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52 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 14, NUMBER 1  •  MARCH 2007 BOOK REVIEW

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles
Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. 2006. By
David Quammen. W.W. Norton & Co., New York. 304 pp.
Hardback – ISBN: 0-393-05981-2. $22.95.

As part of the landed gentry, Charles Darwin’s family lived a
sedate and sophisticated life in a large Georgian house in

Shrewsbury. Darwin’s father, a successful doctor and capitalist,
had a large library, especially rich in natural history; a greenhouse
was just off the morning room, and Darwin’s mother kept fancy
pigeons. After what is often described as an unremarkable child-
hood, Darwin left for Edinburgh to study medicine at the age
of sixteen, but was appalled by the body trade and especially the
brutality of surgery without anesthesia. After he abandoned that
career, his father told him, “You care for nothing but shooting,
dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and
all your family.” Darwin’s next plan was to prepare himself for
ordination at Cambridge and become a parson-naturalist.

But then it happened. In 1831, Darwin received an invita-
tion to accompany Captain Fitzroy on the second Beagle expe-
dition. Darwin wrote in his Autobiography that before leaving he
“did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of
every word in the Bible.” After nearly five years of collection,
observation, and seasickness, he returned to England, and David
Quammen’s new biography The Reluctant Mr. Darwin begins
with this return.

When considering the number of existing biographies of
Darwin, one may wonder what is left to say. However,
Quammen’s biography, while not revisionist, is noteworthy for
several reasons. At 250 pages, it is concise and manageable, espe-
cially compared to Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s 800
pages or Janet Browne’s 1000-page treatment. Also, more than
a biography of the man, Quammen’s lucid and engaging book
is the history of an idea — the “marvelous and shocking and
grim” idea of natural selection. Quammen provides just enough
biographical detail to convey the birth of this idea in the context
of a great deal of hesitation and reluctance on Darwin’s part.

With his characteristic flair for metaphor, Quammen enti-
tles the first chapter “The Fabric Falls,” and writes that for two
years after the Beagle voyage, Darwin “lived a strange double life,
like a spy in the corridors of the British scientific establishment,
which at that time was closely attuned to Anglican orthodoxy
and grounded in the tradition of natural theology.” In 1837, an
important breakthrough occurred when John Gould examined
the bird specimens from the Galápagos Archipelago. Darwin
had thought that one group represented an assortment of wrens,
grosbeaks, orioles, and finches, but they were all finches, thir-
teen species, closely related but distinct, and all unknown to sci-
ence. Also, three distinct species of mockingbird were nestled in
the collection, and, unlike the finches, the mockingbirds had
been carefully tagged. Each species inhabited a different island.

Another breakthrough occurred in 1844, when Joseph
Hooker examined the old plant specimens from the Beagle and
found that their island-by-island diversity contradicted the pre-
conceived notions of species radiating from a center. Darwin
wrote, “At last gleams of light have come & I am almost con-
vinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are
not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” Quammen writes
that this was a daring admission, “cast in sheepish understatement
and contradicting one of the fundamental tenets of British nat-
ural theology.” At that time, Darwin completed a 189-page draft
of his species theory, tucked it away, and seemed to stop.

In speculating on the reasons for what is referred to as
“Darwin’s Delay,” Quammen continues to examine the tensions
between Darwin’s class and status and the political implications
of his work. As a gentleman and patriarch, Darwin was part of
the establishment working in a political climate in which
Church and government feared the Chartists and street agitators
bolstered by Lamarckism and other such subversive ideas. As the
law of the land, Christianity helped to keep the lower orders in
check; anything that challenged the Church was seditious.
Darwin was not only afraid to publish, he wanted no part of this

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

B O O K  R E V I E W

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This image of a Marine Iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) is Plate 12 from C. R. Darwin (ed. 1843. Reptiles, Part 5, No. 2 of The Zoology of the Voyage
of H.M.S. Beagle by Thomas Bell “edited and superintended by Charles Darwin.” Smith Elder and Co., London). The original image was drawn
at natural size from nature on stone by B. Waterhouse Hawkins, printed by C. Hallmandel, and labeled Amblyrynchus Demarlii, as the species was
then known. Reproduced with permission from The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk/).

IGUANA  •  VOLUME 14, NUMBER 1  •  MARCH 2007 53BOOK REVIEW

class warfare. The evolutionary radicals in the public arena were
not his kind of people.

In 1846, Darwin began to dissect barnacles, and because of
his reputation and vast network of contacts, he was able to
obtain them from all over the world. In contrast to his former
belief regarding the rarity of variation, he discovered that barna-
cles were highly variable, and Quammen writes, “Here they
were, the minor differences on which natural selection works.”
After almost eight years of barnacle work, his volumes won the
Royal Medal for Natural Science, providing even more scientific
esteem and credibility from the establishment.

Darwin had sixteen years to refine the ideas he had outlined
in 1842 and drafted in 1844. He had fathered nine children,
buried two, and published eight books. Why not publish?
Instead, he started to breed pigeons.

Quammen compares Darwin to a kiwi, a bird that lays a dis-
proportionately large egg. Not only was it large, but Darwin post-
poned and delayed and then published only when forced to do
so. When Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed the idea
of evolution by natural selection, Quammen writes that Darwin
responded with surprise, nausea, and despair. In 1858, the
Darwin-Wallace material was read before the Linnean Society and
published in the society’s Journal of Proceedings two months later
— and triggered no immediate reaction. In 1859, just ten months
after the Wallace scare, Darwin published Origins, writing, “I am
infinitely pleased & proud at the appearance of my child.”

The idea of descent of species from common ancestors
became widely accepted soon after Origins, but natural selection
did not. Natural selection as the differential reproductive success
resulting from small, undirected variations served as the chief
mechanism of adaptation and divergence — but it lacked pur-

pose or design and challenged not the existence of a Divine
force, but the godliness of humans. The coinage of such words
and phrases as “agnosticism” by Thomas Huxley and “survival
of the fittest” by Herbert Spencer indicates what a profound shift
was taking place in intellectual and scientific circles.

Throughout the biography Quammen discusses the incom-
patibility of Darwinian evolution and Christianity, writing that sci-
entific insight and religious dogma “had never come more directly
into conflict.” In the introduction by way of comparison, he notes
that a 2004 Gallup poll revealed that 45 percent of Americans
interviewed were creationists; 38 percent theistic evolutionists, and
only 13 percent materialistic evolutionists. These results remained
virtually unchanged over the course of a generation, representing
“an extreme level of skepticism and willful antipathy.”

Although the majority seems slow to digest it, Quammen
calls Origins one of the most influential books ever written, pro-
voking the most cataclysmic change in human thinking in four
hundred years. He also calls it “hastily composed” and “seriously
flawed,” and one wishes that his reasons for doing so were more
convincing. One also wishes that Thomas Huxley were more a
part of the story, but, overall, this perceptive and concise biogra-
phy is well worth reading. Part narrative and part essay, it creates
suspense, refuses to romanticize Darwin, and confronts the pol-
itics of evolution in matter-of-fact and explicit ways — and, after
considering Darwin’s torturous reluctance and delay, perhaps we
can better understand the contemporary unwillingness and
inability to accept such a well-established scientific discovery.

Nancy Cervetti
Department of English

Avila University, Kansas City, Missouri

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