Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel

Back in 1926, a group of Soviet biologists made an expedition to West Africa, aiming to prove Darwin right. They were going to cross a chimp with a human being, and their ape-man would be palpable proof that we humans share common ancestors with other primates. As well as testifying to the power of Soviet science, the ape-man hybrid was going to deliver "a decisive blow to religion", and assist the workers in their struggle against "the power of the Church".

After some fumbling, the biologists managed to inseminate three chimps with human sperm — but without any result. Back in Moscow, their hopes were revived by a selfless woman, disappointed in love, who volunteered to mate with an orang-utan for the greater good of science. But the experiment was called off by their political masters, and the Darwinian cause was knocked back, in their opinion, for many years.

The story leaves a nasty taste; and as Steve Jones shows in his wonderful study of Darwin's Island, it is a perfect example of everything that Darwin disliked. He was, by all accounts, an accidental genius. He started out as a prosperous but feckless young gentleman who, having nothing better to do, drifted into a kind of gap-year in South America. The trip was the making of him: he collected thousands of botanical specimens, and when he got back five years later he was ablaze with a new conviction: that life on earth has a history, and that the offspring of one set of ancestors could evolve, over time, into several distinct varieties. On his return, it seems, he spent more than 20 years hammering out a dispiriting doctrine whose implications were soon summed up in Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida: "Darwinian man, though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved." But that, Jones tells us, is only a fraction of the story. Soon after getting back to England, Darwin persuaded a charming and intelligent woman to marry him. They moved into a roomy house in rural Kent, where they would live together for more than 40 years, loving each other and laughing a lot, having 10 children, and co-operating to remodel the house and garden to fit their changing needs. There were anxieties and heart-breaking catastrophes — especially the deaths of three of their children — but in the end they became as happy as any family can hope to be.

The genius of their life was that Darwin's work became part of the family's fun. He took an artist's delight in unregarded details of the natural world, and shared his prodigious perceptiveness with his children as he wandered around the garden, through woods, and down endless country lanes. The study where he wrote some 20 books was also a playroom where they could examine his specimens and help with his experiments; and when they mocked his immoderate raptures over a barnacle larva or a hop tendril, he was always the one who laughed longest.

The children became his scientific collaborators. They dissected pigeons in the kitchen, recorded the growth of plants in their bedrooms, and went out on midnight walks in pursuit of the truth about worms — offering them choices of food and drink, or seeing how they liked the light of a lamp or the sound of their big bassoon. Together, the Darwins established that worms are like a natural plough, turning the soil in tiny instalments and, in the long run, making vast tracts of land fit for vegetation.

Worms were, contrary to prevalent belief, the gardener's best friend, as well as a wonderful demonstration of the Darwinian principle that lots of tiny modifications, added together, can make a very big difference indeed.

Darwin also took pride in his grand theory, always hoping to prove that all the forms of life that ever existed fit into a single family tree, where varieties that are better suited to their circumstances have driven their less adaptable rivals to extinction. But he was modest about it, too: he acknowledged that much of his understanding of "natural selection" was due to others, notably the Kentish farmers, dogbreeders and pigeon fanciers who shared with him the principles of "artificial selection" that they relied on in breeding their stock. And unlike many of his followers, he was not sure what his theory implied for religion. He admired his wife's Christian faith, though he gradually ceased to share it..

"It is always advisable," he said "to perceive clearly our ignorance." No one who reads Steve Jones could doubt that Darwin was a wonderful human being. If you want further confirmation you will find it in Darwin's Sacred Cause — an outstanding piece of historical research which demonstrates that, far from being a complete political agnostic, Darwin was always deeply committed to the anti-slavery movement and to racial equality.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore are convinced that Darwin's anti-racism was the real motive behind his hypothesis of common descent, and they make their case with abundant new documentation. But in the end the argument seems beside the point: Darwinism is never going to make racists change their minds, and Darwin himself would have remained an anti-racist even if, as he sometimes imagined, his theories turned out to be mistaken.

Less can sometimes mean more, and my own favourite among all the new books on the father of evolution is Darwin: a Life in Poems. Ruth Padel follows him from childhood to old age in a series of quiet but vivid poems, borrowing many of her words direct from the man himself, and his friends, colleagues and family. Darwin's happiness, as depicted in this brief but brilliant biography, arose not from an absence of pain but from an attitude to it. The effect is intimate, arresting, and marvellously moving: a good read on a short journey, but a good choice for a desert island, too..

'The children became his scientific collaborators. They dissected pigeons in the kitchen and went on midnight walks in pursuit of the truth about worms'