‘The Darwin industry’, now a term with Wikipedia status, refers to the accelerating production of books on Charles Darwin and Darwinian evolution in the last half century. Like any cultural enterprise engaged in mass production and distribution, this industry has its targeted consumers: those who are educated, environmentally concerned, scientifically curious, intelligently sceptical and averse to ‘fundamentalisms’.

To be interested in Darwin is to signal that you are all or most of these things. Yet most of the books pumped out by the Darwin industry are essentially a stir-fry of received notions, with little science in the mix and even less history; riddled with fond adherences to the belief that Darwin single-handedly introduced atheism to the European consciousness, and shocked the bejesus out of his contemporaries with the suggestion that there was a family resemblance between apes and humans. If everyone who published on Darwin were required to read at least 100,000 words of his work and at least the same amount of writing drawn from a range of works by his peers and predecessors – about as much as one would expect of a student in an undergraduate course – the field of commentary would be transformed.