Charles Darwin
British naturalist
in full Charles Robert Darwin
born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England
died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent
Main
English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection became
the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable country
gentleman, Darwin at first shocked religious Victorian society by
suggesting that animals and humans shared a common ancestry. However,
his nonreligious biology appealed to the rising class of professional
scientists, and by the time of his death evolutionary imagery had spread
through all of science, literature, and politics. Darwin, himself an
agnostic, was accorded the ultimate British accolade of burial in
Westminster Abbey, London. (In February 2009, for the 200th anniversary
of Charles Darwin’s birth, the Britannica Blog asked two of Britannica’s
contributors to answer a few questions on the current influence of
Charles Darwin and his ideas. Noted evolutionary biologist Francisco
Ayala, professor biological sciences at the University of California,
Irvine, and author of Britannica’s entry on evolution and Evolving: The
Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution and others, addresses some of
the current developments in evolutionary biology, while Adam Gopnik, a
staff writer at the The New Yorker and author of the cultural life
section of Britannica’s United States entry and Angels and Ages,
explores the linkage between Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, with whom he
shares his birthday.)
Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after
returning from a voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle, but it was
not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public
expression in On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply
influenced modern Western society and thought.
Early life and education
Darwin was the second son of society doctor Robert Waring Darwin and of
Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of the Unitarian pottery industrialist
Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin’s other grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a
freethinking physician and poet fashionable before the French
Revolution, was author of Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic Life
(1794–96). Darwin’s mother died when he was eight, and he was cared for
by his three elder sisters. The boy stood in awe of his overbearing
father, whose astute medical observations taught him much about human
psychology. But he hated the rote learning of Classics at the
traditional Anglican Shrewsbury School, where he studied between 1818
and 1825. Science was then considered dehumanizing in English public
schools, and for dabbling in chemistry Darwin was condemned by his
headmaster (and nicknamed “Gas” by his schoolmates).
His father, considering the 16-year-old a wastrel interested only in
game shooting, sent him to study medicine at Edinburgh University in
1825. Later in life, Darwin gave the impression that he had learned
little during his two years at Edinburgh. In fact, it was a formative
experience. There was no better science education in a British
university. He was taught to understand the chemistry of cooling rocks
on the primitive Earth and how to classify plants by the modern “natural
system.” In Edinburgh Museum he was taught to stuff birds by a freed
South American slave and to identify the rock strata and colonial flora
and fauna.
More crucially, the university’s radical students exposed the
teenager to the latest Continental sciences. Edinburgh attracted English
Dissenters who were barred from graduating at the Anglican universities
of Oxford and Cambridge, and at student societies Darwin heard
freethinkers deny the Divine design of human facial anatomy and argue
that animals shared all the human mental faculties. One talk, on the
mind as the product of a material brain, was officially censored, for
such materialism was considered subversive in the conservative decades
after the French Revolution. Darwin was witnessing the social penalties
of holding deviant views. As he collected sea slugs and sea pens on
nearby shores, he was accompanied by Robert Edmond Grant, a radical
evolutionist and disciple of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
An expert on sponges, Grant became Darwin’s mentor, teaching him about
the growth and relationships of primitive marine invertebrates, which
Grant believed held the key to unlocking the mysteries surrounding the
origin of more complex creatures. Darwin, encouraged to tackle the
larger questions of life through a study of invertebrate zoology, made
his own observations on the larval sea mat (Flustra) and announced his
findings at the student societies.
The young Darwin learned much in Edinburgh’s rich intellectual
environment, but not medicine: he loathed anatomy, and (pre-chloroform)
surgery sickened him. His freethinking father, shrewdly realizing that
the church was a better calling for an aimless naturalist, switched him
to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1828. In a complete change of
environment, Darwin was now educated as an Anglican gentleman. He took
his horse, indulged his drinking, shooting, and beetle-collecting
passions with other squires’ sons, and managed 10th place in the
Bachelor of Arts degree in 1831. Here he was shown the conservative side
of botany by a young professor, the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, while
that doyen of Providential design in the animal world, the Reverend Adam
Sedgwick, took Darwin to Wales in 1831 on a geologic field trip.
Fired by Alexander von Humboldt’s account of the South American
jungles in his Personal Narrative of Travels, Darwin jumped at Henslow’s
suggestion of a voyage to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South
America, aboard a rebuilt brig, HMS Beagle. Darwin would not sail as a
lowly surgeon-naturalist but as a self-financed gentleman companion to
the 26-year-old captain, Robert Fitzroy, an aristocrat who feared the
loneliness of command. Fitzroy’s was to be an imperial-evangelical
voyage: he planned to survey coastal Patagonia to facilitate British
trade and return three “savages” previously brought to England from
Tierra del Fuego and Christianized. Darwin equipped himself with
weapons, books (Fitzroy gave him the first volume of Principles of
Geology, by Charles Lyell), and advice on preserving carcasses from
London Zoo’s experts. The Beagle sailed from England on December 27,
1831.
The Beagle voyage
The circumnavigation of the globe (see the map) would be the making of
the 22-year-old Darwin. Five years of physical hardship and mental
rigour, imprisoned within a ship’s walls, offset by wide-open
opportunities in the Brazilian jungles and the Andes Mountains, were to
give Darwin a new seriousness. As a gentleman naturalist, he could leave
the ship for extended periods, pursuing his own interests. As a result,
he spent only 18 months of the voyage aboard the ship.
The hardship was immediate: a tormenting seasickness. And so was his
questioning: on calm days Darwin’s plankton-filled townet left him
wondering why beautiful creatures teemed in the ocean’s vastness, where
no human could appreciate them. On the Cape Verde Islands (January
1832), the sailor saw bands of oyster shells running through local
rocks, suggesting that Lyell was right in his geologic speculations and
that the land was rising in places, falling in others. At Bahia (now
Salvador), Brazil, the luxuriance of the rainforest (see the engraving)
left Darwin’s mind in “a chaos of delight.” But that mind, with its
Wedgwood-abolitionist characteristics, was revolted by the local
slavery. For Darwin, so often alone, the tropical forests seemed to
compensate for human evils: months were spent in Rio de Janeiro amid
this shimmering tropical splendour, full of “gaily-coloured” flatworms,
and the collector himself became “red-hot with Spiders.” But nature had
its own evils, and Darwin always remembered with a shudder the parasitic
ichneumon wasp, which stored caterpillars to be eaten alive by its
grubs. He would later consider this evidence against the beneficent
design of nature.
On the River Plate (Río de la Plata) in July 1832, he found
Montevideo, Uruguay, in a state of rebellion and joined armed sailors to
retake the rebel-held fort. At Bahía Blanca, Argentina, gauchos told him
of their extermination of the Pampas “Indians.” Beneath the veneer of
human civility, genocide seemed the rule on the frontier, a conclusion
reinforced by Darwin’s meeting with General Juan Manuel de Rosas and his
“villainous Banditti-like army,” in charge of eradicating the natives.
For a sensitive young man, fresh from Christ’s College, this was
disturbing. His contact with “untamed” humans on Tierra del Fuego in
December 1832 unsettled him more. (See the drawing of a Fuegian Indian
from Fitzroy’s book on the Beagle voyage.) How great, wrote Darwin, the
“difference between savage & civilized man is.—It is greater than
between a wild & [a] domesticated animal.” God had evidently created
humans in a vast cultural range, and yet, judging by the Christianized
savages aboard, even the “lowest” races were capable of improvement.
Darwin was tantalized, and always he niggled for explanations.
His fossil discoveries raised more questions. Darwin’s periodic trips
over two years to the cliffs at Bahía Blanca and farther south at Port
St. Julian yielded huge bones of extinct mammals. Darwin manhandled
skulls, femurs, and armour plates back to the ship—relics, he assumed,
of rhinoceroses, mastodons, cow-sized armadillos, and giant ground
sloths (see the engraving of the Megatherium skeleton). He unearthed a
horse-sized mammal with a long face like an anteater’s, and he returned
from a 340-mile (550-km) ride to Mercedes near the Uruguay River with a
skull 28 inches (71 cm) long strapped to his horse. Fossil extraction
became a romance for Darwin. It pushed him into thinking of the primeval
world and what had caused these giant beasts to die out.
The land was evidently changing, rising; Darwin’s observations in the
Andes Mountains confirmed it. After the Beagle surveyed the Falkland
Islands, and after Darwin had packed away at Port Desire (Puerto
Deseado), Argentina, the partially gnawed bones of a new species of
small rhea, the ship sailed up the west coast of South America to
Valparaíso, Chile. Here Darwin climbed 4,000 feet (1,200 metres) into
the Andean foothills and marveled at the forces that could raise such
mountains. The forces themselves became tangible when he saw volcanic
Mount Osorno erupt on January 15, 1835. Then in Valdivia, Chile, on
February 20, as he lay on a forest floor, the ground shook: the violence
of the earthquake and ensuing tidal wave was enough to destroy the great
city of Concepción, whose rubble Darwin walked through. (See the sketch
from Fitzroy’s narrative.) But what intrigued him was the seemingly
insignificant: the local mussel beds, all dead, were now lying above
high tide. The land had risen: Lyell, taking the uniformitarian
position, had argued that geologic formations were the result of steady
cumulative forces of the sort we see today. And Darwin had seen them.
The continent was thrusting itself up, a few feet at a time. He imagined
the eons it had taken to raise the fossilized trees in sandstone (once
seashore mud) to 7,000 feet (2,100 metres), where he found them. Darwin
began thinking in terms of deep time.
They left Peru on the circumnavigation home in September 1835. First
Darwin landed on the “frying hot” Galapagos Islands. These were volcanic
prison islands, crawling with marine iguanas and giant tortoises.
(Darwin and the crew brought small tortoises aboard as pets, to join
their coatis from Peru.) Contrary to legend, these islands never
provided Darwin’s “eureka” moment. Although he noted that the
mockingbirds differed on four islands and tagged his specimens
accordingly, he failed to label his other birds—what he thought were
wrens, “gross-beaks,” finches, and oriole-relatives—by island. Nor did
Darwin collect tortoise specimens, even though local prisoners believed
that each island had its distinct race.
The “home-sick heroes” returned via Tahiti, New Zealand, and
Australia. By April 1836, when the Beagle made the Cocos (Keeling)
Islands in the Indian Ocean—Fitzroy’s brief being to see if coral reefs
sat on mountain tops—Darwin already had his theory of reef formation. He
imagined (correctly) that these reefs grew on sinking mountain rims. The
delicate coral built up, compensating for the drowning land, so as to
remain within optimal heat and lighting conditions. At the Cape of Good
Hope, Darwin talked with the astronomer Sir John Herschel, possibly
about Lyell’s gradual geologic evolution and perhaps about how it
entailed a new problem, the “mystery of mysteries,” the simultaneous
change of fossil life.
On the last leg of the voyage Darwin finished his 770-page diary,
wrapped up 1,750 pages of notes, drew up 12 catalogs of his 5,436 skins,
bones, and carcasses—and still he wondered: Was each Galapagos
mockingbird a naturally produced variety? Why did ground sloths become
extinct? He sailed home with problems enough to last him a lifetime.
When he landed in October 1836, the vicarage had faded, the gun had
given way to the notebook, and the supreme theorizer—who would always
move from small causes to big outcomes—had the courage to look beyond
the conventions of his own Victorian culture for new answers.
Evolution by natural selection: the London years, 1836–42
With his voyage over and with a £400 annual allowance from his father,
Darwin now settled down among the urban gentry as a gentleman geologist.
He befriended Lyell, and he discussed the rising Chilean coastline as a
new fellow of the Geological Society in January 1837 (he was secretary
of the society by 1838). Darwin became well known through his diary’s
publication as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural
History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle (1839). With a
£1,000 Treasury grant, obtained through the Cambridge network, he
employed the best experts and published their descriptions of his
specimens in his Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1838–43).
Darwin’s star had risen, and he was now lionized in London.
It was in these years of civil unrest following the First Reform Act
(1832) that Darwin devised his theory of evolution. Radical Dissenters
were denouncing the church’s monopoly on power—attacking an Anglican
status quo that rested on miraculous props: the supposed supernatural
creation of life and society. Darwin had Unitarian roots, and his
breathless notes show how his radical Dissenting understanding of
equality and antislavery framed his image of mankind’s place in nature:
“Animals—whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our
equals.—Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind?”
Some radicals questioned whether each animal was uniquely “designed” by
God when all vertebrates shared a similar structural plan. The
polymathic Charles Babbage—of calculating machine fame—made God a divine
programmer, preordaining life by means of natural law rather than ad hoc
miracle. It was the ultra-Whig way, and in 1837 Darwin, an impeccable
Whig reformer who enjoyed Babbage’s soirees, likewise accepted that “the
Creator creates by…laws.”
The experts’ findings sent Darwin to more heretical depths. At the
Royal College of Surgeons, the eminent anatomist Richard Owen found that
Darwin’s Uruguay River skull belonged to Toxodon, a hippotamus-sized
antecedent of the South American capybara. The Pampas fossils were
nothing like rhinoceroses and mastodons; they were huge extinct
armadillos, anteaters, and sloths, which suggested that South American
mammals had been replaced by their own kind according to some unknown
“law of succession.” At the Zoological Society, ornithologist John Gould
announced that the Galapagos birds were not a mixture of wrens, finches,
and “gross-beaks” but were all ground finches, differently adapted. When
Gould diagnosed the Galapagos mockingbirds as three species, unique to
different islands, in March 1837, Darwin examined Fitzroy’s collection
to discover that each island had its representative finch as well. But
how had they all diverged from mainland colonists? By this time Darwin
was living near his freethinking brother, Erasmus, in London’s West End,
and their dissident dining circle, which included the Unitarian Harriet
Martineau, provided the perfect milieu for Darwin’s ruminations. Darwin
adopted “transmutation” (evolution, as it is now called), perhaps
because of his familiarity with it through the work of his grandfather
and Robert Grant. Nonetheless, it was abominated by the Cambridge
clerics as a bestial, if not blasphemous, heresy that would corrupt
mankind and destroy the spiritual safeguards of the social order. Thus
began Darwin’s double life, which would last for two decades.
For two years he filled notebooks with jottings. There was an
intensity and doggedness to it. He searched for the causes of
extinction, accepted life as a branching tree (not a series of
escalators, the old idea), tackled island isolation, and wondered
whether variations appeared gradually or at a stroke. He dismissed a
Lamarckian force driving life inexorably upward with the cavalier joke,
“If all men were dead then monkeys make men.—Men make angels,” which
showed how little the failed ordinand shared his Cambridge mentors’
hysteria about an ape ancestry. Indeed, there was no “upward”: he became
relativistic, sensing that life was spreading outward into niches, not
standing on a ladder. There was no way of ranking humans and bees, no
yardstick of “highness”: man was no longer the crown of creation.
Heart palpitations and stomach problems were affecting him by
September 1837. Stress sent him to the Highlands of Scotland in 1838,
where he diverted himself studying the “parallel roads” of Glen Roy, so
like the raised beaches in Chile. But the sickness returned as he
continued chipping at the scientific bedrock of a cleric-dominated
society. The “whole [miraculous] fabric totters & falls,” he jotted.
Darwin had a right to be worried. Were his secret discovered, he would
stand accused of social abandon. At Edinburgh he had seen censorship;
other materialists were being publicly disgraced. His notes began
mooting disarming ploys: “Mention persecution of early astronomers.”
Behind his respectable facade at the Geological Society lay a new
contempt for the divines’ providential shortsightedness. The president,
the Reverend William Whewell, “says length of days adapted to duration
of sleep of man.!!!” he jotted. What “arrogance!!”
Mankind: there was the crux. Darwin wrote humans and society into the
evolutionary equation from the start. He saw the social instincts of
troop animals developing into morality and studied the humanlike
behaviour of orangutans at the zoo. With avant-garde society
radicalized, Darwin moved into his own ultraradical phase in 1838—even
suggesting that belief in God was an ingrained tribal survival strategy:
“love of [the] deity [is an] effect of [the brain’s] organization. Oh
you Materialist!” he mocked himself. In a day when a gentleman’s
character had to be above reproach, Darwin’s notes had a furtive ring.
None of this could become known—yet. The rich careerist—admitted to the
prestigious Athenaeum Club in 1838 and the Royal Society in 1839—had too
much to lose.
As a sporting gent from the shires, Darwin queried breeders about the
way they changed domestic dogs and fancy pigeons by spotting slight
variations and accentuating them through breeding. But he only saw the
complete congruity between the way nature operated and the way fanciers
produced new breeds upon reading the economist Thomas Malthus’s Essay on
the Principle of Population in September 1838. This was a seminal
moment—even if Malthusian ideas had long permeated his Whig circle.
Darwin was living through a workhouse revolution. Malthus had said that
there would always be too many mouths to feed—population increases
geometrically, whereas food production rises arithmetically—and that
charity was useless. So the Whigs had passed a Malthusian Poor Law in
1834 and were incarcerating sick paupers in workhouses (separating men
from women to stop them from breeding). Darwin’s dining companion
Harriet Martineau (whom many expected to marry his brother, Erasmus),
was the Whigs’ poor law propagandist. (Her novelistic Malthusian
pamphlets had been sent to Darwin while he was on the Beagle.) Darwin
realized that population explosions would lead to a struggle for
resources and that the ensuing competition would weed out the unfit. It
was an idea he now applied to nature (he had previously thought that
animal populations remained stable in the wild). Darwin called his
modified Malthusian mechanism “natural selection.” Nature was equally
uncharitable, went the argument: overpopulated, it experienced a fierce
struggle, and from all manner of chance variations, good and bad, the
best, “the surviving one of ten thousand trials,” won out, endured, and
thus passed on its improved trait. This was the way a species kept pace
with the Lyellian evolution of the Earth.
Darwin was a born list maker. In 1838 he even totted up the pros and
cons of taking a wife—and married his cousin Emma Wedgwood (1808–96) in
1839. He rashly confided his thoughts on evolution, evidently shocking
her. By now, Darwin accepted the notion that even mental traits and
instincts were randomly varying, that they were the stuff for selection.
But he saw from Emma’s reaction that he must publicly camouflage his
views. Although the randomness and destructiveness of his evolutionary
system—with thousands dying so that the “fittest” might survive—left
little room for a personally operating benign deity, Darwin still
believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver of the universe. In 1839 he
shut his last major evolution notebook, his theory largely complete.
The squire naturalist in Downe
Darwin drafted a 35-page sketch of his theory of natural selection in
1842 and expanded it in 1844, but he had no immediate intention of
publishing it. He wrote Emma a letter in 1844 requesting that, if he
died, she should pay an editor £400 to publish the work. Perhaps he
wanted to die first. In 1842, Darwin, increasingly shunning society, had
moved the family to the isolated village of Downe, in Kent, at the
“extreme edge of [the] world.” (It was in fact only 16 miles [26 km]
from central London.) Here, living in a former parsonage, Down House, he
emulated the lifestyle of his clerical friends. Fearing prying eyes, he
even lowered the road outside his house. His seclusion was complete:
from now on he ran his days like clockwork, with set periods for
walking, napping, reading, and nightly backgammon. He fulfilled his
parish responsibilities, eventually helping to run the local Coal and
Clothing Club for the labourers. His work hours were given over to bees,
flowers, and barnacles and to his books on coral reefs and South
American geology, three of which in 1842–46 secured his reputation as a
career geologist.
He rarely mentioned his secret. When he did, notably to the Kew
Gardens botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Darwin said that believing in
evolution was “like confessing a murder.” The analogy with this capital
offense was not so strange: seditious atheists were using evolution as
part of their weaponry against Anglican oppression and were being jailed
for blasphemy. Darwin, nervous and nauseous, trying spas and quack
remedies (even tying plate batteries to his heaving stomach), understood
the conservative clerical morality. He was sensitive to the offense he
might cause. He was also immensely wealthy: by the late 1840s the
Darwins had £80,000 invested; he was an absentee landlord of two large
Lincolnshire farms; and in the 1850s he plowed tens of thousands of
pounds into railway shares. Even though his theory, with its capitalist
and meritocratic emphasis, was quite unlike anything touted by the
radicals and rioters, these turbulent years were no time to break cover.
From 1846 to 1854, Darwin added to his credibility as an expert on
species by pursuing a detailed study of all known barnacles. Intrigued
by their sexual differentiation, he discovered that some females had
tiny degenerate males clinging to them. This sparked his interest in the
evolution of diverging male and female forms from an original
hermaphrodite creature. Four monographs on such an obscure group made
him a world expert and gained him the Royal Society’s Royal Medal in
1853. No longer could he be dismissed as a speculator on biological
matters.
On the Origin of Species
England became quieter and more prosperous in the 1850s, and by
mid-decade the professionals were taking over, instituting exams and
establishing a meritocracy. The changing social composition of
science—typified by the rise of the freethinking biologist Thomas Henry
Huxley—promised a better reception for Darwin. Huxley, the philosopher
Herbert Spencer, and other outsiders were opting for a secular nature in
the rationalist Westminster Review and deriding the influence of
“parsondom.” Darwin had himself lost the last shreds of his belief in
Christianity with the tragic death of his oldest daughter, Annie, from
typhoid in 1851.
The world was becoming safer for Darwin and his theory: mid-Victorian
England was stabler than the “hungry Thirties” or turbulent 1840s. In
1854 he solved his last major problem, the forking of genera to produce
new evolutionary branches. He used an industrial analogy familiar from
the Wedgwood factories, the division of labour: competition in nature’s
overcrowded marketplace would favour variants that could exploit
different aspects of a niche. Species would diverge on the spot, like
tradesmen in the same tenement. Through 1855 Darwin experimented with
seeds in seawater, to prove that they could survive ocean crossings to
start the process of speciation on islands. Then he kept fancy pigeons,
to see if the chicks were more like the ancestral rock dove than their
own bizarre parents. Darwin perfected his analogy of natural selection
with the fancier’s “artificial selection,” as he called it. He was
preparing his rhetorical strategy, ready to present his theory.
After speaking to Huxley and Hooker at Downe in April 1856, Darwin
began writing a triple-volume book, tentatively called Natural
Selection, which was designed to crush the opposition with a welter of
facts. Darwin now had immense scientific and social authority, and his
place in the parish was assured when he was sworn in as a justice of the
peace in 1857. Encouraged by Lyell, Darwin continued writing through the
birth of his 10th and last child, the mentally retarded Charles Waring
Darwin (born in 1856, when Emma was 48). Whereas in the 1830s Darwin had
thought that species remained perfectly adapted until the environment
changed, he now believed that every new variation was imperfect, and
that perpetual struggle was the rule. He also explained the evolution of
sterile worker bees in 1857. These could not be selected because they
did not breed, so he opted for “family” selection (kin selection, as it
is known today): the whole colony benefited from their retention.
Darwin had finished a quarter of a million words by June 18, 1858.
That day he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, an English
socialist and specimen collector working in the Malay Archipelago,
sketching a similar-looking theory. Darwin, fearing loss of priority,
accepted Lyell’s and Hooker’s solution: they read joint extracts from
Darwin’s and Wallace’s works at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858.
Darwin was away, sick, grieving for his tiny son who had died from
scarlet fever, and thus he missed the first public presentation of the
theory of natural selection. It was an absenteeism that would mark his
later years.
Darwin hastily began an “abstract” of Natural Selection, which grew
into a more accessible book, On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle
for Life. Suffering from a terrible bout of nausea, Darwin, now 50, was
secreted away at a spa on the desolate Yorkshire moors when the book was
sold to the trade on November 22, 1859. He still feared the worst and
sent copies to the experts with self-effacing letters (“how you will
long to crucify me alive”). It was like “living in Hell,” he said about
these months.
The book did distress his Cambridge patrons, but they were marginal
to science now. However, radical Dissenters were sympathetic, as were
the rising London biologists and geologists, even if few actually
adopted Darwin’s cost-benefit approach to nature. The newspapers drew
the one conclusion that Darwin had specifically avoided: that humans had
evolved from apes, and that Darwin was denying mankind’s immortality. A
sensitive Darwin, making no personal appearances, let Huxley, by now a
good friend, manage this part of the debate. The pugnacious Huxley, who
loved public argument as much as Darwin loathed it, had his own reasons
for taking up the cause, and did so with enthusiasm. He wrote three
reviews of Origin of Species, defended human evolution at the Oxford
meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in
1860 (when Bishop Samuel Wilberforce jokingly asked whether the apes
were on Huxley’s grandmother’s or grandfather’s side), and published his
own book on human evolution, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature
(1863). What Huxley championed was Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism, his
nonmiraculous assumptions, which pushed biological science into
previously taboo areas and increased the power of Huxley’s
professionals. And it was they who gained the Royal Society’s Copley
Medal for Darwin in 1864.
Huxley’s reaction, with its enthusiasm for evolution and cooler
opinion of natural selection, was typical. Natural selection—the “law of
higgledy-piggledy” in Herschel’s dismissive words—received little
support in Darwin’s day. By contrast, evolution itself (“descent,”
Darwin called it—the word evolution would only be introduced in the
last, 1872, edition of the Origin) was being acknowledged from British
Association platforms by 1866. That year, too, Darwin met his German
admirer, the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, whose proselytizing would spread
Darwinismus through the Prussian world. Two years later the King of
Prussia conferred on Darwin the order Pour le Mérite.
The patriarch in his home laboratory
Long periods of debilitating sickness in the 1860s left the craggy,
bearded Darwin thin and ravaged. He once vomited for 27 consecutive
days. Down House was an infirmary where illness was the norm and Emma
the attendant nurse. She was a shield, protecting the patriarch,
cosseting him. Darwin was a typical Victorian in his racial and sexual
stereotyping—however dependent on his redoubtable wife, he still thought
women inferior; and although a fervent abolitionist, he still considered
blacks a lower race. But few outside of the egalitarian socialists
challenged these prejudices—and Darwin, immersed in a competitive Whig
culture, and enshrining its values in his science, had no time for
socialism.
The house was also a laboratory, where Darwin continued experimenting
and revamping the Origin through six editions. Although quietly swearing
by “my deity ‘Natural Selection,’” he answered critics by reemphasizing
other causes of change—for example, the effects of continued use of an
organ—and he bolstered the Lamarckian belief that such alterations
through excessive use might be passed on. In Variation of Animals and
Plants under Domestication (1868) he marshaled the facts and explored
the causes of variation in domestic breeds. The book answered critics
such as George Douglas Campbell, the eighth duke of Argyll, who loathed
Darwin’s blind, accidental process of variation and envisaged the
appearance of “new births” as goal directed. By showing that fanciers
picked from the gamut of naturally occurring variations to produce the
tufts and topknots on their fancy pigeons, Darwin undermined this
providential explanation.
In 1867 the engineer Fleeming Jenkin argued that any single
favourable variation would be swamped and lost by back-breeding within
the general population. No mechanism was known for inheritance, and so
in the Variation Darwin devised his hypothesis of “pangenesis” to
explain the discrete inheritance of traits. He imagined that each tissue
of an organism threw out tiny “gemmules,” which passed to the sex organs
and permitted copies of themselves to be made in the next generation.
But Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton failed to find these gemmules in
rabbit blood, and the theory was dismissed.
Darwin was adept at flanking movements in order to get around his
critics. He would take seemingly intractable subjects—like orchid
flowers—and make them test cases for “natural selection.” Hence the book
that appeared after the Origin was, to everyone’s surprise, The Various
Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by
Insects (1862). He showed that the orchid’s beauty was not a piece of
floral whimsy “designed” by God to please humans but honed by selection
to attract insect cross-pollinators. The petals guided the bees to the
nectaries, and pollen sacs were deposited exactly where they could be
removed by a stigma of another flower.
But why the importance of cross-pollination? Darwin’s botanical work
was always subtly related to his evolutionary mechanism. He believed
that cross-pollinated plants would produce fitter offspring than
self-pollinators, and he used considerable ingenuity in conducting
thousands of crossings to prove the point. The results appeared in The
Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876).
His next book, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same
Species (1877), was again the result of long-standing work into the way
evolution in some species favoured different male and female forms of
flowers to facilitate outbreeding. Darwin had long been sensitive to the
effects of inbreeding because he was himself married to a Wedgwood
cousin, as was his sister Caroline. He agonized over its debilitating
consequence for his five sons. Not that he need have worried, for they
fared well: William became a banker, Leonard an army major, George the
Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, Francis a reader in botany
at Cambridge, and Horace a scientific instrument maker. Darwin also
studied insectivorous plants, climbing plants, and the response of
plants to gravity and light (sunlight, he thought, activated something
in the shoot tip, an idea that guided future work on growth hormones in
plants).
The private man and the public debate
Through the 1860s natural selection was already being applied to the
growth of society. A.R. Wallace saw cooperation strengthening the moral
bonds within primitive tribes. Advocates of social Darwinism, in
contrast, complained that modern civilization was protecting the “unfit”
from natural selection. Francis Galton argued that particular character
traits—even drunkenness and genius—were inherited and that “eugenics,”
as it would come to be called, would stop the genetic drain. The trend
to explain the evolution of human races, morality, and civilization was
capped by Darwin in his two-volume The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (1871). The book was authoritative, annotated, and
heavily anecdotal in places. The two volumes were discrete, the first
discussing the g of civilization and human origins among the Old World
monkeys. (Darwin’s depiction of a hairy human ancestor with pointed ears
led to a spate of caricatures; see the cartoon.) The second volume
responded to critics like Argyll, who doubted that the iridescent
hummingbird’s plumage had any function—or any Darwinian explanation.
Darwin argued that female birds were choosing mates for their gaudy
plumage. Darwin as usual tapped his huge correspondence network of
breeders, naturalists, and travelers worldwide to produce evidence for
this. Such “sexual selection” happened among humans too. With primitive
societies accepting diverse notions of beauty, aesthetic preferences, he
believed, could account for the origin of the human races.
Darwin’s explanation was also aimed partly at Wallace. Like so many
disillusioned socialists, Wallace had become engaged in spiritualism. He
argued that an overdeveloped human brain had been provided by the spirit
forces to move humanity toward millennial perfection. Darwin had no time
for this. Even though he eventually attended a séance with Galton and
the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) at his brother’s house in 1874,
he was appalled at “such rubbish,” and in 1876 he sent £10 toward the
costs of the prosecution of the medium Henry Slade.
Darwin finished another long-standing line of work. Since studying
the moody orangutans at London Zoo in 1838, through the births of his 10
children (whose facial contortions he duly noted), Darwin had been
fascinated by expression. As a student he had heard the attacks on the
idea that peoples’ facial muscles were designed by God to express their
unique thoughts. Now his photographically illustrated The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) expanded the subject to include
the rages and grimaces of asylum inmates, all to show the continuity of
emotions and expressions between humans and animals.
The gentle Darwin elicited tremendous devotion. A protective circle
formed around him, locked tight by Huxley and Hooker. It was they who
ostracized detractors, particularly the Roman Catholic zoologist Saint
George Jackson Mivart. Nor did Darwin forget it: he helped raise £2,100
to send a fatigued Huxley on holiday in 1873, and his pestering resulted
in the impecunious Wallace being added to the Civil List in 1881. Darwin
was held in awe by many, the more so because he was rarely seen. And
when he was seen—for example, by the Harvard philosopher John Fiske, a
privileged visitor to Down House in 1873—he was found to be “the
dearest, sweetest, loveliest old grandpa that ever was.”
Darwin wrote his autobiography between 1876 and 1881. It was composed
for his grandchildren, rather than for publication, and it was
particularly candid on his dislike of Christian myths of eternal
torment. To people who inquired about his religious beliefs, however, he
would only say that he was an agnostic (a word coined by Huxley in
1869).
The treadmill of experiment and writing gave so much meaning to his
life. But as he wrapped up his final, long-term interest, publishing The
Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms (1881), the
future looked bleak. Such an earthy subject was typical Darwin: just as
he had shown that today’s ecosystems were built by infinitesimal degrees
and the mighty Andes by tiny uplifts, so he ended on the monumental
transformation of landscapes by the Earth’s humblest denizens.
Suffering from angina, he looked forward to joining the worms,
contemplating “Down graveyard as the sweetest place on earth.” He had a
seizure in March 1882 and died of a heart attack on April 19.
Influential groups wanted a grander commemoration than a funeral in
Downe, something better for the gentleman naturalist who had delivered
the “new Nature” into the new professionals’ hands. Galton had the Royal
Society request the family’s permission for a state burial. Huxley, who
by taking over the public debate had preserved Darwin’s reputation of
“sweet and gentle nature blossomed into perfection,” as a newspaper put
it, convinced the canon of Westminster Abbey to bury the diffident
agnostic there. And so Darwin was laid to rest with full ecclesiastical
pomp on April 26, 1882, attended by the new nobility of science and the
state.
Adrian J. Desmond
