Darwin Demystified: Two Constructivist Analyses of the “Revolutionary” Evolutionist

            Peter J. Bowler’s biography of Charles Darwin betrays its relatively unique approach in its physical appearance before the reader ever opens it. The book itself is small, an irregularity anyone familiar with the Darwin industry would find immediately anomalistic. The cover shows a picture of young Charles, before he had acquired his iconic, wizardly white beard. Who is this awkward twenty-something-year-old Victorian? Certainly not the grandfatherly and wise-looking Charles Darwin perpetuated by most biographers.

The general editor’s preface elucidates what exactly will be different about this evidently atypical biography. Part of the Cambridge Science Biographies series, Bowler’s work will concentrate on placing Charles Darwin in his context. Instead of focusing on Darwin the man — which is admittedly part of every biography and will not be completely eliminated — the book will pay special attention to those before him and his influence immediately after The Origin’s publication on into the modern world. It will thus attempt to take Darwin the legend, the exceptional genius who single-handedly revolutionized biology and provided the base for an entire scholarly industry, and place him in his time, surrounded by his influences. It will show that Darwin is not who we have been told he is; he is not the godlike, bearded messiah of biological enlightenment. He, like all of us, was a product of his time, and his ideas were not entirely his own, but built off of a complex network of cultural, social, economic, and scholarly influences. Both as an intellectual being before The Origin and afterward by those that told his story, Darwin was created. Charles Darwin was constructed like science was and is constructed — and both are undeniably human. Peter Bowler will deconstruct Darwin and reveal his humanity.