Devin Monroe’s Reviews > The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution > Status Update

She didn’t share his intellectual interests; she didn’t share his disdain for religion or his materialistic view of the world; she still worshiped a Christian God and worried for the soul of her husband; and he, for his part, loved her to the moon.

The conclusion that Darwin drew from these experiments involved biogeography: Plants were certainly capable of crossing oceans. It didn’t take an ancient land bridge that had sunk beneath the sea (as some of his colleagues imagined), and it didn’t take an act of God, to explain how vegetation might appear on a new volcanic island.

Darwin noted, that from the hard Malthusian struggle involving “death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature” had come a great good, the creation of the higher animals. “There is a simple grandeur,” he wrote,

Does a dog have a conscience? Does a bee have a sense of communal responsibility? Is the human conscience just another form of inherited instinct, an adaptation for social behavior? Is the human mind just a function of the human body? Does the idea of God arise naturally in human minds from that instinctive conscience?

Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own...had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence.