Just Finished Reading: Darwin’s Armada – Four Voyages to the Southern Oceans and Their Battle for the Theory of Evolution by Iain McCalman (FP: 2009)

It was not an idea that struck him out of the blue out of a clear sky. On the contrary it was a long, long time coming. When the young Charles Darwin managed to get himself assigned to the HMS Beagle and its mission to map the Sothern Ocean the prevailing thought was that each species on earth was a special creation of God and though some local adaptation was possible the transmutation of species was not. Each species had been created in its place and time as part of a divine plan. So it was a shame that anomalies and unanswerable questions had steadily been accumulating. One thing was almost universally accepted now – that the Earth was more likely to be millions of years old that the previously accepted six thousand. There was enough time for oceans to fall and mountains to rise and for the land itself to be transformed. Darwin brought back (or often sent back) copious notes, observations and specimens from across the globe to investigate further on his return to England. But he was not the last to do so. Other intrepid explorers of the world – geological, geographical and natural – followed in his footsteps, added pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of life, sent specimens home (including to Darwin himself) and thought about what they had seen with their own eyes. Often they were the first European to have set foot on an island or to have observed the rituals of primitive peoples. Alfred Wallace in particular spent 8 long years in South-East Asia and in the Amazon basin cataloguing, observing and living in close contact with the natives of those far off lands. In the early 1850’s he wrote to Darwin expressing the ideas so close to his own that Darwin thought that his years of vacillation on the topic had undone him and that he could not, in all conscience, claim a prime place in the Evolutionary debate. His friends Thomas Huxley and Joseph Hooker (all three pallbearers at Darwin’s funeral) persuaded him otherwise and encouraged him to publish Origin of Species giving due credit to the work of Wallace. All four of the voyagers, each in their own way, contributed to getting Natural Selection accepted in the Victorian scientific establishment somewhat quicker than Darwin had anticipated. A revolution in human thought had taken place.

This was generally an excellent book focusing on the foundational voyages of Darwin, Hooker, Huxley and Wallace as each encountered, assimilated and speculated on what each had experienced away from the confines of Europe and how those encounters had convinced each of them that Evolution by Natural Selection was a scientific fact. The only wobble (for me) was the section on Huxley’s voyage to Australia which seemed concentrate on his love life and depressive tendencies rather than any scientific discoveries. Apart from Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle my favourite passages concerned the adventures of Alfred Wallace in South-East Asia and the Amazon. I have added his published book on the subject to my Wish List. It sounds amazing. If you’ve ever wondered where the ideas put forward in Origin of Species came from this entertaining work of popular science will answer many of your questions. Recommended.