Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution [Paperback]

This book is primarily about Darwin's family life, his religious convictions, and how his scientific work affected both.

Nearly everyone in early 19th century Britain believed in a all-powerful, all-knowing God who monitored and regulated and judged everything that happened down to the smallest detail. (As in America's Bible Belt, where putting a Darwin Fish on your car is an invitation to vandalism, people who didn't accept the majority view tended to keep a low profile.) God had created all the species, exactly as they were, all at once about 6,000 years ago. Whatever you did, God was watching and might punish you in horrible ways for some small infraction. Most people accepted the idea that if your child came down with some hideous disease it was because God was punishing you for some transgression. (It didn't seem odd to anyone that they were worshiping a God who behaved like a vengeful psychopath.) However, if you followed the rules and did what you were supposed to do (if you were a woman, that meant endless pregnancies and utter, unthinking obedience to your husband, no matter what), after you died you got to go to Heaven where you would finally be happy.

Emma Darwin, wife of Charles, although her faith became strained, believed this. Charles, although in many ways a man of his time, is more complicated. He began as an orthodox Christian, a divinity student at that, went through a decades-long middle period - which takes in THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES - of being a deist, and ended up as an agnostic who found the positions of both believers and atheists untenable because both camps claimed to know for certain things we cannot know at all. The religious tension between Emma and Charles, always there, was thrown into stark relief by the long suffering and death from tuberculosis at the age of ten of their angelic daughter Anne. This book is a study in what theologians have called the problem of evil, and how Darwin, who did as much as anyone to create the modern, secular world, wrestled with it. More than that, it is a study in how a man who loved his wife, but did not share her faith, struggled to find some way to maintain his integrity and yet give her what she needed. Whichever side of that divide you are on, you will find something for you in this book.

Privy to notes, letters, journals, and other information heretofor unseen, Keynes casts the familiar image of Charles Darwin in a new light. The man who emerges from this portrait is unexpected in many ways. A singularly devoted father and husband, Darwin's greatest joys came from ordinary family life. Romping with his large brood, noting details small and grand in their development and children, tenderly corresponding with his beloved wife Emma during their few seperations, Darwin was no cold and ruthless scientist out to cripple the faith of the believers. Keynes portrays him as a man brimming with affection, kindness, and love. Annie, the daughter alluded to in the book's title, remains mysterious in many ways; but what is entirely evident is that grief over her untimely death haunted Darwin until the end of his days.

Keynes so sensitively discusses Darwin's struggles with faith, God, and the human condition that he manages to obliterate the undeserved assumptions I carried with me to the biography. Darwin did not, as many assume, dismiss out of hand the notion of God. Quite to the contrary, he struggled with profound questions about God and lived out his life with a healthy respect for his wife and family's religious ideology even after he could no longer conscientiously participate in it. Darwin's struggles with the Christian faith were based on the central issue of human suffering, and its meaning. His firsthand knowledge of pain and suffering made him acutely aware of the human condition and indeed, of suffering of "all sentient beings... What advantage can there be in the sufferings of the millions of lower animals...?" Even at the end of life, Darwin remained uncertain about the existence and nature of God. Unwilling to use the framework that Neitzsche embraced by pronouncing "God is dead", Darwin instead admitted that he simply did not know and perhaps could not understand.

Keynes' portrayal of Charles Darwin is a welcome addition to any biography shelf, if only for the incredible amount of personal writings he is able to include.

Randal Keynes did not disappoint. His access to a veritable treasure trove of family journals, letters, and records allows Keynes to develop a fully dimensional, complex individual who far exceeds the simple titles of "Evolutionist", "atheist," or any other ordinary label. Far from being a simple scientist (one of the myths dispelled in the book) or a once devout minister-in-training-turned-atheist (another myth), Darwin here is presented as a man of great warmth, devotion, and intellect.

Especially appealing to me was the emphasis Keynes places on Darwin's family life, as opposed to a lengthy discussion of his evolutionary theory. Darwin comes across as a fun, playful, adoring father whose very real grief over the death of his daughter may well have been a turning point in his thinking about God and the nature of the human condition.

Anyone who dismisses out of hand Darwin's theories as mere instruments by which to bring about the fall of Christianity must read this book. Darwin's struggles with the deepest philosophical issues, i.e. human suffering, the nature of evil, God, and redemption, are all discussed with sincerety even as they are backed up with evidence from Darwin's journals and letters. Those who insist on tagging Mr. Darwin with simple labels will be surprised by this revealing look at the real man.

The writing is clear, clever, and refrains from striking a tone either too sentimental or one inclined toward evolutionary apologetics. Definitely a worthwhile read.