Darwin’s Island

by Steve Jones, Little, Brown, 320pp, £20, Week Bookshop £18 (incl. p&p). We tend to see the great scientists in caricature, said Roger Highfield in the Daily Telegraph. Einstein is reduced "to the wild-haired sage of Princeton, not the arrogant upstart who did his greatest work in Europe". Darwin is the "beardie" who sailed to the Galapagos, examined some finches and tortoises, and came up with the theory of evolution.

But, as Steve Jones points out in his new book - "the best" of those published to mark the scientist’s 200th anniversary – Darwin spent just five weeks on the Galapagos, and decades afterwards writing and honing his theory, crisscrossing Britain, observing nature and performing experiments. He wrote 19 books, on topics as varied as "dogs, barnacles, insect-eating plants, orchids, earthworms, apes and human emotion". As Jones puts it, Darwin "underwent another great voyage: not of the body but of the mind".

Jones’s book "is a masterpiece of science writing and a revelation of Darwin's almost poetic sensitivity", said John Carey in the Sunday Times. At his home, Down House in Kent, Darwin had none of the equipment available to modern science, just the simple tools of the Victorian naturalist. Yet from this he built up his vision of the relatedness of all creation.

Darwin saw the links between the damage caused by human inbreeding and the unwillingness of female flowers to accept pollen from males of their own strain. And he was fascinated by insect-eating plants because, like animals, they had the equivalent of teeth, gullets and stomachs, hinting to him of some kind of common ancestry.

"Besides disclosing the beautiful ingenuities of his thought, Jones updates Darwin's science." He was, for instance, the first to postulate the existence of a hormone – he thought that a chemical messenger makes a plant's tip grow towards the light; the discovery was confirmed 40 years after his death, while DNA evidence and the fossil record confirmed his speculations about human ancestry, identifying the exact point at which humans and chimps separated into distinct species.

The "delight" of Darwin’s Island, said Gillian Beer in the Guardian, comes from "the zest with which Jones explores facts and sets them together to reveal more than anyone could have expected, in true Darwinian style". It also shows the man "in the round", said Christopher Hudson in the Daily Mail – at home in Kent, where "nothing escaped his comprehensive vision", from the behaviour of his children and the hops growing in the fields to the expressions of his dog. "If you were to read one new book on Darwin this year, this should be it."

FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 12, 2009