Niles Eldredge - Companion Book to the Exhibition: Darwin

Darwin. Discovering the Tree of Life

Companion Book to the Exhibition Darwin published by W.W. Norton.

My book Darwin. Discovering the Tree of Life is a lavishly illustrated companion volume to the Darwin exhibition. With nearly 100 illustrations, many in full color, the book covers the full range of objects, specimens, and manuscripts found in the exhibition itself.

Both the book and the exhibition follow Darwin’s intellectual journey as he grew up, received his training, made his epochal voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, returned home to England with evolution on his mind—and proceeded to develop his theory of evolution through natural selection in a series of notebooks filled between 1837 and 1839. Keeping his ideas pretty much to himself, Darwin wrote his “pencil sketch” of evolution in 1842—and then shortly after his move to Down House in 1844, wrote a much longer manuscript that essentially was the template for his Origin of Species, not published until 1859. The narrative completes its own voyage through Darwin’s scientific life as it explores his work on breeding pigeons and experimenting with plants—until the inevitable happened: Alfred Russell Wallace sent Darwin his own essay on evolution through natural selection in 1858—prompting Darwin finally to publish his results.

The book begins with a brief overview of Darwin’s life, before moving onto the intellectual climate into which Darwin was born and lived his early life. I then examine in minute detail Darwin’s Red and Transmutation Notebooks, moving on through his 1842 Sketch and 1844 Essay—all the while tracing Darwin’s growth from an earnest young naturalist whose intuitive grasp of the world (Darwin was good at “letting Nature come to him”) through a phase of deductive reasoning; his discovery and analysis of natural selection—and then on to his more purely experimental mode.

I then follow out the subsequent history of evolutionary thought after Darwin—focusing especially on the history of certain ideas—such as the role and importance of isolation in evolution, and the explanations for stasis, or non-change, in evolution—that Darwin himself intended to downplay or ignore in his mature, published works on evolution.

I end the book with a ringing denunciation of “intelligent design”—finding it yet another creationist wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, a particularly shrill form of religion masquerading as science.

Interested? Follow this link to Amazon.com to buy Darwin. Discovering the Tree of Life.