I’ve been an evolutionary biologist for nearly half a century and have read hundreds of books about Charles Darwin and his science. If we exclude books written by creationists — a group that A.N. Wilson doesn’t identify with — “Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker” is by far the worst. Appalling in its sloppy arguments and unrelenting and unwarranted negativity, its most infuriating flaw is its abysmal failure to get the most basic facts right. It’s a grossly inaccurate and partisan attack on both Darwin and evolution.

This book is the founding volume of the Fake News School of Science Writing. It has strict rules: if a fact is inconvenient, ignore it. If it fits, exaggerate, and when fact is lacking use your imagination. Ad hominem always works, so that we learn that Darwin was a habitual liar — damned in his own words, for as a child he told a friend that he could make different coloured flowers by watering them with dyes: this, he later admitted, was “a monstrous fable”.
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But what about his ideas? Here, Wilson seems to glory in using his talent to be wrong, wrong and wrong again on almost every scientific topic. In the classic mould of the contrarian, he despises anything said by mainstream biology in favour of marginal and sometimes preposterous theories.

First, let’s take the science. Wilson concedes with a smirk that Darwin “was among the foremost experts on the earthworm” but not much else. Specifically, the big picture stuff was beyond him, which is why he gobbled up other people’s theories about evolution, including those of his grandfather Dr Erasmus Darwin, and then passed them off as his own. Indeed, Darwin-as-plagiarist is one of the chief poison darts in Wilson’s argument. What actually happened, of course, was that Darwin absorbed the hints and hypotheses of an earlier generation of science writers, including those of his grandfather, and embarked on a painstaking programme of data-gathering that allowed him to substantiate what had previously been merely a widely held hunch. That there remained gaps, dead ends and errors in his narrative account of how life unfolded on earth over multi-millennia was something Darwin was always quick to acknowledge. It was in response to the questions and corrections that flooded into Down House from around the world that he continued to modify his arguments. This, one might think, is what scientists do, especially ones who are committed to the concept of evolution, the slow adjustments of shape and form over time. For Wilson, however, Darwin’s constant need to revise his published work is evidence of nothing more than the narcissist’s terror of being caught in the wrong.
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Most beastly of all, though, is Wilson’s almost-claim that Darwin was secretly sympathetic to slavery. By a series of elisions as slithery as any he ascribes to his subject, he manages to suggest that, if forced to answer the question posed by the enchained black man on the famous abolitionist medallion, “Am I not a man and a brother?”, Darwin “could” have answered “in the negative”. The shock value comes from the fact that the medallion, which did so much to turn ordinary Britons against slavery in the 1790s, was made by Darwin’s grandfather, the potter Josiah Wedgwood.

It turns out that Wilson has no evidence for this egregious slur. All he can muster is the whiskery argument that, because Darwin saw black and brown people (not to mention Jews, Slavs, Celts and anyone who didn’t come from his native belt of central England) as lesser, he was a proto-eugenicist. What he actually was, however, was an Englishman with the usual prejudices of his time. To blame Darwin for being racist is like accusing Freud of not being a feminist, which is to say both blindingly obvious and slightly beside the point.

By the false lights of Wilson’s selectively tutored imagination - and egged on and seduced by a theory whose outward simplicity invites, siren-like, the commentaries of those least qualified to do so - the foundations of modern biological science are unsound, and “Darwin was wrong”. Not content with damning his evolutionary theory, Wilson proceeds to transform the charming, self-effacing, beetle-crazy and endearing gentleman naturalist into a ruthless egomaniac whose evolutionary theory was retrofitted to defend an unwholesome ideology and furnish a mandate for the excesses of Victorian materialism.
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The inadequate evidence marshalled by Wilson to support his contentious assertions, purloined from the pages of popular science books, rehashing tired arguments as if they were a new revelation, is largely blind to the extensive and irrefutable scientific insights of molecular genetics.

Wilson’s book contains numerous and serious factual errors ... Footnotes lead to incorrect references and many dates are quite wrong. It’s hard to see how any care for either historical or scientific accuracy could result in such a book.

Throughout, Wilson bashes Darwin for supposed arrogance, dishonesty and incompetence and trots out a long line of old anti-Darwin myths: for example, that Darwin stole ideas from Edward Blyth, whom Wilson mistakes for an evolutionist. (This too is borrowed from Eiseley.) Wilson invents and condemns a “towering ambition” Darwin had “to be a universal genius”. And eugenics and Nazi race laws are also blamed (incorrectly) on Darwin.

The book claims to be a “radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book which isn’t afraid to challenge the Darwinian orthodoxy”. The result is one of the most unreliable, inaccurate and tendentious anti-Darwin books of recent times.