22 The New York Review
clear: governing and campaigning
would become indistinguishable. The
consequences of that decision extend
beyond a widening national polar-
ization, as the coronavirus crisis has
demonstrated.
Impeachment showed that the per-
manent campaign was about more
than fundraising. An activated Repub-
lican base discouraged GOP senators
who might have broken independent
by raising the specter of primary chal-
lenges. Approaching the impeach-
ment hearings as one long grievance
allowed Nunes and his colleagues to
subvert the hearings if not the out-
come. Yet fundraising was always
present.
Treating governance as a campaign
performance has made it difficult to
unify the country in confronting a
pandemic. Those who have been fed a
steady diet of “the media is fake news”
and “Democrats want to destroy the
country” have been slow to accept
the grave danger that the coronavirus
presents. The inability of leaders like
Nunes and Trump to transition away
from campaign performance slowed
their response to the virus—and
has especially imperiled their retiree
followers.
The day after the Senate acquitted
Trump, the president gave a rambling
celebratory speech in the East Room
of the White House before a crowdedroom of congressional allies, Fox News
celebrities, and other supporters. He
made a point of praising every single
defender by name. “When she opens
that mouth, you were killing them,
Elise,” Trump said about Stefanik, who
stood up and waved to the crowd. “I’ll
always be your friend.”
About Nunes, Trump was rap-
turous: “He’s the other side’s worst
nightmare.... He’s the most legiti-
mate human being. He’s the hardest
worker.... They wanted to destroy
him. They tried. They got close. But he
wouldn’t let it happen.” Those gathered
in the room rose for a standing ovation.
Within hours of the speech, video
snippets of Trump’s remarks appearedon the social media accounts and fund-
raising e-mails of the participants men-
tioned. Nunes sent an e-mail to his “top
supporters” rehashing Trump’s praise:I am truly humbled and honored
by President Trump’s kind words.
I have fought tooth and nail to get
to the bottom of the deep state’s
plot to destroy our president, even
in the midst of countless personal
attacks. But the fight isn’t over yet,
Jake. We must continue to fight
Democrat corruption and defend
our democracy. Take a Stand:
Pitch in $20.(^) Q
The Brilliant Plodder
David Quammen
Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants:
A Tour of His Botanical Legacy
by Ken Thompson.
University of Chicago Press,
255 pp., $25.00
On the Backs of Tortoises :
Darwin, the Galápagos, and
the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden
by Elizabeth Hennessy.
Yale University Press, 310 pp., $30.00
Evolution Before Darwin:
Theories of the Transmutation of
Species in Edinburgh, 1804–1834
by Bill Jenkins.
Edinburgh University Press,
222 pp., $110.00
Charles Darwin is ever with us. A
month seldom passes without new
books about the man, his life, his work,
and his influence—books by scholars
for scholars, by scholars for ordinary
readers, and by the many unwashed
rest of us nonfiction authors who pre-
sume to enter the fray, convinced that
there’s one more new way to tell the
story of who Darwin was, what he ac-
tually said or wrote, why he mattered.
This flood of books, accompanied by a
constant outpouring of related papers
in history journals and other academic
outlets, is called the Darwin Industry.
There’s a parallel to this in publish-
ing: the Lincoln Industry, which by one
authoritative count had yielded 15,000
books—a towering number—as of
2012, when an actual tower of Lincoln
books was constructed in the lobby of
the renovated Ford’s Theatre, the site of
his assassination, in Washington, D.C.
It rose thirty-four feet, measured eight
feet around, yet contained less than
half the total Lincoln library. You could
think of the Darwin library as a similar
tower of books three stories high, big
around as an oak, festooned with biog-
raphies and philosophical treatises and
evolutionary textbooks and Creationist
tracts and the latest sarcastic volume of
The Darwin Awards for suicidal stu-
pidity and books with subtitles such as
“ Genetic Engineering and the Future
of Humanity.” Janet Browne’s magiste-
rial two-volume life would be included;
so would David Dobbs’s Reef Madness,
about Darwin’s theory of the formation
of coral atolls, and a handful of books
on the Scopes trial. Lincoln and Dar-
win were born on the very same date,
February 12, 1809: a good day for the
publishing business.
One lesson from all this is that Dar-
win’s name sells. A less mercantile way
of viewing it is that Darwin’s name
stands for what Daniel Dennett has
called “the single best idea anyone
has ever had,” and therefore serves as
a portal to scientific and philosophical
ruminations of vast depth and breadth.
We can’t stop reading and talking about
Darwin, 138 years after his death, be-
cause the great theory of which he
was co-conceiver (with Alfred Russel
Wallace) and chief propounder (in On
the Origin of Species) was so big and
startling and forceful, yet so unfinished
when he died in 1882, that there’s al-
ways more work to do. We’re still trying
to figure out how evolution by natural
selection—Darwin’s dangerous idea, in
Dennett’s phrase—applies to every as-
pect of life on Earth, from virulence in
coronaviruses to human social behavior.
It takes a lot of books to follow all those
tendrils out to their end points, and a
lot of other books to examine Darwin’s
digressions and lesser fancies (pigeon
breeding, the taxonomy of barnacles,
the facial expressions of orangutans,
climbing plants), his place in scientific
history, and his continuing influence on
how we understand the living world and
humanity’s place within it.
Each of the three new books consid-
ered here offers a unique slant on Dar-
win. The least controversial of them
is Ken Thompson’s Darwin’s Most
Wonderful Plants, a survey of the bo-
tanical experimenting and theorizing
that occupied Darwin’s golden years.
This little volume proceeds from Vir-
ginia creepers to sundews to orchids to
pansies, all as gently as a Sunday gar-
den tour, but with expert evolutionary
commentary, and it is garnished by
Thompson with some odd facts about
plant evolution that Darwin might have
considered but didn’t. It’s a glimpse of
Darwin the country squire, Darwin the
horticulturalist, an old man pottering
in what Thompson calls “the cabbage
patch”—or think of Don Corleone
amid the tomatoes. It contains the fine
sentence, “Of course, any fool can be
impressed by a Venus flytrap,” and adds
contrastingly that “Darwin’s genius
was to see the wonder, and the signif-
icance, in the ordinary and mundane.”
Monitor the weed seedlings coming up
on a patch of bare ground during March
and April, for instance, and you might
find that by May three quarters of them
have been killed, chiefly by slugs—the
struggle for existence.
Darwin’s gardening was no frivo-
lous hobby because it involved serious
buttressing of his theory. From it came
no fewer than six books, plus parts of
a seventh. The last of them, published
two years before his death and titled
The Power of Movement in Plants, was
so ploddingly empirical, describing
the same experiments repeated over
and over, that Darwin, characteristi-
cally candid, called it a “horrid bore”
and encouraged readers to skip to the
summary at the end. (Good advice,
Thompson notes.) But Darwin’s vol-
ume on orchids—his first book after
The Origin, a sly follow-up—explored
a dazzling variety of adaptations by
which orchidaceous plants get them-
selves fertilized by insects, and his book
on carnivorous vegetation explained
how and why some plants growing in
nutrient- poor substrates meet their nu-
tritional needs by catching and digest-
ing animals.
Those and the other plant books all
retold the story: excess population,
competition for resources, and random
variation, with its attendant differen-
Charles Darwin