Darwin's Armada [Paperback]

Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution
Readers have many new books on Charles Darwin and evolution to choose from in this bicentennial year of Darwin's birth. Darwin's Armada surely must rank among the better ones suitable for a broad audience. It consists of five parts. The first four recount the exploration expedition experiences of Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. The fifth describes the events surrounding the publication of Darwin's and Wallace's papers on evolution and the subsequent battles to win support for their theory.

The first four sections serve as good short biographies for significant parts of these men's careers, particularly useful to readers not already versed in the lives of one or more of them. McCalman, a distinguished Australian professor, places emphasis on their southern Pacific experiences, though not exclusively. None of the four was an accomplished naturalist when they first set out on their respective voyages, and one of the values of McCalman's accounts is to show how they learned on the job. He highlights how Darwin and Wallace, in particular, developed evolutionary insights from their observations of animals and plants in isolated island habitats.

McCalman underscores the social class differences among these men, and illustrates how class affected their careers and interactions with the scientific community. Darwin was from a distinguished family, but Wallace fit with the working-class and was self-educated. Hooker and Huxley fit in between, and both struggled financially at times.

I found Part Five "The Armada at War, 1859-82" to be the most rewarding. It shows how the connections among these men coalesced and why they mattered. Hooker and Darwin became friends since the mid 1840s and Hooker served as the principal sounding board for the ideas Darwin was developing about evolution. Huxley, whom Darwin first met in 1853, had to be won over, but he ultimately became the most effective publicist for Darwin's views.

The action intensifies in 1858 when Darwin received Wallace's paper "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type," which closely aligned with Darwin's own ideas about evolution, not yet published. Darwin's friends, particularly Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell, were concerned that Darwin not be pre-empted, and they quickly arranged for the joint reading of Darwin and Wallace papers at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. McCalman provides a fine account of that proceeding. He concludes that Darwin's friends had sought to advance Darwin's position versus that of Wallace, but that without their efforts Wallace's paper would likely have received no hearing.

McCalman does a good job of summarizing certain similarities and differences between the ideas of Darwin and Wallace. He mildly suggests that social class played a role in the ascendency of Darwin as the recognized innovator. Darwin clearly had one advantage: he had the leisure in 1858-1859 to pull together his thoughts into On the Origin of Species, while Wallace was still busy trying to earn a living collecting in the Malay Archipelago. Darwin would later help to arrange a government pension for Wallace.

The book begins and ends with Darwin's 1882 funeral at Westminster Abbey, a venue promoted by Huxley, ever the publicist. Huxley, Hooker, and Wallace were among the pallbearers.

McCalman offers another perspective on Darwin's humanity and his travails in the synthesis of his great theories. Hooker, Huxley and Wallace cajoled and drove Darwin to complete The Origin and then helped him to defend it. McCalman captures the mood of the period and each scientist's journey is an insight into the cogitations of an innovative thinker. This history is very readable - one can smell the sea air, feel the debilitating aspects of long ocean voyages and empathise with Darwin as he gathers evidence from around the world. If McCalman's armada sparks a deeper interest in the life and times of Darwin, try the insightful biography by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

This is a wonderful book. It is well written and easy to read.

The author retells the stories of men whose names are often well known to students of the Life Sciences, but whose lives are not. In retelling the stories of these men whose work gave rise to the Theory of Evolution, the book brings to life the process by way of which the concept of evolution was developed and refined. Along the way, it utterly destroys the tired old Creationist/ID claim that the whole idea of evolution is "only" just one man's "theory", and not backed by any evidence.

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