Product Description

It is 1846. Darwin is poised to publish "The Origin of the Species" and blow the scientific world apart. But one small creature makes him hesitate. First, he decides to solve the riddle of a tiny barnacle the picked up on teh shores of southern Chile, the last of his Beagle specimens. The investigation takes eight years and tests his theory to the limit. "Darwin and the Barnacle" is the fascinating story of how genius sometimes proceeds through indirection - and how one small item of curiosity contributed to history's most spectacular scientific breakthrough.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110027 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
"Now, at last, Rebecca Stott...has had the courage and tenacity to make Darwin's barnacles--and their importance--accessible to the rest of us."

James A. Secord, author of 'Victorian Sensation
'A marvellous evocation of an eminent Victorian's passion for some surprisingly sexy sea creatures. You'll never look at a barnacle, or at Darwin, the same way again.'

Glasgow Herald, 8 March 2003
(It) weaves together science and humanity superbly, making it an absorbing accessible read.

Customer Reviews

Extremely Disappointing
This book has several problems, the most noticeable one being that it doesn't live up to its own subtitle- "The Story Of One Tiny Creature And History's Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough". I think that, based on that subtitle, it is a reasonable assumption that the book is going to link Darwin's study of barnacles to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Well, I read all 261 pages of this book and let me state categorically that the author never makes the connection. We get a lot of information about barnacles, no doubt about it. We find out about barnacles that secrete their own shells, barnacles that burrow into other creatures' shells, barnacles that attach themselves to flesh, etc. We also get to know about hermaphroditical, bisexual, and unisexual barnacles. But the author never goes into specifics regarding why these variations developed, nor does she explain how the study of barnacles helped Darwin to further develop, or fine tune, his theory of evolution by natural selection. As I kept reading this book, I said to myself that the author must have a reason for barraging us with all of this barnacle minutiae. Must be she'll have a chapter near the end where she'll explain the specific biological/environmental reasons for the variations and show how this helped Darwin to clarify his thinking. Well, sorry to say, there is no such chapter in the book. Another problem with the book is that the narrative flow is interrupted by some very bizarre analogies. For example, a developing fetus in Emma Darwin (Charles's wife) is compared to a barnacle attaching itself to a host; and Charles undergoing an examination of his stomach is compared to a dissected barnacle being studied under a microscope. There are many more similar examples scattered throughout the book. The book does have its good points: we learn about what an incredibly hard job Darwin took on when he decided to devote years of his life to studying barnacles, due to the seemingly endless variations he encountered, complicated by the physical difficulty involved in dissecting and studying such tiny creatures. We also learn that Darwin didn't work in a vacuum. He corresponded with many other naturalists, some of them generous enough to loan Darwin barnacle specimens and fossils from their own collections. Unfortunately, the positive aspects of the book are too few to overcome the strange style of writing, compounded by the more serious problem of the author not accomplishing what she set out to do,

Darwin and the Barnacle
If you are coming to this book from a biological background, hoping to learn what it was about barnacles that so captivated Darwin's interest for eight long years, you may be dissapointed. This story is supperficially about barnacles, and makes me wonder whether the author has any knowledge or interest in them. As an emotional historical novel of that period of the life of Darwin I cannot fault it, but I was, perhaps mistakenly, expecting more. The author may be well read and may have even seen the actual manuscrips and many of the original samples, yet she appeared more interested in the style of Darwins handwriting then the actual biological import of his work. She goes into very little detail of the work, and by placing the barnacle at such prominance in the catchy title mistakenly implies a book about the relationship between a key figure in the understanding of Biology, and the organism which gained him that reputation. The author has failed to distance herself from her subject, and has failed completely to address the barnacle, or Darwin's work on the barnacle.

a mind at work
a meticulous and poetic study of an important phase of Darwin's life - an important study of a great mind at work. No one has in my view woven the texture of Darwin's daily life with this much care and attention.