Charles Darwin
Page 19
In other words, the native inhabitants are simply unable to adapt to the new way of life imposed upon them by the invader/colonist.25
In a chapter entitled ‘Principles of Sexual Selection [defined as natural selection arising through preference by one sex for certain characteristics in individuals of the other sex]’,26 Darwin declares:
Just as man can improve the breed of his game-cocks by the selection of those birds which are victorious in the cockpit, so it appears that the strongest and most vigorous males, or those provided with the best weapons, have prevailed under nature, and have led to the improvement of the natural breed or species.27
‘Prevailed under nature’ – agreed, but the notion that this has ‘led to the improvement of the natural breed or species’ is debatable, to say the least. For example, how does it square with the overthrow of supposedly civilized ancient Rome by those who Darwin would define as ‘barbarians’?
On a personal level, according to Darwin,
Our difficulty in regard to sexual selection lies in understanding how it is that the males which conquer other males, or those which prove the most attractive to the females, leave a greater number of offspring to inherit their superiority [i.e. their superior characteristics] than their beaten and less attractive rivals.28
The answer to this ‘difficulty’ is provided by Darwin in his ‘Summary’ to Chapter 18.
The law of battle for the possession of the female appears to prevail throughout the whole great class of mammals. Most naturalists will admit that the greater size, strength, courage, and pugnacity of the male, his special weapons of offence, as well as his special means of defence, have been acquired or modified through that form of selection which I have called sexual. This does not depend on any superiority in the general struggle for life, but on certain individuals of one sex, generally the male, being successful in conquering other males, and leaving a larger number of offspring to inherit their superiority than do the less successful males.29
Finally, Darwin declares:
In general we can only say that the cause of each slight variation and of each monstrosity lies much more in the constitution of the organism, than in the nature of the surrounding conditions; though new and changed conditions certainly play an important part in exciting organic changes of many kinds.30
Darwin therefore remained convinced that the environment did have a part to play in producing variations. He then proposed that, as with physical characteristics, ‘It is not improbable that after long practice virtuous tendencies may [also] be inherited.’31
The way forward, according to Darwin
i. The importance of ‘Sexual Selection’
In regard to ‘sexual selection’, Darwin observes, somewhat dryly, that
Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care … . Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind … [However, he realized that] such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known.32
ii. The necessity of making adequate provision for offspring
The advancement of the welfare of mankind is a most intricate problem: all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children …
iii. The ‘most able’ should have the most children
The most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring.33
Here Darwin appears to be implying that intellect and morality (as well as ‘virtuous tendencies’) are characteristics that are both desirable and heritable.
* * *
Darwin was, of course, aware that the publication of The Descent of Man would inevitably cause many ‘hackles’ to be raised, but nevertheless, he was not prepared to compromise. Said he, perhaps with a hint of mischief in his tone
The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
He then proceeds to describe, in gory detail, the typical Fuegian whom he had encountered during the course of the Beagle voyage as
a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.34
Finally, he ends on a note of optimism.
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen …, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.
But then he brings the reader down to Earth with a bump.
We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which [he] feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system – with all these exalted powers – Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.35
Today, from the fossil record, it is believed that the last common ancestor from which Old World monkeys (Cercopithecidae) on the one hand, and lesser apes and great apes on the other, evolved, lived about 25 million years ago. From the great apes evolved orang-utans, gorillas, and the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. This common ancestor lived between 8 million and 6 million years ago, though its fossilized remains have yet to be discovered.36
Thus, spurred on by the support he had received from his followers throughout the world, Darwin had finally overcome his anxieties and reservations; gone public, and published The Descent of Man. Honestly and openly, he had voiced his hopes and fears for the human race, whilst at the same time insisting that, when it came to a head-to-head confrontation between scientifically based notions of how to improve the human race on the one hand, and humaneness on the other, then there was no contest – humaneness must always prevail.
* * *
Selfishness in nature: a view to which Darwin was adamantly opposed
Some time after April 1871, Darwin took issue with Frances J. Wedgwood, daughter of Emma’s brother Hensleigh and his wife Frances, in respect of a communication which he had received from the former on the subject of evolution.
I enter my protest against your making the struggle for existence (which is sufficiently melancholy fact) still more odious by calling it ‘selfish competition’.
A feline animal [which] is born rather bigger, fiercer or more cunning than others of the same or some other species & succeeds in life, & rears lots of savage little kittens, who get on very well in life, yet you cannot call this, even metaphorically, selfishness.37
An example would be a lion that wakes up one day feeling hungry. As a carnivore he is obliged to eat meat. For his survival it is essential for him to hunt down an antelope or a zebra. His behaviour is, therefore, instinctive; instinct being defined as an innate, typically fixed pattern of behaviour in animals in response to certain stimuli.38 It might also be argued that other emotive words or phrases such as ‘brutality’, ‘cruelty’, and ‘bitter struggle’ are also inappropriate in respect of evolution in the natural world. Human beings are also animals, and even though they lead more complicated lives, when it comes to matters of survival, the same basic instincts exist.
Darwin was elected as ‘Foreign Corresponding Member’ of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Section of the Imperial Academy of Science of Vienna on 1 August 1871. He described Hooker, on 20 October, as ‘the best & oldest friend I have in the world’39 a
nd, on 7 December, was named ‘Foreign Corresponding Member’ of the Anthropological Society of Paris, and awarded the Society’s Diploma. In the same month, when he wrote to his son Horace, he was pondering over why some men make discoveries whereas others do not.
I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever – much cleverer than the discoverers – never originate anything. As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching for the causes or meaning of everything which occurs. This implies sharp observation & requires as much knowledge as possible of the subjects investigated.40
In November Scottish writer and dog breeder George Cupples, presented him with a deerhound puppy called ‘Bran’.41
NOTES
1. Darwin to Wallace, 22 December 1857, Cor.6, pp.514–15. In Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.xxxi.
2. Darwin, Descent, p.18.
3. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
4. Darwin, Descent, pp.42–3.
5. Ibid, p.44.
6. Ibid, p.46.
7. Ibid, p.65.
8. Ibid, p.65.
9. Ibid, p.96.
10. Ibid, pp.141–2.
11. Ibid, p.147.
12. Darwin, Descent, p.147.
13. Ibid, p.151.
14. Luke’s Gospel 6:31.
15. Darwin, Descent, p.151.
16. Ibid, p.159.
17. Emma to Francis Darwin, 1885, in Litchfield, Henrietta, Emma Darwin, Cambridge University Press, 1904.
18. Darwin, Descent, p. 153.
19. Ibid, pp.159–60.
20. Ibid, pp.163–4.
21. Ibid, p.168.
22. Ibid, p.176.
23. Genesis I, 26–7.
24. Darwin, Descent, p.207.
25. Ibid, p.213.
26. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
27. Darwin, Descent, p.245.
28. Darwin, Descent, p.247.
29. Ibid, p.618.
30. Darwin, Descent, p.677.
31. Ibid, p.682.
32. Ibid, p.688.
33. Ibid, pp.688–9.
34. Ibid, p.689.
35. Ibid.
36. Source, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington. DC.
37. Darwin to F.J. Wedgwood, Cor.19, p.247.
38. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
39. Darwin to Henry Holland, Cor.19, p.642.
40. Darwin to Horace Darwin, 15 December 1871, Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters 1792–1896, Volume 2, p.207.
41. Cor.1, p.290.
Charles Darwin. (© English Heritage)
Charles Darwin. A chalk and watercolour drawing by George Richmond. (© English Heritage. By kind permission of Darwin Heirlooms Trust)
Jean Baptiste P. A. de Monet de Lamarck
Leonard Darwin
Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle
Alfred Russel Wallace
Francis Galton
Thomas Henry Huxley
Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford
Emma Darwin (née Wedgwood). A chalk and watercolour drawing by George Richmond. (© English Heritage. By kind permission of Darwin Heirlooms Trust)
Charles Lyell
Richard Owen
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Thomas Robert Malthus
William Paley
John Locke
Josiah Wedgwood (II)
Samuel Butler
Adam Sedgewick
Robert Waring Darwin, from an engraving by Thomas Lupton after a painting by J. Pardon. (© English Heritage)
Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood)
John Stevens Henslow
Down House in the 1870s
HMS Beagle in the Murray Narrows, Tierra del Fuego, by Conrad Martens. (© English Heritage. By kind permission of Darwin Heirlooms Trust)
Oxford University Museum. An engraving from the Oxford Almanack (1860). (Courtesy of the Oxford Museum of the History of Science)
Rhodnius prolixus of the family Reduviidae. (Courtesy of Toni Soriano Arandes)
Chapter 22
Darwin and Freedom of Thought
To his lawyer Vernon Lushington, Darwin once wrote:
On one point I have for many years vehemently [protested] in my own [mind], viz against the schemes of suggesting subject[s] for me to follow [i.e. study], I cannot conceive any scheme better adapted for stopping originality & great discoveries ….1
What constraints, if any, were imposed upon Darwin, in respect of his scientific researches and writings? First, it is necessary to consider what had gone before.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
In 1632 the Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Galileo, published his Dialogue on the Two Principal Systems of the World, in which he affirmed his support for Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) who proposed that the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun and not vice-versa, as was formerly believed. For this, Galileo was tried as a so-called heretic (one who holds a belief or opinion contrary to orthodox [and] especially Christian doctrine2) by the Inquisition (Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis – Inquiry into Heretical Perversity, part of the Catholic Church’s judicial apparatus). He was forced to recant and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Others suffered far worse fates than he.
Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, however, a series of events occurred which completely altered the environment in which scientists were obliged to work:
The Protestant Reformation
The Reformation – a sixteenth-century movement for the reform of abuses in the Roman Catholic Church ending in the establishment of the Reformed and Protestant Churches3 – was set in train on 31 October 1517 by German religious reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546), Professor of Biblical Studies at Germany’s University of Wittenberg. In particular, Luther was disgusted by the venal greed of the clerics who grew wealthy by trading in ‘indulgences’ (an indulgence being a grant by the Pope of remission of the punishment in purgatory still due for sins after absolution, purgatory being, in Roman Catholic doctrine, a place or state of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are expiating their sins before going to Heaven.)4 Followers of Luther became known as Protestants.
Protestant Reformers took the view that neither the intercession of priests, departed saints, nor the Virgin Mary was necessary, as far as a believer’s relationship with Christ was concerned. Luther was, therefore, anxious to circumvent the priesthood and bring the scriptures directly to the people. The only way in which this could be done was to translate the Holy Bible from the Greek into German, a feat which he himself achieved between the years 1522 and 1532. The outcome was that, in 1534, the so-called Luther Bible was printed in German at Wittenberg. (The first Bible in English was the one translated by English scholar William Tyndale; known as the ‘Great Bible’, which was printed in 1539.) By his action, Luther had challenged the authority and jurisdiction of the Catholic Church.
King Henry VIII’s break with Rome
Another challenge to Rome came in 1527 with the so-called English Reformation – the catalyst for which was the refusal of Pope Clement VII to annul King Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The monarch reacted by rejecting the pontiff’s authority and declaring himself (by the parliamentary Act of Supremacy of 1534) head of the Church of England.
The Civil War
When King Charles I of England (1600–49), who believed his Royal Prerogative – the ‘rights and privileges exclusive to the sovereign’5 – to be divinely ordained, came into conflict with Parliament, this led to the Civil Wars of 1642–49, at the conclusion of which the King was executed. According to historian Kenneth O. Morgan, this so-called English Revolution (which actually affected all three kingdoms) stood ‘as a turning-point’ and marked the beginning of a new ‘age of pragmatism and individualism’.6
The Royal Society
&nb
sp; The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was founded on 28 November 1660.
The week after the formation of the new Society … word was brought that the King [Charles II] ‘did well approve of it’. This support led to the Charter of Incorporation of July 1662 and to the Second Charter of April 1663, which is still the basis of the constitution of the Society. By these charters, Charles II and all later monarchs have been Patrons of the Society.
The first fellows of the Royal Society were not scientists. They were courtiers, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and merchants. They came together because they were fascinated by the possibility of a new way of thinking – a ‘new philosophy’ [which] relied on first-hand observation and experiment to understand the world. The new philosophy would be based on facts: facts that could be witnessed, discussed, verified and replicated. It was demanding and exciting, and very soon it would change the world.7
In his History of the Royal Society (published in 1667), English divine and man of letters Thomas Sprat, wrote of the society’s early Fellows,
one of the Principal Intentions they propos’d to accomplish, was a General Collection of all the Effects [belongings] of Arts, and the Common or Monstrous Works of Nature. This, they at first began by the casual Presents [bequests], which either Strangers, or any of their own Members bestowed upon them. And in short time it has increas’d so fast … that they have already drawn together in one Room, the greatest part of all the several kinds of things, that are scatter’d throughout the Universe.8