The Darwin Myth is a short biography of Charles of Darwin and a discussion of his ideas and their implications. Darwin, the grandson of an enthusiastic proponent of evolution, was born in a freethinking family and very much a child of his times. Wiker makes the case that Darwin’s idea of natural selection was not the unintended result of evidence unearthed during his famous trip on the HMS Beagle that matured over time. Rather, he devised it from the outset with the goal of putting together an entirely godless explanation of nature, including humans. According to the Wiker, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man should be understood as two parts of a single work in which Darwin progressively unfolded his argument in a way that would be more easily accepted by public opinion.
The Darwin Myth draws attention to the contradictions in Charles Darwin: he was a kindly man, a loving husband and father, yet his ideas of natural selection and the survival of the fittest would serve as justification for the Nazis in Germany and the eugenics movements in the United Kingdom and the United States. He was a careful scientist, but at the same time he was so invested in his ideas that, even in the face of contradicting evidence, he would not contemplate the possibility that his interpretation of evolution was wrong or incomplete. Darwin was not unaware of the troubling consequences his ideas would have especially when applied to social sciences and policy. He made a faint attempt to mitigate these by asserting that “sympathy” was the highest expression of evolution, a notion that Darwin’s more logical and less scrupulous followers were quick to discard.
The author is not opposed to evolution; on the contrary he believes it is an established scientific fact. But he distinguishes evolution from ‘Darwinism,’ the belief that everything can be explained as the result of blind fate and natural selection.