On the morning of October 2, 1836, HMS Beagle sailed into Falmouth harbor, and Charles Darwin stepped ashore after five years at sea. He was twenty-seven years old and carried with him notebooks, specimens, and an accumulating set of observations that he could not yet fully explain but could not stop thinking about. He went directly to his parents' house in Shropshire and slept for two days. When he woke, he began the work that would consume the rest of his life. He would not publish his theory of natural selection for another twenty-three years, held back by a combination of scientific caution and a very clear understanding of what it would mean when it finally appeared. He knew that what he had seen on the Galápagos Islands and across the Pacific did not fit the prevailing account of how life had come to be arranged as it was. He knew that the account he was developing in its place would unsettle not only science but theology, philosophy, and the self-understanding of the species he was proposing to explain. He spent two decades gathering evidence, corresponding with naturalists around the world, and breeding pigeons in his garden, before a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, who had arrived at the same idea independently, forced his hand. The book he published in a rush in 1859 sold out on the day of its release and has never gone out of print.
British biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) laid the foundations of the theory of evolution and transformed the way we think about the natural world. Few books have influenced human thought more profoundly than On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, which expounded his theory of natural selection with an accumulation of evidence so carefully marshaled and an argument so clearly made that it shocked society and revolutionized science in the same breath. The idea that all living things share common ancestors, shaped over vast stretches of geological time by the pressure of variation and selection, was not merely a biological theory. It was a new way of understanding existence itself, with consequences that have never stopped rippling outward into philosophy, theology, psychology, and the social sciences.
Yet the man behind that world-changing idea remains, in many ways, elusive, his private anxieties and personal dramas concealed beneath the patient, methodical surface of his scientific correspondence. It is precisely this hidden Darwin, the man whose discoveries cost him something profound and whose life contained contradictions that the official biography has tended to smooth over, that has drawn the attention of former New York Times reporter and bestselling author John Darnton. The author of several acclaimed novels, including The Darwin Conspiracy, Darnton brings to his subject both a journalist's instinct for the story beneath the story and a novelist's understanding of how character and circumstance shape the ideas that change history.
In the conversation that follows, Darnton guides us into Darwin's world, exploring the man behind the theory, the personal and intellectual costs of his discoveries, and why a naturalist who spent twenty-three years hesitating before publishing the most consequential book in the history of biology continues to fascinate readers and writers who sense that the official version has left something important out.
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