The general outline of Darwin's life will be familiar to many, beginning with the desultory undergraduate education. The long voyage as a naturalist on the Beagle includes a lively recapitulation through extensive quotes from Darwin's journal, revealing salient elements not only of the voyage itself but of Darwin's increasing sophistication as a naturalist and as a biological theorist. The ‘settled’ Darwin emerges as a retiring Victorian gentleman of large family and ample means, whose days after the great voyage were spent on his studies when he was not overwhelmed by ill health. The repercussions and the aftermath of the publication of “The Origin of Species” is illustrated through the account of the bitter personal and professional feud that erupted between William Bateson and W. F. R. Weldon. Bateson was a classic naturalist while Weldon was both a biologist and a mathematician. The organic type versus the numbers type is the quickest way the conflict between them can be characterized, with the nature and mechanism of inheritance constituting the main bone of contention. Into this charged atmosphere suddenly loomed the previously overlooked work of Gregor Mendel, followed by the elegant fruit-fly experiments of T. H. Morgan in New York. This volume does an admirable job of telling about the revolution Darwin’s work catalyzed, not only in biology and related sciences but in human affairs as well, in a generally interesting and intelligible way.
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