Darwin Got It Wrong

Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Lord Kelvin are remembered as unimpeachable geniuses. But over the course of their careers, they each made tremendous errors — not just faulty equations but fundamental misunderstandings. In Brilliant Blunders, Mario Livio showcases those failures and the surprising discoveries they lead to. “Science is presented as this direct march to the truth,” Livio, a NASA astrophysicist, tells Kurt Andersen. “Being a scientist myself, I know that’s very far from the truth.