, by A. N. Wilson, John Murray

A. N. Wilson is a prolific author who has written more than 45 books, including many biographies of subjects ranging from Queen Victoria to Hitler. His latest, a biography of Charles Darwin, begins with the startling sentence: 鈥淒arwin was wrong.鈥� Wilson argues that 鈥淒arwin offered to the emergent Victorian middle classes a consolation myth鈥� there was something inexorable, natural about their superiority to the working class.鈥�

This book provides an appallingly inaccurate rendition of Darwin鈥檚 theory and its scientific context. According to Wilson, Darwin told his contemporaries 鈥渢hat their land-grabs in Africa, their hunger for stock-market wealth in the face of widespread urban poverty, their rigid class system and their everlasting wars were not things to be ashamed of, but actually part of the processes of nature鈥�. The theory is not science, Wilson concludes, just another offering in a bazaar of 鈥渆rsatz religions鈥�.

Wilson maintains that Darwin鈥檚 theory is wrong and not the basis of current knowledge. He believes Darwinism was about extreme gradualism over geological time. But Darwinian gradualism simply means that one animal cannot all of a sudden give birth to a completely different species. The current view of life on Earth is precisely one of changing lineages branching from common ancestors. This, and not the speed of change, is the core of Darwin鈥檚 theory.

The other component of Darwinism, according to Wilson, is 鈥渢hat evolutionary progress happens by conflict鈥�. Here is the common misunderstanding that the de facto struggle that occurs because some animals live and some die means conscious fighting. And Darwin鈥檚 theory is not about 鈥減rogress鈥�, it is about change.

Darwin鈥檚 theory of evolution by natural selection, as any competent reference work describes, is about the differential survival of individual living things based on tiny differences between them. This differential survival (or selection) in effect filters living things to become adapted to a changing world. DNA evidence indicates that all living things are related genealogically on a vast ever-branching tree of life. This is Darwinism. Wilson instead erroneously describes variations in 鈥渟pecies鈥�, not individuals, and he mocks a 鈥淒arwinian鈥� scenario in which the short-necked ancestors of today鈥檚 giraffes were supposedly 鈥減anting to reach those leaves, but without success鈥�. This is not Darwinism, this is Lamarckism.

Strewn with errors

Wilson鈥檚 book contains numerous and serious factual errors such as 鈥渋f Darwin were correct, there would be hundreds, thousands of examples鈥� of transitional fossils. There are. as Wilson states. A fragment of Wallace鈥檚 letter to Darwin from when Wallace was living in Ternate does not survive. 鈥淒arwin believed that his own theory鈥� made it impossible to believe in the Bible.鈥� Not so. The first 50 pages of Darwin鈥檚 evolution notebook are not missing, they were located and published by 1967. (Wilson copied this claim from a conspiracy-laden essay, 鈥溾��, published by Loren Eiseley in 1965, two years before Darwin鈥檚 pages were published.)

Wilson claims Darwin 鈥渘ever鈥� persuaded the scientific community in Britain during his lifetime 鈥渢hat one species could evolve into another鈥�. In fact, Darwin was world famous for having done so. There are very, very many more. Footnotes lead to incorrect references and many dates are quite wrong. It鈥檚 hard to see how any care for either historical or scientific accuracy could result in such a book.

Throughout, Wilson bashes Darwin for supposed arrogance, dishonesty and incompetence and trots out a long line of old anti-Darwin myths: for example, that Darwin stole ideas from , whom Wilson mistakes for an evolutionist. (This too is borrowed from Eiseley.) Wilson invents and condemns a 鈥渢owering ambition鈥� Darwin had 鈥渢o be a universal genius鈥�. And eugenics and Nazi race laws are also blamed (incorrectly) on Darwin.

The book claims to be a 鈥渞adical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn鈥檛 afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy鈥�. The result is one of the most unreliable, inaccurate and tendentious anti-Darwin books of recent times.