Darwin’s Ghosts by Rebecca Stott
Darwin’s Ghosts begins with an epigraph from one of my favorite authors, Virginia Woolf. This book is a testament to the importance of precursors and predecessors. It is a marvelous account of the people, the books, the revolutions, the histories, and the struggles that ultimately led to the publication of The Origin in 1859.
He wasn’t the first.
Such is the nature of discoveries that settle in the public imagination as groundbreaking but often involve decades and often many decades of systematic work, serendipitous or otherwise. These involve amateurs and professionals alike. Republics and monarchies rise and fall. Predecessors are born and they die. Leaving stacks of unread papers sometimes lost to time. Out of these conditions, a work like Origin is born.
A month after Origin was published, Reverend Baden Powell, the Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, sent Darwin a letter complaining that he had failed to acknowledge his predecessors. This wasn’t the first time he had received complaints about intellectual theft. Modern academia is at its seat’s edge as soon as anyone drops the word ‘plagiarism’ these days. There are apps and websites to check for plagiarism in your text. But in the 19th-century dissemination of facts took weeks and months. So, Darwin made a list of predecessors titled “Historical Sketch” which had thirty-seven names by the time the fourth edition of Origin was published in 1866.
The eleven chapters in this book tell the story of thinkers and philosophers and botanists and naturalists who observed the patterns in nature that revealed clues about adaptation, metamorphosis, and transformation.
Every chapter begins with a vivid description of a place where Stott captures the sights, smells, sounds, and tastes of the era. Starting in 344 BCE on the island of Lesbos where Aristotle and his students were capturing, dissecting, and cataloging (?) live fish at the port of Mytilene. We visit the bustling markets of Basra and Baghdad in 850 CE where al-Jahiz wrote Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Living Things), the first extensive study of animals published in the Islamic world under the auspices of the Abbasid Empire. Then we visit Leonardo da Vinci in Milan in 1493, and Bernard Palissy in Paris in 1570 all the while learning the tremulous history of Huguenots in France. These early artists and polymaths observed the constant state of flux in rocks and mountains and rivers and lakes. They pondered about the formation of fossils and questioned their presence on top of the mountains suggesting that once upon a time these steep hills were buried under the sea.
We meet Abraham Trembley in the 18th century Hague who discovered the regenerative powers of the Hydra. Benoit de Maillet, Diderot, Erasmus Darwin, Robert Grant, Robert Chambers, and finally Alfred Russel Wallace make their appearance. The professors at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris: Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, provide a rich history of transmutation against the tumultuous backdrop of Napoleon’s exploits.
Rebecca Stott is a fabulous writer of history and natural history, in particular, no doubt. This might be one of my favorite natural history books of all time. Darwin’s Ghosts is a beautiful example for writers who are trying to write nonfiction. There’s rigorous research, scenic descriptions, and seamless connection between chapters so it all feels like a timeline. If you are particularly interested in Darwinian studies, this book is a must-read. Previous knowledge of natural selection and Darwin’s Origin is helpful.
By the time Alfred Wallace arrives in the final chapter, you can feel the heavy weight and importance of our ancestors in the body of knowledge that is so easy to come across now. You feel the dark shadow of European imperialism as naturalists traversed the tropics to label and quantify nature. Crates of animals, fishes, insects, birds, eggs, feathers, tusks, minerals, stones, and shells were shipped off to Europe for the men (mostly) of the science to pore upon and gesticulate about in the galleries of the institutions. This endeavor gave us such a beautiful idea about species but can only be fully honored with embracing its history.
