable climate of modern publishing, the survival-of-the-fittest principle threatens early extinction for several of them, but a few are sturdy enough to establish themselves without needing a peg of topicality to swing from.

Darwin’s Island is a case in point. When it came to choosing titles, the great man was scarcely his own best friend. Even the most inquisitive non-specialist is unlikely to fall with avidity on The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom or The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. Our loss, according to Steve Jones, whose thoughtful reading of these and other unpromisingly-labelled works in the Darwinian canon reveals how much more underpins the scientist’s evolutionary perspective than giant tortoises and ancestral hominids.

The Beagle experience, three years of seasickness, cramped quarters and the not especially congenial company of the crosspatch creationist and defender of slavery Captain Fitzroy, was traumatic enough to turn Darwin into a convinced homebody, nursing his hypochondria with doses of Condy’s Fluid and seldom venturing beyond the confines of his Kentish garden at Down House. It was here that most of his crucial scientific insights arrived, deriving from such varied research fields as the sexuality of cowslips, the capacity of dogs to register emotion, the refined sensitivities of hops, mimosa and honeysuckle, co-dependent impulses in moths and the habits of hermaphrodite barnacles.