Darwin

THE anniversary of Darwin's birth in 1809 and publication of Origin of Species in 1859 is connecting past to present, science to art, philosophy to biology, just as firmly as Darwin linked chimpanzees to humans. Evolution is being presented to us by all kinds of writers, artists and scholars in widely different registers.

The connection between Darwin, art and Australia is the hook that successfully picks up otherwise disparate historical topics in Jeanette Hoorn's Reframing Darwin. This collection of essays accompanied an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne and develops some of the links between Darwinism and Australian art already well known from F. W. and J. M. Nicholas's Darwin in Australia. But this book also presents a few entirely surprising associations. With an illustration on every page, Reframing Darwin offers genuinely new and readable scholarship in an elegant package.

A 1907 Melbourne controversy over the instalment of an anthropomorphised gorilla statue is one of the more intriguing stories, beautifully illustrated. Canonical artists — Tom Roberts and Conrad Martens, for example — are reconsidered in the light of Darwinism. Another chapter connects Gould's famed Birds of Australia, Darwin's sexual selection theory and the royals Victoria and Albert. A little stretched? That's what I thought. But there it is: a brilliant, insightful essay by Jonathan Smith in which Gould's lyrebirds become part of Darwin's data for The Descent of Man, all set against the tricky sexual selection of the gender-inverted Victorian royal family. The thing about evolution is that it connects just about everything: it's nothing if not ecumenical.

One great benefit of the Darwin year is that it has produced fresh angles, less on Darwin himself than on all the other natural historians across the world – those who agreed and disagreed; those of his own generation and their intellectual descendants. Amelia Scurry's chapter on the stunning illustrations of Tasmanian natural history artist Louisa Ann Meredith, for example, shows how Darwin's ideas reshaped some of the key conventions of artistic engagement with science. Sarah Thomas writes on Augustus Earle, the accomplished and well-travelled artist, and his series of slavery paintings. She investigates Earle and Darwin, who shared a ship (the Beagle) and a house in Brazil, as well as fierce anti-slavery convictions. Similarly intriguing is Richard Aitken's work on various botanists in Australia, many of whom were in strong opposition to the methods and message of Origin of Species, in particular Melbourne's Ferdinand von Mueller.

In this very “Melbourne” book, John Mulvaney provides a good chapter on the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, who introduced evolutionary biology to that city's university from 1887. The representation of nature in this period was an artistic endeavour as much as a scientific one. Like so many biologists, Spencer was a skilled illustrator and the book reproduces some of his notebook and published sketches of frogs, lizards and water fleas from the period before he shifted to the study of humans.

The book shifts seamlessly from art that illustrated science – Meredith's fish, Baldwin's frogs – to Darwinian science, which has animated contemporary art. John Wolseley's ecologically inspired work is interpreted here by Alex Taylor. This is a fine essay, partly a meditation on lines in both space and time that resonate meaningfully with Darwinian ideas: lines of descent, timelines and the biogeographical Wallace Line, named for the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace.

If ecology is one of the intellectual descendants of Darwin's work, transhumanism is another. And, like ecology, contemporary artists have visually reproduced and developed transhumanist ideas, here analysed by Barbara Creed. The strange art of post-Darwinian bodies certainly shakes the reader out of the nostalgia of Victorian natural history illustration. And yet the hybrid pig-human sculpture by Patricia Piccinini recalls, a little uncomfortably, Baldwin Spencer's chicken embryo sketches. It's a useful reminder that there was nothing nostalgic about Darwin in his own 19th century.

Richard Milner's Darwin's Universe operates in a different register altogether, and I love it. It's playful right from Stephen Jay Gould's preface, which reproduces a 1954 photograph of the dinosaur-obsessed boyhood friends “Fossilface” (Gould) and “Dino” (Milner). Thereafter the book becomes a lively, informative, even funny volume, reminiscent in its design of an old-fashioned children's encyclopedia.

It's a browsing book, in which the entries — perhaps two or three to a double page — are cleverly and usefully subtitled: “Coprolite industry: how dino dung saved England”, “Hunting hypothesis: how apes killed a theory”, “Insect societies: most ancient social communities”, “Kidd, Benjamin: survival value of religion”. The entries that Milner has chosen and written cover the conventional and the quirky. His teenage exuberance is still there on every page.

The outspoken critic of creationism and intelligent design Richard Dawkins has added his voice to the Darwin year with a back-to-basics book. The Greatest Show on Earth sets out to prove evolution, again. Even though everyone refers to “Darwin's theory of evolution”, it is, rather, the fact of evolution, says Dawkins. That he has to present the facts so forcefully is evidence of the pull and influence of the “deniers” – and Dawkins draws the analogy with Holocaust deniers throughout.

He is surprised that all these years after he published The Selfish Gene – indeed, all these years after Origin of Species – he needs to lay down the data, not necessarily to explain but to persuade. The Oxford professor once saw this as necessary only in the strange world of US education. But now, he writes, there is a clear need to do so in Britain and Europe as well. It would seem unnecessary in Australia but if you find yourself needing ammunition for evolution-creationist fights at dinner tables or in the public sphere, Dawkins is the arms dealer of choice.

Alison Bashford is professor of Australian studies, Harvard Department of History of Science.