MOST YOUNG MEN OF HIS TIME COULD ONLY FANTAsize; but Charles Darwin experienced the overt drama of his century’s archetypal episode in a genre of personal stories that we now call “coming of age”: a five-year voyage of pure adventure (and much science), circumnavigating the globe on H.M.S. Beagle. Returning to England at age twenty-seven, Darwin became a homebody and never again left his native land, not even to cross the English Channel. Nonetheless, his subsequent life included two internal dramas far more intense, far more portentous, and (for anyone who can move beyond the equation of swashbuckling with excitement), far more thrilling than anything he had experienced as a world traveler: first, the intellectual drama of discovering both the factuality and mechanism of evolution; and second, the emotional drama of recognizing (and relishing) the revolutionary implications of his theory of natural selection, while learning the pain that revelation would impose upon both immediate family and surrounding society.
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