A detailed and engaging retrospective look at the numerous contributions made by Charles Darwin to modern botany.
The thesis of Ken Thompson’s engaging new book is that Darwin’s reputation as a botanist has long lacked the recognition it deserves. The over-arching achievement of his career, the discovery and promulgation of the theory of evolution, has cast shade on some of his more detailed research in the sphere of plant biology; work that demands celebration in its own right. The author sets out to right this wrong by examining some of Darwin’s prescient botanical discoveries and theories.
Thompson draws attention to Darwin’s work in three areas: the contrivances by which climbing plants climb, insectivory in plants, and the mechanisms within flowers that encourage cross-pollination. His account highlights the creativity of Darwin’s mind, and his uncanny knack for asking the right questions, questions that foreshadowed some still expanding fields of research. Compared to modern-day botanists, Darwin was disadvantaged by a lack of knowledge in the fields of microscopy and chemistry and limited to experimenting on plants he could grow in his own garden. His fixation with cross-pollination mechanisms is a case in point – before the science of genetics existed, Darwin had intuited the vital importance to a species’ survival of mixing the gene pool.
This is a fascinating insight into the scientist’s sheer delight in observing the minutiae of living organisms. Intuitive he may have been, but it was the painstaking hours spent on detailed observation that put him in a position to generate his larger ideas. To paraphrase his son, Francis: ‘he supplied the most brilliant evidence in favour of… natural selection… But I do not think that was his object, it was rather a byproduct of work carried on for the love of doing it’.