Charles Darwin: Evolution Through a Network of Lives
100 Lives That Shaped the World · Episode 38
- Historical Biographies
- 42 min
- Ages 12–99
- 10 chapters
About this audiobook
A biography of Darwin from privileged family and global voyage to notebooks, correspondence, experiments, Wallace's parallel insight, publication, human evolution, and contested social legacy.
Why it's worth a listen
It explains natural selection while restoring collectors, Indigenous encounters, enslaved people, family labor, breeders, correspondents, and Alfred Russel Wallace to the story.
A question to keep
How did Darwin turn observations gathered through imperial networks into natural selection, and how should we separate evolutionary science from later social misuse?
Chapters
- A Letter from the Malay Archipelago
- Privilege, Loss, and Natural History
- Edinburgh and Cambridge Networks
- The Beagle as Survey and Empire
- Fossils, Islands, and Return
- Notebooks Toward Natural Selection
- A Household and Correspondence Machine
- Wallace, Joint Papers, and Origin
- Humans, Sex, Race, and Victorian Hierarchy
- Evolution After Darwin