James Le Fanu, meanwhile, wants to put Darwin back in the dock and get him to account for all the damage that has been done in his name down the years. In this bold, synthesising polemic, Le Fanu marshals the evidence to show that, while the theory of Evolution might be good at explaining slight variations in related species (a larger crest here, a shorter tail there), it simply cannot account for man's development. Take, for instance, the well-known fact that we share 98 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees and mice. What on earth, asks Le Fanu, does that mean the remaining 2 per cent of our unique genetic material is up to? Several decades of genetics and brain science have got nowhere near an answer and, indeed, seem to be taking us into deeper levels of mystery. Moreover, suggests Le Fanu, by reducing life to the level of the strictly material, Darwin has deprived us of any way of thinking about the self or, indeed, the soul. You may look for as long as you like at the way the brain lights up like Blackpool when asked to perform a particular linguistic or cognitive task. But, concludes the good doctor (Le Fanu is a doctor as well as a medical journalist), you will be no closer to knowing what makes you, you.

The extent of James Le Fanu's ambition for this book becomes clear only in the closing paragraphs. Just as the theories of Marx and Freud have been revealed as "self-evidently erroneous", he now intends to bring about the same outcome for the third founding thinker of the 20th century. But this, surely, is a misreading of where we are now. Communism may have collapsed, but anyone who wants to understand how we live now still needs to read their Marx for a full briefing on where we have been. Likewise while some of Freud's odder ideas have been set aside as unworkable, every psycho-therapist working in the 21st century does so within an intellectual framework which has been permanently shaped by his thought.

And so it is with Darwin. His theory of evolution may not be the reason for absolutely everything that it once appeared to be. But every scientist, even Le Fanu's favourite geneticists and neurologists, works in a landscape which still bears the imprint of his remarkable mind. Darwin's ideas may have been nipped and tucked over the decades, some of them may even have been jettisoned completely, but they remain recognisably part of the warp and weft of our intellectual world. No matter how much James Le Fanu might try to deny it, Charles Darwin, like everything else on this planet, has evolved.