A nicely presented book, with many interesting photographs to accompany Darwin's descriptions of his travels.
Darwin had a privileged upbringing. He spent his time shooting birds out of the sky for sport. He says he was "passionately fond of shooting". He studied to become a physician, but dropped out. His dad didn't want him to become "an idle sporting man" and arranged for Charles to study to become a clergyman. Charles didn't fancy this, but went to Cambridge for three years where he enjoyed his bloodsports, along with boozing, singing and card games. Sometimes he hired chorister boys to sing in his room to him. He also started collecting beetles.
He later developed an interest in geology, thanks to Charles Lyell, but says that he preferred partridge shooting to it.
Later, he travels to Brazil. He doesn't think much of the inhabitants: "Brazilians are as contemptible in their minds as their persons are miserable."
I wonder what the Brazilians thought of him. He states, "I was crossing a ferry with a Negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud and made signs ..." Darwin reveals himself to be an old fashioned colonialist imperialist: "To hoist the British flag seems to draw as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity and civilisation."
French naturalist Buffon gets a brief mention, but there is no mention of the extent to which Lamarck inspired his researches.
In Brazil, he sees evidence of sudden mass extinctions. "Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants." He doesn't seem to have an explanation for this and expresses his "great astonishment". He found evidence that the horse had existed in South America, but had suddenly become extinct. The Spanish had reintroduced horses and they were thriving there. The Origin of Species has no mention of mass extinctions, so perhaps Darwin didn't want to alarm his imperialist readership into thinking that the British Empire would not last forever.
On the subject of the actual origin of species, "the first appearance of new beings on this earth" is "that mystery of mysteries". He also explains how he came to lose his faith in Christianity.
In The God Delusion, Prof Dawkins declares that Darwin blew the idea of intelligent design "out of the water" and that "Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from."
This is what Darwin has to say on the matter. He states that he has a conviction in the existence of God and that "This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist."
Darwin believed in God and in intelligent design.
On the subject of the development of the natural selection theory, he says he developed this in Oct 1838. "I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population ..." From this he got the idea that favourable variations are preserved and unfavourable ones are destroyed. He does not present any evidence to substantiate the notion that species transmutate. He states that Origin of Species was translated into many languages and that a subsequent essay in Hebrew showed that the theory was contained in the Old Testament.
