The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

CLARK, Ronald W. The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1991.

Octavo. Full black leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 449 pp., with black and white photographic illustrations throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "Library of Great Lives" series.

Ronald W. Clark (1916–1987) was the most consistently accomplished British scientific biographer of his generation, the author of lives of Einstein, Freud, Bertrand Russell, and J. B. S. Haldane among others. The Survival of Charles Darwin, published in 1984 and one of his last major works, is unusual among Darwin biographies in the scope of its ambition: the subtitle — A Biography of a Man and an Idea — signals that Clark is not content to stop at Darwin's death in 1882. The book traces the entire subsequent history of Darwinism, from the initial controversy surrounding On the Origin of Species through the eclipse of natural selection by Mendelian genetics in the early twentieth century, through the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s in which genetics and natural selection were reconciled, and into the molecular biology of the mid-twentieth century that gave evolution its biochemical foundations. It is as much an intellectual history of biology as a conventional biography, and the two threads illuminate each other throughout.

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published On the Origin of Species in 1859 after more than twenty years of deliberate delay, aware of what the book would provoke. It provoked everything he had anticipated and more. The confrontation between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860 was only the most theatrical episode in a debate that continued long after Darwin himself had retreated to Down House and left the public argument to others. What Clark traces with particular care is the way in which the theory survived not only religious opposition but also periods of serious scientific doubt, when the absence of a credible mechanism for inheritance appeared to undermine its foundations, until the synthesis of Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics produced the framework that has governed biology ever since.

Fine. Presenting as new.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000482