Evolutionary road

EVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS
By Charles Darwin; edited by James A. Secord
Oxford University, 485 pp.,
illustrated, $25

THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE
By Charles Darwin
National Geographic, 466 pp.,
illustrated, $24

WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
By Jerry A. Coyne
Viking, 282 pp., illustrated, $27.95

February 12 marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, so brace yourself for an avalanche of all things Darwin: lectures, bumper stickers, DVDs, baby outfits. Stanford University is offering a three-week private-jet tour tracing the route of Darwin's voyage on the HMS Beagle. London's Natural History Museum has mounted its largest Darwin exhibition ever. The journal Nature recently published a half-serious suggestion that scientists try recreating a woolly mammoth to commemorate the bicentennial.

Plenty of Darwin books will mark the occasion, too. If you want to go big, there's Oxford University's "Evolutionary Writings," a 485-page opus featuring excerpts from most of Darwin's texts and his "Autobiographies." "Evolutionary Writings" includes "The Origin of Species," of course, arguably the most important and controversial book ever written in English, but fans of the more esoteric will also find reviews and responses to Darwin's books from his contemporaries, and chunks of Darwin's "Recollections," a loosely written memoir of sorts. "I am surprised," an aging Darwin writes, "what an indelible impression many of the beetles which I caught at Cambridge have left on my mind."

The volume's editor, James A. Secord, says it best: "It is because [Darwin's] books have been read in so many ways that it is vital to confront the texts in the originals and not just as pithy quotations or through piecemeal searches on the internet."

For my money, Darwin's most entertaining and engrossing book is "The Voyage of the Beagle." Oxford presents six chapters of this classic travelogue, with parenthetical notes summarizing excised sections, but National Geographic is bringing out the entire 466-page manuscript in grand style, with a short introduction from the gifted nature writer David Quammen.

In "Voyage," Darwin hunts rheas in Patagonia, studies owls outside Buenos Aires, collects finches in the Galapagos, gets stung by corals in the South Pacific, scales a waterfall in Tahiti, and does about 10,000 other fascinating things. His insatiable eye pays attention not just to animals, plants, and fossils but to slaves, rocks, lightning, the habits of gauchos, and the ceremony of "pressing noses" in New Zealand.

Here is an amenable man in his early 20s who interrogates the world with a raw, generous, and compelling enthusiasm. He digs up hibernating insects, eats roasted armadillo, and watches huge chunks of ice calve off glaciers. He wonders about the immense time scales revealed in cliffsides and the gradations in shapes of finch beaks. Through much of this a reader can see Darwin cautiously pouring the foundations for his theory of natural selection. Only 11 pages into the book, when considering exposed granite along the coast of Brazil, Darwin writes, "Can we believe that any power, acting for a time short of infinity, could have denuded the granite over so many thousand square leagues?"

"The Voyage of the Beagle" is as compelling a read in 2009 as it was in 1839, when it made Darwin famous. For $24, you get to circumnavigate the Southern Hemisphere as it once looked with one of the most astute, humble, and capable observers of all time. "The sea was so highly luminous," Darwin writes as the Beagle sails through the South Atlantic in 1832, "that the tracks of the penguins were marked by a fiery wake, and the darkness of the sky was momentarily illuminated by the most vivid lightning."

Finally, if you'd prefer a book to follow the reverberations of Darwin's insight into contemporary science, there's "Why Evolution Is True," by Jerry A. Coyne. In nine crisp chapters, using the same lawyerly rhetorical strategy Darwin employed in "Origin of Species," the respected evolutionary biologist lays out an airtight case that Earth is unspeakably old and that new species evolve from previous ones.

"Evolution is far more than a scientific theory," argues Coyne, "it is a scientific fact." Evolution, he points out, has been supported by storerooms of fossils, by every finding in embryology and biogeography, by everything from vestigial organs, tails, and wings to the "imperfect" relics bequeathed to us in our own DNA. When Coyne directly refutes creationist arguments, he does so gently but with overwhelming persuasiveness. "Why," he asks, in a typical example, "would a creator use exactly the same bones in flying and flightless wings, including the wings of swimming penguins?"

Coyne doesn't present much evidence that will be new to folks who follow developments in evolutionary biology, but he does synthesize a vast assortment of findings very well. "We are apes descended from other apes, and our closest cousin is the chimpanzee," he concludes. "These are indisputable facts. And rather than diminishing our humanity, they should produce satisfaction and wonder, for they connect us to all organisms, the living and the dead."

One can only hope, however naively, that in another 200 years, Darwin's theory of natural selection will have ceased to be so controversial. Two centuries from now we may understand exactly how life originated on Earth. We may be synthesizing new kinds of life in laboratories. We may even have detected it on a distant planet.

Perhaps in 2209, some diligent, embattled soul will still need to write a book titled "Yes, for Crying Out Loud, Evolution Is Still True." Or, maybe, just maybe, publishing a book titled "Why Evolution Is True" in 2209 will seem as redundant as publishing a book titled "Why the Earth Rotates Around the Sun."

Anthony Doerr is the author of "The Shell Collector," "About Grace," and "Four Seasons in Rome."