ALSO BY REBECCA STOTT
The Coral Thief
Ghostwalk
Copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Stott
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing Pic, London.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stott, Rebecca.
Darwin’s ghosts: the secret history of evolution/Rebecca Stott.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60413-6
1. Evolution (Biology)—History. 2. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. On the origin of species. 3. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882—Sources. 4. Scientists—Biography. 5. Naturalists—Biography. I. Title.
QH361.S76 2012
576.8′2—dc23 2011041951
www.spiegelandgrau.com
Title-page images: © iStockphoto (journal; shell)
Jacket design: Tal Goretsky
Jacket images: © PoodlesRock/Corbis (snake),
Science and Society/SuperStock (green insect),
akg-images (fish, cuttlefish)
v3.1
For Kate and Anna,
and for Dorinda
Once grant that species [of] one genus may pass into each other … & whole fabric totters & falls.
Charles Darwin,
NOTEBOOK C
Masterpieces are not single solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Virginia Woolf,
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
Preface
I grew up in a Creationist household. As a child, I often thought about Charles Darwin; I wondered who he was and whether he knew, as my grandfather and the other preachers alleged, that he had been sent to earth to do Satan’s work. It seemed an odd reason to make a man, I thought, but then, in the scale of things, perhaps no more odd than the story of God and Satan tormenting Job or the angels who appeared in Sodom and Gomorrah, no more strange than the pillar of salt that Lot’s wife was turned into, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I also wondered if, as Satan’s man, Darwin might have hooves and scales. But generally it wasn’t a good idea to ask questions about such things.
One hot summer’s day, when I was around the age of nine or ten, knowing that I could not ask about Darwin or his ideas without being reprimanded, I went looking for him in the pages of the family Encyclopaedia Britannica. The house was empty—my preacher father was away from home and my mother was out gathering my younger brothers and sisters for the evening prayer meeting—but I still felt fear as I eased out the volume marked D from the shelves. I knew I could be getting myself into serious trouble.
But the page where Darwin should have been was missing. Along the gap there was a perfectly straight stub: the page, my father told me much later, had been razored out by my grandfather sometime in the 1950s. When the encyclopedia volumes had arrived in their wooden crate, my grandfather had summoned the family to the sitting room in their Brighton house to admire them; during this ceremony he had picked up the D volume and taken a razor to the page, while delivering a sermon about the wickedness of Mr. Charles Darwin.
The missing page only made me more determined to find out what Darwin had really said. Because we had only a small collection of carefully selected books on the shelves of the family home—including several morality tales such as The Story of Mary Jones and Her Bible—I had already discovered the transgressive pleasures of the school library. There, a few days later, I found another encyclopedia set, and in a stolen moment between lessons, I read as quickly as I could the definitions of evolution, animal-human kinship, and natural selection, convinced that at any moment I might be discovered and denounced. I struggled to understand the complex ideas on the page. I dared not ask questions, however, even of my teachers, for fear that news of my scientific interests might be revealed at a parent-teacher evening. Questions multiplied in my head. I began to daydream about half-animal, half-human forms, molten landscapes and prehistoric worlds.
When my parents later joined a moderate Anglican church and developed more permissive views, later still when my father had lost his faith and my mother had allowed us to work out our own beliefs for ourselves, when, as a teenager, I had the freedom to pursue my own intellectual curiosities unchecked, I continued to feel the simultaneous magnetism and frisson of danger when I wandered, as I often did, back to library shelves containing books on Darwin or evolution or genetics. I still feel it.
Certain curiosities, perhaps especially those that arise out of childhood prohibition and transgression, are not sated by a lifetime’s reading and thinking. Evolution opened up a new way of seeing the world for me that was quite different from the one I had grown up with, but not necessarily any easier to understand or any less odd or extraordinary.
Years later, I wrote a book about the young Darwin. I came to admire him for his doggedness, for his rebelliousness, and for the range and brilliance of his imagination, as well as for the way he had stuck to his guns and kept on pursuing answers to his questions about the origin of species even though he knew he would be denounced as a heretic.
At the same time, I became preoccupied with the shadowy figures behind Darwin, his predecessors, the less well-known rebels who, I realized, had asked similar questions about the origin of species before him, in some cases a long time before him, and reached similar conclusions. What kinds of risks had they taken? What price had they paid for their curiosity? Why had understanding nature’s laws and the origins of species been so important to them that they had been prepared to challenge intellectual or religious orthodoxies and thus risk their reputations and sometimes even their freedom? I knew they must have been audacious as well as clever.
Priests and bishops denounced Darwin’s predecessors; police agents spied on them. They locked their ideas away for fear of bringing disgrace on their families. They deferred publishing. They searched out like-minded men and women and safe places to ask the questions about the origins of time and of species that pressed upon them. They went underground. All of them went on gathering evidence just the same, convinced that species were not fixed and that they had not all been created in seven days.
Many of Darwin’s predecessors were called infidels. The word has its origins in the fifteenth century and means, in its broadest sense, those who do not believe. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when religious leaders and university professors called Darwin’s predecessors infidels, they believed them to be as dangerous as the infidel soldiers of the Crusades; anyone who promoted a theory about the mutability of species, they declared, was an enemy of Christianity because such an idea contravened the sacred truth set out in the Bible. By the early nineteenth century it seemed there were so many infidels around—mostly radicals who were promoting atheism as part of a reformist agenda—that evangelicals wrote books with titles like The Young Man’s Guide Against Infidelity to warn young men how to recognize infidels in public places and how to steer clear of their dangerous traps and snares.
We cannot accurately call these men evolutionists, although I have done so in this book as a kind of shorthand. Even Darwin did not call himself an evolutionist. The word “evolution,” which means literally an unfolding or unrolling, did not come into common usage to mean the mutation of species through natural selection until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before then, there had been no common phrase to describe the idea of species transformation or descent with modifi
cation. In early-nineteenth-century France, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and others used the term “transformism.” In 1832, the British geologist Charles Lyell, deeply opposed to the theory of species change and scornful of the French, who were all infidels as far as the British were concerned, labeled the idea “transmutation,” a word drawn from alchemy; he denounced it as both wrongheaded and heretical. Everyone knew that alchemists held nonsensical notions of magic and unicorns and making gold from lead. Transmutation was preposterous, Lyell declared in forty pages of close refutation in the second volume of Principles of Geology; it was a castle in the air.
In July 1837, Charles Darwin, who had been reading and rereading Lyell’s Principles of Geology on the Beagle and had become convinced of the truth of species change through his own investigations, began the first of what would become a series of what he called his “transmutation of species” notebooks. In 1847 he used the phrase “us transmutationists” in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker to make his allegiances clear and to try to persuade Hooker to do the same. He did not think there was anything ridiculous about such theories, but he knew he would be ridiculed for holding them until he could find a way of proving them to be true beyond all reasonable doubt. He knew that what he was doing was dangerous.
When Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859 and began to steel himself against the first waves of reprobation, he became increasingly preoccupied with his predecessors. He determined to put together a lineage, a line of intellectual descent, to bring these people out of obscurity, but he failed to uncover much information. He was, he wrote to a friend, a poor scholar of history. He was also afraid of getting that history wrong or of not doing his predecessors justice. He did what he could with the little knowledge he unearthed, adding a preface called “An Historical Sketch” to the third edition of Origin in which he listed thirty men who had published evolutionary ideas before him. By the time he revised the list for the fourth edition, the list had swelled to include thirty-eight men. The sketch was just that, a rather hesitant document, the best that Darwin could do in the time he had and perfectly adequate for what was needed. However, as a man who took intense pleasure in reading the biographies of the men and women he admired, he must have remained perpetually curious about the lost lives of his predecessors. This book, Darwin’s Ghosts, is dedicated to both him and them.
As I began to search for these lost forebears, I found men of science who were not on Darwin’s list, men who lived in medieval Basra or in Renaissance Italy and France who had been called “proto-evolutionists” but about whom Darwin would have known nothing. I found others on Darwin’s list who should not have been there. To my frustration, I found no women who published evolutionary ideas before Origin.
I have not included all the people who might have claims to a place in this book. Of those whom I have chosen, some have their own chapters; some, whose stories are particularly entangled with others, share chapters; others figure briefly in chapters that belong to others. All who appear here are pathfinders, iconoclasts, and innovators, men whom Darwin would have claimed as kin even if he thought their pursuits and ideas misguided or fanciful. Most of them have regrettably disappeared from our view, obscured by the shadow of Darwin. This book aims to bring them back into visibility.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
1 Darwin’s List—Kent, 1859
2 Aristotle’s Eyes—Lesbos, 344 BC
3 The Worshipful Curiosity of Jahiz—Basra and Baghdad, 850
4 Leonardo and the Potter—Milan, 1493; Paris, 1570
5 Trembley’s Polyp—The Hague, 1740
6 The Consul of Cairo—Cairo, 1708
7 The Hotel of the Philosophers—Paris, 1749
8 Erasmus Underground—Derbyshire, 1767
9 The Jardin des Plantes—Paris, 1800
10 The Sponge Philosopher—Edinburgh, 1826
11 The Encyclopedist—Edinburgh, 1844
12 Alfred Wallace’s Fevered Dreams—Malay Archipelago, 1858
Epilogue
Appendix: “An Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
1
Darwin’s List
KENT, 1859
Just before Christmas in 1859, only a month after he had finally published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, Charles Darwin found himself disturbed, even haunted, by the thought of his intellectual predecessors. He entered a state of extreme anxiety that had the strange effect of making him more than usually forgetful.
It had been a cold winter. Though Darwin might have liked to linger on the Sand Walk with his children to admire the intricately patterned hoarfrost on the trees, he knew he had work to do, letters about his book to answer, criticisms to face.
He had weathered the first blasts of the storm of censure in a sanatorium in Ilkley, where he had been taking the water cure, wrapped in wet sheets in hot rooms, the skin on his face dry and cracked with eczema. Since his return to his family home, Down House, now garlanded with Christmas holly, ivy, and mistletoe by his children, he had braced himself every morning against the sound of the postman’s footsteps on the gravel outside his study window. The letters, he lamented to his wife, Emma, came like swarms.
Each new mailbag delivered to Down House brought letters voicing opprobrium, some veiled, some outspoken; a few contained praise. But though some reviewers might be expressing outrage, Darwin reassured himself, hundreds of ordinary people were reading his book. On the first day of sale in November, the entire print run of 1,250 books had sold out. Even Mudie’s Select Lending Library had taken five hundred copies. Now his publisher, John Murray, was about to publish a second edition; this time Murray intended to print three thousand copies, and he had agreed to let Darwin correct a few minor mistakes. Darwin was relieved. The mistakes embarrassed him.
As readers and reviewers took up their positions for or against his book, Darwin began to keep a note of where everyone stood on the battleground. “We shall soon be a good body of working men,” he wrote to his closest friend and confidant, the botanist Joseph Hooker, “& shall have, I am convinced, all young & rising naturalists on our side.”
The letter that launched Darwin into a prolonged attack of anxiety came from the Reverend Baden Powell, the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, a theologian and physicist who had been forthright in his support for the development theory for some time.* The elderly professor was on the brink of being prosecuted for ecclesiastical heresy. Of all the letters in that day’s pile, the one from Powell would be innocuous enough, Darwin assumed. He scanned it quickly, relieved to glimpse phrases like “masterly volume” and a few other words of praise. But Baden Powell was not happy. Having finished with his compliments, the professor launched into a direct attack, criticizing Darwin not for being wrong, not for being an infidel, but for failing to acknowledge his predecessors. He even implied that Darwin had taken the credit for a theory that had already been argued by others, notably himself.
This was not the first time Darwin had been accused of intellectual theft, but until now, the accusations had been tucked away in reviews and had been only implicit. How original is this book? people were clearly asking. How new is this idea of Mr. Darwin’s?
He might have protected himself better from charges of plagiarism, Darwin reflected fretfully, if he had only written a preface, as most scientists did when they published any controversial set of claims: a survey of all the ideas that had gone before. It gave the ideas a history and a context. It was a way of showing where the edges of other people’s ideas finished and your own began. But he had not done so, though he had planned to. And now he was being accused of pas
sing off the ideas of others as his own.
Darwin’s Study, Down House, Kent.
Getty Images
As he sat reading and rereading Powell’s letter, Darwin’s excuses came thick and fast. He should have included a short preface, he wanted to tell Powell, but his book had been rushed. He had not been at all well. His closest friends, the botanist Joseph Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell, had been badgering him to publish for years. Then, when Alfred Russel Wallace had sent him that alarming essay from the Malay Archipelago showing that Wallace had worked out natural selection, too, Hooker and Lyell had practically forced him to go straight into print. For months, he had hardly slept for writing. He had never written so fast or for so long. And in all that rush, he had neglected to acknowledge those who had gone before. Besides, aware that he was a poor scholar of history, he had not been confident that he knew exactly who had gone before or that he had the skills to describe their ideas accurately and fairly. They wrote in every language under the sun. Some of them were obscure, others mad. It would have taken years.
Darwin had known from Wallace’s enthusiastic letters that he was getting close to working out natural selection, but until seeing Wallace’s essay he had underestimated the speed at which the brilliant young collector was working. The thought that after all this procrastinating, someone like Alfred Russel Wallace could step in and publish his essay and make a claim to the discovery of natural selection before him was more than he could bear. At that point Hooker and Lyell had intervened, explaining to Wallace that Darwin had first formulated the idea some twenty years earlier. Wallace had been generous. He had given up any claim to being the discoverer of natural selection. He had even written to Hooker to say that he did not mind in the least that Darwin was going to take the credit and that it was right that he do so. He considered himself lucky, he confessed, to have been given some credit.
Darwin's Ghosts Page 1
