The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution. David Quammen. W. W. Norton, New York, 2006. 304 pp. $22.95 (ISBN 9780393059816 cloth).

David Quammen is a traveler and science writer, perhaps best known for his account of the development of biogeography, The Song of the Dodo (Scribner, 1996). In his new book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, Quammen tells the story, at a popular level, of how Darwin conceived, substantiated, and eventually promoted his theory of evolution by natural selection. He certainly seems to have hit the nail on the head—the book has already received a rave review in Science from Janet Browne, author of the best modern scholarly biography of Darwin in the literature.

Quammen takes the unusual approach of beginning his story after Darwin's return from the voyage of the Beagle. He does this partly on the grounds that the voyage will already be familiar to many readers, but also because he wants to focus very closely on the theory of natural selection. He is very clear about the radical implications of the idea of undirected evolution, as opposed to more comforting visions of evolution driven by some kind of purposeful force. To chart Darwin's development of the theory, Quammen intersperses the story of Darwin's life with occasional flashbacks to fill in the previous history of the areas Darwin studied, including taxonomy and biogeography. There is a nice mix of the professional and the personal aspects of Darwin's life—the latter often of major significance, as with the death of his daughter Annie, which undermined the last of his religious faith. Quammen gives us a feel for the technical aspects of Darwin's work in areas such as barnacle taxonomy, and provides a balanced analysis of the controversial question of why he delayed publication of his theory. Was it the fear of persecution or the need to generate more scientific evidence? Probably a bit of both.

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin includes a clear outline of the argument of Darwin's Origin of Species, although here—perhaps inevitably—Quammen has to adopt a rather more didactic presentation to get the details across. His coverage of the role played by Alfred Rus-sel Wallace is good, and he is aware of the possibility that the theory of natural selection presented in Wallace's 1858 paper was significantly different from Darwin's. He also gives a good account of the reception of the theory, although he says surprisingly little about the role played by Thomas Henry Huxley in defending Darwin against the early attacks.

Here I have to declare an interest, because Quammen makes use (with generous acknowledgment) of my own work on the non-Darwinian theories of evolution that flourished in the late 19th century. In the end, Darwin persuaded almost everyone to take evolution seriously, but it would be another 50 years before the synthesis with genetics turned natural selection into the modern evolutionary paradigm. To simplify the last part of the story, Quammen ends with an interview he conducted with Douglas Futuyma, who explains how a modern geneticist understands the workings of natural selection.

Quammen is well aware of the disturbing nature of Darwin's theory, although he confesses that he can't really understand how present-day creationists can be so blind to the evidence supporting evolution. It's not, he claims, that we can prove evolution—but all the alternatives are useless as science. The ideas of directed, inherently progressive evolution that were floated in the 19th century in an attempt to head off the more disturbing implications of natural selection have also turned out to be unworkable.

We are left with a choice between Darwin and creation—and many Amer-icans clearly prefer creation. Books such as The Reluctant Mr. Darwin may go some way toward helping to maintain an interest in Darwin and his theory, but whether they can stem the rising tide of opposition to Darwinism is another story. In the end, those who see supernatural creation as the default position—that is, the position one takes up without some good argument to the contrary—will never be persuaded, because the arguments for evolution will never be strong enough to move them. The problem for evolutionary biologists, and for writers like Quammen, is that for them the search for natural explanations is the default position, and this makes it hard for them to understand the thinking of those who feel quite comfortable invoking the supernatural.

What we need are not more accounts of Darwin and his discoveries, but more efforts to understand the underlying motives behind the debate. We also need a clearer presentation of the alternative positions that can be taken up by a serious Christian who wants to explore the possibility that the Creator might choose to achieve his ends through a complex and indirect process of natural development. I suspect, however, that in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species, we are going to get a lot more books like Quam-men's. Few, however, will do a better job of presenting the story of how Darwin put together his momentous new idea.