Product Description

In a chest of drawers bequeathed by his grandmother, author Randal Keynes discovered the writing case of Charles Darwin's beloved daughter Annie, who died at the age of ten. He also found the notes Darwin kept throughout Annie's illness, the eulogy he delivered at her funeral-and provocative new insights into Darwin's views on nature, evolution, and the human condition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #323148 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this intimate portrait of the great naturalist as devoted family man, Keynes describes how Charles Darwin's "life and his science were all of a piece." The great-great-grandson of the scientist, Keynes uses published documents as well as family papers and artifacts to show how Darwin's thinking on evolution was influenced by his deep attachment to his wife and children. In particular, his anguish over his 10-year-old daughter Annie's death sharpened his conviction that the operation of natural laws had nothing to do with divine intervention or morality. Keynes, also a descendant of economist John Maynard Keynes, shows that much of Darwin's intellectual struggle in writing On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man arose from his efforts to understand the role of suffering and death in the natural order of the world. Early in his career, Darwin saw the indifference of natural law as an answer to the era's religious doubts about how a benevolent god could permit human misery; cruelty and pain, he argued, should not be seen as moral issues, but as inevitable outcomes of nature. After Annie's death, however, Darwin's views darkened, and in a private letter he railed against the "clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!" Though Keynes doesn't break new ground about Darwin's life and work, he produces a moving tribute to a thinker who, despite intimate acquaintance with the pain inflicted by the "war of nature," could still marvel that, from this ruthless struggle, "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)Forecast: General readers attracted by the book's warm, sentimental cover won't be disappointed by Keynes's equally accessible prose.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
When the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin inherited the writing case of Darwin's daughter Annie, who died at age ten, he discovered notes from his famous forbear that he used to reinvestigate the entire family.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
When descendants of Charles Darwin get together, some still tell the story of a long-ago servant who expressed pity for the family patriarch. The poor man, she said, was so idle that she saw him staring at an ant heap for a whole hour. Darwin's full-time, self-created job, of course, was to observe every animate creature, from the ants and bees in his garden, to giant tortoises in the Galápagos, to his own family. He even published a monograph on the behavior of his infant children. Randal Keynes, a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin (and also a descendant of John Maynard Keynes), has crafted a superb intellectual and social history about Darwin's quiet years (c. 1842-1882) at his country estate, long after his HMS Beagle adventures. Charles and Emma Wedgwood Darwin produced 10 children but lost three--an infant daughter and son, and the bright and charming 10-year-old Annie, whose death plunged her parents into profound bereavement. Annie's fatal tuberculosis (a cogent diagnosis suggested by Keynes, although it was problematic in Darwin's day) was the most wrenching event of the naturalist's middle age. Among his family's heirlooms, Keynes discovered Annie's writing case, containing her goose-quill pens and stationery, a lock of her hair, and her father's mournful yet objective daily notes on her deteriorating condition. (The British edition of the book is titled Annie's Box.) Initially inspired and affected by these mementos, Keynes came to realize that "Charles's life and his science was all of a piece." With impeccable scholarship, he has woven clips from Victorian magazines, contemporary poems and novels, family letters and keepsakes, and even recollections of living people into a stylish narrative that is both moving and thoroughly documented. Darwin had often wondered whether his powerful affection for family could be explained in evolutionary terms. His then radical conclusion: our deepest emotions are rooted in the evolution of primate social organization. If we had descended from bees instead of from apes, he once opined, "there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering." According to Keynes, Darwin was at a loss to understand why most naturalists at the time thought they saw evidence of ubiquitous, benevolent design in a world so full of pain, death and disease. "There seems to me," he wrote, "too much misery in the world" for a loving deity to have designed it that way. He had witnessed genocide of the Indians in Argentina and the torture of slaves in Brazil. He had written of wasps whose larvae devour a living caterpillar from within, leaving the beating heart for last. With the slow death of Annie, the misery became personal. Some contemporary critics painted Darwin as a cold intellect with no place for love in his famous "struggle for existence." Keynes shows he was actually a man of uncommon warmth. While he was "anxious to observe accurately the expression of crying child," according to his son Francis, he usually found that "his sympathy with the grief spoiled his observation." To comfort his friend Sir Joseph Hooker when the botanist's young son fell ill, Darwin drew on his own agonizing deathwatch of Annie: "Much love, much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love." As the first evolutionary psychologist, Darwin was breaking new ground by seeking the roots of human behavior in our species' mammalian history. In On the Origin of Species (1859), he had predicted that "psychology will be based on a new foundation," which he attempted to establish in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions. Comparing the behavior of dogs, cats, monkeys, orangutans, infants and tribal peoples from all over the world, he argued that human affection, sympathy, parental love, morality and even religious feelings had gradually developed from a primate base. Such "evil passions" as rage and violence were also part of Grandfather Baboon's legacy. Once I had a rare chance to examine Darwin's printer's proofs of this treatise on comparative psychology, which contain his handwritten corrections. The title, as printed, was The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Lower Animals. Darwin had emphatically crossed out the word "lower."

Historian of science Richard Milner, who is preparing a new edition of his Encyclopedia of Evolution, frequently performs his one-man musical, "Charles Darwin: Live & In Concert."

Customer Reviews

Darwin the Man, Darwin the Myth
Having no real knowledge of Charles Darwin beyond myths and some sketchy memories of high school science, I was eager to read this book and finally become acquainted with the Charles Darwin, the man.

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.

Finally, Darwin evolves as a real man...
My own ideas about Charles Darwin and his contributions to science were quite frankly limited to a week of study in high school natural sciences, long since forgotten. The ideas I had of him came from popular culture rather than my own investigations. Unsure whether to brand him a revolutionary atheist plotting to bring down Christianity or a zealous naturalist merely satisfying his own curiousity, I was eager to read what Keynes, a well pedigreed descendant of Darwin, had to say.

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.

Darwin and the problem of evil
This book touches only lightly on Charles Darwin's scientific work. If you are looking for a popular introduction to the basic mechanisms of evolution, try The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner or The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

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.