The Voyage of the Beagle: the best popular science book ever?

 

Darwin in 1840, by George Richmond (Down House)

The Voyage of the Beagle might not be the first ever popular science book, but it certainly has a claim to be the first significant example, and today remains one of the best popular science books ever written. Even today, with thousands of popular science books on the market, Darwin’s account compares very favourably. It’s interesting to examine why that should be. 

By “popular science” is meant to convey scientific thinking in a format that non-specialists can follow. It means more than simply exposition. It certainly does not mean a textbook, which starts from the premise that the author knows but the reader does not.

The popular science genre

There are examples of earlier science books for the general reader, but the genre seems to have emerged during the 19th century; according to Wikipedia, the earliest popular science book was Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), probably best known today because Whewell created the term “scientist” in a review of this book. 

Today, popular science is a well-established component of trade publishing. For some authors, their academic reputation has not suffered as a result of their popular writing (Steven Jay Gould and Douglas Hofstadter spring to mind). Wikipedia contains a list of no fewer than 200 popular science authors, the majority of them still alive today. Its popularity, it would seem, has never been greater. But there is one great difference between science today and in Darwin’s time: the growth of the science academy has transformed and professionalized the study of science, and in many areas limited or removed the role of the amateur. Today, there is often an expectation that science will be practised (or written about) only by professionals, and this affects the tone and style of writing science for the common reader. Here is Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, and well-established popular science writer, writing about evolution and religion: 

Today’s biology emphasises how little relevance the subject has to the issues so often and so tediously discussed by non-biologists. [Darwin’s Island, 2009, Preface] 

In other words, non-scientists should keep out of this discussion: biology is for (professional) biologists only. Cat Jarman, writing about genetics and archaeology, uses the pronoun “we” to mean, not all of us, but professional archaeologists, not including the reader: 

… the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials … The remarkable shift in the way we are learning from the past and the scientific evidence … is having a tremendous impact.  [Cat Jarman, River Kings, 2021, pp 150-152] 

There is a very different feel when we travel with Darwin on the Beagle: we feel we are sharing his discovery as he sees new unexplained rock structures, new evidence of extinct animals. We don’t feel that he knows, and we do not. Crucially, we often don’t know what we are going to find: this is true of people, plants, animals, and rocks. 

Darwin avoids lecturing by sharing his thinking. Although for each new landing, Darwin is happy to present what is already known on a topic, as a result of his background reading, he soon moves on to his hypothesis, which he shares with us: not to tell us that he knows and we don’t, but to say “I think this might be the cause … what do you think?” In other words, he respects the reader. We all notice what is around us when we travel, and we make observations, but not quite as incisively as Darwin. The most commonplace objects and events start him thinking. For example, he is crossing the Cordillera Mountains between modern-day Peru and Argentina, and then, presumably during a rest halt, notices the mule train carrying their luggage: 

In a troop each animal carries on a level road, a cargo weighing 416 pounds (more than 29 stone), but in a mountainous country 100 pounds less; yet with what delicate slim limbs, without any proportional bulk of muscle, these animals support so great a burden! The mule always appears to me a most surprising animal. That a hybrid should possess more reason, memory, obstinacy, social affection, powers of muscular endurance, and length of life, than either of its parents, seems to indicate that art has here outdone nature. [The Voyage of the Beagle, 2nd edition, chapter 15]. 

You can almost see Darwin’s thought processes in action; and you feel encouraged to look, and to think, for yourself. When he writes about “the upraised recent shells along more than 2,000 miles on the western coast” of Latin America, you suddenly think, yes, of course, that’s how to demonstrate earth movement on a large scale. Unlike much other popular science writing, Darwin’s Voyage makes you want to go out and to look for yourself. I’d love to know how many people became scientists as a result of reading Darwin’s account of his epic journey. 

Is the Voyage just a popular account, a travelogue? It’s certainly not a fully-fledged scientific treatise; it is an account of a voyage, with, afterwards, separate specialist publications examining the various finds from the expedition. Nonetheless, I bet that for every reader of the books about the specialist findings, there are a hundred readers of this book. And, unlike the specialist accounts, Darwin gives us a gloriously joined-up account. He pulls everything together, displays the evidence he has found, gives his interpretation, but appears to make you think that your opinion is valued.  You can disagree.

Darwin the observer

For Darwin, his focus on science does not prevent him responding to non-scientific events. During the voyage, he encounters people and places that he responds to, quite openly. In Brazil, he is horrified by the evidence of slavery: 

On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco … [The Voyage of the Beagle, 2nd edition, chapter 21]

Some of his attitudes are of course out-dated; in Mauritius he praises the English-built roads and compares them unfavourably with the earlier French colonial infrastructure (and you suspect not without a little national pride). He takes a great dislike to everyone in New Zealand. But we can make allowances for what appears as prejudice to modern eyes. Certainly, Darwin’s five-year journey was not value-free, whatever Steve Jones claims: 

As Darwin put it in The Descent of Man, ‘We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it.’ Science can do that, and no more.  [Steve Jones, Darwin’s Island, preface] 

For me, the unfortunate distinction between “the truth” and everything else is what science has lost in the last hundred or so years. For me, the Voyage represents science at its best: thinking, questioning, no doubt sometimes wrong, but always observing. The experience of reading the Voyage is to share one scientist’s inquisitive examination of everything he sees. Right at the end of the book, Darwin asks himself if he would recommend a similar journey to anyone: “If a person asked my advice before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced.” For me, the magic of Darwin is the distinction between his taste for knowledge, and his openness to discovery of things he did not know when he set out: genuine scientific enquiry, and genuine inquisitiveness.