Charles Darwin*

by Kathleen Krull

  His friend Harriet Martineau added, “We must all be glad that he has set the world on this great new track.”

  Even Queen Victoria praised one of her daughters for plowing through Mr. Darwin’s book.

  Alfred Russel Wallace was Darwin’s fierce backer, at least for a while. The book “will live as long as the Principia of Newton,” he wrote. Darwin helped Wallace get a government pension, and they stayed friends, though Wallace drifted away from biology, pulled instead to spiritualism and séances (“rubbish,” per Darwin). Wallace also came to believe in an overriding power that controlled evolution. To this Darwin scrawled a firm, “No!!!”

  The Reverend Charles Kingsley, an important writer and prominent Anglican parson, became the first clergyman to state that Darwin’s science was perfectly compatible with religion. Kingsley thought you could accept Darwin’s ideas and still believe in a God “that created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms.” So it was possible to reconcile belief in a divine power with this theory of life.

  But attacks on the book were immediate. The very first review was violently negative, claiming it promoted the “men from monkeys” idea, although Darwin had not even mentioned this notion in Origin. (It was Mr. Vestiges who had.)

  Captain FitzRoy hated it and blamed himself for giving Darwin his start by taking him on the Beagle. Darwin’s old professor Sedgwick hated it too—parts of his former pupil’s work were “utterly false and grievously mischievous.”

  Some called the book blasphemous, actually illegal, for seeming to question God. To some the book was dangerous, threatening the stability of the nation; many simply could not wrap their heads around it.

  The debate was heated.

  In one of the most famous “battle scenes” in science, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce led an attack on Darwin’s theory at Oxford University in 1860. The scene was a crowded meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. “Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?” the bishop mocked, grossly misinterpreting the theory. Thomas Huxley argued the case for Darwin, who was happy to be too ill to attend (“I would as soon have died”).

  Both sides came away from the evening feeling victorious. Wilberforce needled Huxley as to whether he was descended from monkeys on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s side. Huxley snapped back that he would “unhesitatingly” prefer an ape as his ancestor rather than a man such as the bishop who used his intelligence and eloquence “for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion.”

  Meanwhile a rowdy audience of several hundred cheered and booed, or sometimes shouted, “Monkey, monkey!” Some women fainted. FitzRoy showed up, waving his Bible emotionally in the air, yelling, “The Book! The Book!” (Five years later FitzRoy was to commit suicide at age fifty-nine.)

  The uproar only made Origin of interest to an even wider audience.

  Huxley went on to establish himself as “Darwin’s bulldog” over the next thirty years. He was the public face, the marketer for evolution, especially in his popular lectures to the working class. In a way he did the dirty work for his friend, who so loathed confrontation.

  After the meeting in Oxford, Darwin’s book gained much wider acceptance. After 1860 most critics were ministers, attacking the theory on religious grounds. Gradually, the book established itself as a staple scientific text.

  In 1863, Henry Walter Bates published a book on the amazing collection of butterflies he had amassed along the Amazon. His discovery of several transitional forms in between different species supplied the first real evidence for Darwin’s prediction of missing links.

  Darwin’s ideas took hold and were applied to totally unrelated areas like business, studies on how we acquire language, and psychology. Sigmund Freud was a huge fan, always calling him “the great Darwin.” Poets such as Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were intrigued, novelist George Eliot was inspired, and in America Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated Darwin’s explanations of nature’s mysteries.

  Caricatures of Darwin with the body of an ape or monkey started to appear, some good-humored, some not. He collected them. As if they were beetle specimens, he clipped all reviews (more than two thousand), filing them carefully in scrapbooks, complete with indexes, scrawling testy comments in the margins—“false,” “rubbish,” “what a quibble.” He also wrote some five hundred letters a year in support of his work, begging for feedback.

  He never considered On the Origin of Species quite finished. He was always making improvements to his theory, strengthening his case, including new facts. The book went through six editions in his lifetime. Not until the fifth edition did he start using “survival of the fittest” to describe his natural selection theory. The phrase, so closely associated with Darwin, was coined in 1864 by philosopher Herbert Spencer, and Wallace had urged Darwin to borrow it.

  The book would sell 25,000 copies during his lifetime. He had negotiated a very favorable contract for himself, but the pressure drained him. “I am really quite sick of myself,” he wrote. A new neighbor encountered this “shy and nervous man” on his daily walk, in black clothes and a cape, wrapped in a gray shawl. He grew frailer, knowing that the controversy he had started would not be settled any time in the near future.

  Very true.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In Need of Soothing

  AFTER GETTING HIS masterpiece out there, Darwin spent most of the next twenty years soothing his nerves. How so? By embarking on a scientific exploration of exotic plants.

  First he became obsessed with tricky plants like sundews and Venus flytraps that snare and digest flies and spiders with their tentacles. He happily tested their reactions with everything he could think of, including his own urine, mucous, and saliva.

  Next up was ten solid months focused on the complex beauty of orchids, or rather their love lives, which were amazingly similar to barnacles’. Based on his observations of wild orchids growing in the countryside around Down House, he published On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing . This 1862 tome with such a mouthful of a title was not a page-turner or a bestseller, but it persuaded many botanists still on the fence about evolutionary theory. He showed how the “endless diversity of structure” in species of orchids was all for the purpose of fertilization. Orchids had evolved with each part of a flower adapting to allow pollination by flying insects. This was scientific theory, as opposed to the notion that flowers were divinely designed to give humans pleasure and beauty.

  He spoke about orchids briefly at the Linnean Society. Alas, this “brought on 23 hours vomiting,” with loud retching.

  In all he did now, he was looking for further evidence to support his theory. Also research was an acceptable excuse to stay home and avoid the spotlight. He spent six years on his next book, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, collecting evidence about variations in cucumbers, chickens, goldfish, honeybees—evidence that supported statements in Origin. This was not a bestseller either—the public craved more about apes.

  More and more Darwin was an invalid, spending hours or days vomiting or more accurately, retching, since little came up except acid, which wore away his teeth. Always cold, he kept a fire going year-round in his study, wearing wool underwear under several layers of clothes. His untrimmed beard grew increasingly out of control.

  Somehow he managed to keep writing books. Actually he felt worse if he wasn’t absorbed in work. Emma and his daughters helped extensively with proofreading and other details. In the evenings he tried to relax playing backgammon with Emma; they kept a running score which at one point was 2,795 (him) to 2,490 (her).

  He built an expensive hothouse for peaceful hours observing his plants and conducting meticulous experiments. He was no techie. For the most part he preferred old-fashioned equipment. Science was becoming a profession, shifti
ng from private homes to university labs. One son desperately urged him to get more sophisticated equipment but, like his frugal father before him, Darwin didn’t see the point in spending the money, even though by this time he had a great deal of it. Always a compulsive record keeper, he kept financial notebooks for the forty-three years of his marriage, noting every investment, every expense, no matter how tiny.

  He was proud of his children and their accomplishments. Most of them went on to have distinguished careers; three of his sons were named Fellows of the Royal Society for their work in science.

  In 1864 his “bulldog” Huxley met with Hooker, Spencer, and others to form what became the influential X Club. It was devoted to “science, pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogmas,” and it helped Darwin’s ideas spread further into British culture. Huxley was later to coin the word “agnostic”—someone who believes it’s impossible to know whether God does or does not exist. Darwin applied this label to himself, saying that he really didn’t know: things in nature were “so obscure that we stand in awe before the mystery of life.” He studied a little about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions, and he saw Christianity as on a par with but not superior to other beliefs. He thought that the concept of God was beyond the mind of man, and also that religion was a very private matter.

  Endearingly, he sometimes looked past his own theory when face-to-face with some marvel of nature. Once he picked a flower and questioned how such stunning, intricate beauty could simply be the result of random forces. His visitor joked, “My dear sir, allow me to advise you to read a book called The Origin of Species.”

  As his health continued its decline, Darwin lay on his sickbed in a room filled with inventive experiments to trace the movements of climbing plants. He would stare at potted plants for hours—did their tendrils go clockwise or counterclockwise? Which plants moved faster?

  He also kept working on a sort of sequel to Origin, what he called his “Man book.” In it he actually stated for the first time the ideas he’d previously been ridiculed for. With The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, he focused his theories of evolution on humans. Humans, he theorized, were part of the animal kingdom. (Teasingly, he once said his own Emma was “the most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals.”) He presented evidence for the connection, such as the fact that diseases could be communicated between man and other animals, proving “the close similarity of their tissues and blood.”

  He noted that from what we know of the development of human fetuses, we could conclude that our prehistoric ancestors, both male and female, were covered in hair, and both had beards. From a mass of evidence like this, he concluded: “We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.”

  This was arguably the most controversial sentence ever written in science. He didn’t mean that man was descended directly from monkeys, but that both man and monkey were descendants, with modifications, of a common hairy primate ancestor. He had no prehistoric human fossils to work with, but our skeletal resemblance to gorillas and chimpanzees, animals of Africa, allowed him to speculate that this was where humans had first developed. He suspected that someday fossils would be found of an “intermediate form,” a creature in between man and his apelike ancestor.

  Grouping humans with the rest of the animal world was in no way demeaning to humans, not in Darwin’s mind. Underscoring what makes us human (the ability to reason, making tools, self-awareness, language, abstract thought, moral sense, appreciation for beauty), he pointed out simpler forms of the same behaviors in animals. All creatures are connected, all part of the tree of life. Human civilization had tempered the brutal “survival of the fittest” battle—we have the potential to protect life with medicines, caring for the weak and helpless, not letting them die.

  Descent of Man sold well, not provoking a furor. His work was becoming more and more socially acceptable, much to his relief—“everybody is talking about it without being shocked,” he noted. The first children’s books on evolution were appearing. Charles Lyell was starting to use the phrase “missing links”—exactly what Darwin had predicted with “intermediate forms” connected by common descent.

  The following year, at age sixty-three, he published The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Readers were fascinated with his ideas about the similarity of facial expressions among people and animals all over the world. One of the first books to feature printed photographs, this was his biggest bestseller thus far.

  His next book, Insectivorous Plants, was followed by The Power of Movement in Plants, written with his son Francis.

  In 1876, he started writing an autobiography. It was not meant for publication, but a grandchild was on the way and he wanted to share his story with future generations of Darwins. He avoided anything too emotional or painful or controversial.

  He did worry that his mind was atrophying, becoming “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts.” But he never lost his child-like sense of wonder about nature, the trait that had started him asking so many questions. One of his sons remembered his gentle touch of a flower—“it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color.”

  And when his grandson Bernard arrived, he didn’t study him scientifically as he’d done with his own children. His simply enjoyed their daily conversations and walks around the garden, timing Bernard’s tricycle races up and down the path—just for the joy of being with him.

  Thinking about his daughter Annie still made him cry. When the germ theory of infection was finally developed in 1877, he realized how powerful the tiny bacteria were, how much the new research could have helped Annie.

  He published his earlier notes on “The Natural History of Babies” as “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant.” One of the first articles on child behavior, it led to new research on infant development—what was due to nature, what was because of nurture.

  His last book was on worms, which had always mesmerized him. “He has taken to training earthworms,” wrote Emma, tolerant as ever. He believed that lowly worms, with their gradual but significant effects on soil, were shortchanged by scientists—they were clearly creatures “which have played so important a part in the history of the world.” Now he tested their behavior. Did they react to tobacco fumes, a whistle blowing, vibrations when Emma played piano? Would they eat the tiny triangles and diamonds he cut out of paper? He would observe them outside by moonlight, or creep downstairs to see what they might be up to in his potted plants. He may not have found emotions in them, but they evoked his—affection, amusement, exasperation.

  Weirdly enough, The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms turned out to be a blockbuster. A day after publication, his publisher wrote “3,500 Worms!!!” Plenty of others found them fascinating, too, and not the least controversial.

  Ras was still an important part of his life, a source of gossip and encouragement, a superb uncle to his children. But his beloved brother died in 1881. Darwin called him “the most pleasant and clearest headed man whom I have ever known.”

  Less than a year later, Charles Darwin died of heart failure. For all his ailments, he lasted until the age of seventy-three. He worked until two days before his death on April 19, 1882. His last words were to his family, assuring Emma, “I am not the least afraid of death.”

  His plan was to be buried alongside Ras and his daughter Annie in the local churchyard. But the family bowed to pressure from his important friends and supporters.

  Darwin was given the most lavish of funerals and buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the great physicist Isaac Newton. England’s royalty, leading politicians, scientists, and clergy were all in attendance.

  The worm book had been a fitting end to his career—billions of worms, over billions of years, turning over soil, cha
nging the earth, the tiny accumulations of change he loved to think about. Humble, agreeable creatures—nice ones.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Darwin Never Dies

  SO MUCH HAS been written about Charles Darwin. Why add another book to the pile?

  Because two hundred years after his birth, many people still don’t understand his work, and the debate over it still rages.

  Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection opened up an exceptionally rich, yeasty area for further study in biology. As an explanation for biological change, a framework for investigation, Darwin’s theory is priceless. As a well-known 1973 essay puts it, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”

  But Darwin’s reach stretched farther than biology. His work was a spur to many fields of study in the nineteenth century, leading to waves of progress in psychology, anthropology, medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology, and had an indirect effect on art, literature, and philosophy. It was part of a serious shift in thinking—the universe is not permanent but fluid, changeable. Moreover, all creatures on Earth share connections. He flung open the door to huge areas of ongoing research. Thanks to his painstaking labor, science in general became more established, more of a discipline.

  Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, Gregor Mendel’s brilliant work in genetics became known and widely accepted. The Austrian scientist had died in obscurity in 1884. It took until the 1930s before scientists realized how much Mendel’s work vindicated Darwin’s. Passing traits down from one generation to the next—Darwin knew this happened; Mendel showed exactly how it worked.

  Combining Mendel with Darwin is known as the “modern synthesis,” and it forms the basis of all modern biology and genetics. Scientists consider it the best way of understanding life on Earth, the similarities and differences among living things over time, and what might happen in the future.