Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  This was important, historic work, though it wasn’t recognized at the time. But grinding away in his office, FitzRoy was promoted to the rank of rear admiral, and enjoyed the first taste of career satisfaction in twenty years. He married again, Maria Smyth, the daughter of a distant cousin. For a time, he found a balance in life.

  But beyond the walls of his shipshape home and productive little office, the world was changing. Unholy currents were abroad, and the unholiest of these was snaking toward him.

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  In October 1838…I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population,” Darwin wrote in the slim autobiography he penned for his family near the end of his life.

  He was referring to “An Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, one of those natural-philosophizing English country parsons Darwin might have turned into had he never met Robert FitzRoy. He began reading it on September 28 and finished on October 3. Hardly amusing, it was a grim little monograph. Malthus had stated that unless checked by some means, human population could double, quadruple, and continue to multiply geometrically until it quickly grew beyond any possibility of feeding itself with a food supply that could only increase arithmetically and never keep up with demand. Continual global famine was the only possible mathematical result.

  But Malthus observed that this didn’t happen, that natural “checks”—disease, war, periodic localized famine, sexual abstinence, and early death—kept population numbers roughly at sustainable levels.

  This was what Darwin, with all his cogitation, had been waiting to read. Doors opened in his brain.

  It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it.

  The theory supported his developing ideas about the transmutation of species: that adaptation to a hostile world which kept population numbers steady by attrition would, in time, produce better-adapted, survivalist species. But the implications of such a theory—godless creation, and humans from apes—were so inflammatory that Darwin resisted putting his thoughts in writing until he had the roundest possible argument to support it.

  It is almost impossible today to understand the reluctance Darwin felt about publishing his ideas. While scientists, clergymen, and liberal thinkers might debate the literal or metaphorical length of the “days” of creation in the book of Genesis, the public and private acceptance of God’s responsibility for it all, whether it had taken six days or six million years, was absolute. To suggest otherwise, particularly if well-supported by scientific argument, would change the way mankind perceived itself. Whether people wanted to believe it or not, Darwin’s argument threatened to undermine the deepest faith. The idea of expressing it, he wrote to Joseph Hooker, an eminent botanist to whom he sounded his theory, felt “like confessing a murder.”

  Instead, he simply made notes. Years went by as he studied and published his findings about barnacles and other natural mysteries, while refining his thoughts about this Malthusian-style natural preservation, or survival, of the fittest individuals of any genus.

  Darwin was in no hurry. Although in time his books would become best-sellers and bring him an enviable income, he felt no financial need to publish. He had a good income from his father, and in 1839 he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his favorite uncle Josiah, the Wedgwood pottery tycoon who had proved so influential in his youth, particularly supporting his voyage aboard the Beagle when his father had disapproved. Emma brought with her real wealth, and removed forever any worry Darwin might have felt about money. This enabled him to concentrate solely on his work for its own sake, writing up his conclusions—or not—without regard to any schedule. To pursue this without the demands and distractions of London, the Darwins moved to Downe, a small village in Kent; today just on the southern edge of greater London, but then quite a rural retreat. There, with the modern equivalent of a millionaire’s income and fifteen household servants, Darwin settled down to work.

  He almost never went anywhere else again, except to spas for his health. Oddly, after the robustness he showed throughout his five-year voyage around the world, Darwin soon became sickly in the manner of many eminent Victorians: he suffered from chronic nausea, vomiting, headaches, indigestion, dizziness, and insomnia. The reasons remain inconclusive despite much inquiry during and after his lifetime. He may have become infected by some virus or parasite, possibly contracting Chagas’ disease, during his epic travels, particularly in South America, where he ate and drank adventurously in the wild and was bitten by all sorts of insects. It may have been psychosomatic; Darwin was a great worrier about the health of his family, and his own health certainly deteriorated after the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie in 1851. His own education and experience in medicine made him prone to a vividly imaginative hypochondria. Visits anywhere, and having guests at Downe, only made his health worse, and after his move to the country in 1842, Darwin gradually assumed the life of an invalid. He went for walks in his garden, and occasionally farther afield, but mostly he remained indoors in his cluttered study.

  From here he maintained contact with the outside world through an enormous correspondence. His work depended completely on it, and perhaps no one benefited more from the remarkable efficiency of the British postal system when, during the mid-Victorian era, 25,000 postmen handled over 600 million letters a year. Newspapers, books, packages, and money orders moved around the country as fast as steam locomotives could carry them. In London there were up to eleven deliveries a day. The telegraph has been called the Victorian Internet, but its use was restricted to specialized services. It was the postal system, cheap and fantastically efficient, available to everyone, that made by far the bigger impact on people’s lives and their perception of the world.

  Darwin employed this incredible engine of communication to obtain data, opinions, and specimens. It acted as an enormous reference library for him. It became as crucial to his work and eventual conclusions as the great voyage that had prompted them.

  Holed up in seclusion, Darwin turned away from the world and made a life of rumination and study. As he refined his ideas about species and the laws of nature, he was ineluctably led to a reappraisal of his religious beliefs.

  Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point…. But I had gradually come…to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world…from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian….

  By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported,—that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become…I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.

  I was very unwilling to give up my belief…but I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.

  Darwin had at last become “an unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason.”

  His eventual atheism may have helped ease his concerns over committing his ideas about species to paper. In June 1842, “I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil in 35 pages.” Two years later Darwin enlarged this to 230 pages. But still he made no move to publish it—except to write a letter to Emma giving her very specific instructions for its publication in case of his death. But for the indefinite future he was in no h
urry.

  Years more went by while Darwin continued to make notes, and busy himself with other publications—volumes on the zoology of the Beagle voyage (as editor), new editions of his Journal of Researches, books and monographs on geology, volcanic islands, coral reefs, and barnacles. He went no further in writing out his ideas on the “species question” than in letters to friends, scientists like Lyell, and Joseph Hooker.

  However, the question of how species came into existence was, in the late 1850s, gaining considerable attention. A number of naturalists and scientists were beginning to write about it, from all points of view, and Lyell knew enough about Darwin’s work to advise him to go public and make this issue his own. In 1856, at Lyell’s urging, Darwin finally began to write out a definitive examination of his ideas on the transmutation of species.

  His treatment of it was so exhaustive that he might have gone on for a decade but for the slim package that came with the mail one day in June 1858. It was from one of Darwin’s far-flung correspondents, Alfred Russel Wallace, posted from Ternate, a remote dot in the spice islands, or Moluccas, on the far side of the world. It was dated February 1858, and had been making its way to Darwin for four months.

  Wallace, a thirty-five-year-old English naturalist, was halfway through eight years of wandering through the Malay Archipelago, the vast scattering of large and small islands astride the equator, across 45 degrees of longitude and three time zones, comprising roughly what is now the Republic of Indonesia. He was a very different sort of traveler than Charles Darwin. He came from impoverished circumstances and there was no one underwriting his travels. He had previously spent four years in Brazil, supporting himself by shipping specimens back to England and selling them to museums and collectors through an agent. In 1852 he lost all his own specimens, notes, and equipment when the ship carrying him back to England from Brazil caught fire and sank (the suggestion for A. S. Byatt’s story, and the eventual film, Angels and Insects). In England Wallace published a book, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro that impressed nobody, sold poorly, and was soon remaindered. Undaunted, he went to Southeast Asia. With the help of Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographic Society he got a free ride aboard a government ship to Singapore, and then made his way to Borneo. From there he began again sending specimens back to England for money. His best-sellers were orangutan hides, but his most sought-after item was the rare and impossibly gorgeous bird of paradise.

  In Wallace’s travels through the jungles of Borneo, the volcanic island of Java, the Celebes and Banda Seas, and the fragrant Moluccas, he came across an unimaginable variety of plant and animal species. He grew keenly aware of the geographic and physical differences between them, and also between the natives of Asia, Malaysia, and Polynesia. He observed and plotted across a map of Southeast Asia a line dividing the Indo- and Austro-Malayan regions, on either side of which all the plants, animals, and even humans, belonged to these two distinct regions. Today this is still called the Wallace Line.

  Wallace had also read Malthus, and his observations soon got him thinking along lines that history (always written by the victors) has termed Darwinian. He put some of these thoughts in a paper he sent to England that was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855. Wallace later summarized the conclusions of that paper.

  Relying mainly on the well-known facts of geographical distribution and geological succession, I deduced from them the law, or generalisation, that “Every species has come into existence coincident both in Space and Time with a Pre-existing closely allied Species”; and I showed how many peculiarities in the affinities, the succession, and the distribution of the forms of life, were explained by this hypothesis, and that no important facts contradicted it.

  Wallace’s paper aroused various reactions. A number of naturalists felt this was pointless theorizing. Darwin read it and wrote a letter to Wallace telling him, “I can plainly see that we have thought much alike and to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions.” Darwin also mentioned that Lyell too had enjoyed his paper. Wallace, whose naturalizing wanderlust had been directly inspired by both Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Darwin’s Journal of Researches, was pleased and encouraged. This was praise from the top. He continued his correspondence with Darwin and sent him a Javanese chicken and other skins.

  In February 1858, Wallace was struck by malaria. Shivering and sweating with fever, he lay in his bed in a palm-thatched house in Ternate. Around him sat boxes of pinned butterflies, the skins and bones of birds and animals, his books, his glasses, a gun, and his sweat-stained clothing. The Malthusian question, “Why do some live and some die?” spun around and around in his fevered mind. How do some escape the natural checks on populations—and why? Hungry, lightheaded, but with a growing lucidity, the threads of all his thinking came together in an elegant conclusion. He rose from his soaked bed, staggered to his table and began writing.

  The answer was clearly that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, the swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior remain—that is, the fittest would survive.

  Wallace worked on his thesis for three days, making it as clear and simple as he could. Finally he had a 4000-word essay that excited him. “The more I thought it over,” he wrote much later, “the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.”

  He signed and dated it and sent it to Darwin, together with a letter asking if he would read it and, if he thought it worthwhile, forward it to Lyell, and perhaps help him arrange for its publication.

  Four months later, the pages Wallace wrote in his hut trembled in Darwin’s hands. Darwin was staggered. He could hardly believe what he read. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” he wrote in dismay to a friend. “If Wallace had my ms. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract. Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.”

  Darwin was devastated. The work that had preoccupied him for twenty years, the theory he had thought his own, which he had delayed making public for so long, had now been neatly summed up by a nobody on the other side of the world. He didn’t know what to do. He felt paralyzed, irresolute. So he sent Wallace’s essay, as requested, to Lyell.

  Lyell immediately wrote back insisting that Darwin get something of his own, a very short summary, into print immediately. Darwin balked. “I shd be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so,” he wrote back. “But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably.” He was also suddenly distracted by the illness of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Henrietta, and his and Emma’s tenth child, Charles, nineteen months old, both of whom suddenly came down with raging fevers. Darwin left his dilemma in Lyell’s hands.

  There were none better. After thirty years in the scientific limelight, defending his own revolutionary views and commanding respect, Lyell knew everything there was to know about intellectual turf and reputation. He consulted Joseph Hooker, who was also familiar with Darwin’s work, and the two of them, eager to protect their friend’s interests, came up with a seemingly fair solution. They would have extracts from Darwin’s notes, and dated letters describing his ideas, read out together with Wallace’s essay at the next meeting of the Linnean Society. This was the pre-eminent naturalist’s society—Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker were members—the sort of august old boys club where Wallace ordinarily couldn’t hope to have his work taken notice of. By this tactic, Darwin’s years of study on the subject could be established, while Wallace would be offered the sort of respect and exposure he had never experienced.

  The readings took place on July 1, 1858. Darwin’s
baby boy had just died and he did not attend. Nor, of course, did Wallace, then in New Guinea and entirely unaware of the whole business. The items were read. Darwin’s claim to his ideas was established, along with Wallace’s, and the world went about its business.

  Darwin now threw aside his usual parsonly deliberation and began swiftly to do what he realized he should have done many years earlier. He began writing for publication.

  The world did not suddenly shift on its axis as Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were read at the Linnean Society. No outrage or damnation was voiced. Very little attention was paid to them. History has, in retrospect, paid rapt attention to these documents and the moment of their portentous appearance, but on that July day they were simply scientific papers routinely read into the record in droning voices to a sleepy audience. Darwin was not yet Darwin, so to speak—merely a respected, reclusive naturalist noted for his works on travel, zoology, and barnacles; and Wallace was an obscure collector. What was to come of it all was still to come.

  In fact, creationism, the other side of the species coin, had never been so widely and popularly discussed. In response to the challenges raised by cold science—mainly by the Lyellian view of geology and the worldwide proliferation of fossil finds, which suggested with increasing weight the enormous age of the earth and a creation that was ongoing—a slew of books appeared in the 1850s offering explanations and proofs of divine creation. Most notable and most radical among these was Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse, published in 1857.