Reviews

• 傑作伝記であるが第２巻に看過できない欠陥あり！

  ブラウンのダーウィン伝記、傑作であることはマチガイないのだが、この第2巻については、一つ重大な欠点を見つけたので指摘しておきたい。ただし、その点を考慮しても、ブラウンのこの大著が傑作であることに変わりはない。評者は、別のところ（ウェッブ上、2008年）でブラウンの2冊について、かなり立ち入った書評を書いて終わりにしたと考えていた。しかし、この大著について、日本語での読者レヴィユーがいまだにないので、古い書評のサワリ部分を要約しておくのもムダではなかろう。 では本題に入る。第2巻の看過できない欠点とは、ダーウィンの「師匠筋」に当たるチャールズ・ライエルによる「人類進化」の取扱いとダーウィンによる取扱いの対比に関わる。ここでは、ライエルの1863年の本『人類の古さ』に的を絞る。ライエルのこの本をブラウンはまともに読んだのか、と思わせるほどブラウンの記述がアンフェアであるのが問題。ライエルのこの本での見解と、ダーウィン自身が到達した人間にかんする見解とを対比させるのは、両者の違いと、ダーウィンの（当時にあっては）画期的な見解を際立たせるには格好の題材である。そこに目をつけたのは、ブラウンの卓見！しかし、ライエルのこの本における見解を紹介するブラウンの記述は、先のコメントで予告したとおり、ひどすぎるのである。いわく、引用箇所の言及が欠如、要約が不正確でブラウンの自説に都合よく捻じ曲げられいる、という具合！ライエルがダーウィンの自然淘汰説を要約する箇所は、よく読んでみるとそれほどひどくない。ライエル自身の古い偏見が影響しているにせよ、まあ「フェアだ」と言えよう。 しかも、人類の古さを裏付けようとするライエルの議論は、（１）当時にあっては最先端の研究結果を踏まえた優れたものである。しかし、（２）自然淘汰説が人間の進化にも重大な帰結をもたらすことを理解したライエルは、その帰結を受け入れることができない。それゆえ、いくつか持って回ったような反論を展開しているのである。 で、ブラウンの記述（217ー220ページ）の問題は、まず（１）を押さえずに、（２）を急ぎすぎて、自分自身のズサンな読み方（ブラウンによるライエルの要約は簡略すぎてアンフェアである！）に合致するように、ライエルの「言葉」を恣意的に引用するという、歴史家としては恥ずべき手法を（知ってか知らずか）用いているということ。一例だけ挙げる。ブラウンの記述では、ライエルが「人間と動物の間には大きな溝があって、この溝が［自然淘汰説によって］どのように埋められるのかは＜深遠な謎のまま＞だ」と言ったことにされている。しかし、そんな言明は、ライエルの本のどこを探しても出てこない（評者は克明に調べたが）！これ、実はブラウンが、ライエルの異なる文脈で使った幾つかの言葉をつなぎ合わせて作り上げた「捏造言明」である、しかも、自分の解釈に都合がいいように！＜深遠な謎＞という言葉は、ライエル本の23章で、多くの異なる言語がそれぞれ何世代にも渡って異なる地域で変遷してきたはずなのに、なぜそれぞれがかくも見事に出来ているのか、それが深遠な謎だ、という文脈でしか出てこない。それをブラウンは「人類の起源」という別の問題の文脈で強引に転用して「人類の起源が深遠な謎だ」という言明にすり替えたのである。 以上のような欠陥があるので、ブラウンの2巻本は全体として傑作であるけれども、この第2巻については星3あるいは４しか差し上げられない！お情けで４にした。

• This is the sequel to the first volume of a superb biography, `Voyaging.' The first is excellent but the second volume is even better. The story carries on from the late 1850s, when Darwin is on the cusp of publishing his `Origin of the Species'. Having spent over twenty years collecting the evidence, a feat that has left him on the brink of exhaustion, he is shocked to discover that a little known explorer called Alfred Russel Wallace has hit upon the very same theory he has. Darwin till now has prevaricated in publishing the results of his researches, dreading the controversy and calumny that he is convinced will be heaped upon him to suggest nature develops according to natural laws needing no guidance from a creator. And he hasn't even talked about man's kinship with the apes yet. But publish he does, and the book goes on to describe the impact of the idea of evolution as the shockwaves radiate outwards from Down House. As the first volume of this biography attests, Darwin was no natural revolutionary. Much of the subsequent fighting and advocacy for the theory was done for him by people like Thomas Henry Huxley, founder of the so-called X dining club, assiduous propagators of Darwin's work. Browne gives a fascinating account not just of the man but also of the spread and influence of the idea of evolution. The idea that Darwin tore asunder the ties of a pious society is far from the truth. These ties were already being frayed by the intellectual tumult of the time, this tumult reaching into the heart of the Church of England itself with some churchmen even going as far as to question the very foundations of the Christian faith such as the virgin birth and resurrection. Browne is fascinating in describing the cultural and intellectual impact of Darwin's ideas. That a study based largely on zoological observations, including barnacles, pigeons and livestock, could have provoked such anguished debate about the place of mankind in nature is remarkable. After all, in the Origin of the Species, he did not touch upon mankind's origins. But he touched a nerve: a theory that showed that nature can develop needing no guiding divine hand has obvious implications for the place of human beings in it. It was not until the 1870s that Darwin actually addressed the topic of human origins - the Descent of Man. Here some of his cultural assumptions shone through - he clearly and unselfconsciously believed in the distinction between savage and civilized peoples, and the superiority of the latter over the former, but this was a cultural, not biological conviction, for he also argued for the common origins and biological unity of mankind, and made the prediction, increasingly borne out by contemporary evidence, that mankind's origins were in Africa. And Darwin did not coin the term survival of the fittest. His preferred term was natural selection but Wallace persuaded Darwin that this term sounded too much like attributing deliberate intention to a natural process and enjoined him to use Herbert Spencer's term instead. The challenge of a biography detailing the middle and later years of Darwin's life - domesticated and sequestered as he was at Down House - is to convey the firestorm his ideas provoked. Browne's book succeeds in doing this marvelously. We also get a correction to the picture presented by some biographers of a sickly, reclusive Darwin, exaggerated by some of his previous chroniclers. Sick he was much of the time but he had a good deal of support from his wife and family and though he was not a public intellectual in the modern sense of the term, he cultivated links with influential persons whom he could enlist as allies shrewdly, and was canny about taking advantage of new technological mediums like portrait photography to promote his own `brand', as we might put in modern parlance. In all this, Browne does not neglect the man, the gentleman scholar, a devoted husband and father (like Huxley, their naturalism did not rob them of being able to form deep human attachments), an unlikely revolutionary whose arsenal of ideas was generated in his greenhouse and gardens. And, no, contrary to some rumours, there was no deathbed renunciation of his theory (his wife, Emma, a believer, and who fretted over Darwin's salvation in the hereafter, would surely have recorded such a recantation). This truly is a monumental biography. Browne spent 14 years of her life writing it. One senses a degree of identification the author has with Darwin and his own colossal struggles to compose his ideas. George Orwell once said that the act of writing was like pulling a demon out of one's mouth. Browne has not pulled out a demon out of hers with this book - she has produced a diamond of a book. One can only award this book five stars.

• Just like in the first volume of her Darwin biography, Janet Browne’s The Power of Place is clearly written, loaded with interesting anecdotes, and a joy to read. Browne’s deep familiarity with Darwin’s letters and scientific work comes out on every page. The book begins with the publication of Origin of Species and, unlike many other biographies, covers the subject’s later work in great detail. The book reads like it was written by a close friend of Darwin, a friend that is not afraid to point out both his strengths and weaknesses. Darwin’s intense love of detailed work in nature, from orchids to worms, leaves the reader with a real sense of how the power of evolution lies in the details. His explanations, such as many of those in The Descent of Man, were often inadequate, given the lack of information that we have today, but his intuitive leaps were superb. Besides his revolutionary insight into natural selection and the development of life on earth, Darwin’s “gemmules” were clear forerunners of genetic theory and his understanding of facial expressions was a major breakthrough in what has become an important part of psychology. The later Darwin, plagued constantly by illness, comes across as a gentle and kind person but very subject to the English class system. His close friendship with Alfred Wallace is spelled out in detail. Overall, Browne estimates Darwin wrote 1500 letters a year to both the famous and the not so famous. He was remarkably conscientious; generosity comes across as a major character trait even in the face of tremendous physical pain at times. Yet this same man refused to attend the funerals of the two people most influential in his life – Henslowe and Lyell. Browne, who could have given many excuses for her subject, knows Darwin’s letters and personal circumstances so well that she bluntly calls him “selfish” for not being able to overcome his fears for the sake of his friends’ families. You get a full picture of the man by an author who knows him as well as anyone can. This is a great book. Combined with the first volume, Browne’s Darwin biography stands out in first rank among biographies of scientists, no matter what the field.

• Non potevo mettere giù questo libro. Janet Browne è brillantissima. Ha fatto un rittratto di Charles Darwin dettagiato e indimenticabile.

• Uma obra definitiva sobre o ícone da ciência Charles Darwin. Detalha a vida do naturalista britânico após seu retorno da viagem do Beagle.

• This book is the second part of a really excellent two-volume biography of Charles Darwin, one which the great evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr called “the definitive Darwin biography”. This second volume takes up the story a year or so before the 1859 publication of “On the Origin of Species”. Darwin was dilly-dallying about publishing a book on his theory of natural selection, when, in June 1858, he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace in which Wallace enclosed a paper which showed that he had just come up with the same theory. Wallace did not know that Darwin had already had the same idea. Darwin was torn: he didn’t want to lose the credit for having thought of the theory himself much earlier than Wallace; but on the other hand he didn’t want to treat Wallace badly. Two of Darwin’s scientific friends came up with a solution. They made a joint presentation of Wallace’s paper and some extracts from Darwin’s unpublished writings on the theory to the Linnean Society. To make matters worse, all this commotion coincided with the illness and then death of the Darwins’ youngest child. As in the first volume, there is certainly plenty of ammunition in this book to shoot down the ridiculous conspiracy theory which claims that Darwin stole the credit for the theory of natural selection from Wallace. Wallace certainly deserves credit for independently coming up with the same idea, but Wallace himself was always happy to play second fiddle to Darwin. For example, in 1908 Wallace made a speech to the Linnaean Society in which he explicitly defended Darwin’s priority, pointing out that “...the idea occurred to Darwin in October 1838, nearly twenty years earlier than to myself (in February 1858); and that during the whole of that twenty years he had been laboriously collecting evidence...” Darwin probably started thinking seriously about “transmutation” on the last stretch of his Beagle voyage in 1836. He certainly opened his first notebook on the subject in 1837, and the idea of natural selection as the mechanism of evolutionary change came to him, after reading Malthus, in 1838. In 1842 he wrote what he called the “pencil sketch of my species theory”, and in 1844 he wrote a fuller and more polished version. Darwin’s letters, notebooks and the two essays/sketches, show beyond question that all the key ideas that Darwin made public in 1859 in “On the Origin of Species” had already been developed by him much earlier. Stephen Jay Gould once described Darwin as being “radical in his scientific ideas, liberal in his political and social views, and conservative in personal lifestyle...” This book by Janet Browne shows us that Gould’s summary of Darwin is a perfectly accurate one. Browne describes Darwin’s personality, his personal life, his class position, the social context of nineteenth century England, and the influences which led him to develop his theory of natural selection, as well as Darwin’s researches and the theory itself. The only thing that I was not happy about with this second volume was the fact that it was not published until seven years after the publication of the first volume. Even allowing for the enormous amount of research that went into these books, that is a long time! I remember that when the first volume came out in 1995 I decided not to get it until the second one was published, so that I could buy and read both together. I didn’t think that I would have to wait for seven years to be able to do that. Still, that’s water under the bridge now. Darwin fans can read, re-read and savour both volumes. Phil Webster.

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