Books on Charles Darwin

These books about Charles Darwin are a very select group, says James A. Secord.

1. The Tree of Life       Q JB Darwin S
By Peter Sís
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003
It might seem surprising to begin a column on books about Charles Darwin with a children's title (age 8 and up), but this delightful volume is a superior introduction for all readers to the great naturalist. The delicate drawings and diagrams -- displaying animals, plants, instruments, portraits, maps -- lend to the book the flavor of a gorgeously illuminated medieval manuscript. Peter Sís's images, like Darwin's own writings, invite the reader to observe carefully and make connections. The emphasis on detail comes across best in a cross-section of the Beagle, the ship that took Darwin around the world. This is a book to think with and an ideal way to escape the mindless polemics (and hero worship) that will inevitably crop up during the 2009 bicentenary of Darwin's birth on Feb. 12. Give it to your kids, if you can stop looking at it long enough yourself.

2. The Beak of the Finch    598.883 W
By Jonathan Weiner
Knopf, 1994
The theory of evolution, for all its generality, is founded on the observation of tiny differences in plants and animals. The classic instance involves "Darwin's finches" from the Galápagos Islands. These exceptionally variable birds range in type from the bark-stripping vegetarian to the blood-drinking vampiric (preying on another Galápagos bird, the booby). It is often assumed that the finches provided Darwin with on-the-spot evidence that clinched the case for evolution. But this is a myth. To watch "evolution in action" among the finches, as the biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant began to do in the 1970s, has taken almost unimaginable patience. In "The Beak of the Finch," a classic of science writing, Jonathan Weiner brings to life the scientific process as practiced both in Darwin's era and among modern Galápagos researchers. We watch as the Grants measure barely perceptible differences in the lengths of beaks, gather tiny drops of blood for DNA sequencing and trace birds over many generations. There is no better way to understand the character of Darwinian science.

3. The Politics of Evolution    575 D
By Adrian Desmond
University of Chicago, 1989
London in 1837, where Darwin moved soon after the Beagle voyage, was a modern Babylon: dirty, noisy and dangerous. It was in this bustling metropolis, not on a tropical island or in the rural isolation of his later home in Kent, that he forged the theory of evolution. Adrian Desmond's "The Politics of Evolution" shows why it matters that Darwin began his speculations in London during a turbulent era of political and religious reform. Forget polite academic discussions and salon conversations about divine design; the ideas Darwin was contemplating in the 1830s were threatening and divisive. When "On the Origin of Species" was finally published in 1859, it came into a very different scene, causing little of the uproar it would have prompted two decades earlier.

4. Charles Darwin
By Janet Browne
Knopf, 1995, 2002 (two vols.)
There are several fine biographies of Darwin, but Janet Browne's two-volume work is the best at capturing the genteel and peculiarly English tone of Darwin's life. The early chapters might almost be taken from an undiscovered Jane Austen novel: We watch an aimless young man emerge as a leading naturalist and daringly speculative theorist. Browne draws on the comprehensive edition of Darwin's correspondence, which is being prepared by an international team at the University of Cambridge. The biography's second volume, which opens with the publication of "On the Origin of Species," traces Darwin's ability to turn fame to account in spreading his ideas. Few long biographies are so successful at maintaining interest and energy right to the end.

5. Darwin Loves You   576.82 L
By George Levine
Princeton, 2006
Does Darwinism strip the world of meaning, reducing life to cutthroat competition and cold calculation? Fundamentalist atheists and evangelical Christians generally agree that it does, but such a perspective is far too narrow. In this highly personal book, the literary historian George Levine argues that Darwin's work, with its generous language that invites interpretation, has the potential to create aesthetic and moral value. Darwin writes of flying squirrels, pouting pigeons, peacocks' tails and the instincts of ants. But he also encourages wonder at small things, gradual forces and the power of individual action in a world of life and possibility.

Mr. Secord, the editor of Darwin's "Evolutionary Writings" (Oxford, 2008), is the director of the Darwin Correspondence Project and professor of the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University.    576.82 D

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8
* FIVE BEST
* FEBRUARY 7, 2009