The Darwin Archipelago: The Naturalist’s Career Beyond Origin of Species by Steve Jones (review)

The Darwin Archipelago is unabashedly, unapologetically, a work of Whig history. In this cleverly titled work the geneticist and science popularizer Steve Jones—you may have heard him on BBC Radio’s In Our Time—discusses the ways in which Charles Darwin anticipated later scientific work, focusing on Darwin’s work after The Origin of Species (1859). Its bibliography is thus filled with references to present-day articles appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or Nature Reviews Genetics rather than, say, 1848 Ray Society monographs on helminthology. The Darwin Archipelago is thus unlikely to be of great interest to the average reader of Victorian Studies, or even the specialist historian of biology. This is merely a statement about intended audiences, not a kneejerk criticism about Whig histories (which can sometimes be quite useful and informative in certain contexts). Keeping this firmly in mind makes one more sympathetic to such sentences as “Charles Darwin was the era’s greatest popular science writer” (xi). For at first this seems somewhat ignorant—what about Michael Faraday or John Tyndall? Or Ebenezer Brewer, who probably sold more books than either man? But by “greatest” Jones means something entirely different than considerations such as popularity or contemporary appeal—it is the writer who most affected later science.

This review will therefore not criticize this work based on alternative conceptions of what science history should be about, and will restrict itself only to matters of factual accuracy and other scholarly problems. We can start with relatively minor issues first. One pedantic quibble is the book’s missing scholarly apparatus—it is not possible to find the origins of some of the material here. Thus an amusing quotation by Noam Chomsky on the unlikelihood of apes having language ability appears on page 23, and even an index entry is duly made. Yet the source of this quote is never stated. Slightly more serious are factual errors. One representative example is the claim that “the first model organisms of all were Darwin’s barnacles” (132). They most certainly were not. That honour probably goes to the freshwater Hydra polyp, which in 1740 was shown by Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley to regenerate into two individuals after being cut in two. This inspired countless later generations of budding naturalists to do the same thing to many unfortunate hydroids. The claim that Darwin was the first to use model organisms is a nice demonstration of what is called Robert K. Merton’s “Matthew effect,” in which famous scientists tend to be given more credit than they may actually deserve.

Jones’s wonderfully impish sense of humour runs through the book, and he has a great flair for the arresting image. He is clearly interested in making science interesting to non-scientists. But other popularizers of biology such as Jacques Monod or Stephen Jay Gould would probably never use sentences as imprecise as “Physicists and chemists now busy themselves with questions once raised only by intellectuals”—possibly a backhanded swipe at non-scientists with pretensions, but with the unintended consequence of making physicists and chemists unintellectual (49). Nor would Monod or Gould make claims as unsubtle as “politicians often act on the basis of prejudice. Darwin did not” (71). No definition of what “prejudice” means can be found, so the reader is left wondering if Darwin avoided all theoretical preconceptions in favour of Baconian empiricism, if he abhorred racism, or whether he simply couldn’t decide on whether, say, he preferred H. M. S. Pinafore (1878) over The Pirates of Penzance (1879). This lack of clarity even leads to apparent internal contradictions in The Darwin Archipelago. At one point we are told that “it is foolish to speak of a gene for language,” but only twenty-eight words later we hear that “neanderthals had the human version of the gene” (24). As a careful geneticist, Jones couldn’t possibly have meant...