One of Charles Darwin's signature attributes, we learn early in David Quammen's marvelous new biography, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, was chronic vomiting. No one knew—or knows—what his exact ailment was, except that it was likely a nervous disorder. Today he would be drugged to the gills; in mid-19th-century Britain the treatment he underwent was a somewhat frightening "Water Cure," based on the alternation of freezing and scalding baths.
But Quammen does not deal in this queasy subject just to be colorful or to create sympathy for his subject (though these are two results). Although Darwin's seasickness has become famous, his intestinal troubles oddly worsened after his five-year voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, while he lived nestled in affluent, self-sustaining domesticity in the quiet countryside. Because it was at this time that he began to postulate a biological theory whose ramifications, Quammen suggests, were so unsettling that they literally made him sick.
This turns out to be an entirely plausible notion, because when we look clearly at the theory of evolution—which posits that all forms of life are randomly occurring and interrelated variations that exist by dint of their chance ability to procreate more successfully than competing variations—and we take in the full measure of its consequences, our stomachs turn a little even today. Quammen's argument is that Darwin wasn't just ahead of his time; he was ahead of ours, as well. "Let's be clear," Quammen writes. "This is not evolution versus God. The existence of God—any sort of god, personal or abstract, immanent or distant—is not what Darwin's evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of Man—the conviction that we above all other life forms are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expectations of God, special rights and responsibilities on Earth. That's where Darwin runs afoul of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and probably most other religions on the planet."
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The revolutionary change in perspective that must accompany evolutionary theory, and which is still in its early stages, disturbed Darwin to such an extent that he withheld broadcasting his ideas for 20 years. Quammen cannily begins the biography after Darwin's return from sea (that voyage has been dramatized well by others, none less than Darwin), as he reemerges into London society something of a celebrity. He decides, in his fussily ratiocinative, pro-versus-con way, that he should get married and so abruptly proposes to his cousin. He learns that his father will be generous with the family fortune and that he need not generate an income. And so he settles in at his Kent estate to the business of making babies and making sense of the questions that accepted creationist principles could not seem to satisfy: Why would God put five species of finch on the Galapagos Islands, and why would each be endemic to its own island? Where was the line in the sand between species, which were said to be immutable, and variations? And why the hell do men have nipples?
By 1838, Quammen says, Darwin had the theory clear in his mind. But he didn't begin The Origin of Species until 1858. The event that finally forced him forward is meaningful both as a gauge of Darwin's personality and as proof that the derogatory label "Darwinism," implying one man's concoction, is specious: What happened was that another scientist hit upon evolution, too.
This was Alfred Wallace, a kind of autodidactic, blue-collar naturalist who traveled the tropics in emulation of Darwin and others. While bedridden with malaria in the Malay Archipelago, Wallace had a feverish epiphany and quickly scribbled out a deft précis on evolution by natural selection. (Notice how illness always accompanies this idea.) One of the people to whom he sent his proposal was Darwin. Afraid of being scooped, Darwin slammed out The Origin of Species in 10 months, an aptly unplanned and imperfect genesis to one of the most influential books in history.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin appears as part of the Great Discoveries series, an offshoot of the Penguin Lives biographical series (which has changed publishers and morphed into Eminent Lives). These books are modeled on the style of Lytton Strachey, who commended biographers to achieve "a becoming brevity," and who made good on that advice in his brilliant, polemical Eminent Victorians. The premise of the series is therefore excellent, but I, for one, have found the results disappointing. These slim studies are frequently unfocused rather than incisive, watery instead of tart. Sometimes the page limits hamper writers who are more verbose, and on more than one occasion I've come away thinking that the established author was treating his assignment as a profitable sideline and not giving it his full attention.
But in this case the author and subject have been ideally matched, and Quammen, who started as a columnist for Outside (his essay collections, like Natural Acts and The Flight of the Iguana, are wonderful), knows how to pack great amounts of learning into a swift, pointed narrative. His prose is affable and humorous and full of periodic sentences that roll along so quickly you get the odd sense you need to read faster to keep up.
He also deals equably with Darwin, whose features have been frequently blurred by both idolaters, who hold him up as a science saint, and detractors, who cast him as a bugaboo. In Quammen's representation, he is likable and limited, a sweet man who adored his family and worked tirelessly, but who was also ambitious (Quammen calls his one-upmanship of Wallace "weaselly") and upheld most of the conservative conceits of the leisure class. Quammen is just as evenhanded in his brief and edifying summary of The Origin of Species, which he calls "magnificent, hastily composed, compelling and seriously flawed."
A touching thread throughout The Reluctant Mr. Darwin concerns the sadness Darwin's growing agnosticism caused in his loving marriage. In the margin of a letter in which his wife had gently expressed her fears for his soul, Darwin added, "When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this." To this day, evolution, which is now well-enough established to move from theory to fact, cuts mercilessly at the shins of central beliefs accepted by both the religious and the secular—because don't we all, in some way, still think that man has a special place in the universe? In Darwin's life we see the upshot of the "cold, scary materialism" that evolution implies; the true meanings of his theory made him vomit, tied up his tongue and made him cry.