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fascinated by the idea that he—a young man never considered extraordinarily smart or talented—had arrived at a very radical, very different new idea. Yet one of the fun things about evolution is how extremely logical it is. (As Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin’s great defenders, recalled thinking, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”) Despite nearly two centuries worth of concerted attempts to kill it, evolution by natural selection survives because it is a triumph of common sense. And one of the questions I liked to ponder while I traveled was whether the theory had clarified itself in Darwin’s head after a few eureka moments, or if the specific examples themselves were less important than the travel experience. Did Darwin learn the logic in England, then bring it to bear on examples as he found them in South America? Was this a product of education and place, where any similarly educated and disposed Englishman, introduced to the finches of the Galapagos, the rheas of Patagonia, and the fossilized remains of long-extinct giant sloths would have arrived at the same conclusion? (Say, for example, Darwin had stayed home, but someone had mailed him the fossils, finches, and rheas to study.) Or was there something about the travel itself, the length of time away from home, and the broad diversity of events—not just scientific, but cultural and personal—that turned him into an expert logician and allowed him to put all those specific examples in context?

I’m not sure Darwin himself could have answered this question. And he did occasionally consider it. In a delightful concluding chapter in his autobiography titled “An estimation of my mental powers” (a segment dedicated for the most part to lamenting that he no longer enjoyed poetry) Darwin evaluated his mental qualities like this: “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit . . . My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; I should, moreover, never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics. My memory is extensive, yet hazy. . . . I have a fair share of invention and of common sense or judgment, such as every fairly successful lawyer or doctor must have, but not I believe, in any higher degree.” On the plus side, he wrote, “I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully,” and “From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed,—that is, to group all facts under some general laws.”

That early youth was spent unremarkably, perhaps, but in a way that prepared him well for life on the Beagle: outdoors, and in collecting plants and animals. Darwin’s family hailed from Shrewsbury, a small country town three hours west of London by train. So while Nathan f i nished lecturing sixteen-year-olds on the merits of the roundabout, I went to visit some friends in Shrewsbury who lived a few blocks from Darwin’s old haunts.

Although Shrewsbury has grown a bit since, Darwin was a country boy. He entertained himself in the great outdoors as a child, wandering alone along the Severn River, which wound just behind his home, and where he could dabble in hunting and fishing. He liked collecting all sorts of plants and animals from the outdoors, but became particularly smitten with collecting beetles, a mania apparently quite popular in England at the time. “I will give proof of my zeal,” Darwin wrote in his autobiography. “One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.” A cartoon, drawn at the time by a friend of Darwin’s, shows the young man wearing a top hat and riding a beetle, waving his collector’s net above the caption, “Go it Charlie!”

Within half an hour of arriving in Shrewsbury,