Randall Keynes, a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, has written a sympathetic account of how the great Victorian naturalist's scientific investigations and family life made him believe in some sort of universal design yet disbelieve in a benign Christian God. He observed that Nature's ruthless culling of the unfit was necessary to achieve evolutionary progress, but felt that it was impossible to reconcile God's supposed omnipotent benignity with animal and human suffering.
Darwin wrote in the 1840s "disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete." He told a questioner: "I never gave up Christianity until I was 40 years of age." He explained that he investigated the "claims of Christianity" and concluded that they were " The central point of Keynes's intimately researched family history seems to be that Darwin's religious disillusionment was brought about not so much by objective reasoning as by personal tragedy, the long illness and premature death of the favourite of his 10 children. Annie, whom he always remembered as an entirely innocent, loving and lovable child, lived for only 10 years, from 1841 to 1851. When Darwin became 40, in 1849, she was already incurably ill.
"After Annie's Death" Keynes writes, "Charles set the Christian faith firmly behind him. In a strictly conformist Christian faith family, "he did not attend church services with the family; he walked with them to the church door, but left them to enter on their own...He did, though, still firmly believe in a Divine Creator. But while others had faith in God's infinite goodness, Charles found him a shadowy, inscrutable and ruthless figure."
After much doubtful speculation, while his affectionate wife adhered unwaveringly to her orthodoxy, Darwin confessed: "I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton". Darwin recorded his observations of Annie's development from birth and her decline till death.
He studied her changing condition and behaviour as intently as he examined an orang-utan in the London Zoo, and undoubtedly noted common factors endorsing his evolving theory of The Origin of Species. Keynes recounts in moving detail how devotedly Darwin nurtured Annie at every stage of her short life. Though there have been innumerable biographies of Darwin, there cannot have been any warmer portrayals of his humanity and his desire to discover meaning in human existence. The Annie's Box of the title was the writing-case containing her precious quill pens and scraps of what she wrote. Her mother cherished them. Darwin's reminiscent emotions were on the grander scale of geological time.
Peter Raby's meticulous biography of another renowned Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, shows that Darwinian theory of natural selection was not uniquely Darwin's.
Wallace discovered Darwin's ideas about evolution independently. Unlike many other scientists, then and now, Wallace apparently was not jealous of another's achievement of prior publication and celebrity. Wallace always loyally supported Darwin in the perennial controversy with creationists who refused to relinquish Biblical tradition. It was only late in his career that Wallace attempted to venture beyond Darwin by trying to explore spirituality scientifically.
Most of Raby's excellent book is devoted to Wallace's periods of exploration, gathering specimens of fauna and flora in remote places, four years in Amazonia and eight in the Spice Islands of the East Indies.
Such is the author's own enthusiasm that it becomes possible to experience some degree of vicarious excitement when Wallace sees "the great bird-winged butterfly Ornithoptersa poseidon towards him in the forest-covered Aru Islands, and gazes, "lost in admiration, at the velvet black and brilliant green of its wings, seven inches across, its golden body, and crimson breast."
After his long exile, Wallace returned to England with a king bird of paradise, the observation that there is a clear delineation, now called the Wallace Line, along the Mascassar Strait, between Asian and Australian biological regions, and a conviction that " A hard worker and a nice chap, was Wallace.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic