The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth

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A] meticulously researched compelling narrative . . . Diana Preston’s vibrant reconstruction of Darwin’s extraordinary journey, world-changing work and the consequences he experienced makes it all accessible and new in her telling.”— Janet Somerville, Toronto Star Thirty-five years before, in 1796, having observed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox appeared immune from smallpox, Edward Jenner had created a vaccine using cowpox. Though people were initially skeptical, by the 1830s vaccination was well established in England. During his years at Cambridge, Darwin’s enthusiasm had become beetle hunting, then a popular pursuit, to which his second cousin and lifelong friend William Darwin Fox, also an undergraduate at Christ’s College, introduced him. One day, peeling a strip of bark from a tree trunk, he uncovered two rare specimens and seized one in each hand. But then he spotted a third. Unable to contemplate letting it go, he popped the beetle he was clutching in his right hand into his mouth, upon which it secreted an acrid fluid, burning his tongue so badly he had to spit it out. Before long Darwin was so keen that he hired an assistant—a laborer—to scrape moss off old trees and gather debris from barges in which reeds were transported into the city from the fens. As a result Darwin acquired some rare species. In 1829 he sent a beetle to Stephens’s Illustrations of British Insects and was thrilled when the magazine published a drawing of it above the magic words, ‘captured by C. Darwin, Esq.’ —the first time his name had appeared in print. It is, however, perhaps symptomatic of where his strongest enthusiasms lay at Cambridge that Darwin, who was to become an inveterate list maker, kept few records of his beetle collecting but a meticulous, detailed inventory of the kinds and numbers of game he shot and when and where he shot them. Unforgettable . . . The definitive account of the Lusitania.”— Philadelphia Inquirer, on Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy In both cases Dampier was prefiguring Darwin’s thinking. Curious about what Darwin knew of Dampier’s work, I began reading Darwin’s writings to find them peppered with references to Dampier. I also discovered Dampier’s books were on the cramped shelves of the Beagle’s library.

Preston’s] books are always entertaining . . . This book fits that mould; it’s an adventure story . . . The author has chosen the perfect topic. It’s nearly impossible to write a dull book about Darwin . . . The real attraction of this book lies in the way it turns the development of evolutionary theory into a personal story.”— Gerald DeGroot, Times (UK) A brisk and accessible account of how Charles Darwin developed his theory of natural selection . . . A rewarding look at the development of an earth-shattering idea."-- Publishers Weekly One pitch-dark night Darwin recorded a strange sight: “The sea from its extreme luminousness presented a wonderful … appearance; every part of the water, which by day is seen as foam, glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake was a milky train.—As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and from the reflected light the sky just above the horizon was not so utterly dark as the rest of the Heavens …” The sight reminded him of Milton’s descriptions “of the regions of Chaos and Anarchy” from his favorite book, Paradise Lost. A colorful chronicle of high-stakes negotiations and a study in human frailties, missteps, and ideological blunders.”— Washington Post Ms. Preston’s conference narrative abjures authorial hindsight judgments, placing the spotlight instead on the characters’ natural blind spots and biases. She also devotes a full third of the book to the summit’s historical context and personalities, the latter of which are nicely developed.”— Wall Street JournalFrom the Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning historian, the colorful, dramatic story of Charles Darwin's journey on HMS Beagle that inspired the evolutionary theories in his path-breaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man While much has been written about Darwin’s revolutionary scientific achievements on this journey, historian Preston sheds light on the voyage itself, its captain and crew, and the Native populations they encountered.”— Booklist (starred review) A highly readable, highly detailed account of the historic meetings and often difficult and contentious negotiations between Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and their staffs, and a vivid description of the once ornate Tsarist palaces and their much deteriorated wartime condition that served as the setting for meetings, dinners, and private talks."-- New York Journal of Books

When twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles—invited by ship’s captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship’s naturalist — he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history. Nonetheless, over the course of the five-year journey around the globe in often hard and hazardous conditions, Darwin would make observations and gather samples that would form the basis of his revolutionary, evolutionary theories about the origin of species and natural selection. The historian Diana Preston travelled around the world to retrace Charles Darwin’s momentous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle for her new book, The Evolution of Charles Darwin. She tells Historia about her own voyage of discovery in his wake. From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning historian, the colorful, dramatic story of Charles Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle that inspired the evolutionary theories in his path-breaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man Charles Darwin’s first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species, 1837: Wikimedia (public domain) An engaging narrative . . . Rich in detail and texture."-- San Diego Union Tribune, on Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to HiroshimaCover: The Evolution of Charles Darwin, THE EPIC VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE THAT FOREVER CHANGED OUR VIEW OF LIFE ON EARTH by Diana Preston

Over succeeding months FitzRoy’s sometimes violent and usually mutually unsatisfactory encounters with the Fuegians convinced him that so long as we were ignorant of the Fuegian language, and the natives were equally ignorant of ours, we should never know much about them … nor would there be the slightest chance of their being raised one step above the low place which they then held in our estimation. He conceived a plan to take some Fuegians to England to be educated in Christianity and British ways before being returned to their homeland as a catalyst for civilizing others. By a variety of methods he inveigled aboard a little girl around nine years old and three young men, quieting any twinges of conscience by attempting to make sure his social experimentees understood that one day they would return. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Evolution_of_Charles_Darwin_2022_-_DIana_Preston.pdf, The_Evolution_of_Charles_Darwin_2022_-_DIana_Preston.epubThe Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth by Diana Preston is published on 17 November, 2022. Lively and nuanced . . . Shrewd on the main personalities . . . Preston goes beyond the horse-trading of three old men, with vivid scene-setting of the tsarist palaces where the conference took place.”— Times (UK) On 30 June 1860, in Oxford University's hot and crowded Museum of Natural History, crowds politely endured a rambling talk by a visiting New York academic 'On the Intellectual Development of Europe, with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin'. What they had really come to hear was not the lecture, but the subsequent debate about Charles Darwin's recent publication, On the Origin of Species. Newspapers reported the event to be as sensational as anticipated, with onlookers shouting and even fainting. Because of its twin scientific and philosophical consequences for humanity, the voyage of HMS Beagle was to become one of the most important ever undertaken, arguably surpassing the expeditions of Leif Erikson, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus, and James Cook, and even the first moon landing. Yet when the Beagle departed England, little suggested the intellectual revolution to follow. Charles Darwin was a conventional young man, but as the voyage progressed, he began to develop unconventional ideas. The theories that grew from his research on the voyage would redefine perceptions of humanity and its relationship to other species, showing it had evolved from earlier life forms and was not the divinely created and ordained apex of an unchanging hierarchy. Darwin’s thinking would consign the first chapter of Genesis, and with it Adam and Eve, to a mythological limbo, though he would never become a declared atheist himself. One thousand pounds was a very substantial sum, equivalent to more than one hundred thousand pounds today. CHAPTER TWO A Birthday for the Rest of My Life