Darwin

Hoping to head to the Galapagos, but failing (thanks, Covid-19) I read two books on Darwin.  There was Charles Darwin (part of the "Giants of Science" series) by Kathleen Krull, and Darwin's Ghosts:  The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott.  Both books were written for the educational market and both revealed much that I didn't know.  Both had strong but very structured writing, books of this type being held to strong standards on their length and number of chapters.

The first one, by Ms. Krull, was a little bit more "upbeat" than I cared for, glossing over the darker parts of Mr. Darwin's life, but did a good job of looking at the facts of his work rather than the hype.  Ms. Krull did a nice job of showing what Darwin actually researched and how that informed his changing view of biology.  The most amusing quote in the entire book was "The most hardened resistance to Darwin's theory is in the United States, where scientific literacy lags behind that of other industrialized nations."  Given the politicizing of our Coronavirus-gripped country as I write this, the quote struck me as humorous, sad, and insightful.

Darwin's Ghosts was somewhat more intriguing as it looked at all who had come before.  Ms. Stott gets major kudos here for her research which found figures and theories not listed on your general Google search.  Starting hundreds of years in the past it was impressive to realize what random men, often without education, were able to surmise about the origins of our world long before Darwin climbed aboard the Beagle.  It showed how theories can mirror each other despite being separated by time and distance, pushing the idea that truth will surface regardless of our means to fully interpret it.  Ms. Stott also does a good job of showing how politics and religion suppressed scientific discovery for thousands of years.  She manages to do this without becoming preachy.  I enjoyed the book a good deal and only had minor quibbles about the inclusion of Leonardo da Vinci, which seemed a tad crowbarred in (part of his chapter was shared with a potter who made discoveries independently).  There was also the issue of chapter length which seemed mandated.  To make the chapters "equal" some figures were described with a detailed personal history, others had long tracts of their works reprinted.  The book may have been better had the author just been given the freedom to write about each person to the extent that there was information available.  That being said, I liked that Ms. Stott left me with several philosophical questions to ponder, including the idea that maybe universal truths only come to light when a society is ready to hear them.