Title: The Darwin Wars
Genre: Science
Year: 1999
Pages: 220
Origin: bought in a charity shop during September 2012
Nod Rating: 3 nods out of 5
Hailed by the author himself ‘as a history if ideas with all the messy bits left in’, The Darwin Wars is a book about evolutionary theory and the different positions that have developed ever since Darwin’s initial mutterings on the subject. Within ten – rather brief – chapters, Brown attempts to include the main viewpoints and theoretical standpoints, whilst looking at the human motive behind such scientific work.
Writer and journalist, Andrew Brown has written a career’s work of books on many differing eclectic subjects, from the intriguing book title In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite to the London police (Watching the Detectives). Throughout The Darwin Wars he shows his journalist’s touch, making the words on the page relevant, and removing any superfluous material; resulting in a modest and manageable 220 pages. Furthermore, his schooling in the topic is vast, having served as Religious Affairs Correspondent for The Independent for a decade.
The central dialogue and debate during the book is between two groups; labelled by Brown as the ‘Gouldians’ and the ‘Dawkinsians’. Led by their anointed leaders (Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins), Brown pits them against one another in a fight, in the words of the book’s subtitle, for ‘the scientific battle for the soul of man’.
Numerous characters pop up during the book, with Brown always interested in not simply the theory but the human story that led to the theory. This is the strength of the book, in hooking the reader with that keen journalistic eye. Such people include not only Gould and Dawkins, but also William Hamilton, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and even obligatory space for the likes of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. The most interesting of all is the story surrounding the torn soul that was George Price, who serves as the main focus for the book’s opening chapter, ‘The Deathbed of an Altruist’.
A decade after The Darwin Wars first went into print, Brown won the 2009 Orwell Prize for the book Fishing in Utopia. The Darwin Wars never threatens to obtain such a lofty position, with Brown himself labelling such work as ‘pop science books’: pages for the general public and not simply the specialists. As a short and compact book that attempts to explain the different positions of the various thinkers on the theories of evolution, it is a welcome book to the collection. It is not Brown’s intention to supersede the meatier and involving works of Dawkins & co, but rather to serve as a window for these works to the uninitiated.
Buy it here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Darwin-Wars-Scientific-Battle/dp/0684851458
Check out the website promoting the book:
http://www.darwinwars.com/index.html
