Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution - Softcover

Randal Keynes

3.84

595 ratings by Goodreads

9781573229555: Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573229555 ISBN 13: 9781573229555

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2002

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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. In it were the notes Darwin kept through Annie's illness. Together with his deeply moving memorial of her, they provide a key to provocative new insights into Darwin's views on nature, evolution, and the human condition.

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Review:

Keynes shows elegantly and convincingly how Darwin's mature theory grew out of his intensely personal pain. ... A poignant reminder of the shaping presence of personal recollection, memory, and loss in the intellectual as well as emotional life of a figure even of Darwin's stature. --Lisa Jardine, The Sunday Times

Both moving and superbly documented ... 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. ... 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. --Richard Milner, Scientific American

This already acclaimed book deserves its wide recognition. It is the single best book on the family life of Charles Darwin, and as such it should command the attention of scholars, teachers, and the general reading public. ... For historians of science perhaps the most important element of this deeply moving and beautifully written book is the manner in which Keynes demonstrated how thinking about and observing his children may have affected Darwin's evolutionary thought - especially his thinking about human evolution - as well as his religious sensibilities. Keynes writes with a light hand and does not overstate his case. He points to the manner in which Darwin's thinking about the moral sense, parental affections, and infant development come from his own family experience. He also shows how Darwin navigated the difficult shoals of thinking about human nature in a thoroughly naturalistic manner without ignoring the reality and warmth of human emotion and personal love. For many decades, historians of science have argued about the impact, or lack of impact, of social structure on scientific thought. Family life may be no less important and even more interesting, as well as more difficult to calibrate. Keynes's study in that respect stands as a challenge for historians of science to delve more deeply into the dynamics of family life. One can hope that other historians will seek to write similar family histories with the same subtlety and good sense. --Professor Frank Turner, ISIS

About the Author:

Randal Keynes is a great great grandson of Charles Darwin and a great nephew of the economist John Maynard Keynes. He lives and works in London. He is a Trustee of the Charles Darwin Trust and a Board Member of the Charles Darwin Foundation for Galapagos.

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