Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  Here we see the essence of the Lamarckian explanation of how generative evolution works. Characteristics acquired during a parent’s lifetime can be handed down. Charles Darwin is credited with disproving this view of evolution, as when he rather loftily (and surely foolishly) remarked to Huxley, about the time of The Origin of Species, ‘the history of error is quite unimportant, but it is curious to observe how exactly and accurately my grandfather gives Lamarck’s theory’.59 Foolishly, because the history of science is, surely, the ‘history of error’, one scientist building on the researches of predecessors and correcting their mistakes; foolishly, too, because, in the first edition of The Origin of Species, he would use four categories of evidence for biological evolution which Lamarck himself had used. Without acknowledging his debt to Lamarck, he would write, ‘I think there can be little doubt that use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them: and that such modifications are inherited. Under free nature . . . many animals have structures which can be explained by the effects of disuse.’ This is just a summary of the law by which Lamarck is best known.60

  Back in Edinburgh, in April 1827, it is difficult to reconstruct Charles Darwin’s state of mind, beyond knowing that his own account of it in the Autobiography must be false. His friendship with Grant, sharpened by the spat at the Plinian over the flustrae, had opened his mind to an entirely new way of viewing nature, deepened by reading his own grandfather’s work. He had now become an accomplished young naturalist; indeed he was slightly more than that, a fledgling scientist, who had attended Jameson’s boring but deeply informative series of lectures; had heard papers from many other young scientists at the Plinian; and had discussed evolution with a passionate Lamarckian, Grant, all the while continuing with his medical studies. His mind was teeming with knowledge, which we see him putting to good use four years later when he sailed with the Beagle, not as some ignorant bumbling amateur, but as one who was prepared for the journey. Edinburgh was the making of Darwin’s young mind: Edinburgh, and reading old Dr Erasmus. Given his strange psyche, it was necessary to play these facts down, even to expunge them from the record.

  ‘The history of error is quite unimportant.’ In what did Lamarck’s ‘error’ consist? In 1954 at the University of Melbourne in Australia, William Agar and colleagues reported on an experiment conducted over a period of twenty years. Laboratory rats were placed into a tank of water with two exits. The ‘right’ exit was in the dark; the ‘wrong’ exit was illuminated. Those who chose the ‘wrong’ exit received an electric shock. Those whose parents and forebears had been trained, by electric shock, to choose the darkened exit were shown to learn far more quickly than untrained rats how to escape the tank. This experiment suggests that Lamarck could have been right, and that in some circumstances acquired characteristics could be inherited.61 Perhaps Lamarckianism (and Darwin’s alternative theory of evolution by natural selection) belonged less to the history of error than to the category dismissed by Johnson when discussing Monboddo, ‘conjecture as to what would be useless to know’. The how of evolution might indeed be unknowable (as opposed to the how of genetics, which is now demonstrable in all its wonderful intricacy and tininess and exactitude). Adaptive change within species, ‘amidst the wreck of worlds’,62 however, is an overwhelming fact. Once a belief in a world aged only 5,000 years or so has been abandoned; once geology has been accepted as a science; once Hutton’s uniformitarianism has displaced catastrophism in the mind; once the fossil evidence has been seen, and pondered, then it would not be merely perverse, it would be impossible to say that you did not believe in some form of evolution, however it takes place, whatever your theories respecting it. As a phenomenon, it is inescapable. Charles Darwin confronted and absorbed this scientific fact, this enormous phenomenon, this way of viewing the timelessness of the earth’s past and the impersonality, so to say, of the natural process, as a late teenager in Edinburgh.

  The objections to evolutionary theory at this stage of history were not scientific. They could not be, since there were no scientific facts which could, at this stage, even suggest what a disproof of evolution would look like. There existed the phenomena – some of them listed in the previous paragraph – and the Lamarckian/Erasmus-Darwinian theories were as plausible explanations as you were likely to get, at that date, from the geological, palaeontological and zoological facts and puzzles. The moral objections, which would be expanded when Charles Darwin linked the theory of evolution to the merciless ideas of Malthus, were that it appeared to promote an idea that selfish struggle was an underlying necessity of existence. The chief objection, therefore, if you put this purely moral objection to one side, was and is a religious one. Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, ‘I understood that you would take the Human Race in the concrete, having exploded the absurd notion of Pope’s Essay on Man, [Erasmus] Darwin, and all the countless believers – even (strange to say) among Christians – of Man’s having progressed from an Orang-Outang state – so contrary to all History, to all Religion, nay to all Possibility – to have affirmed a Fall in some sense.’63

  Coleridge wrote that letter on 30 May 1815, just three weeks before the war of twenty-two years against France came to an end. Wordsworth relates in The Prelude how he and his friend Coleridge moved from being wild enthusiasts for the French Revolution –

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young, was very Heaven!

  – to being members of the Church of England who shrank from any of the ideology which had fuelled the Revolution. Lamarck’s ideas about evolution were not frowned upon in England, and in the older universities of Oxford and Cambridge, because they were scientifically at fault. They were abhorred as being part and parcel of the Revolution which had brought to Europe the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. It would need a generation for the English scientific establishment to come to terms with this, and to distinguish between Lamarck’s politics and his science. Scotland was intellectually and spiritually detached from the Establishment. Its Church, Presbyterian, had nothing to do with the Church of England, with the bishops in the House of Lords, or with Oxford and Cambridge, most of whose academics were Church of England clergymen, and all of whose students at this date were obliged to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion.

  These matters would have been of purely academic interest had Charles Darwin pressed on with his medical studies and become a qualified physician. Word had reached The Mount, Shrewsbury, however, that Charles had cooled towards his medical career. With Ras having already made it clear that he was never really going to practise as a doctor, Dr Robert Waring Darwin’s feelings can be imagined. The total absence of letters for the year 1827 in the diligently collected complete Correspondence of Charles Darwin must, surely, speak volumes. In the ‘Chronology of his Own Life’ which Darwin wrote as an appendage to his Journal, he recorded, having finished in Edinburgh, ‘In Spring [1827] went tour. Dundee St Andrews Sterling. Afterwards Glasgow. Belfast Dublin. – Then London Paris. In Spring went to Dublin & Portran [Portraine, Co. Dublin], & then to London & Paris (in May) with Uncle Jos.’ In other words, he was keeping out of his father’s way. Uncle Jos was always the person to whom the young Darwin turned when Robert Waring was being especially difficult. ‘He was very properly vehement’, Darwin recalled in old age, ‘against my turning into an idle sporting man which then seemed my probable destination.’64 His fondness for sport was never in doubt, and he was always to be one with whom bursts of intellectual activity were punctuated by ‘idleness’, but this sentence, like so much in the Autobiography, is hugely misleading. Surely there was no danger of his becoming an idle sporting man, even though this is the version of events which Darwin was himself to give out. He wrote it in his Autobiography because he did not wish to advertise the fact that by the age of eighteen or nineteen he was well on the way to his inevitable destiny, which was to become an evolutionary scientist in the mould of Grant and Erasmus Darwin. Since his ‘
personal myth’ depended upon the sense of his scientific life being sui generis, self-created, coming from nowhere and dependent upon no one, it was much more convenient to pretend that he was just an idle loafer with a shotgun under his arm who was forced to change career by his father.

  Robert Waring decreed that, if Darwin would not become a doctor, he must go to Cambridge and prepare to become . . . a clergyman. Darwin admits that this idea was ‘ludicrous’. At any stage in history, however, there must have been plenty of young men who, while not being especially religious, accept the role of a clergyman – especially in that agreeable period of the nineteenth century when a large parsonage house in a country parish, adjoining land where the shooting was good, and where natural history could be pursued freely, would have been so suitable for a man of Darwin’s taste. But only to a man who had not read and absorbed Zoonomia; only to a man who had not had those long walks and conversations with Grant. Darwin’s sisters and cousins were committed Christians, who were anxiously hoping that Charles would read the Bible. Dr Robert Waring was furiously impatient for his son to settle down. The young man was given a copy of John Pearson’s An Exposition of the Creed and told to overcome his ‘scruples’. Darwin had a lifelong horror of confrontation of any kind. He was temperamentally incapable of it. Like many a Darwin uncle, great-uncle and great-grandfather before him, he was lined up to become a clergyman of the Established Church.

  The place to study for the priesthood of that Church was either Oxford or Cambridge, and given the many Darwins who had been at Cambridge, the choice was obvious. It must have been something of a shock to hear of this change of course, and to have it imposed from above by his tyrannical father. It is clear that Darwin skulked away from Shrewsbury as much as possible, either with the Wedgwoods at Maer Hall or with his Shropshire neighbours the Owens, whose estate, Woodhouse, was a happy refuge from the silences and moods of The Mount.

  Woodhouse, a few miles from Shrewbury, was a fine brick residence, flanked with Ionic columns and pilasters, and surrounded by a park and a good shooting-estate. It was the seat of a convivial retired soldier, who enjoyed reminiscing about his campaigns in Holland. His flirtatious daughters were friends with Darwin’s sisters. This summer they became, in Darwin’s words, ‘the idols of my adoration’. When he was not out shooting with their brothers, he loved flirting with Fanny or Sarah Owen. The Owens and the Darwins conversed in a private language. With allusion to Falstaff after the Battle of Shrewsbury (in Henry IV Part Two) they spoke of ‘by Shrewsbury Clocks’ as a synonym for time; ‘broadcloth’ was a man, ‘black broadcloth’ a clergyman. Getting married was ‘being led to the halter’. Little was ‘leetle’; a woman was a ‘muslin’; a letter was a ‘budget’; an invitation was an ‘insinivation’; and rumours or bits of gossip were ‘mysteries’.65 Fanny Owen, in particular, caught his fancy – ‘the prettiest, plumpest charmingest Personage that Shropshire possesses’.66 Happy hours were spent with her, lying ‘full length upon the Strawberry beds grazing by the hour’.67

  Whatever else they spoke of, it was not of Charles Darwin’s future, or anyway not with candour. When Darwin finally accepted the inevitable and went to Cambridge, he was followed by a reproachful letter. ‘I never was so horror struck as to receive your leetle note the other day . . . I was very much surprised to hear from Sarah that you have decided to become a DD [Doctor of Divinity] instead of an MD. You never let me into the secret.’68 The apparently amorous, frivolous young man, so addicted to shooting, seemed an improbable ‘black broadcloth’. But in December 1827 (the academic year had begun in October) Darwin, having forgotten most of what Dr Butler had taught, had still not mastered enough Latin to pass into Cambridge; and he would postpone his cramming until the shooting season at Woodhouse was well under way. Ras, meanwhile, had been studying anatomy at the academy in Great Windmill Street – the theatre where John Hunter had dissected the corpse of Samuel Johnson in 1784. He had agreed to go back to Cambridge to read for the degree of Bachelor of Medicine.

  The choice of college for Charles, therefore, was obvious. It would be Christ’s, where Ras had already spent three years, and where cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood was a Fellow. Ras would follow, but it was alone that Darwin clambered aboard the coach, which took him through misty roads and ice-hard puddles to that fenland university.

  4

  Cambridge: Charles Darwin, Gent

  OF THE TWO English universities, Cambridge was marginally more interested in science than Oxford. When Joseph Banks, a keen amateur botanist even at the age of eighteen, was entered as a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford in December 1760, he discovered that there were no lectures in botany. He promptly took the stagecoach to Cambridge and, at his own expense, returned with the astronomer and botanist Israel Lyons, who gave the lectures at Oxford to Banks’s satisfaction. (Lyons would accompany Banks’s friend Captain Phipps – later Lord Mulgrave – as the astronomer on his voyage towards the North Pole.) Banks, who came into a huge fortune in his first year at Oxford (on the death of his father, a Lincolnshire landowner), devoted his life to science. When he was twenty-three, he accompanied Phipps to Newfoundland to collect plants. He befriended Daniel Solander, one of Linnaeus’s pet pupils, and procured him the appointment of assistant librarian at the British Museum. Together with Solander, he toured the world, collecting plants and animals and marine birds. He accompanied Captain Cook on his first great voyage of discovery in the Endeavour, exploring New Zealand and Australia and the islands of the Pacific. He was one of the great scientists of the eighteenth century. When Darwin became a world-voyager, he felt himself to be, almost literally, in the footsteps of Banks. ‘I felt I was treading on ground, which to me was classic,’1 he wrote to his sister on 30 March 1833. The example of Banks was an unforgettable one – President of the Royal Society, Director of the royal gardens at Kew, one of the great demonstrations of the truth that money could buy the independence to travel and to become a proper man of science.

  One writes ‘man of science’ because, when Darwin went to Cambridge, the word ‘scientist’ did not quite exist. In 1894, with absurd pomposity, Thomas Huxley wrote to the Science-Gossip magazine to protest against its use of a vulgar Americanism – the word ‘scientist’. The English term, he insisted, was ‘man of science’. He lumped the word ‘scientist’ with American coinages such as ‘electrocution’, a hybrid of ‘electricity’ and ‘execution’. Other ‘men of science’ joined their voices to Huxley’s over this trivial question: they included Darwin’s old Kent neighbour Sir John Lubbock, his co-evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace and the Duke of Argyll.2

  In fact, the word ‘scientist’ was not an American neologism of the 1890s. It was first used in Cambridge, during the 1830s, not long after Darwin had left the place. It was a usage of William Whewell, Professor of Mineralogy, later Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He had coined the word because of the thing. Before Whewell’s generation, what we call scientists were called ‘philosophers’ or ‘natural philosophers’. During Whewell’s early lifetime, the phenomena which were under such free discussion when Darwin went to Edinburgh had become part of intellectual discourse throughout Europe. In 1818, when he was twenty-four, Whewell had been one of the founder-members of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (what we should call Scientific Society – in Cambridge they continue to speak of ‘moral sciences’ where others speak of ‘philosophy’). Its aim was to keep abreast of developments in modern astronomy, anatomy, botany, taxonomy, mineralogy, mechanics, mathematics, but to keep these all within the focus of a metaphysical outlook. Whewell was of modest origins – his father was a master carpenter from Lancaster – whose cleverness had been fostered ever since he went as a young child to the ‘Blue School’, the town’s grammar school. By the time he had been elected to his Fellowship at Trinity, he was not only an accomplished mathematician, but also a very good linguist who had become a disciple of Kant. He went to Potsdam and met the greatest scientist-explorer of the age, Alexander von H
umboldt, who was later heard to complain that he had been expecting ‘an English gentleman’ to call on him. He had been happily discussing science with Whewell under the impression he was a German.

  Darwin was not entering a university which was devoid of interest in those scientific subjects that were now so predominant in his mind.

  Though Dr Erasmus Darwin had been a non-believer, and though Lamarck was far from being a Christian, was there necessarily a conflict between being a clergyman and taking the keenest interest in all the developments of modern science? Not at all, as was demonstrated by the career of Whewell, who became Professor of Mineralogy three months after Darwin arrived in Cambridge, and who had been ordained priest three years before that. Most of the dons at Cambridge were in holy orders. When Darwin was matriculated – that is, became a full member of the University, standing in line in the Senate House, vowing (in Latin) to keep all the rules of the University, and submitting to the Articles – he did so before the Senior Proctor, Adam Sedgwick, who was to become not merely an academic mentor, but a friend.

  Sedgwick, like Whewell, was a Fellow of Trinity; like Whewell, a priest; like Whewell, a scientist – Professor of Geology since 1818. Although he had been given this job purely because he was well liked in Cambridge, he recognized that there was something ludicrous about accepting the post with an almost complete ignorance of the subject. By the time Darwin knew Sedgwick, he had made himself an expert in the field, though his knowledge was chiefly of British geology. More parochial in every sense than Whewell, Sedgwick – a tall, smooth-shaven man, with a fiery temper and a Yorkshire voice – was another reminder that Cambridge was a place which now took science seriously.

  But, of course, you could not graduate in science at Cambridge. Ras followed his younger brother back to Christ’s. He was going to finish his medical studies and read for the degree of MB – Bachelor of Medicine. Darwin was preparing to take holy orders, at least notionally. The required syllabus for undergraduates was by modern standards limited, remarkably so. Mathematics and classics were studied – mathematics at a more advanced level than classics. Darwin later regretted not having grasped ‘something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense’.3 In his first year, he was idle and needed coaching in the vacation to reach the required level. In the second year, he continued to read mathematics and classical texts. The final year would be devoted to a few classical texts, to algebra, to Euclid’s geometry, which he enjoyed, and to some elementary theology – a book called Evidences of Christianity by William Paley. In order to proceed to holy orders, he would have needed to show competence in New Testament Greek, though this would have been examined not by the University, but by whichever bishop was to admit him to the order of deacons.