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A book that chronicles the development of the theory of evolution told as a bildungsroman of four men: Charles Darwin (and his journey to South America and the Galapagos), Alfred Russell Wallace (and his journey to the Amazon, and modern day Singapore and Indonesia), Thomas Huxley (and his journey to Australia and Papua New Guinea), and Joseph Hooker (and his journey to New Zealand and Antarctica).

In formulating their theories, the four men, who were contemporaries in Victorian Britain, would draw upon and challenge the ideas of Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles Lyell, as well as be influenced by the social and political context of the ongoing industrial revolution.

During their sea voyages the men made various observations around a set of themes:
a) Different species of fauna/flora, insects, animals existed in geographic patterns which seemed to defy the distribution explained by a theory of creationism (or 'centres' of creation).
b) Life forms developed adaptations which made them fit for their indigenous environments. Though as new specific could assimilate or even out-compete native species, this challenged the idea that species were expressly "created" for certain environments.

From these themes came the tenets of the theory of evolution and natural selection (mostly based on the work of Darwin and Wallace, though socialized with the advocacy of Huxley and Hooker):
1) Instead of being fixed and immutable, species developed/evolved over time
2) Species are capable of diverging from a common ancestor through a series of permanent variations
3) These variations appear by "chance" and are selected for fitness

The book also goes into some detail about the intellectual climate of the age, one in which science was increasingly becoming a profession as opposed to a hobby indulged by the privileged, and the resulting tensions from pushing the philosophical implications of the theory (evolution vs. creationism) for society.

The wide and far reaching influences of the original naturalist thinkers is also the topic of The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf. Von Humboldt, whose works directly inspired Darwin, aptly articulated the wonders of nature which still hold us in awe today: "In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation".