Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History's Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough (review)

The prolific scholarship on Darwinism has diversified and specialized, and there are now detailed studies of Charles Darwin's research on Galapagos finches, his contemplation of the evolutionary development of human emotions, his investigation of pollination in varieties of orchids, and his work on coral reefs. Over the past 15 years or so, these studies of Darwinism have been supplemented very usefully by a substantial body of biographical treatments of Darwin himself. Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (1994) was well received for its location of Darwin's ideas in the context of his life experience. This was followed by Janet E. Browne's monumental two-volume study Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). Randall Keynes—a descendent of both Darwin and of the economist John Maynard Keynes—produced perhaps the most successful human portrait of his subject in Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (2001). Darwin's personal life also has received fictional treatment, with the publication of Roger MacDonald's Mr. Darwin's Shooter (2000).

Rebecca Stott's Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History's Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough is a welcome addition to the study of both the idea and the man. Stott heads the Department of English and Drama at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, and is an Affiliated Research Scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. A scholar of Victorian letters, Stott has previous published books on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in addition to numerous articles on Victorian science and society in edited volumes and journals. Her study of Darwin's immersion in barnacle classification between the years of 1846 and 1854 is a daunting undertaking, but the result in a highly readable rendition of a relatively neglected, though demonstrably pivotal, stage in the theorization of natural selection.

It was in 1835, when he was the naturalist on board the HMS Beagle, that the 24-year-old Darwin first encountered the barnacle that was to take over his life. Darwin nicknamed the barnacle "Mr. Arthrobalanus" (curiously written as "Mr. Anthrobalanus" on the dust jacket), which later became the official classification of Crytophialus. This particular specimen was then entirely new to biology—an extremely rare barnacle, almost invisible to the naked eye, that did not secrete its own shell. The discovery led Darwin to challenge the existing zoological taxonomy of barnacles, in the process uncovering and illustrating the evolutionary development of adapted species from common ancestry—"The Universe in a Barnacle Shell," as Stott titles her final chapter.

The core thesis of the book is stated with admirable concision and clarity in the preface, and supported throughout the rest of the text with narrative flair and an authoritative use of sources. In 1846, Darwin had written an essay containing the essential elements of the natural selection theory and placed the essay in a locked drawer. Stott argues that Darwin's eight-year obsession with barnacles—which seriously eroded his physical and mental health—confirmed the contentions that were to be published in The Origin of Species (1859) but delayed the publication of that text until the findings of the barnacle studies met the emerging standards of scientific verification in the mid-19th century. Stott has abundant justification for concentrating her study of Darwin on his investigation of marine invertebrates. As she convincingly argues, this period in Darwin's life illustrates important features of Darwin's personality, of the intellectual and cultural climate in which he was functioning, and of the state and composition of the scientific community at the time.

In terms of Darwin's personality, Stott finds in the barnacle research "an instinct for postponement" (xxiii). As early as 1832, Darwin had expressed to J. S. Henslow his fear of being dismissed as "a Baron...