Archive blog: Darwin and the vivisectionists

FILM
He was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. He was an adventurer both geographically and intellectually. He was a husband and a father whose work undermined the foundations of his own family life. So why has Charles Darwin, one of the most fascinating and complex characters that British science has produced, inspired so little cinema until now?

“It's like gold under your feet,” says Jeremy Thomas, the producer of the forthcoming Darwin biopic Creation (out in September). “You don't see it but it's there all along. I thought there must have been something about him before. But there is nothing memorable. So we get to see a figure we haven't really seen dramatised before, even though he was a very complex and troubled figure ripe for a film, particularly around the time that we are portraying him.”

A fictionalised version of the great naturalist appeared in Tarsem Singh's eccentric fantasy The Fall in 2006. Clad in a furry red coat and riding boots, Darwin found himself in the company of an African prince and Alexander The Great. But film fans will have to wait until later this year for a meaty, historically accurate exploration of his life. Adapted from Annie's Box, an acclaimed book by Randall Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson, Creation will link the death of Darwin's daughter, Annie, to the writing of On the Origin of Species.

The man tasked with bringing Darwin to life is the screenwriter John Collee, who has drawn on Darwin's work before. For his last film, Master and Commander, Collee found inspiration in the scientist's journals of the Beagle voyage. Having worked with the actor Paul Bettany on the movie, he urged the Creation team to cast him as Darwin. “Not only is Paul a brilliant, intuitive actor, he's very similar to the younger Charles Darwin in physique and colouring,” he says. And Bettany's real-life wife Jennifer Connelly plays Darwin's beloved spouse, Emma.

The Darwin we'll see in the film is, says Thomas, “a troubled character who knew that his ideas were going to trigger a profound change of balance in the status quo and it made him ill.” He is a tortured genius, far removed from the assured, bearded elder statesman of the public perception.

“What happens to most historically significant figures,” Collee explains, “is that they become preserved in aspic at the time when they were at the height of their fame. Afterwards people find it difficult to imagine what they were like before that point. This has happened to Darwin, who became a legend in old age and is remembered as the grand establishment figure.

“But of course drama is about change and what interested me was what he suffered along the way to finally achieve that aura of unassailable gravitas. He was deeply in love with a woman who disagreed profoundly with his theory. He cherished his children and saw three of them die. He suffered horribly from a lifelong illness that may or may not have been psychosomatic. He studied to be a parson and wrote the book which killed God... I wanted to write about that guy.”

So what was the key to understanding Darwin the man and bringing him to life in the screenplay? Collee cites Randall Keynes's statement in the foreword to Annie's Box that Darwin's life and work were all of a piece. “His love for his wife, his observations of his children, his friendships with gardeners, schoolteachers and pigeon fanciers, his fears about death, revolution, bankruptcy, inbreeding... all these things found their way into his theory. He was the most inclusive of thinkers.”
Wendy Ide

BOOKS
Those who feel that they already know enough about Darwin had better hide in a cave. His 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species will be celebrated in song and fable, or their modern equivalents. Darwin's modern interpreters, the heirs of T.H.Huxley, believe the honours being done him are no more than his due. His big idea of natural selection gives biology its guiding principle. says Richard Dawkins.

One reason why Darwinism has retained its potency is because it has been subjected to a near-constant series of attacks over the past century and a half, on many different fronts. Darwin knew his idea was incendiary so spent years gathering data to support it, aiming to bury his critics under an avalanche of information. His idea, the survival of the fittest, was in part inspired by reading Malthus's gloomy predictions on the future of the human race. His ideas retain their vitality because they are timeless, bearing on issues that continue to perplex. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, for example, argue in Darwin's Sacred Cause that his hatred of slavery was one motive for his insistence that mankind was a single species with a common origin. They believe his evolutionary researches were fired by moral passion and had humanitarian roots.

At the time, scientists who believed in the immutability of species also believed that black and white people sprang from different origins and were, indeed, distinct species. This false belief underpinned slavery and later racism. The fact that people of different races can readily interbreed, meaning that they are members of the same species, had little effect on the heat of the debate. But here Darwin was not only right, but brave. If his view of the unity of mankind had been heeded, we might have been spared much human misery.

But might there not be a price to pay for undermining religion? This is one of the themes of James Le Fanu's attack on Darwin, Why Us? By setting aside the notion of Man as a free moral agent, distinct in this respect from animals, and replacing it with the philosophy that the strong will triumph over the weak, Le Fanu charges Darwin with cutting mankind adrift.

Darwinism transcends biology, but the problem with such elastic ideas is that they can be stretched. In the 1950s William Hamilton, then a student at Cambridge, complained that most of the biologists there didn't believe in evolution. Today they do, in part thanks to Hamilton's brilliant use of evolutionary theory to explain human social traits such as altruism. With the help of Richard Dawkins, the new field of evolutionary psychology emerged.

This makes some biologists uneasy. In Why Evolution is True, the American evolutionist Jerry Coyne deplores the tendency of psychologists, biologists and philosophers to Darwinise every aspect of human behaviour. Some behaviour may have evolved because it is adaptationist, he acknowledges: but not everything in nature, or human nature, is driven by Darwin's evolutionary engine. Social Darwinism may be dead, but psychological Darwinism is now staking its claim.

Coyne's book is just what was needed in this bicentennial year to anchor Darwin where he belongs. It is calm, clear, detailed and utterly convincing. One feels like echoing the sentiments of Georgiana Lowe, who read On The Origin of Species at a single sitting and announced: “Well, I don't see much in your Mr Darwin after all: if I had had his facts, I should have come to the same conclusion myself.”
Nigel Hawkes

Why Evolution is True, by Jerry A.Coyne (Oxford, £14.99)

Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves by James Le Fanu (Harper Press, £18.99)

Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Allen Lane, £25)

On the Origin of Species anniversary edition, by Charles Darwin (Penguin Classics, £30)

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• The bright side of this winter rain
• Story behind the picture: Snow Leopard, 2008
• Times Charity Appeal: The Place2Be