Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker Kindle Edition

As a historian of science who specializes on Darwin, and the Director of Darwin Online, I have to say this is the worst biography of Darwin I have ever read.
I was sent this volume for my views prior to publication and was dismayed at the catalogue of errors and misreadings it contains. I think it fair to share them on the book's Amazon page in case other readers are in danger of being misled.

The author provides an absurd rendition of Darwin’s theory, and then proceeds to confidently assert that Darwin was wrong.
Here is an example: “the stronger and the better fitted to survive, the greater a species’ chance of survival” (p. 248) This error is repeated many times in the book. But Darwin’s theory is about individuals surviving (or not), not whole species. Another: Darwin had to show that “natural selection occurred by sexual means”. This is so ignorant it isn’t even wrong.

The book is full of inexcusable, sloppy errors. These show both a staggering ignorance of the topic and lack of competent research rigour.

Wilson writes (twice) of an “ornithological society of London” where Darwin sent specimens. This was in fact the Zoological Society of London. For a writer on Darwin and his context to not know well the ZSL shows breathtaking ignorance.

Equally breathtaking ignorance is shown of the large scholarly literature on Darwin. Wilson repeats the 1960s claim of anti-Darwin conspiracy theorist Loren Eiseley that the first 50 pages of Darwin’s first evolution notebook were suspiciously missing. They aren’t. They were located and published by 1967. How could anyone even vaguely competent to write a book on Darwin know so little of the literature on him?

Wilson even describes and ridicules a “Darwinian” scenario with the ancestors of giraffes “straining their muscles in order to elongate their necks”. What!? Even the most casual research would show that this is Lamarckism, not Darwinism. But for Wilson, Darwin’s theory was the same as Lamarck’s and Vestiges.

Another egregious blunder is made regarding a 1 June 1858 meeting of the Linnean Society which was supposedly cancelled because of the former president’s death on the 10th!? (p. 235) How could a meeting be cancelled in honour of someone who died 9 days later??
(In my book on Wallace and Darwin, Dispelling the darkness (2013), the correct dates can be found: “The last meeting of the 1858 season was 17 June. However the former president of the society, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, had died aged eighty-four the week before”)

Wilson claims that George Richmond made only pencil sketch portraits of Darwin and Emma after their wedding. Wrong. Richmond painted both in watercolour. These paintings are reproduced in countless books on Darwin. How could anyone get such things wrong? (A pencil sketch study for Darwin’s portrait was found in the cellars of Botany School Cambridge in 1929.)

Wilson claims: “Darwin believed that his own theory…made it impossible to believe in the Bible.” (p. 238) This is simply made up by Wilson. Darwin thought no such thing. The majority of those who accepted Darwin’s theory in the early decades were Christians.

The discussion of Darwin’s book Descent of Man never even bothers to cover the theory of sexual selection, which makes up the majority of Darwin’s book. Wilson’s coverage of Expression of Emotions is equally bonkers.

The other main theme of the book is to attack Darwin’s character, honesty, motives and competence. Here again the portrait painted by Wilson bears almost no resemblance to the real Darwin. According to Wilson, Darwin’s illness was just “psychosomatic whims” used as “excuses” to get out of doing things. (e.g. p. 271) Wilson also invents and spends a lot of time condemning Darwin’s supposed “driving ambition to become the English Humboldt” with a “towering ambition” “to be a universal genius”. Wilson imagines he sees a “personal deviousness” in Darwin and damns his “inability to come clean about…his debts to previous scientists” (p. 239) Darwin’s method of argumentation was “slithery” and he only “waved” away the big difficulties for his theory. (p. 253) Nonsense. On the contrary, even Darwin’s strongest critics admired how he laid out all the likely objections to his theory. Tired old creationist fantasies are also carted out, such as Darwin being responsible for Hitler and the Nazis.

It’s puzzling how anyone could get Darwin and his science so completely wrong. The other puzzle is how someone so unqualified to write about Darwin and the science of evolution today could dare to make such brazenly overconfident claims sweeping away generations of science and scholarship. This is “towering ambition” indeed.

This book is rubbish. AN Wilson's understanding of genetics, evolution, and science is laughable. The errors he makes are truly astonishing for a person that claims to do serious research before writing it, and that is only my opinion about the science bit. Blaming Darwin for raise of totalitarianism or the decline of organised religion is pure nonsense. The only reason I can think of that anybody would write book like this would be to create a 'controversy" to sell even more books.

This book widely has been condemned as being a "hack job" on Darwin, resting upon numerous scientific mistakes and odd opinions asserted by the author. All true I believe. Nonetheless, if you are seriously interested in Victorian science and Darwinian evolutionary theory, then you should probably read A.N. Wilson's Darwin biography, even with all its many deficiencies. There are several reasons I offer this surprising recommendation.

First, Wilson is a leading scholar of the Victorian period. While his judgment may be faulty at times, he can expertly place Darwin and his life within that cultural context like no other bio I have seen. He argues, for example, that Darwinian evolution took the upper class Victorians by storm because it afforded them justification for world conquest, economic exploitation of the lower classes, and sitting on top of the hill while most other Britons toiled away in gruesome factories or lived our their lives in Dickensonian hardship. Darwin is an embodiment of upper class Victorians and should be assessed within that context.

In addition, Wilson has conveniently put into one place virtually every criticism of Darwin I have ever heard of and a few more on top of those. There is nothing particularly devastating here and even Darwin supporters should not fear putting Wilson to his proof. Granted, he does have an irritating habit of trotting out various authors, each of whom he asserts is "lethal" to Darwin's theories, without discussing scientists who reject those contentions. While he has done substantial research, he also has a tendency to go to extremes, for example linking Darwin with Hitler. Hopefully, we will hear from qualified scientists as to their take on Wilson's indictment. As a trial lawyer, I have learned that you don't want to hide from your opponent's allegations, but confront and dissect them. The same needs to be done regarding this book.

Wilson's does make some solid contributions. His discussion of "The Origin" is very effective, as are his chapters on the Beagle voyage and the great Oxford debate between Wilberforce and Huxley. . He takes a somewhat Social Darwinian perspective on the theory's impact which is interesting. But then it is back to the business of bashing Darwin: he was ambitious; he simply stole theories that others had long promulgated (including his own relatives); he wanted to discard God and found a new religion; and he simply was too rich and exploited that advantage to claim greatness.

Darwin survives this tirade rather well; but it is valuable to hear all the attacks Wilson can make and think about his points. So, the book is in several ways a solid bio of Darwin, with the exception of the constant brickbats Wilson hurls at him. At 367 pages of text, 26 pages of notes, and a 21 page quite helpful bibliography, Wilson pushes quite a lot at the reader. But I found it a worthwhile, if often painful, reading experience.

John van Wyhe's review pretty much covers it, and for particulars go there. But I don't think I've ever seen so many plain sloppy errors in one book in my life. Although the writing is better, it contains the kinds of errors often seen in the eleventh-hour student term paper--e.g., sources improperly quoted and sometimes even mixed up, old arguments long since debunked, superficial characterizations of complex ideas, a padded bibliography, etc. When van Wyhe states that this is the worse biography ever written on Darwin he is not exaggerating. Despite the frequent praise for Janet Browne's two-volume bio on Darwin (Voyaging and The Power of Place), I still think one of the best efforts remains Adrian Desmond and James Moore's biography Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond (1994-06-17).

It is simply embarrassing to see how far A. N. Wilson has fallen with this book. Wilson is a fantastic biographer, but this work would rank as a poor effort from an undergraduate. It is a rant and a poor one at that. Perhaps the nadir is when he excuses Marx for the actions of Stalin, but claims that Darwin's thought underpinned Hitler.

A.N. Wilson is a fine biographer, but this is a truly dreadful book.