A book on Darwin damned in New Scientist

A while back, several readers sent me an Evening Standard article by A. N. Wilson, “It’s time Charles Darwin was exposed for the fraud he was.” That turned out to be a precis of a new book by Wilson, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (out on September 7 in the UK, December in the U.S.). Of course the title of Wilson’s article got my hackles up, and the Amazon summary of the book didn’t make me feel much better:

In this beautifully written, deeply erudite portrait, Wilson argues that Darwin was not an original scientific thinker, but a ruthless and determined self-promoter who did not credit the many great sages whose ideas he advanced in his book. Furthermore, Wilson contends that religion and Darwinism have much more in common than it would seem, for the acceptance of Darwin’s theory involves a pretty significant leap of faith.

Armed with an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, Wilson explores how Darwin and his theory were very much a product of their place and time. The “Survival of the Fittest” was really the Survival of Middle Class families like the Darwins—members of a relatively new economic strata who benefited from the rising Industrial Revolution at the expense of the working classes. Following Darwin’s theory, the wretched state of the poor was an outcome of nature, not the greed and neglect of the moneyed classes. In a paradigm-shifting conclusion, Wilson suggests that it remains to be seen, as this class dies out, whether the Darwinian idea will survive, or whether it, like other Victorian fads, will become a footnote in our intellectual history.

Brilliant, daring, and ambitious, Charles Darwin explores this legendary man as never before, and challenges us to reconsider our understanding of both Darwin and modern science itself.

His article in the Evening Standard says pretty much the same thing.

I didn’t write about the book, as I haven’t read it, and I didn’t write about the article (and won’t now) because I’d like to formally review the book when it appears in the U.S.

Andrew Norman Wilson (born 1950) is a prolific author: I counted 47 books, many of them biographies, on his Wikipedia page—an astounding production. It may be relevant to Wilson’s takedown of Darwin that, once an atheist (he claimed he lost his faith while writing a biography of C. S. Lewis), he became a Christian again after 20 years of nonbelief. His deconversion and conversion experiences, also documented in the New Statesman, include this telling passage:

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

Well, perhaps this attitude drove him to the Darwin debunking—a debunking itself debunked by Darwin scholar John van Whye in the latest New Scientist. van Whye’s title gives his assessment: “‘Radical’ new biography of Darwin is unreliable and inaccurate.” van Whye knows his Darwin, and finds the book full of inaccuracies—not just in Wilson’s description of Darwin’s theory, but in Wilson’s assessment of the evidence. A few quotes from the review:

This book provides an appallingly inaccurate rendition of Darwin’s theory and its scientific context.

. . . Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, as any competent reference work describes, is about the differential survival of individual living things based on tiny differences between them. This differential survival (or selection) in effect filters living things to become adapted to a changing world. DNA evidence indicates that all living things are related genealogically on a vast ever-branching tree of life. This is Darwinism. Wilson instead erroneously describes variations in “species”, not individuals, and he mocks a “Darwinian” scenario in which the short-necked ancestors of today’s giraffes were supposedly “panting to reach those leaves, but without success”. This is not Darwinism, this is Lamarckism.

And what’s most damning of a biographer—factual inaccuracies:

Wilson’s book contains numerous and serious factual errors such as “if Darwin were correct, there would be hundreds, thousands of examples” of transitional fossils. There are. Darwin’s first grandchild did not die in childbirth as Wilson states. A fragment of Wallace’s letter to Darwin from when Wallace was living in Ternate does not survive. “Darwin believed that his own theory… made it impossible to believe in the Bible.” Not so. The first 50 pages of Darwin’s evolution notebook are not missing, they were located and published by 1967. (Wilson copied this claim from a conspiracy-laden essay, “Darwin, Coleridge, and the Theory of Unconscious Creation“, published by Loren Eiseley in 1965, two years before Darwin’s pages were published.)

Wilson claims Darwin “never” persuaded the scientific community in Britain during his lifetime “that one species could evolve into another”. In fact, Darwin was world famous for having done so. There are very, very many more. Footnotes lead to incorrect references and many dates are quite wrong. It’s hard to see how any care for either historical or scientific accuracy could result in such a book.

Indeed. van Whye’s conclusion?

The book claims to be a “radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn’t afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy”. The result is one of the most unreliable, inaccurate and tendentious anti-Darwin books of recent times.

The “Darwin was wrong” trope persists for a variety of psychological reasons, but the detractors can never make the charges stick. Apparently Wilson didn’t, either. What’s ironic about all this is that Wilson’s debunking book is published by John Murray—the very same outfit that published Darwin’s On the Origin of Species!

h/t; Matthew Cobb