Darwin's Armada - How Four Voyagers to Australasia won the Battle for evolution and Changed the World. [Hardcover]

Iain McCalman (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Penguin / Viking (2009)
• ISBN-10: 0670071587
• ISBN-13: 978-0670071586
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,027,056 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darwin's Legacy, April 16, 2009

By 

Andrew Desmond (Neutral Bay, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Darwin's Armada - How Four Voyagers to Australasia won the Battle for evolution and Changed the World. (Hardcover)

Iain McCalman has produced a wonderfully timely book. It is exactly two hundred years since the birth of Charles Darwin; a man of great consequence. In the past millennium, Darwin would rate as one of the world's greatest scientists and most influential people.

McCalman's book begins with Darwin's funeral where he was buried in Westminster Abbey. What a delicious irony! The book then proceeds to work backwards and covers the lives of Darwin as well as Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Wallace. Each of these individuals had their role to play in the development of the theory of evolution or its subsequent propagation. These were men of great originality and courage. While it is easy today to accept the point that evolution has been proved, in the nineteenth century, the world of science had to defeat the forces of literal biblical interpretation. This was not a simple task. Darwin was initially widely ridiculed. However, his views came to the fore and, today, it is only the most deluded that would deny the existence of evolution.

One feature of this book is that McCalman writes with such lucidity. While many books of science can be hard work, this is not the case with "Darwin's Armada". McCalman's narrative is beautiful and is a delight to read. If only more writers in this field had McCalman's gifts.

Overall, I thoroughly recommend this book to all readers. And I make this point not just to those who accept Darwin. It should have a wider audience, particularly in the US which has seemingly adopted the role of creationism's last redoubt.