Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation

By Michael Keller and Nicolle Rager Fuller. Rodale Books, 192 pp, $23.50, hardcover

This has really been Charles Darwin’s year. Marking both the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, 2009 has seen a number of commemorative efforts, from the minting of a two-pound coin bearing the English naturalist’s likeness to the free distribution of a version of the groundbreaking text bowdlerized by creationists (thank you, Kirk Cameron!).

On the Origin of Species is an important work, the bedrock of evolutionary biology, and despite its relatively recent acceptance, however reluctant, by both the Church of England and the Catholic Church, there are still antiscience activists out there who dress their antiquated notions up with such legitimizing words as intelligent design and specified complexity.

Michael Keller’s adaptation of On the Origin of Species, illustrated by Nicolle Rager Fuller, probably won’t prove more convincing to such wing nuts than any other version, but they probably wouldn’t read it in any case. Keller doesn’t dumb things down, generally using Darwin’s own words to introduce the basic concepts of natural selection and descent with variation, but occasionally interjecting to note cases where science has refuted or shed new light on the original text.

Fuller’s drawings of animals and plants are often beautiful and richly coloured, providing a vivid visual account of the ideas discussed in the text. Oddly, though, her depictions of human beings are frankly amateurish, looking like the type of thing one might find in a high-school yearbook.

As a primer on Darwin’s ideas for the uninitiated, this volume is not bad. As a graphic novel, however, it’s less successful. It’s a pity Keller didn’t team up with the talented British artist Simon Gurr, illustrator of Darwin: A Graphic Biography, published earlier this year. Gurr draws people with as much skill as he draws animals, which seems apt, given the subject matter. After all, as Darwin himself could have told you, we are animals.