A flawed and dangerous theory

If there were a prize awarded to the book with the best opening line, A. N. Wilson would be clearing a space on his mantelpiece. ‘Darwin was wrong’, he announces at the start of this hugely enjoyable revisionist biography, which will be read in certain scientific circles to the background noise of teeth being ground and knives being sharpened. A brilliant Victorian naturalist, certainly, and still an inescapable cultural presence — think of Darwin staring out benignly from the £10 note — but according to Wilson, also a passive aggressive racist whose evolutionary theories no longer stand up to scrutiny. If that doesn’t put the felis catus among the columbidae it’s hard to know what will.

These days probably fewer people encounter Darwin through his writings than they do through his statue in the entrance hall of Kensington’s Natural History Museum. Thickly bearded, with one leg carelessly crossed over the other, he looks both grandly imposing and surprisingly down-to-earth, like an Old Testament prophet waiting for the bus.