Another Life/Michael Viney: I can take the US publication National Geographic or leave it alone, sometimes deserting it for a year or two after one Inca temple too many, but invariably being drawn back by the magazine's superlative maps and photography. Besides, it's one way of connecting with a land grown darkly strange.
In that context, the November issue is undoubtedly brave. The cover story "Was Darwin Wrong?" and editorial headline "Humans are not descended from apes" are clearly out to excite the wing of religious fundamentalism that helped re-elect George Bush. But the magazine allies itself firmly with David Quammen (author of the brilliant The Song of the Dodo), for whom evolution is "a beautiful concept" and the machinery of natural selection is confirmed every day.
Quammen confronts a Gallup poll finding that no less than 45 per cent of American adults agree that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". Only 12 per cent believe that humans evolved from other life forms without any involvement of a god. Only 37 per cent "were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwin". The figures have remained much the same at each such poll since 1982.
Quammen can't believe there are really that many Bible literalists in the US, despite creationist assaults on the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools. There just has to be too much simple ignorance and confusion, he believes, and his long and lucid essay on Darwinian theory, with many modern demonstrations, works hard to correct it (insects and weeds, in one example, acquire resistance to pesticides and herbicides through evolution by natural selection).
Bush's re-election may now have disabused Quammen about the power of the evangelical right in American life. Most environmentalists, certainly, mourn the result. They fear the mindset that treats the whole of nature as a God-given human fiefdom to be exploited for logging, mining, oil and gas, and that accepts only the science it wants to hear. The first four years of Bush brought a wave of corporate intrusion on protected lands, exemptions from pollution control and weakening of wildlife protection (for a litany of charges, try the website of the august and conservationist Sierra Club: www.sierraclub.org/).
Not, of course, that all Darwinians are atheists. Even National Geographic is quick with a proviso that "evolution does not exclude God from our origins". And for wholly devout adoration of nature one has only to turn to the 19th-century naturalists to whom Darwinism seemed no threat at all. "All my religious beliefs," wrote Edward Adrian Wilson, "are founded on the idea of evolution driven to its logical conclusion . . . So long as I have stuck to Nature and the New Testament, I have only got happier every day." This was the Wilson who died in the tent with Captain Scott and whose luminous Antarctic paintings have helped to furnish the setting of that ultimately dismal drama. But he was also "Uncle Ted" (more properly great-uncle Ted) to two modern Wilson brothers who grew up in a house full of his pictures and nature sketchbooks that never saw the light of day.
While art history may remember him as the last major expedition artist, their new book of his work in the British and Irish countryside puts him not far below greats such as Thorburn and Gould.
Both authors, David and Christopher Wilson, are themselves keen naturalists, and the latter is widely known in Ireland as an ornithologist, a broadcaster and a warden of the Wexford Wildfowl reserve. This connects them with a family passion for natural history stretching back two centuries. Although Edward Wilson was a doctor in Cheltenham, he taught himself to paint and lived for his intimate encounters with "the glory of God in nature".
A large-format book, Edward Wilson's Nature Notebooks weaves his life story through album-like pages with hundreds of drawn and painted images of wildlife, computer-freshened and cleansed of time's grubby marks. Their glorious variety - from bats, mice, newts and birds to fish, flowers, whales and seals - offers reminders of the challenge of such work before there was colour photography to hold things still. Tender observation of corpses abounds, but nothing can replace the wild eye's living gleam: a stoat "made dashes at my hand, spitting like a cat . . ."
Edward Wilson's Nature Notebooks by David and Christopher Wilson is published by Reardon Publishing, 56, Upper Norwood Street, Leckhampton, Cheltenham GL 53 0DU, UK. Price £40