Darwin spent years globe-trotting aboard HMS Beagle. He then spent decades in virtual seclusion, forming his version of the origin of species. Nineteenth-century society managed to lampoon his theory and at the same time applaud the way his work weakened spiritual hope - although this was not his intent. In fact, it caused him great emotional strain. As his biographers Desmond and Moore wrote in Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, "it was a terrifying feeling, knowing that he was about to break ranks with the Anglican elite and go public."

In his later years, besieged by fame and notoriety, and by strain and old age, Darwin returned to the study of earthworms, a field of research he first undertook many years before the publication of Origin of Species. The ceaseless recycling of nature, in this case by worms, caused him to wonder more than once about a grander view of nature. He saw that death allows life to succeed by providing space, food, and opportunities for others. As Phillips himself marvels at the complexity and ingenuity of the earthworm, he wonders: "What would our lives be like if we took earthworms seriously," as Darwin had. What if we saw "the ground under our feet rather than the skies high above our heads, as a place to look, as well as eventually, as a place to be?" Perhaps appropriately, Darwin's Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits was the last book he published.

It is a little more difficult to follow Freud's ideas about death. He is "inspiringly inconsistent and muddled," Phillips concedes. Still, in absorbing the oral biographical accounts of his patients, Freud noted an instinctual tendency not just to avoid death, or the fear of it, but, in an odd twist, a tendency "to secure our own idiosyncratic death." This would be Thantos, the opposite of Freud's creative Eros. With death, life has parameters, and thus our life stories have meaning. What would a story, in this case a life history, be without an ending? We may find some control, if not acceptance, of death if we accept it.

Freud was concerned about the blunt assault of biographers on persons such as himself. Biographers, obviously, interpret how their subjects live their lives and, finally, how they come to terms with their mortality, if they do at all. For Freud, it was the unfathomable laundry list of unconscious, instinctual, and environmental factors that make us visibly react to events we face in everyday life. But the biographer sees only the visible reactions. Because of this perceived incompleteness in the biographical process, Freud avoided the advances of would-be biographers. He went so far as to destroy his own notes to avoid them. Freud's life work, through psychoanalysis, was a search for more "truthful truth[s]," an early attempt to comprehend the basic psychological building blocks that constitute life and thus our interpretation of death.

Phillips is persistent, despite some strain in the thread-like ties, in his attempt to weave together Darwin's and Freud's views on death. Through psychoanalysis and biology, both influential thinkers evoke the implication of losses in life. In biology, the loss is that of extinction. In psychology, it is personal. By surviving these losses, species endure, and the human individual can gain an appreciation of death. Phillips seems to say that Darwin and Freud argued from different viewpoints that death provides opportunities for improving and appreciating life.

Phillips concludes, "There is something bright about opportunism, or lack of it, that both [Darwin and Freud] keep noticing in the creatures that interest them." The seemingly odd, joint philosophical implications of biology and psychology illustrate the pragmatic side of life, one not devoid of optimism, but one that enhances the appreciation of the contingencies of life. Darwin's Worms manages to encapsulate such a view, but at times the writing may be too "philosophical" for more practical-minded readers. Nevertheless, the attempt to mesh biology, and its concerns for the likes of earthworms, with psychology, and its concerns for the likes of biographers and psychoanalysts, is at least worth our attention as it strives to take both subjects to a higher, unifying level.