THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 24, 1996 TAG: 9601240041
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY ANN EGERTON
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
ANCIENT THINKERS such as Aristotle and St. Augustine and then Sir Francis Bacon, Linnaeus and others in the 17th and 18th centuries theorized about what was first called in 1826 ``evolution.'' But it was Charles Darwin who produced solid theory and evidence of natural selection, particularly with his reports on the finches of the Galapagos and their task-developed beaks, and who published the revolutionary ``Origin of the Species.'' Darwin's findings paved the way for such breakthrough discoveries as chromosomes, chromatin, the laws of inheritance, mutation and DNA.
In the excellent ``Darwin: A Life in Science'' (Dutton, 298 pp., $24.95), English science writers Michael White and John Gribbin, who wrote ``Einstein'' and ``Stephen Hawking,'' illuminate the life of Charles Darwin in alternating chapters. White relates the private life of the man while Gribbin tells of his wide-ranging pursuits in geology, biology and botany. This arrangement works well with Darwin because his private life was inextricably linked to his professional one.
Depressed and lonely after his mother's death when he was 8, Charles Darwin and his older brother, Erasmus, enjoyed the generosity of their busy physician father, Robert, dabbling in hunting, medicine, theology (in which Charles received his degree at Cambridge) and partying.
At 21, Charles, who had been a poor student, received the pivotal invitation to sail around the world on the Beagle. The arduous, nearly five-year voyage directed him unalterably to the study and writing of natural science.
Darwin married a cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and they had 10 children, seven of whom lived into adulthood. Emma was a devoted, compliant wife who made a comfortable home in which he could create and write about his extensive projects of study, from fossils to barnacles to orchids to earthworms, and even the expression of emotions in man and animals. He respected her conventional religious beliefs, and it seems that she respected his revolutionary scientific ones. Their ideas were hardly harmonious, but they managed.
Darwin kept his ground-breaking biological theories to himself for many years before he received a letter from naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace informing him that he, too, was working on the same thesis of natural selection. Darwin then hurriedly published ``The Origin of Species'' in 1859. Marketing and publicity being rather primitive in Darwin's day, his heretical ideas were slow to find their way into people's consciousness, and he was both praised and vilified. (As he is today.)
The ideas in ``The Origin of Species'' and later in ``The Descent of Man'' (1871) that all creatures descend from one simple organism, tracing back hundreds of millions of years, and that man is descended from the apes of Africa, were more than the people of Victorian England could accept.
Darwin studied and wrote prodigiously until his death in 1882 at age 73, an extraordinary feat considering that he was often plagued with unclear but debilitating illnesses, usually accompanied by nausea, weakness and skin eruptions. He may have had multiple allergies; some of his children had the same complaints, including his favorite daughter, Annie. After she died at age 9, the distraught Darwin became an atheist. ``Beyond biology,'' he concluded, ``there is nothing.'' MEMO: Writer Ann Egerton lives in Baltimore. by CNB