Why Evolution is True
By Jerry Coyne
OUP £14.99, 256 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England
By Steve Jones
Little, Brown £20, 306 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins
By Adrian Desmond and James Moore
Penguin £25, 484 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life
By Martin Brasier
OUP £16.99, 304 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search of the Origins of Species
By Sean Carroll
Quercus £16.99, 330 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Charles Darwin: Origins and Arguments
By Bill Price
Pocket Essentials £9.99, 160 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.99

The Rough Guide to Evolution
By Mark Pallen
Rough Guides £10.99, 346 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.79

Publishers love an anniversary. So this year’s double celebration of Charles Darwin – 200 years since his birth and 150 since the publication of The Origin of Species – has inspired an outpouring of books about the father of evolutionary theory. The authors include some of the world’s top biologists. As many as 20 original books are being published to coincide with the anniversary, not to mention assorted reprints, facsimiles, diaries – and Mrs Darwin’s recipe book.

Some authors focus on the great man himself, delving deep into his family, travels, friends and enemies, and other influences on his intellectual life. Others take a wider view, using Darwin as the starting point for an exploration of evolutionary biology up to the present day and even into the future. Although hundreds of books about Darwin and his theory already exist, this year’s crop shows there is still scope for productive new writing.

There are several reasons why Darwin has more appeal to authors than any other famous scientist. Perhaps his closest rival is Albert Einstein, the subject of half a dozen books in 2005, the centenary of his three most celebrated scientific papers.

The starting point for these books, of course, is the brilliance of Darwin’s big idea: that evolution proceeds through the natural selection of random hereditable changes, which make organisms fitter to survive and procreate in their particular environment.

Furthermore, Darwinian evolution is relatively easy to explain and amplify in terms that are comprehensible to the general public. Einstein’s big idea was that everything in time and space is relative rather than absolute – this is arguably just as important for understanding how the universe works but its ramifications are far harder to demonstrate to non-scientists.

The fact that Darwin’s theory remains so controversial in the spheres of religion, education and politics provides another reason for writing about it. Opinion polls show with depressing regularity that even in secular western Europe only about half the population believes in Darwinian evolution; in the US, Darwin has fewer adherents than religious creationism. Scientists, in contrast, “have as much confidence in Darwinism as they do in the existence of atoms or in micro-organisms as the cause of infectious disease,” writes Jerry Coyne, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.

As Coyne points out, his book Why Evolution is True should not be necessary. No one writes to persuade people that the germ theory of disease or even relativity theory is true. Although Coyne is ostensibly writing for those who don’t believe in Darwinism, I doubt whether many creationists will bother to read this excellent volume. But believers will find it a rich account of the evidence for evolution accumulated by many different scientists over the past 150 years.

Of course Darwin had little conception of the biological mechanics of what he called “descent with modification” – how small random changes, which make natural selection possible, occur and are then propagated through the generations. The discovery of genes, and then DNA, solved the overall mystery, though many puzzles remain. Coyne points out that creationists are prone to seize on these uncertainties and blow them up out of all proportion, claiming: “The theory of evolution is in crisis.”

One longstanding puzzle is how and why the pace of evolution varies so much. Some “living fossils” such as ginkgo trees, coelacanth fish and tuatara reptiles appear virtually the same today as their ancestors, which co-existed with the dinosaurs 100m years ago, while in the African Great Lakes thousands of new species of cichlid fish have appeared within the past 10,000 years.

A new puzzle, which is not addressed by any of these books, is horizontal gene transfer (HGT). HGT has emerged recently as scientists have analysed the DNA of more and more species. It turns out that organisms sometimes acquire whole genes directly from other species, through means other than the normal process of reproduction (sexual or asexual). As a way of passing on genetic traits, this provides an alternative to the conventional Darwinian descent from parents to offspring.

A fierce debate is under way in evolutionary biology about how HGT happens – viruses may play a key role in carrying DNA between species – and how common it is. If it occurs extensively, then HGT would undermine Darwin’s brilliant concept of a branching “tree of life” linking all species to their ancestors; a more complex web of life might have to take its place. But it would not undermine the fundamental truth of evolution through natural selection.

Though Darwin is celebrated for his theories, authors and historians relish the wealth of archival material available to those with the time and energy to explore it. Darwin was extraordinarily prolific, writing an estimated 6m words in 19 published books and monographs, hundreds of shorter scientific papers and innumerable letters. Thanks to the heroic work of the Darwin Correspondence Project over the past 35 years, scholars have access to 14,500 letters exchanged between Darwin and 2,000 correspondents around the world.

For Darwin to be remembered only for The Origin of Species would be as foolish as to celebrate Shakespeare just as the author of Hamlet, says Steve Jones in Darwin’s Island. Jones, genetics professor at University College London, draws out beautifully the rich material in Darwin’s lesser known books – about barnacles, orchids and insects, domesticated pigeons, carnivorous plants, earthworms and many other creatures. At the same time he shows what an indefatigable traveller Darwin was. Although he did not go abroad again after the five-year voyage on the Beagle, Darwin’s passion for natural history sent him criss-crossing Great Britain for the remainder of his life – and this is the island of Jones’s title.

Jones estimates that, during the 40 years Darwin lived at Down House in Kent from 1842 until his death in 1882, he spent 2,000 nights away from home, equivalent to a day a week. Despite his persistent ill health – perhaps the result of a chronic infection he picked up during the Beagle voyage – Darwin visited Scotland, Wales and every region of England. He often travelled with his large family, accompanied at considerable cost and inconvenience by experimental subjects such as pots of orchids or insectivorous plants.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore published in 1991 what is generally regarded as the most thorough biography of Darwin so far. Now the two historians of science have dug further into the archives to produce Darwin’s Sacred Cause. Their fascinating thesis here is that Darwin’s well-known opposition to slavery played a bigger role in his work than anyone had previously appreciated. Desmond and Moore maintain that Darwin’s moral passion sets him apart from the modern model of a “disinterested” scientist who is supposed to derive theories from “the facts” – and only then allow moral conclusions to be drawn.

His family background was passionately abolitionist and Darwin himself saw “heart-sickening atrocities” in South America during the Beagle voyage, including the screams of a tortured slave that haunted him for life. Desmond and Moore demonstrate convincingly from unpublished correspondence that abolition of slavery was more than a background belief for Darwin. It was a sacred cause. While his relations threw themselves into abolitionist rallies and petitions, he set out to subvert slavery through science – to refute its apologists’ argument that blacks and whites were created separate and unequal. Darwin’s Sacred Cause provides an interesting link between him and the other great abolitionist born on February 12 1809: Abraham Lincoln, also the subject of a good crop of anniversary books.

Besides books of original scholarship and research, the Darwin anniversary has also inspired some good shorter guides. On the biographical side, Bill Price, who previously concentrated on writing about archaeology and ancient history, has done an excellent job of summing up Darwin and his work in plain words in his Pocket Essentials guide. On the scientific side, Mark Pallen, a genomics professor at Birmingham University, presents the theory of evolution and its ramifications in the well-known Rough Guide format with illuminating illustrations and graphics.

If there is one book in the crop that Darwin himself would surely have appreciated, it is Darwin’s Lost World. Martin Brasier explains how later scientists solved what came to be known as “Darwin’s dilemma”. Fossils formed a key part of the evidence for evolution in The Origin of Species but Darwin was tormented by his inability to explain a huge gap in the geological record. Animals suddenly appeared in rocks from the Cambrian period, which we now know started 540m years ago. Darwin, with no reliable way of dating ancient strata, generally underestimated their age.

But why was there no trace of life in Precambrian rocks that, Darwin knew, spanned a large majority of Earth’s history? Darwin’s embarrassing inability to answer this question was one of his few gifts to opponents of evolution, some of whom interpreted the apparent explosion of animal life from nothing as an act of creation.

Brasier, professor of palaeobiology at Oxford University, shows how research over the past 50 years has pinned down the Precambrian fossil record that remained elusive for 100 years after the publication of Darwin’s great work. It turned out that multicellular animal species, which changed rapidly into more complex forms during the Cambrian era, originated from simple organisms whose fossils would have been invisible to Victorian scientists. Indeed modern geological microscopy has shown that single-celled life has existed on Earth for at least 3.5bn years. But why evolution moved so fast between about 565m and 525m years ago remains unclear.

The books published to mark Darwin’s anniversaries this year stand out for their quality as well as their quantity. Best, by a narrow margin, is Sean Carroll’s Remarkable Creatures, which manages to combine a wide narrative sweep with wonderful details and superb writing.

Carroll, professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is one of the leading evolutionary biologists working today. His new book places Darwin at the heart of a noble series of scientific adventurers who travelled the world in search of biological inspiration.

Without doing down Darwin, Carroll plays up the role of Alfred Wallace, who came up with his own theory of evolution that was similar to Darwin’s, though less refined – and precipitated the completion and publication of The Origin of Species.

Carroll argues that the conventional view undervalues Wallace’s research, based on two long voyages, with a shipwreck in between, and a dozen years collecting and observing in the jungles of Amazonia and Indonesia. It would be a shame if Wallace disappeared from college textbooks, as Carroll fears. But the most exciting part of Remarkable Creatures comes when Carroll looks ahead to ask: “Are we going to find anything that would turn our worldview upside down, anything of the magnitude of the revolution in thought than began 150 years ago?”

His answer is that we will discover how life started in the first place, in the universe and on Earth. The overwhelming view among experts is that extraterrestrial life is “very, very likely – a virtual certainty”. And Carroll believes scientists will find it. Whatever the shape and chemistry of extraterrestrial life, and wherever it has arisen, we can make one prediction: it will have evolved by the two universal principles first formulated by Charles Darwin 150 years ago: descent with modification and natural selection.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor