Reading Adam Phillips after Richard Dawkins is a bit like stepping off a highway and into a garden. Both men are working in Darwin’s shadow. Both are trying to understand what the theory of natural selection actually means for how we live and die. But where Dawkins zooms out — to the gene, to the meme, to the vast computational machinery of replication — Phillips zooms all the way down, past the organism, past the behavior, past the intention, all the way to the earthworm moving through soil in total darkness.

Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (Basic Books, 2000) is not a science book, exactly. It is not a biography. It is an extended philosophical essay — elegant, elliptical, occasionally infuriating — that uses two figures, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, to ask a question that neither science nor psychoanalysis has fully answered: how do we make peace with the fact that we are temporary?

The Worm at the End

Darwin published The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms in October 1881, six months before his death. He had been studying earthworms, on and off, for more than forty years — since a visit to his uncle’s garden in the 1830s, when he noticed how cinders and lime spread across a field had been swallowed into the soil, brought under by the slow industry of worms. He came back to the subject at the end of his life as a tired man in failing health, telling his German translator that he had “little strength and felt very old.” The resulting book, which he called “a little book on a subject of small importance,” outsold On the Origin of Species during his lifetime, with thousands of copies moving in its first weeks.

What Darwin had proven, through decades of patient experiment — spreading stones across fields and digging them up twenty years later, playing bassoons at earthworms, testing their responses to light and vibration — was that these blind, deaf, apparently primitive creatures were among the most consequential animals on the planet. They had been ploughing farmers’ fields for millennia. They had buried ancient ruins. They had, grain by grain and cast by cast, made much of the topsoil that feeds the world. As Darwin wrote in his conclusion, worms “have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first suppose.”

Phillips latches onto something essential here. Darwin did not stumble onto earthworms as a curiosity. He kept returning to them because they demonstrated something central to his whole understanding of nature: that vast transformation is the sum of countless small, unremarkable acts. The worm does not plan. It does not aspire. It simply moves forward through the dark, digesting, casting, digesting again. The cathedral buries itself not in catastrophe but in the slow accumulation of worm castings. This is not a metaphor for Phillips — it is the mechanism. And the mechanism, he argues, was deeply personal to Darwin.

Scaling Down, Not Up

This is where the contrast with Dawkins becomes instructive — and worth sitting with. If you’ve read The Selfish Gene or The Extended Phenotype, you know Dawkins’s move: he takes Darwin’s framework and scales it up into an almost cosmic theory of replication, where the individual organism is simply a gene’s way of making more genes, and the unit of selection is something smaller and more durable than any one creature. It’s a grand, sweeping synthesis, and it has the advantage of being scientifically productive and intellectually bracing. Dawkins is, in his way, as interested in the small as Darwin — but his small is the gene, which he clothes in the language of agency and strategy. Dawkins’s gene wants to survive. It competes. It deceives. It builds extended phenotypes that reshape the world in its image.

Darwin’s earthworm wants nothing. It moves because moving is what it does. Phillips, reading Darwin’s last book alongside the man’s declining health and impending death, finds something in this that Dawkins’s framework cannot contain: a way of being consequential without being purposive. The worm does not know it is changing the world. It is not optimizing. It is simply living in its own fashion — and in doing so, over geological time, it has rearranged everything. Phillips calls this “Darwin’s secular maintenance myth,” replacing the idea of divine creation with something far stranger and more interesting: the world as perpetual digestion, perpetually remade by creatures with no concept of what they are making.

There is a kind of comfort in this, and Phillips is honest enough to say so. Darwin in his final years was not a man given to consolation — he had, after all, removed God from the picture decades earlier, and he had no illusions about what awaited him. But the earthworm offered something. Not immortality. Not meaning in any grand sense. Just the observation that even the most modest, unaware act of living leaves a residue. That persistence itself, without purpose or plan, reshapes the world.

Phillips and Freud: When the Argument Strains

Darwin’s Worms is actually two essays bound together, and honesty requires acknowledging that the second — on Freud — is considerably less successful than the first. Phillips sets out to draw a parallel between Darwin’s obsession with earthworms and Freud’s lifelong hostility to biographers. Both men, he argues, were grappling with how to think about death. Freud’s late invention of the “death instinct” and his fierce resistance to anyone writing his life story are, for Phillips, two sides of the same coin: a secular man confronting transience without the benefit of metaphysical rescue.

The parallel is suggestive, and Phillips — a working psychoanalyst and one of the more graceful prose writers in the field — carries it with considerable elegance. But where the Darwin sections are grounded in specific, observable behavior (actual worms, actual experiments, actual soil), the Freud sections float free of evidence in a way that can feel more literary than illuminating. The argument becomes a series of beautiful propositions that circle each other without quite landing. One British reviewer put it plainly: the Darwin sections make sense because they are grounded in observation. The Freud sections are something else. You may find them moving. You may find them frustrating. Probably both.

This is not a fatal flaw. Phillips has always been a writer who works by suggestion rather than proof — he has called himself an “expert in the truths of uncertainty” — and readers who come to him expecting scientific argument will leave disappointed. But readers who come to him expecting a certain kind of philosophically charged meditation on how two of the last century’s most consequential thinkers understood their own mortality will find plenty to reward them.

What Darwin Knew at the End

The most affecting passage in Darwin’s Worms is not about Freud at all. It is about Darwin in his garden at Down House, in the final years, watching worms. He had by then published the book that overturned the Victorian understanding of life and species. He had weathered decades of controversy, personal loss, chronic illness. And here he was, in the soil, paying attention to creatures that his culture found beneath notice. He told Carus the worm book was “a subject of small importance.” He did not believe it. He had spent a significant portion of his life paying attention to something everyone else had dismissed, and he understood that attention itself — patient, accumulated, directed without agenda at the overlooked — was the whole point.

That, more than the earthworm’s agricultural importance or the Freud parallel, is what Phillips is after. In a culture obsessed with scale — with grand theories, with viral reach, with the gene’s-eye view of everything — Darwin’s last act was to get on his hands and knees and watch something small. Not because it wasn’t connected to the grand theory. It was. Everything Darwin ever noticed connected to the grand theory. But because the grand theory, correctly understood, doesn’t actually require you to think big. It requires you to pay attention. To trust that accumulation means something even when no individual act seems to.

It is a different way of being in the world than the Dawkinsian one — less combative, less interested in winning the argument against theology, more interested in what it means to be a mortal creature who finds the world interesting all the way to the end. Whether or not you agree with everything Phillips builds on top of it, that observation is worth the price of the book.

Sources

Phillips, Adam. Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories. Basic Books, 2000. Amazon
Darwin, Charles. The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. John Murray, 1881. Amazon
Chancellor, Gordon. “Introduction to Earthworms.” Darwin Online, darwin-online.org.uk. Link
Henchman, Anna. “Charles Darwin’s Final Book on Earthworms, 1881.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Link
Freebury, D. Ray. Review of Darwin’s Worms. Psychiatric Services, 2001. Link
Boynton, Robert S. “Adam Phillips and the New Freud.” robertboynton.com. Link
Roberts, Adam. “On Worms.” Adam’s Notebook, Medium, July 2024. Link
Dalby, Simon et al. “Charles Darwin, earthworms and the natural sciences.” ScienceDirect, 2003. Link
“Darwin’s Earthworm Experiments Broke New Ground.” NPR, February 12, 2009. Link