A serviceable biography of Darwin the man and his ideas. However Johnson has an ideological agenda. Johnson is a conservative Catholic who surprisingly to me accepts the theory of evolution, part of the reason I picked up this book other than that I'm a fan of his historical writings. Johnson really does think Darwin the man is a genius, and tells us about his good character and intellectual prowess. But even though he accepts evolution, he is very uncomfortable about drawing any implications from natural selection about the universe or human nature. He sharply criticizes the new atheists for critiquing religion and aiming to explain its origin through natural selection itself. Given all of that, those looking for a short basic biography of Darwin will be pleased but should be aware of Johnson's ulterior motives.
The source of Johnson's discomfort with natural selection is with Robert Malthus whom Johnson devoted several pages to attacking. This is odd because it was the population theory of Malthus, that population has a tendency unchecked to outgrow subsistence and eventually decrease to subsistence, that inspired both Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace to come up with natural selection independently. As Darwin wrote "Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die" which accords with the drive towards more population being selected into different levels of stability by the environment. It was Malthus who probably more than anyone else suggested a plausible mechanism to Darwin and Wallace that would answer how the transmutation of species occurred, as the idea of evolution had been around for a while but without such a plausible mechanism as natural selection.
Johnson's first problem with Malthus is that he didn't have much data in his essay on population. This is in contrast to Darwin who did volumes of research on barnacles and coral reefs before publishing his theory. But Malthus wrote his book for political reasons against radicals who thought want could be eliminated through a reordering of society. In 1798 the radical phase of the French Revolution was fresh in memory. Edmund Burke penned his Reflections on the Revolution in France at this time and founded modern Anglo conservatism, for much the same reasons as Malthus. As for the population principle, the reasoning behind it was mathematical. Population increases unchecked at a geometric rate and food at an arithmetic rate. The Fibonacci number sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 in which every number is the sum of the previous two numbers was originally proposed by Fibonacci as rabbit breeding. If a pair of rabbits give birth to another m/f pair and that pair itself gives birth the next generation, how many rabbits will there be in a year? 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144: a geometric increase. This assumes perfect conditions of no deaths and every pair being male and female but the math works out. As for subsistence, the amount of arable land is limited and requires subsistence to be paid to to cultivate it, which as population increases gives diminishing returns. Luckily advances in technology and farming techniques have increased productivity, but hundreds of millions remain in extreme poverty and consumption is highly unequal. Malthus did not predict imminent catastrophe as population could be controlled by preventing births, sometimes through coercive means like China's one child policy, and unfortunate conditions which keep up the death rate. World population has gone from under a billion in Malthus' day to 7 billion at the beginning of the 21st century, with the continuing increase coming from the third world as consumption has increased in the first, so the data was forthcoming.
Johnson's other beef with Malthus is that his thinking inspires social Darwinism and eugenics which used natural selection as justification. Malthus' theory is directly aimed at human society by giving a link between biology and social policy. Darwin is excoriated by Johnson for his Descent of Man which engages in some social Darwinian thinking. Darwin wasn't as good an anthropologist as biologist Johnson argues and worried about human population, such as opposing mass vaccination for disease to keep the population down. Darwin however didn't support contraception which would also keep the population down, reflecting his own Victorian views. Application of evolution to society before modern genetics often led to wrong conclusions, but social Darwinism was based more on Lamarckian evolution by acquired characteristics which is individualistic than natural selection by the environment. After all "social Darwinists" like Herbert Spencer who coined survival of the fittest wrote about evolution before the Origin of Species. Even eugenics which was pioneered by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was more about population statistics rather than biology. So Johnson's worry about the application of natural selection to society is mostly historical.
Nevertheless there are conclusions that Darwinism can draw about human nature and society which are scientifically sound. This has been the work of the sociobiologists and those inspired by them who come in different political stripes: Peter Singer on the left, EO Wilson on the liberal side, Matt Ridley on the libertarian side, and Thomas Fleming who is a Catholic paleoconservative. Marxists used to be champions of Darwinism, such as Joseph Stalin who upon reading The Descent of Man as a seminary boy became an atheist. However when Stalin became dictator of the USSR he suppressed genetic research which suggested evolution to be less progressive for the communist cause. than he wanted. Grounding ideology on Darwinism gives it a very different perspective, but nonetheless different interpretations have been done, usually highlighting certain aspects above others. Malthus himself inspired stricter poor laws in the nineteenth century, but also environmentalists in the twentieth.
As for religion, Darwin's theories do weaken its claims and religious faith, as it did for Darwin himself. What Darwin's theories did was to restrict the domain of what religion could explain. The Copernican theory of heliocentrism did that to the Catholic Church in physics, Thomas Lyell's geology did it to the biblical age of the Earth calculated by Bishop Ussher, and Darwin's natural selection did it to human to human origins in Genesis. Johnson's own Catholicism merged Christianity with classical philosophy, and the challenge the latter has weakened the former. If religion continues, it will be for transcendental questions which science can't yet explain or ever will, such as the existence of God or the afterlife. We shouldn't fear Darwin in the humanities and social sciences because we thought those up, often from secular thinkers like Aristotle whom the Catholic church relied upon. We no longer invoke religion to the conduct of physics because it isn't necessary and the scientific method has given us better results than human reasoning from dogma. Good and bad ideas will still survive.
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