DARWIN

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue
2. Chapter One - The Boy from Shrewsbury
3. Chapter Two - A Gentleman Naturalist
4. Chapter Three - The Voyage Begins
5. Chapter Four - Earth Beneath His Feet
6. Chapter Five - Islands, Iguanas, and Instinct
7. Chapter Six - Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
8. Chapter Seven - The Slow-Burn Secret
9. Chapter Eight - Wallace Strikes the Match
10. Chapter Nine - On the Origin of Species Explodes
11. Chapter Ten - The Empire Reacts
12. Chapter Eleven - Into the Human Question
13. Chapter Twelve - Eugenics and the Misuse
14. Chapter Thirteen - The Quiet Years
15. Chapter Fourteen - The DNA Revolution
16. Chapter Fifteen - Beyond Biology
17. Chapter Sixteen - The Tree Replanted

Excerpt

PROLOGUE HE WASN’T THE first man to look at nature. He wasn’t even the first to wonder if it changed. But Charles Darwin did something no one else had done: He watched the world slowly enough — closely enough — to notice a pattern so big, so strange, so uncomfortable, that it would break the spine of every old belief. Before Darwin, life was a fixed creation. Species were set in stone — born as they were, forever unchanged. Mountains were eternal. Oceans were endless. God had made it all, and that was that. But the Earth itself whispered otherwise. Fossils of animals no longer alive. Shells on mountaintops. Birds with beaks too perfectly suited to their islands. Subtle shifts across...