Wonders of the World dedicates three pages to zoophytes, a group that includes corals along with sea anemones and sponges. 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, these zoophytes “unite the animal and vegetable kingdoms, so as to fill an intermediate space.”

Corals were not animals and not plants, but both, bridging the otherwise separate realms of nature. And for good reason: the larva hatches from an egg and swims about, just like an animal, until it permanently attaches itself to the ground, transforming into a plant-like body with a mouth surrounded by tentacles.

The polyp lays eggs, yes, but the gelatinous polyp also reproduces via shoots and offsets, as a plant does. It duplicates itself, again and again, until it becomes a colourful little forest of hungry mouths.

At times, the new polyps are still stuck to their parent while already producing new branches from their own bodies. Three generations in one body, “thus constituting a real genealogical tree.”

Could this be real?

Hybrid creatures have always fascinated and unsettled us. Roman frescoes showed vines populated with winged lions, dragons with human heads, figures half-plant and half-animal. These were the first grotesques, named after the grottos where they were found. The zoophyte fits this company well, with one difference: it is real.

What makes hybrids special is not their strangeness alone, but a specific kind of strangeness: they cross lines that are supposed to hold. They occupy the space between categories, refusing to belong to one or the other. They violate what we might call the order of nature: a sense that plants are plants, animals are animals, and human beings are something else entirely.

They shake up something we barely notice we depend on: the sense that things belong where they belong. In that brief loss of orientation, they seem at once comical and monstrous.

But there is another quality to the grotesque that the zoophyte shows. The grotesque body is never complete and self-sufficient. It is always growing, opening, connecting to other bodies. Birth is a classic grotesque moment: one body opens to produce another. The “real genealogical tree“ gives this theme a curious twist: three generations stuck in one body, not yet separated from one another. Each body visibly begins as part of another.

Whatever influence the book had on young Charles' imagination, zoophytes were at the center of his earliest scientific endeavors. He learned to collect and study them under a microscope, and later, aboard the HMS Beagle, filled his notebook with careful observations of zoophytes he encountered along distant coasts. The boy who read about wonders became the man who dissected them.

Let's see what he found.

A worm, a tree, a stone

In the published report on his Beagle voyage, Darwin describes two encounters with zoophytes. The first is a sea pen, found in Bahia Blanca.

Sea pens are a type of coral, though in an unusual form. Imagine a thick, fleshy feather stuck into the seabed. It looks like a single twig, gently swaying in the current. When touched, the entire structure pulls itself inward and vanishes into the sand.

Next to his own description, Darwin includes a quote from an earlier voyager, Captain Lancaster. More than two hundred years separate the two texts. Lancaster tells the story of a small twig he found, which sinks into the ground when he tries to pull it up, "unless held very hard."

“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 stone. Lancaster has no category for what he is seeing, so he moves through several, one after another, none of them quite fitting. It is wonderful precisely because language is failing to contain it.

Darwin’s description opens differently. He speaks of a “stony axis,” truncated on one end, with a “vermiform fleshy appendage” on the other. The vocabulary is precise, the tone unhurried. Where Lancaster reached for familiar things and found them failing, Darwin employs exact terms and paints a detailed picture.

What he finds, on closer inspection, is something Lancaster missed entirely. The whole structure consists 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; that they have one central axis connected with a system of obscure circulation; and that 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.

Earlier, we saw polyps growing side by side, temporarily joined before separating. Here, they never separate from their “brethren.” Each one remains distinct — its own mouth, its own body — yet permanently part of something larger: a literal family tree.

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

Compound bodies

Later, during his visit at the Falkland Islands, he encountered various types of moss animals. These are small and unspectacular, often mistaken for seaweed. Only on close inspection are they visible as colonies of tiny animals.

In his words, we can hear an echo of the Wonders of the World:

“What can be more remarkable than to see a plant-like body producing an egg, capable of swimming about and of choosing a proper place to adhere to, which then sprouts into branches, each crowded with innumerable distinct animals, often of complicated organizations?”

Darwin looks closer. Many of them share a common trait: a moveable organ attached to their cells, which, in most cases, “very closely resembles the head of a vulture.“

He studied them carefully, as they moved rhythmically back and forth, occasionally snapping their jaws shut. Despite their size, they fiercely attacked the needle Darwin poked them with, holding it so firmly in their beak that he could shake the whole branch.

Most of the time, they moved independently of one another. Sometimes they all moved as one. At times, only the heads on one side moved simultaneously. And sometimes, they moved like a wave, one after the other.

Here, in these uniform actions, “we apparently behold as perfect a transmission of will in the zoophyte, though composed of thousands of distinct polypi, as in any single animal,” Darwin concludes. Zoophytes remain both one and many.

Faced with this riddle, Darwin reaches for a surprising comparison. A tree, he suggests, is really no different from a zoophyte. Its buds are individuals, each one a separate plant, yet permanently joined to a common body. We do not notice this because a bud does not have a mouth or intestines. But the logic is the same: what we see as one organism is really a “union of separate individuals in a common body,” their separation never quite completed.

Every tree, it turns out, is a genealogical tree.

Life, all of it

After the Beagle voyage, zoophytes disappear from Darwin’s work. There is, however, one more compound animal — at the very heart of the theory of evolution, hidden in plain sight.

On the Origin of Species only contains a single illustration: the famous diagram of species. It is a tool to visualize a change operating on a scale far beyond our imagination, the slow accumulation of small variations across thousands, millions of generations.

The letters at the bottom represent species, while the branching dotted lines above them trace how their offspring diverge over time. The horizontal lines mark the passage of a thousand generations. Thus we can see how in the course of ten thousand generations, A transforms into a10, f10, and m10.

Depending on the amount of change we suppose, these could still be varieties, or they might be species of their own. And that is how new species come about. Voilà!

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

Welcome to deep time.

With this change in scale, the diagram no longer just shows the development of species, but moves up the ladder of biological classification: genera, families, orders. The inner logic of the model is such that, given enough time, it can trace all of life, from a single origin outward.

The image of the Tree of Life, which he evokes alongside the diagram, highlights this unity of all life in one tree of descent. A genealogical tree scaled beyond recognition. Each body distinct, and yet its family ties remain visible, linking it to something beyond itself.

Imagine your family tree, linking you to your parents, through them to your grandparents. That is three generations. Now imagine that this tree reaches much further, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of generations. Keep going, and you will eventually arrive at the common progenitor of all life, all of it. Along the way, you meet creatures that look quite unlike you, animals, plants, everything.

The diagram shows what the zoophytes had already suggested: one organism made up of countless individuals. In the big picture, birth and death are not beginning and end, but moments of one ongoing transformation.

The many wonders of the world are fleeting forms of one. Life itself shapeshifting.

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 deepest 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 grotesque images, glimpses of a world in restless transformation, 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.

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 was the barnacle guy.

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.

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—reveals a fundamental truth: the individual is not a fortress, but 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.

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.