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    Darwin: Portrait of a Genius
    Darwin: Portrait of a Genius
    Darwin: Portrait of a Genius
    Audiobook4 hours

    Darwin: Portrait of a Genius

    Written by Paul Johnson

    Narrated by John Curless

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The author of more than 40 books, acclaimed historian Paul Johnson also writes for Forbes and theSpectator. With Darwin, Johnson sheds new light on a man many regard as the most influential scientist in history. Darwin's theories of evolution transformed the world's view of biology. Here, in meticulous detail, Johnson describes Darwin's brilliance and the unfortunate circumstances that compelled him to support the eugenics movement.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 11, 2012
    ISBN9781470323905
    Darwin: Portrait of a Genius
    Author

    Paul Johnson

    Paul Johnson is a historian whose work ranges over the millennia and the whole gamut of human activities. He regularly writes book reviews for several UK magazines and newspapers, such as the Literary Review and The Spectator, and he lectures around the world. He lives in London, England.

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    Reviews for Darwin

    4/5

    19 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This was just okay a lot dry at times, but I did learn a few new facts about the man and his work.
    • 4/5
      interesting short book. Not traditional biography, not exactly history. Johnson looks at Darwin's personal hisstory, and at the effects of his ideas on Darwin's own life and on society. I enjoyed most of it, but Johnson inserts some of his own ideas in the final chapter that seem odd to me. Applying natural selection to inanimate objects that do not reproduce sexually misses the point in my opinion, and feeds the ideas of social darwinism that take the superficial view and apply to other situations. Bu perhaps he is more subtle than I and this is his point....
    • 3/5
      By CARL ROLLYSONThe 'genius' of Paul Johnson's biography of Charles Darwin is manifestly, impressively apparent in "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," to give the full title of the first edition. "Favoured Races," was an unexceptionable term to his contemporaries, individuals Darwin treated with extraordinary sensitivity. As Mr. Johnson observes:No scientific innovator has ever taken more trouble to smooth the way for lay readers without descending into vulgarity. What is almost miraculous about the book is Darwin's generosity in sharing his thought processes, his lack of condescension. There is no talking down, but no hauteur, either. It is a gentlemanly book.In both style and substance, this passage is classic Paul Johnson. The author of "Modern Times" (1984) and many other books has in the past decade produced five other short, powerfully argued biographies: "Napoleon" (2002), "The Founding Father: George Washington" (2005), "Churchill" (2009), "Jesus: A Biography from a Believer" (2010), and "Socrates: A Man for Our Times" (2011).In all his biographies, Mr. Johnson presents a consistent historical vision informed by a coherent set of moral principles that can be reduced to one axiom: It is never permissible to do evil—not even in a good cause. This is the teaching of Socrates, and the reason Johnson calls the philosopher "a man for our times." In Mr. Johnson's books, Churchill and Washington are greater men than Napoleon because they sought but also gave up power, and because they bowed to the will of the people. What makes Napoleon evil is not only his arrogation of all power to himself, but his refusal—right to the very end of his life—to repent his responsibility for the loss of millions of lives. As Mr. Johnson puts it in the final words of his Napoleonic narrative:It is well to remember the truth about the man whose example gave rise to it all, to strip away the myth and reveal the reality. We have to learn again the central lesson of history: that all forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building, are as nothing—indeed are perilous in the extreme—without a humble and a contrite heart.There is no finer passage in Mr. Johnson's biographies than the scene in which Socrates surrenders himself to the judgment of Athens, knowing full well that he will die as a result, and knowing that the judgment against him is not only wrong but even ridiculous. But Socrates believed in the rule of law, Mr. Johnson emphasizes, and he went to his death in great joy, sustained by his principles. So, too, Jesus surrendered unto Caesar those things that were Caesar's, but in the process gained a far greater triumph than any earthly ruler. How small a man Napoleon, sulking in exile on St. Helena, appears in Mr. Johnson's biography.What makes Darwin good, in the biographer's estimation, is the scientist's democratic dissemination of knowledge. Darwin triumphed with "The Origin of Species," Mr. Johnson contends, not only because of his ability to portray the theory of evolution as the inescapable outcome of his decades of study and the work of fellow scientists, whom he was careful to praise, but because he was acutely aware that he had to present his notions of natural selection and survival of the fittest so as not to stir up public controversy. To an extraordinary degree, Darwin deflected attacks by couching his discoveries in terms of the plants he liked to examine and cultivate. He had relatively little to say about human evolution.Brought up as a gentleman who never had to worry about income (although he sometimes worried about spending), Darwin was always concerned primarily for his wife, Emma. She was, in a sense, his first reader, the one he had in mind when considering the pieties of Victorian England. The faith she always expressed in him, Mr. Johnson implies, was transformed into the confidence of a scientist who paid deference to his culture's sensibilities.This view of the Darwin marriage is also vintage Paul Johnson. Women always become key figures in Mr. Johnson's biographies, even when he has to suss out evidence other biographers have failed to properly evaluate. He notices, for example, that Jesus treats women with a respect not customary in his era, and how women disciples came to Jesus at times when even his male apostles were absent and in fear for their lives. Similarly, Martha Washington and Clementine Churchill have integral roles to play in their husbands' biographies. When women are ignored or abused—as in Napoleon's case—this behavior becomes prima facie evidence of a bad hat.Both Mr. Johnson's prose and his moralism may seem a throwback to the era of the Victorian sage, to someone like Carlyle, and to the Great Man theory of history. And it is true that Mr. Johnson has no truck with historians who believe history is essentially the product of forces and confluences beyond the control of even the most powerful individuals. In the biographer's books, there are heroes of history, but Mr. Johnson, unlike Carlyle or Emerson, never gets carried away in the frenzy of greatness and genius.He takes pains to convince the reader, for instance, that if "On the Origin of Species" is a great achievement, much of other Darwin's other writing is suspect. Darwin's woeful inadequacy in mathematics resulted in his acceptance of the bogus Malthusian theory of population explosion. The rambling "Descent of Man" includes "many racial generalizations that now would be denounced as racism or chauvinism"; unlike Mendel, Darwin misunderstood that nature of inheritance, believing erroneously that characteristics could be acquired and passed on to progeny. Darwin "shut his eyes to the ultimate consequences of his work, in terms of the human condition and the purpose of life, or the absence of one," Mr. Johnson argues. His exaggerated view of nature as a constant struggle inspired Hitler and Stalin in their extermination efforts.Thus Darwin, in the most riveting part of Mr. Johnson's biography, is brought to book.Mr. Johnson is a great one for believing that ideas and actions have consequences that reverberate far into the future. He has no doubt that Napoleon is the author of the modern totalitarian state, or that Darwin—no matter how his defenders protest—promulgated a view of nature that led to Herbert Spencer's racist extrapolations: "First, the struggle to survive applied not just to individuals but to entire societies and nations. Second, evolution provided an explanation for all phenomena—political, economic, military, psychological, and social."Darwinians, like Napoleonites, are sure to take issue with Mr. Johnson's sweeping conclusions. But his response can easily be imagined: If the lasting positives of great men are to be credited, so too must their negatives. Mr. Johnson never absents his great men either from the history that shaped them, or from the history that will put them in their place.Of course, the biographer is subject to the same process. As Mr. Johnson notes at the conclusion of "Darwin": "This book is written from the viewpoint of a historian, and while all theories of history are vainglorious absurdities, doomed to eventual oblivion, history does teach certain lessons, one of which is that science, like everything else, becomes out of date." It is a statement worthy of Mr. Johnson's hero Socrates, who was wise precisely because of his awareness of all he did not know.As the biographer puts it in his concluding sentence: "It is a sobering but also an intoxicating thought that we are just at the beginning of the process of acquiring knowledge. How Darwin would have agreed!"