Its pages were filled with marvels from around the globe: volcanoes and mastodon bones, whole islands made of ice, hummingbirds, pyramids and concentric rainbows.

These wonders were not fabulous tales or ancient superstitions. Far from it. They were described according to the “best and latest authorities” and confirmed by “the concurrent testimony of enlightened writers.”1 They were wonderful facts.

In his autobiography, Darwin recalls reading it often, disputing its claims with the other boys.2 It was this book, he writes, that first inspired his wish to travel the world—a wish that ultimately came true with the voyage of the Beagle.

Among its hundred wonders, three pages are dedicated to zoophytes.

Zoophyte. The word itself is a hybrid, stitching together the Greek words for animal and plant in just a few syllables. Unlike anything young Charles and his friends had seen, zoophytes “unite the animal and vegetable kingdoms, so as to fill an intermediate space.”

First comes the small but “infinitely curious” freshwater polyp. It consists of a tubular, plant-like body, attached at one end to aquatic plants or other surfaces in the water, while the other end has a mouth surrounded by a crown of tentacles.

Harmless enough, on first impression, it is a fierce predator.

Its tentacles equipped with microscopic suckers, it can catch and hold on to a worm with just one arm, but uses all of them when swallowing its prey, “in order to absorb it the more readily.” Even a worm three or four times its own size can disappear inside, the polyp’s body stretching around the meal, like a snake around a small animal.

Stranger still, it can grow itself back. Cut the polyp in two and each half replaces what is missing: the head grows a new tail; the tail, a new head and arms. Cut it into three and the middle part grows both. All it needs is a few warm days. According to the book, it can be cut crosswise or in almost any other direction, and each piece will grow a body of its own.

Even without being cut, it produces new bodies. While the polyp lays eggs like an animal, it also reproduces through “shoots and offsets” like a plant. It grows new bodies much like other animals grow a limb: a bud swells from its side and gradually becomes another polyp, complete with a mouth and tentacles. Eventually, it drops away and begins a life of its own.

Birth, here, is a very public process.

Sometimes the offspring remains attached to its parent even as new branches begin to grow from its own body: three generations stuck in one body, “thus constituting a real genealogical tree.”

This living family tree is temporary: sooner or later, its branches separate into individual animals. But other polyps never part.

We know them as corals.

The book loosely differentiates between the smaller corallines and the hard or stony corals, but the principle remains the same: they are “so many ramified sea-polypes, covered with a kind of strong, horny case,” to protect them from the elements.

Body by body the coral grows, while secreting its hard shell, a permanent home “which may at once be considered its bone.”

The illusion is complete. Place a freshly gathered twig of coral in seawater and tiny flowers appear to open from every cavity in its surface. But the blossoms are polyps, extending their tentacles to feed, and the twig is their shared skeleton.

A coral is therefore a “large compound zoophyte,” so many polyps joined together. A skeleton-tower inhabited by hungry worms. An animal-plant.

Could this be real?

The Edinburgh years

Whatever influence the book had on young Charles’s imagination, his early fascination with zoophytes is well documented.3 While supposedly studying medicine in Edinburgh, he spent much of his time by the coast, collecting marine creatures and taking notes.

In Robert Edmond Grant, Darwin found an experienced mentor who took him on collecting expeditions along the Scottish coast. For Grant, zoophytes were more than curiosities: they seemed to stand at the uncertain threshold of animal life, promising clues to its origins and development. Under his guidance, Darwin collected sponges and other marine creatures, learned to dissect them, and made precise observations under a microscope.

The zoophytes had left the page. They were now soft, living bodies, lifted from cold seawater and placed beneath a microscope. Instead of disputing a book’s claims with his school friends, Darwin discussed his own observations with the members of the Plinian Society, a student natural-history club. There he presented his first scientific paper, on Flustra, a zoophyte that looks much like seaweed. Its eggs, Darwin found, could swim.4

The Hundred Wonders of the World had offered him facts certified by authorities. In Edinburgh, Darwin learned how a wonderful fact was made.

By the time he boarded the Beagle, Darwin had the eye and the tools of a naturalist. A world of wonders before him.

The polyp, its brethren

During the voyage, Darwin came upon zoophytes every bit as strange and wonderful as those he had read about. Two encounters were published in his journal.

The first was a sea pen at Bahia Blanca, Argentina.

At low tide, Darwin found hundreds of them buried upright in the muddy sand, their yellow-orange tips “projecting like stubble.” A sea pen is a type of coral, though it takes an unusual form: a central stem with branches on either side, resembling a feather. When touched or pulled, the entire structure drew itself inward and vanished into the sand.5

Darwin was not the first to marvel at this behaviour. Alongside his own description, he quotes an earlier voyager, Captain Lancaster. More than two hundred years separate their accounts. Lancaster tells of a small twig that sank into the ground whenever he tried to pull it up, “unless held very hard.”

He makes no effort to hide his astonishment.

“On being plucked up, a great worm is found to be its root, and as the tree groweth in greatness, so doth the worm diminish; and as soon as the worm is entirely turned into a tree it rooteth in the earth, and so becomes great. This transformation is one of the strangest wonders that I saw in all my travels: for if this tree is plucked up, while young, and the leaves and bark stripped off, it becomes a hard stone when dry, much like white coral: thus is this worm twice transformed into different natures.”

A worm that becomes a tree that becomes a stone. The sea pen moves effortlessly through the separate realms of nature. It is wonderful precisely because it is a hybrid, three things that shouldn’t be one. A wonder worm.

Darwin’s description opens differently. The worm, tree and stone are still there, but rearranged into anatomical parts: a thin, fleshy stem surrounds a “stony axis” and ends in a “vermiform fleshy appendage.” The vocabulary is precise, the tone unhurried. Where Lancaster speaks of familiar things behaving in unexpected ways, Darwin names each part and fixes it in place.

Yet this new way of seeing does more than bring the same creature into sharper focus. On closer inspection, Darwin finds something Lancaster missed entirely: the seemingly single structure is composed of minute polyps.

“Each polypus, though closely united to its brethren, has a distinct mouth, body, and tentacula. Of these polypi, in a large specimen, there must be many thousands; yet we see that they act by one movement: they have also one central axis connected with a system of obscure circulation, and the ova are produced in an organ distinct from the separate individuals.”

The sea pen hovers between one and many. It is a colony of thousands of individuals. And it is one animal with thousands of mouths.

Darwin could not yet know how such colonies come into being.

It begins with one. A single larva drifts through the water until it settles in the mud. There it changes form and becomes the sea pen’s first polyp. As the polyp lengthens, its lower end burrows into the seabed, anchoring it in place, while the rest grows upwards to form the central stem.

Then a new polyp buds from its side, and then another. As they multiply, the sea pen’s feather-like form gradually emerges. Each birth is both the beginning of a new individual and the continued growth of the larger body they share. Some of the polyps feed. Others pump water through the colony, causing the entire structure to inflate and deflate like a single body.

In The Hundred Wonders of the World, we encountered polyps growing from each other’s bodies, temporarily joined before separating. Here, they never lose touch with their “brethren.” Each retains its own mouth, its own body, its own tentacles, yet remains permanently attached to the body from which it grew. Polyp and sea pen have become impossible to disentangle.

Darwin ends, inevitably, with a question: “Well may one be allowed to ask, what is an individual?”

Many more heads

In the course of the voyage, Darwin encountered an old friend: Flustra, the zoophyte he had studied in Edinburgh and made the subject of his first scientific paper. Years later and on the other side of the world, he returned to it with the same fascination, filling page after page of his zoological notebook with close comparisons of its different forms.6

At first glance, Flustra resembles a brown leaf or a piece of seaweed. Up close, the apparent leaf resolves into a mosaic of tiny compartments, each inhabited by a living animal.

Some of the forms he studied held a further surprise: movable organs attached to the edges of their cells. In most cases, Darwin writes, this organ “very closely resembles the head of a vulture.”7 It sat on a short neck and possessed a lower jaw that could open much wider than a bird’s beak.

Darwin watched the heads move back and forth, sometimes slowly and rhythmically, sometimes rapidly and by starts. Their jaws opened and snapped shut. Minute as they were, they were remarkably forceful. When Darwin touched one with a needle, its beak seized the point so firmly that he could shake the whole branch.

Most of the time, each head moved independently. But sometimes all the heads moved together; sometimes only those on one side; and sometimes they moved in regular succession, one after another, like a wave.

In these uniform actions, Darwin notes, “we apparently behold as perfect a transmission of will in the zoophyte, though composed of thousands of distinct polypi, as in any single animal.”

Just like the sea pen, each polyp is distinct. Yet they act as one.

Faced with this riddle, Darwin reaches for a surprising comparison. A tree, he suggests, is likewise a body composed of many individuals.

Surprising as this union of separate individuals in a common stock must always appear, every tree displays the same fact, for buds must be considered as individual plants. It is, however, natural to consider a polypus, furnished with a mouth, intestines, and other organs, as a distinct individual, whereas the individuality of a leaf-bud is not easily realised; so that the union of separate individuals in a common body is more striking in a coralline than in a tree.

The zoophyte is not an exception, but an unusually vivid expression of a more general principle. In both polyp and bud, “the division of the individual has not been completely effected.”

Every tree, it turns out, is a genealogical tree. Its unity fragmented by so many births.

All of life

The final zoophyte in this story was not lifted from the sea. It appeared on paper.

Darwin’s books were often richly illustrated. Yet his main work, On the Origin of Species, contains only one illustration: the famous diagram of species. Too large for the page, it folds outward, leaving its right-hand branch visible as the reader turns the pages. As if life, in its ceaseless growth, had crawled out of the book that explains it.

The diagram is a system of classification, but it is also an instrument for seeing beyond the span of a human life. It reveals a history of descent otherwise invisible.

Begin at the bottom. The capital letters represent different species of the same genus—related, but different enough to be clearly distinguished from one another. Time moves upward, with each interval between the horizontal lines representing a thousand generations. The dotted lines trace their descendants, branching as small differences accumulate from one generation to the next. Some branches continue; others end.

Now follow species A. After a thousand generations, its descendants have diverged into two varieties: a1 and m1. These become the starting points for further branches. After ten thousand generations, A has given rise to three distinct forms—a10, f10 and m10. Depending on how much change has accumulated along the way, they may still be varieties of the original species—or have become distinct species in their own right.

One species becoming many.

But Darwin doesn’t stop there. The same horizontal lines, he notes, could just as well mark a million or a hundred million generations.

Welcome to deep time.

At this scale, the diagram no longer shows only species branching into species, but moves up the ladder of biological classification: from species to genera, families, orders and classes. The small tree we have followed becomes a single branch within a much larger structure. A tree inside a tree.

Darwin marvels at the sheer scale of what has come into view:

“It is a truly wonderful fact—the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity—that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold.”8

All animals and all plants, throughout all time and space. Taken to its widest scale, the diagram traces life in its entirety, from a single origin outward. It shows what the zoophytes had already suggested: one plant-like organism composed of countless individual bodies. Only this time, the organism is life on Earth.

Darwin gives this immense structure a familiar name: the Tree of Life.

He compares his diagram to the genealogical tree of an ancient and noble family, which allows us to trace “the blood-relationship between the numerous kindred.”9 The difference is one of scale. The Tree of Life encompasses every animal and plant; the ancient and noble family is a tiny twig on it. Classification becomes genealogy, and genealogy becomes the history of life.

On the body of a zoophyte, family ties remain visible: new individuals stay attached to the body from which they grew. Where offspring separate from their parents, that link is less obvious. The genealogical tree draws it back into view, joining separate lives into one continuous movement.

The Hundred Wonders of the World had gathered its marvels one by one: extraordinary things discovered, explained or invented by the brightest minds of the age. Darwin’s diagram offers a different order of wonder. It does not merely add another curiosity to the collection. It lets us see life as a whole—and with it, a new view of the individual.

Seen from this new height, the individual remains intact, with a body and history of its own. Yet at this scale, its boundaries blur into the larger pattern.

For the individual, birth and death still mark beginning and end. From the perspective of the whole, they are moments in an ever-unfinished transformation.

Life itself shapeshifting.

No better place to start our expedition than the sea. Waves in steady, tireless motion, washing up something curious now and then.

This time it was the shell of a sea snail, washed up on a beach in Chile. Darwin picked it up and inspected it with curiosity.

It wasn’t the snail itself that caught his attention, but a tiny hole in its shell leading into an oval cavity. Inside sat a minute, bright orange barnacle, smaller than a grain of rice, its three pairs of feathery limbs barely curled.

Barnacles were far from new to Darwin. He must have seen countless of them while studying in Edinburgh, and his notebook mentions a few individuals he encountered during the voyage of the HMS Beagle.

Darwin knew the familiar acorn barnacles, with their grey volcano-like cones, and the elegant goose barnacles, slim white shells on a dark, leathery stalk. When the tide returns, they open up and extend their feathery cirri, sweeping plankton from the passing water.

Barnacles, in other words, lived inside shells of their own. But not this one.

Darwin did what any good nineteenth-century naturalist would do with an unfamiliar creature: he bottled it up in spirits and added it to the growing collection aboard the Beagle.

Later, under the microscope, he found eggs and larvae in different stages of development.

At first they appear as simple ovals. Soon tiny limb-like shapes begin to form. Finally they become coffin-shaped, with two jointed legs that can move and bend. The legs push out from the sides of the body, clumsy and oversized.

Only the most important step was missing: there was nothing linking the tiny larva to the adult animal.

Who would recognise this “ill-formed little monster” as a barnacle, Darwin wondered, adding that it “must clearly yet undergo a great metamorphosis.”

The barnacle years

After their return to England, the barnacle moved in with the Darwins in their country house in Downe. It sat patiently on a shelf in Darwin’s study, among other curiosities that were yet to be classified.

In his notebook Darwin had suspected that this was a new genus. However, the only way to prove this was to compare it with other species and see where it fit in the grand scheme of things.

Unfortunately, there was no bigger picture to rely on. The whole classification of barnacles was a frustrating mess, and Darwin decided to start from scratch.

He spent eight years studying barnacles and became the undisputed authority on these microscopic crustaceans. He dissected and studied them under the microscope, compared specimens, and organized collections sent to him from around the world. And while struggling with the sheer diversity, he got to know the barnacle more intimately than any naturalist before.

He was the barnacle guy.

In the end he was right. His Chilean barnacle, now by the name of Cryptophialus minutus, didn’t fit in and was its own genus.

But the wonderful facts he discovered were not exclusive to this rare curiosity. They belonged to all barnacles, even the most ordinary ones.

A body in transition

After years of intense study, Darwin knew that the metamorphosis of the larva — the “ill-formed little monster” — was characteristic of all barnacles.

What is more, he understood the “great transformation” that would turn it into its adult form.

In its earliest stage, the larva is a tiny, oval crustacean, swimming freely in the ocean with its three pairs of limbs. It has a single eye and a functioning mouth, perfect for catching plankton drifting in the water.

After several molts it changes again, taking on a compact, coffin-shaped form. Two large compound eyes dominate its front, and six pairs of legs beat rhythmically through the water.

In this phase the old mouth becomes rudimentary and no longer functions. Feeding days are over. At the same time the mouth of the adult barnacle is already forming beneath it, though it has not yet opened.

Here, the larva carries both: a reduced organ from an earlier stage and the fully structured but inactive mouth of the next. Its body bears the traces of past and future metamorphosis.

Thus, with two mouths but unable to eat, it sets out to find a permanent home.

Its antennae change into grasping organs, connected to powerful cement glands. With these the larva tests surfaces, taps, withdraws, moves on. Until at last it finds a suitable spot and glues itself head-first to it.

Now comes the final transformation. Once again the minute body rearranges all its parts to fit its new life. The swimming legs become the feathery cirri that sweep food from the water. The body turns into a soft, fleshy sack that houses the internal organs.

In barnacles that build their own shell, this sack extracts calcium from seawater and begins to grow the plates that will form its fortress. These plates can open to fish for food, or close to protect the animal from predators and dehydration.

It is now a body turned upside down, using its legs to kick food into its mouth while building a stony home around itself.

Barnacle anatomy is a moving thing, a story of change and becoming.

Complemental males

The mating habits are stranger still. To begin with, they possess the longest penis in the animal kingdom—or, as Darwin phrased it, a “probosci-formed penis capable of great elongation.”

Most species are simultaneous hermaphrodites: each individual carries both male and female organs, yet cannot fertilize itself. When the time comes, the animal extends its penis far beyond the safety of its shell, searching, probing, until it encounters a neighbor and transfers its sperm.

The body stretches far beyond its boundaries to connect with another. And that is not yet the strange part.

Darwin’s next discovery was so small and so unlikely that it took him a while to believe his own conclusions. And yet, there it was.

Some of the barnacles had tiny beings clinging to them. He had seen those many times and thrown them away, assuming they were parasites. But the closer he looked, the clearer it became that they were male barnacles.

They hatch from eggs just like the larvae, but their development is limited to, well, the male sexual organ and very little else. Tiny, even in barnacle terms, most of their organs were rudimentary or absent. In one species he found a male with no mouth or limbs, “but furnished with a stupendously long male organ.“

What exactly was this creature? Was it a very simple animal, or a reproductive organ swimming about on its own? Since in most cases, barnacles are hermaphrodites and don’t exactly need an additional penis (or more), he decided to call them complemental males.

Having the longest penis in the animal kingdom, keeping a few more may seem excessive. But barnacles, it seems, like to be prepared.

Like the larva, complemental males swim about freely at first, until they find another barnacle and attach to it permanently. Sometimes to the upper shell plates, right beside the opening. In other cases, Darwin found them inside the sack, fishing for food inside their mate, or even cemented directly to their bodies.

The barnacle is all of this: one hermaphrodite, its offspring in various stages of their development, and one or more males which “may, in fact, be said to exist as mere bags of spermatozoa.“

Darwin marvelled at what he saw:

What a truly wonderful assemblage of beings of the same species, but how marvellously unlike in appearance, did this individual hermaphrodite present!

Note how the individual becomes an “assemblage of beings“, an unlikely miniature underwater patchwork family.

The image of the barnacle dissolves into multiple simultaneous forms. There is no single creature one could point to and call the barnacle, only a shifting constellation of bodies linked by a shared life cycle.

Classification in motion

That Darwin highlights transformation and interconnection is no coincidence, and it isn’t simply an aesthetic preference. It is a necessity.

Looking at the different beings united in one barnacle sack, “marvellously unlike in appearance,“ Darwin remarks:

Unquestionably, without a rigid examination, these four forms would have been ranked in different families, if not orders, of the articulated kingdom.

There is no way to classify them correctly without understanding their relationships and the story of their development.

Most zoologists at the time focused on the completed adult body, leaving larval stages and metamorphosis aside. They believed in a common blueprint, an abstract archetype from which real specimens differed only to a certain degree.

This static view was the exact opposite of what Darwin saw. The radically different appearances of the same barnacle made clear that the archetype simply did not work. Otherwise, young and old, male and hermaphrodite might end up in entirely different families, if not orders.

The conflict echoes the one described by Mikhail Bakhtin between the classical and the grotesque image of the body. The classical body appears finished and self-contained, a stable form in which the traces of growth, decay, and transformation are carefully smoothed away. The grotesque body, by contrast, is never complete. It is caught in processes of development, metamorphosis, and exchange with other bodies. Its boundaries remain open and unstable.

Darwin’s barnacles clearly belong to this second world. Their identity cannot be grasped in a fixed form but only through the transformations that connect larvae, hermaphrodites, and dwarf males within a single unfolding life cycle.

Long before writing On the Origin of Species, Darwin had already begun to see the living world in motion. Any attempt to classify it would have to be dynamic.

The birth of the sexes

There is another theoretical twist to Darwin’s research, one that moves from the individual body to the very architecture of the species.

In the barnacle’s openness to change and becoming, Darwin saw that even the order of the sexes was not a fixed law, but a story in motion.

He noticed that the barnacles did not follow a single, tidy arrangement. Instead, he found a spectrum: species that were hermaphrodites, species with separate sexes, and the “wonderful” in-between cases where a hermaphrodite’s “masculine efficiency” was aided by those tiny, clinging complemental males.

Again, the various states become the still images of a transformation. Darwin proposed an evolutionary sequence that reads like a slow, biological dismantling. First, there is the hermaphrodite. Then, specialized males (the complemental ones) emerge simply by the loss of other organs. Now that males are abundant, the masculine parts of the original body become redundant. Evolution shrinks what is no longer needed and the female barnacle is born.

This explains why the males of these species so closely resemble those tiny complemental males, while the females appear identical to the hermaphrodites, simply stripped of their male organs.

Seen in this way, the separation of the sexes is not the default state of life, but a later development, a result of specialization and loss. It is the grotesque body at work: shifting its functions, shedding parts of itself, and rearranging its boundaries.

It is the story of a hermaphrodite whose penis swims away and becomes its own husband. Adam and Eve estranged.

Male and female are no longer timeless categories. They are derivatives of an older, unified form. Both are hermaphrodites that have lost half of their sexual organs.

Beyond the Shell

This shifting constellation of bodies—from the free-swimming larva to the sessile hermaphrodite and its parasitic males—shows the barnacle not as a thing, but as a movement and a „wonderful assemblage of beings.“

What began as a small curiosity in a snail shell turns out to be a creature whose life unfolds through constant transformation. A creature that challenges classification because it always looks different, depending on when you look.

Seen from the outside, the barnacle appears as nothing more than a hard shell glued to a rock. But under Darwin’s microscope it acquires a life of its own. What once seemed like a static object becomes a story — a sequence of forms unfolding through time.

It is a simple story and a familiar one: finding food, searching for a place in the world, building a home, and securing the next generation.

In this very moment, millions of barnacles are drifting through the ocean as larvae, testing surfaces for a place to settle, extending their feathery limbs into the water, searching for food, for a home, for a mate.

Fragile as they may seem, these creatures have conquered the world’s oceans through their tireless cycles of transformation.

The theory of evolution is home to many wonderful facts. Strange beings that live at the very margins of our attention, whose world unfolds only under prolonged, systematic observation.

The love life of barnacles. Ants that hold slaves. A furry human embryo with a tail. Worms that cover the surface of the world in their fertile excrement. “I am a complete millionaire in odd and curious little facts,” Darwin once noted.

These facts are strange, yes — but strange in a very specific way. They are, in the best sense of the word, grotesque.

This may seem like an unusual claim. The grotesque is usually understood as distortion — ugly, excessive, unreal. But there is another tradition that describes something else entirely: a specific way of seeing life as transformation, as interconnection, as a process that never quite finishes.

So understood, Darwin's wonders are glimpses of a world in restless transformation, where boundaries blur, bristling with life.

That is the world this book sets out to explore.

But what exactly is the grotesque?

Most attempts to explain the grotesque place it in direct opposition to the sublime and the beautiful: ugly, misshapen, disproportionate. Its most iconic motifs are hybrid creatures, part human, animal or plant, disturbing the natural order of things.

The effect is disorientation. The world becomes unfamiliar, estranged.1 To this day, this is how the term is commonly used: as a stronger form of the absurd, marked by discomfort and rejection.

But this is only one side of the grotesque, Mikhail Bakhtin argues. And seeing the full picture radically shifts its meaning.

If the grotesque violates the order of things, that is because it unfolds its own. Far from being merely a disturbance, it follows an inner logic and has its own perspective. Bakhtin describes a conflict between two worldviews: the classical ideal of harmony and completion, and the grotesque vision of life as perpetual change.

These are not simply two aesthetic preferences. They are fundamentally different ways of seeing life, of how bodies relate to the world.

Grotesque vs. classical bodies

The grotesque body does two things: it changes, and it opens.

In Bakhtin’s words:

“Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.”

The grotesque shows bodies in a state of transformation — always giving and receiving, from other bodies and from the world. One line of exchange runs through eating and excreting: the world enters the body, is transformed, and returned. Another runs through sex, pregnancy, and birth: two bodies join, a third emerges.

It is no surprise, then, that the grotesque draws attention to the body’s openings — mouth, genitals, anus — and to the belly, the place of transformation. We take in, we transform, we give back. In the end, death marks a final transformation, dissolving the body’s boundaries and returning it to the earth.

The grotesque body is never at rest, and it is never truly individual. It exists as part of a larger, shared process of life.

Bakhtin helps us understand the hybrid creatures in a new way. Not as disturbances of the natural order, but as condensed images of the grotesque body, “blended with the world, with animals, with objects.“

The classical body is the precise opposite, unchanging and isolated, closed off from the world and from other bodies. Its openings are concealed, all traces of change and becoming are hidden. Attention is drawn to the surface of the body and to the face as the seat of personality. This is the body of the individual: stable, complete and self-sufficient.

No wonder that, measured against this ideal of classical beauty, the grotesque body appears ugly and out of place.

Down to earth

This opposition between two ways of seeing the world culminates in the central movement of the grotesque: degradation.

At first glance, the word may sound negative. Nobody wants to be degraded. But in Bakhtin’s sense, degradation is ambivalent. It destroys and renews. Anything high, abstract, and ideal is brought down to the material level of the body and the earth. To the belly, the genitals, the womb. To eating, sex, birth, and decay.

This lowering is not an insult; it is a homecoming. In the grotesque world, to be 'degraded' means to be returned to the fertile earth, the zone where life is made and remade. What is brought down is broken apart, yes, but only to become the raw material for something new. Here, the rot of the old is the fuel for the next metamorphosis. Destruction and creation are not opposites; they are the rhythmic breathing of a living world.

The classical ideal follows the exact opposite movement. It seeks to protect life from the chaos of change by lifting it toward the eternal. It strives for a beauty that is timeless and complete, providing a safe distance from the terrifying flux of existence. Everything that points to change, decay, or becoming is covered up. Here, the timeless ideal prevails.

A world in motion

The grotesque is not just a special type of weird. It is a world view of metamorphosis. And this is anything but abstract. Bodies change, the world changes. In this ongoing transformation, boundaries begin to dissolve.

Birth and death are no longer beginning and end, but two parts of a single movement. A continuous metamorphosis in which everything intertwines.

Seen from this angle, a Darwinian grotesque gains plausibility. Darwin's task was precisely this: to articulate a dynamic view of life in a culture committed to stable orders, fixed species, and self-contained individuals.

Some studies have drawn careful attention to grotesque elements in Darwin’s writing, such as barnacles or worms.2 While they are insightful, these elements remain isolated and risk becoming anecdotal, a curious footnote to evolutionary theory. Barnacles and worms are only two among many wonderful facts that form a coherent whole. To understand them is to enter the strange and wonderful world Darwin saw.

I’m writing a book by the title “Darwin’s Wonders. An expedition to the grotesque world we live in.“ In my head it’s all there, and it’s quite something.

Now, all I need to do is write it down. But writing it down turns out to be a lot harder than it should seem, and that is why I start right here, on this Substack, with you. That way I can publish it in many small and not-so-scary steps, and revise it where it is needed. So please expect a rough sketch rather than perfectly polished chapters. After all, it’s an expedition, we never know where we end up. There will be rough winds, scary creatures and unfamiliar places. We might get lost a few times. Will be fun.

Setting sail for our wonderful world

So here’s the plan: we embark on an expedition into Darwin’s world and look for its wonders. I admit this may seem strange. It is, after all, a scientific theory we are talking about, “one long argument“, as Darwin called the Origin of Species. It seems an unlikely place to look for wonders.

Well, yes and no. Darwin and his contemporaries loved the strange and wonderful. Artifacts from every corner of the world arrived at their ports, and with them reports of exotic places and creatures that stretched the imagination. In his autobiography, Darwin recalls a book called Wonders of the World he had read as a boy, which first sparked his wish to travel the world1. The book lists a hundred wonders, including chapters on geological change, coral reefs, fossil vertebrates, the orangutan, and the fantastic zoophytes2 — all topics that would later resurface in Darwin’s own research.

So in this context, wonders are not opposed to facts. They are not the superstitious tales of the dark ages. They are facts and findings, documented by explorers and natural philosophers like Alexander von Humboldt. And that made them all the more fascinating. Unreal as these landscapes, creatures or artefacts may seem, they share the same planet with us, breathe the very air we breathe.

When Darwin speaks about the “wonderful facts“ he discovered, they are primarily facts, carefully described and illustrated according to scientific conventions. At first sight they are not that weird, really. But, after careful reflection, they begin to move. Their meanings shift. What seemed ordinary starts to shimmer with a quiet, unexpected life of its own. Take corals, for example.

Let’s talk corals

High on nature’s list of fancies sits the humble polypus. Each coral colony is formed by countless of these soft-bodied creatures. Their life begins as a drifting larva, which eventually settles on a hard surface, transforms into a single polyp, and begins to bud, forming a living colony. Thus, these tiny beings resisted classification as either plant or animal. They eventually earned their own place in between and were named zoophytes, Greek for “animal-plants.” So that was solved, only… there wasn’t supposed to be a place in between. The very existence of this little weirdo challenged the order of nature.

What is more, their calcareous skeletons remain after they die, forming the base for future generations to live on — the coral reef. A collective skeleton, home to a fantastic underwater world of lush colors and bizarre beings.

During his voyage aboard the Beagle, Darwin encountered atolls, rings of coral islands far out in the ocean. Inside lay a calm lagoon; outside, the reef plunged steeply into “unfathomable” depths. How? Darwin wondered. He observed, collected evidence, and reconstructed the story of their formation, much like a private detective piecing together a hidden chain of events from scattered clues.

And here it is: Once upon a time, there was a volcano island. In the shallow waters surrounding it, corals could happily live in the sunny water, forming a perfect circle around it. Now let’s fast forward. We watch the volcano island sink, while the tiny polypus keeps building layer upon layer, always remaining just under the surface. Sloooooowly. Millions of years, thousands of meters of coral reaching all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. Until the island is gone and only the circle of corals is left behind. Voilá!

Darwin certainly seemed happy to add to the list of wonders, and wasn’t shy about giving it a top spot…

(…) such formations surely rank high amongst the wonderful objects of this world. It is not a wonder which at first strikes the eye of the body, but rather after reflection, the eye of reason. We feel surprised when travelers relate accounts of the vast piles & extent of some ancient ruins; but how insignificant are the greatest of them, when compared to the matter here accumulated by various small animals.

— Charles Darwin, Beagle Diary

The scientific endeavor reveals an image visible only to the ‘eye of reason’: a giant, submarine skeleton-sculpture built by generations of weird worms. And somewhere below, they are still building. After successfully defying classification as animal or plant, the polypus now blurs the boundary between biology and geology. Human beings are not the only architects of the world, and our monuments lose all their glory beside these organic ruins.

In the Book of Wonders he had read as a child, we were in charge. Its marvels were trophies of human achievement: things we discovered, explained or invented. Darwin’s wonders quietly undo that order.

The Darwinian Grotesque

During the course of our expedition, we will discover many more “wonderful facts“ scattered throughout Darwin’s publications.

Hermaphroditic barnacles that keep a tiny male in a pocket, little more than a bag of sperm. Just in case. A furry human embryo with a tail. Worms that cover the whole surface of the world in their fertile excrements. Ants building mock civilizations, farming aphids or holding slaves. “I am a complete millionaire in odd and curious little facts“, Darwin once wrote to a friend3.

And these odd facts are absolutely central to his work; they form the puzzle pieces of a new image of nature and of ourselves:

• Hybrid creatures that blur the boundaries of plant, animal, and human

• Death and decay as parts of a creative process of change and renewal

• A world in motion, never still or harmonious but constantly becoming

• Open bodies, interconnected with each other and their surroundings

• Reversed hierarchies, the low and the earthly reclaiming their dignity

• No higher plan, no purpose, only the ceaseless becoming of life itself

In other words: Darwin’s new image of nature is grotesque. And as such, it stands in sharp contrast to the classic ideals of Victorian England.

Dark and unsettling on one side, our world appears strange and unfamiliar; yet this very strangeness is freeing. It dissolves old pretensions, restores our kinship with the living world, and invites us to celebrate change and becoming.

Why it matters

I hope this expedition will be, first of all, fun. An actual journey, with a taste of freedom and adventure when we set out for new horizons.

Exploring the Darwinian grotesque will also reveal a new way of seeing the world, including ourselves. And this is the underlying philosophical motivation for writing this book.

Science has often been reduced to a mere tool. It helps us do things with nature. As such, it strengthens the opposition of subject and object. The subject of science is in full control, understanding and manipulating the world according to its wishes. Nature becomes a passive object, a material to be used, to serve a purpose. That is why the world seems mechanical and disenchanted.

Science as perspective, however, is a completely different story. It subverts the clean opposition of subject and object. As spectators, we are deeply, inextricably entangled with everything we see. Nature is not an object to be used. It looks back at us through countless eyes, all different from ours but related in our common history. This is not only a more humble position for humankind, but also a much more colorful and exciting world to live in.

And so, to my own great surprise, my engagement with Darwin turns out to be part of a lifelong search for perspective. And now I found it, against all odds, and now all I need to do is write it down.

Thanks for joining me.

Many other authors are shaping the project along the way. This evolving bibliography gathers the most influential books and essays. Where possible, I have linked directly to digitised editions and historical illustrations.

All of Darwin’s texts can be accessed via Darwin Online.

If you know of any texts that touch on these themes and should be included, I’d be very grateful for your recommendations.

Armstrong, Patrick. Under the Blue Vault of Heaven: A Study of Charles Darwin’s Sojourn in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Nedlands: Indian Ocean Centre for Peace Studies, 1991. Darwin Online.

Baker, Henry. An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Polype: In a Letter to Martin Folkes, Esq.; President of the Royal Society. London: R. Dodsley, 1743. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Sergeiy Sandler. Foreword by Caryl Emerson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Bredekamp, Horst. Darwin’s Corals: A New Model of Evolution and the Tradition of Natural History. Translated, edited, and adapted by Elizabeth Clegg. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882: With the Original Omissions Restored. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958.

Darwin, Charles. Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes and Specimen Lists from H.M.S. Beagle. Edited by Richard Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray, 1872.

Darwin, Charles. The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. London: John Murray, 1881.

Darwin, Charles. Insectivorous Plants. London: John Murray, 1875.

Darwin, Charles. Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N., from 1832 to 1836. London: Henry Colburn, 1839.

Darwin, Charles. A Monograph of the Sub-class Cirripedia, with Figures of All the Species: The Balanidae (or Sessile Cirripedes); the Verrucidae, etc. London: Ray Society, 1854.

Darwin, Charles. A Monograph of the Sub-class Cirripedia, with Figures of All the Species: The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes. London: Ray Society, 1851.

Darwin, Charles. “Notebook B: Transmutation of Species.” 1837–38. Cambridge University Library, DAR 121.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859.

Darwin, Charles. On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. London: John Murray, 1862.

Darwin, Charles. The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs: Being the First Part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle, under the Command of Capt. FitzRoy, R.N., during the Years 1832 to 1836. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1842.

Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998.

Ellis, John. An Essay towards a Natural History of the Corallines, and Other Marine Productions of the Like Kind, Commonly Found on the Coasts of Great Britain and Ireland. London: Printed for the author and sold by A. Millar, J. and J. Rivington, and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755. Museums Victoria.

Helmreich, Stefan. “Ghost Lineages, Ghost Acres, and Darwin’s ‘Diagram of Divergence of Taxa’ in On the Origin of Species: Critical Commentary Inspired by Banu Subramaniam’s Ghost Stories for Darwin.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 4, no. 2 (2018): 1–17.

Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Translated by Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Levine, George. “Hardy’s Woodlanders and the Darwinian Grotesque.” In Darwin the Writer, 186–210. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Müller-Wille, Staffan. “The Dark Side of Evolution: Caprice, Deceit, Redundancy.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 31 (2009): 183–200.

Müller-Wille, Staffan. “The Economy of Nature in Classical Natural History.” Studies in the History of Biology 4, no. 4 (2012): 38–49.

Phillips, Richard. The Hundred Wonders of the World, and of the Three Kingdoms of Nature. Published under the name Rev. C. C. Clarke. 13th ed. London: Sir Richard Phillips and Co., 1821.

Shaw, George. The Naturalist’s Miscellany; or, Coloured Figures of Natural Objects, Drawn and Described Immediately from Nature. Illustrated by Frederick Polydore Nodder. Vol. 2. London: Nodder & Co., 1790–91. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Shaw, George. Zoological Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution in the Years 1806 and 1807. Vol. 1. London: Printed for George Kearsley by Thomas Davison, 1809. Internet Archive.

Sloan, Phillip R. “Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836: Preconditions for Transformism.” In The Darwinian Heritage, edited by David Kohn, 71–120. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Smith, Jonathan. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Stott, Rebecca. Darwin and the Barnacle. London: Faber and Faber, 2003.

Stott, Rebecca. “Darwin’s Barnacles: Mid-Century Victorian Natural History and the Marine Grotesque.” In Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh, 151–81. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Ulin, Donald. “A Clerisy of Worms in Darwin’s Inverted World.” Victorian Studies 35, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 294–308. JSTOR.

Voss, Julia. Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–1874. Translated by Lori Lantz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

By the year 1480, Nero’s Golden House, the Domus Aurea, lay buried beneath centuries of dust and rubble. Renaissance artists lowered themselves into the ruins — among them young Raphael and Luca Signorelli. By the flickering light of an oil lamp, they explored what they thought was a cave, a grotto. And there it was.

Floral patterns alive with winged lions, their bodies woven into the vines like blossoms growing from them. Human-faced creatures part animal, part leaf. The meandering patterns were everywhere, filling walls and ceilings. There was no frame to contain them, or if there was a frame, it belonged to yet another meandering pattern. There was no beginning or end, no center.

It must have been dizzying, like stepping into a foreign world. The dim light wavering across the walls. Someone shouting, ragazzi, come over here, look at this. Footsteps echoing in the darkness.

What they discovered flatly contradicted the classical ornaments of their time. When they thought of frescoes, they thought of clear lines, architectural elements like pillars, order and stability. Those ornaments were arranged around quiet images, mostly biblical scenes, and stayed in the background.

But this… what is this?

The frescoes in the Golden House gave the grotesque its name, along with its core principles: the blending of worlds, the playful crossing of boundaries. Humans turn into plants, animals into ornaments, vines into bodies. Nothing stays fixed or pure; every form is in motion, half something else. The high and the low, the beautiful and the absurd — it’s a world where opposites meet and distinctions blur. A flowing symmetry that seems to breathe movement and interconnection.

Once the grotto was open, its restless hybrids began to spread across Italy’s walls and ceilings. Renaissance artists copied the images, passed them on to their students, and made them their own.

The most prominent example is Raphael’s loggia in the Vatican. His style differs notably from the frescoes of the Domus Aurea, yet the main theme of the grotesque remains intact. Ceilings bloom with vines, corridors come alive with winged beasts. Instead of neat narrative scenes, an abundance of detail fills every inch of space.

While Raphael perfected the ornamental elegance of the grotesque, others, like Luca Signorelli, pushed it into more experimental and playful territory. Not far from Rome, in Orvieto, he decorated the Chapel of San Brizio with a wealth of grotesque details.

The image below shows the Greek philosopher Empedocles leaning from an illusional window, admiring the surrounding ornaments. The painting seems to mock the very idea of the portrait: we can’t even see his face, nothing here is about him. His frame doesn’t separate inside and outside; it becomes permeable and part of the ornaments. While there is a clear center of the image, Empedocles’ gaze draws us away from it and towards the restless edges.

And what a beautiful, busy mess he is watching. Feathered dragons with human heads (and boobies), aquatic creatures, bodies twisting into vines. Every figure merges with another; it’s impossible to say where one begins or ends. This is the signature of the grotesque: everything moves, everything belongs to the same living whole. It is not hard to see where artists like Luca found their inspiration.

The term would later spread far beyond these painted walls, finding its way into many forms of art, especially literature. Yet something of that first encounter remained: hybrid creatures, forms spilling beyond their boundaries, the familiar world turning strange. A sense of disorientation. For some, this loss of order was disturbing, even threatening. For others, it opened a space for play, freedom, and imagination.

This essay began as part of Chapter 1 of Darwin’s Wonders. The idea was to begin with the origins of the grotesque, move through Wolfgang Kayser’s theory, and finally arrive at Mikhail Bakhtin. Unsurprisingly, the chapter became quite dense and more complex than it needed to be.

Still, I love the history of the grotesque, its strange fascination and disorienting pull.

Hope you enjoy!

Few have dived as deeply into the grotesque as Wolfgang Kayser. Before him, the grotesque had its place at the margins of aesthetic theory, often reduced to a deviation from beauty or an exaggerated form of the comic. Kayser seeks to understand it on its own terms, with its own distinctive quality.

His historical investigation begins with the frescoes of the Domus Aurea, Nero’s Golden House in Rome: ornamental vines populated by hybrid creatures, part human, animal or plant, defying classical ideals of order and proportion.

But Kayser traces the same unsettling quality through centuries and across continents, in paintings as well as literature.

What makes them all grotesque?

According to Kayser, it is the effect it has on us. The grotesque breaks the order we rely on to understand things and makes the familiar world strange. Categories collapse: human and animal, person and object, self and other. Suddenly, we no longer know what belongs where. We are caught between laughter and horror, unsure how to feel.

Fantasy and fairy tales may show bizarre or frightening creatures, but their world is neatly separated from ours. We can simply close the book. The grotesque, on the other hand, hits us so hard because it happens right here. “We are so strongly affected and terrified because it is our world which ceases to be reliable,” Kayser writes.1 The grotesque pulls the rug out from under our feet.

Comedy makes us laugh. Tragedy makes us cry. Horror frightens us. The grotesque leaves us alienated in a world we thought we knew.

So, how can the grotesque shake the foundations of our reality so profoundly?

According to Kayser, it undermines the boundaries that our reality relies on. The ornamental grotesque showed hybrid creatures that blend human, animal and plant into one. The boundaries between forms dissolve as everything becomes partly something else.

In later grotesque works, the line between object and person blurrs. Tools and everyday objects escape their functional context and develop an uncanny life of their own. Or it is the other way around: people become objects. We lose our agency and turn into marionettes in the hands of an “impersonal force, an alien and inhuman spirit.”

In this estranged world we are deeply involved but never in control.

Grotesque by nature

This structural understanding allows Kayser to follow the grotesque across the arts, from painting to literature and even music. But something still more curious follows from it: the same unsettling experience can be encountered in life itself.

Certain animals undermine our sense of order by their sheer existence. Especially “nocturnal and creeping animals which inhabit realms apart from and inaccessible to man.” The “grotesque animal incarnate“ is the bat, nocturnal and unsettling, a living hybrid between bird and mammal.

There is more.

“The plant world, too, furnishes numerous motifs, and not only for the ornamental grotesques. The inextricable tangle of the jungle with its ominous vitality, in which nature itself seems to have erased the difference between plants and animals, is so grotesque that no exaggeration is needed. The enlarging microscope or a glance into otherwise hidden organic realms reveals grotesque sceneries as well.“

Once again, nature itself blurrs the line separating plant and animal. No exaggeration, no distortion needed. Likewise, it seems that the very existence of other “realms” threatens the stability of our own. With this last example, the discovery of “hidden organic realms” and the use of a microscope, the grotesque takes us into the field of biology.

It is indeed curious that animals or plants can unsettle the ‘order of nature,‘ an order that remains undefined and taken for granted. It is the blind spot of our normality, visible only where it breaks down.

This essay began as part of Chapter 1 of Darwin’s Wonders. Originally, I wanted to start with Kayser’s definition of the grotesque and then introduce Mikhail Bakhtin. But the chapter became too dense, and I felt that this added complexity obscured more than it revealed. Kayser became a footnote.

Still, his theory is every bit as strange and fascinating as the grotesque art he builds on. I hope you enjoy it.