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Darwin and the Barnacle compared with Creation
18 October 2010
Earlier this year, we got a DVD copy of Creation, the film about Charles Darwin and his family life as he struggled to come to grips with his ideas about evolution. It's a touching, emotional film about the man inexorably linked with the theory of evolution (played brilliantly by Paul Bettany) as he wrestled with competing issues of faith and science, intertwined with his family and its moments of tragedy and joy.
It was a deep, moving, yet intellectually satisfying film. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. For various reasons, we did not watch the DVD until recently, and then realized how we had missed seeing a remarkable movie.
Despite being a stunning, original film (released in 2009), Creation had some difficulty getting a US distributor, and only found one in early 2010. According to Wired magazine, this was in part due to the backwards pro-creationist attitude of many Americans. Rather revealingly, we purchased our copy in Mexico before it was available in the USA.
A couple of months ago I began to read Rebbecca Stott's book, Darwin and the Barnacle (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), which is ostensibly about Darwin's eight-year effort to write the comprehensive work on barnacles, and in the same time solidify his own theories about natural selection. In fact, it's much more - and much deeper and richer, and one of the most highly readable books about Darwin's life and family before Origin of Species. It's entertaining, enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable, populated with a host of vivid characters and paced almost as tightly as a detective novel.
Both the book and movie provide a close study of Darwin's family, his lingering post-Beagle illness, the effects of his personal life on his studies and his ideas, and the eventual conflict in his life between popular belief and scientific evidence. But although the film's cinematography is captivates the viewer, the book is far deeper, far more fulfilling in providing insight and depth into the naturalist's life and his emotional and ideological conflicts.
Stott's work is the most compelling biographies I have read about Darwin (a personal hero of mine) and presents the man in a light I had not seen before: that of the struggling but passionate young biologist who is trying to parse the world through his theories that are increasingly contradictory to popular belief, and yet still trying to have a normal home life (his wife was as passionate about her faith and her belief in biblical creation; illnesses claimed the life of a beloved daughter and almost took Darwin's own life). These conflicts form the tension against which his intellectual development is portrayed in both book and movie.
While I have found nothing (yet) that links the two (book and film), in many scenes the film Creation seems drawn directly from the pages of Stott's book and her personification of the man. There are two major exceptions: first, the movie doesn't touch on Darwin's eight-year, obsessive study of barnacles. That massive, and time-consuming, effort would end in the publication of a four-volume set of books on barnacles that defined Darwin not only as a competent scientist and a qualified observer of the natural world, but it would establish his credentials that he needed to get his his greatest work, The Origin of Species, accepted.
Second, the book does not touch significantly on Darwin's formative voyage on the Beagle, where the movie uses several scenes from it to both illustrate Darwin's developing character and to highlight events that later shaped his ideas and his perspectives.
This was, after all, mid-Victorian England, and much of what we accept or take for granted today - like evolution - was not merely new to his contemporaries, but was a significant intellectual challenge that shook the foundations of their faith. Many of the ideas in play during Darwin's time were equally challenging, including many social and political concepts. The movie makes it seem, however, that Darwin's ideas were new, whereas Stott chronicles the history of the idea of evolutionary change ("transmutation") that preceded Darwin by as much as a century.
What made Darwin's work so powerful was not only that he had the scientific credentials to be taken seriously by his peers, but that he also identified a mechanism - natural selection - that had not been presented in previous theories.
Darwin's efforts to understand life at the microscopic level of barnacles gave him a better understanding of the macroscopic world - something that Buddhists or Taoists would have understood and appreciated. While his ideas ran counter to some contemporary faith-based views, it did not rock as many believers then as it does today. There were many other scientists and lay people in Darwin's time trying to understand the nature of the world. Even the age of the planet was being disputed and the idea of a world millions, even hundreds of millions of years old, was commonly accepted. Stott gives us this background.
Neither the film nor Stott really touch on the controversy Darwin's origin created, aside from how it affected his personal life and family. That is really a much bigger issue and to cover it would lose the tight focus the two have on the man himself.
Stott's book makes it much clearer, however, that Darwin toiled within the network of other naturalists and scientists, and depended on them for specimens, observations, and critical analysis. The film makes Darwin seem much more a loner than he really was. True, he worked alone in his home, but as Stott points out, he was at the centre of a hub of correspondence that saw letters, manuscripts and specimens coming and going daily, often to contemporaries around the world.
Without the precursor of his in-depth barnacle studies and his diary of his Beagle voyage, his works on natural selection would have been rejected as mere theory penned by an amateur. Those early years established Darwin as both an excellent and respected researcher, and cemented his role in the network of his contemporaries and competitors. While the movie brings such character as Hooker and Huxley to life, the book offers a deeper, richer view of their influence on Darwin (and of him on them).
The movie offers some alternate moments not in the book - such as Darwin's touching connection with an orang-utan, and the moral episode of the native children - but while deeply moving, they fall shy of declaring the moral implications such parables have. They also leave a lot unsaid about how they affected Darwin himself.
Both the movie and the book provide a good view of Darwin's formative years, but if you really want to understand how Darwin came to his conclusions against the changing world of Victorian science and faith, Stott's book is the better choice. Darwin emerges as a dogged, sometimes obsessive, but always courteous researcher widely respected by his peers, but also a troubled, caring and loving family man.
If you want a more emotional perspective, but beautifully crafted work on Darwin woven with the joys and agonies of his personal life - including his debilitating illness, the growing rift between him and his more religious wife, and the painful death of his beloved daughter, Annie - then the movie is your choice. Darwin's dilemmas over faith and family are more vividly incised in the film.
Either way, I recommend both Stott's book and the film and suggest you may want to pursue both. Just as an aside, casting Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin in Creation was an inspired choice: he looks remarkably like the man. And if you read the book, your view of the humble barnacle will never be the same. Neither are directly about evolution or Darwin's masterwork, Origin of Species and both only deal with it indirectly.
It was a deep, moving, yet intellectually satisfying film. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. For various reasons, we did not watch the DVD until recently, and then realized how we had missed seeing a remarkable movie.
Despite being a stunning, original film (released in 2009), Creation had some difficulty getting a US distributor, and only found one in early 2010. According to Wired magazine, this was in part due to the backwards pro-creationist attitude of many Americans. Rather revealingly, we purchased our copy in Mexico before it was available in the USA.
A couple of months ago I began to read Rebbecca Stott's book, Darwin and the Barnacle (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), which is ostensibly about Darwin's eight-year effort to write the comprehensive work on barnacles, and in the same time solidify his own theories about natural selection. In fact, it's much more - and much deeper and richer, and one of the most highly readable books about Darwin's life and family before Origin of Species. It's entertaining, enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable, populated with a host of vivid characters and paced almost as tightly as a detective novel.
Both the book and movie provide a close study of Darwin's family, his lingering post-Beagle illness, the effects of his personal life on his studies and his ideas, and the eventual conflict in his life between popular belief and scientific evidence. But although the film's cinematography is captivates the viewer, the book is far deeper, far more fulfilling in providing insight and depth into the naturalist's life and his emotional and ideological conflicts.
Stott's work is the most compelling biographies I have read about Darwin (a personal hero of mine) and presents the man in a light I had not seen before: that of the struggling but passionate young biologist who is trying to parse the world through his theories that are increasingly contradictory to popular belief, and yet still trying to have a normal home life (his wife was as passionate about her faith and her belief in biblical creation; illnesses claimed the life of a beloved daughter and almost took Darwin's own life). These conflicts form the tension against which his intellectual development is portrayed in both book and movie.
While I have found nothing (yet) that links the two (book and film), in many scenes the film Creation seems drawn directly from the pages of Stott's book and her personification of the man. There are two major exceptions: first, the movie doesn't touch on Darwin's eight-year, obsessive study of barnacles. That massive, and time-consuming, effort would end in the publication of a four-volume set of books on barnacles that defined Darwin not only as a competent scientist and a qualified observer of the natural world, but it would establish his credentials that he needed to get his his greatest work, The Origin of Species, accepted.
Second, the book does not touch significantly on Darwin's formative voyage on the Beagle, where the movie uses several scenes from it to both illustrate Darwin's developing character and to highlight events that later shaped his ideas and his perspectives.
This was, after all, mid-Victorian England, and much of what we accept or take for granted today - like evolution - was not merely new to his contemporaries, but was a significant intellectual challenge that shook the foundations of their faith. Many of the ideas in play during Darwin's time were equally challenging, including many social and political concepts. The movie makes it seem, however, that Darwin's ideas were new, whereas Stott chronicles the history of the idea of evolutionary change ("transmutation") that preceded Darwin by as much as a century.
What made Darwin's work so powerful was not only that he had the scientific credentials to be taken seriously by his peers, but that he also identified a mechanism - natural selection - that had not been presented in previous theories.
Darwin's efforts to understand life at the microscopic level of barnacles gave him a better understanding of the macroscopic world - something that Buddhists or Taoists would have understood and appreciated. While his ideas ran counter to some contemporary faith-based views, it did not rock as many believers then as it does today. There were many other scientists and lay people in Darwin's time trying to understand the nature of the world. Even the age of the planet was being disputed and the idea of a world millions, even hundreds of millions of years old, was commonly accepted. Stott gives us this background.
Neither the film nor Stott really touch on the controversy Darwin's origin created, aside from how it affected his personal life and family. That is really a much bigger issue and to cover it would lose the tight focus the two have on the man himself.
Stott's book makes it much clearer, however, that Darwin toiled within the network of other naturalists and scientists, and depended on them for specimens, observations, and critical analysis. The film makes Darwin seem much more a loner than he really was. True, he worked alone in his home, but as Stott points out, he was at the centre of a hub of correspondence that saw letters, manuscripts and specimens coming and going daily, often to contemporaries around the world.
Without the precursor of his in-depth barnacle studies and his diary of his Beagle voyage, his works on natural selection would have been rejected as mere theory penned by an amateur. Those early years established Darwin as both an excellent and respected researcher, and cemented his role in the network of his contemporaries and competitors. While the movie brings such character as Hooker and Huxley to life, the book offers a deeper, richer view of their influence on Darwin (and of him on them).
The movie offers some alternate moments not in the book - such as Darwin's touching connection with an orang-utan, and the moral episode of the native children - but while deeply moving, they fall shy of declaring the moral implications such parables have. They also leave a lot unsaid about how they affected Darwin himself.
Both the movie and the book provide a good view of Darwin's formative years, but if you really want to understand how Darwin came to his conclusions against the changing world of Victorian science and faith, Stott's book is the better choice. Darwin emerges as a dogged, sometimes obsessive, but always courteous researcher widely respected by his peers, but also a troubled, caring and loving family man.
If you want a more emotional perspective, but beautifully crafted work on Darwin woven with the joys and agonies of his personal life - including his debilitating illness, the growing rift between him and his more religious wife, and the painful death of his beloved daughter, Annie - then the movie is your choice. Darwin's dilemmas over faith and family are more vividly incised in the film.
Either way, I recommend both Stott's book and the film and suggest you may want to pursue both. Just as an aside, casting Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin in Creation was an inspired choice: he looks remarkably like the man. And if you read the book, your view of the humble barnacle will never be the same. Neither are directly about evolution or Darwin's masterwork, Origin of Species and both only deal with it indirectly.
