Darwin's Island

by Steve Jones

  The eighteenth century was a vintage era for ‘wild children’, those raised - metaphorically or otherwise - by wolves, in the fashion of Romulus and Remus. The naturalist Linnaeus classified them as Homo ferus - wild men - whose nature would reveal what made thinking humans, Homo sapiens, different. Most of the supposed examples were fakes, but a few were not.

  In 1797, a young boy was found alone and almost naked in the forests of the Aveyron, in south-central France. He was captured, escaped, recaptured and escaped again, but in time he emerged from the woods under his own volition. He was about twelve years old, unable to speak and savage in his behaviour. A vicious scar on his throat hinted that his parents had tried, but failed, to kill their aggravating child. The lad appeared to have been without contact with others for almost his whole life and showed no obvious signs of joy, fear or gratitude when at last he met members of his own species. Here, perhaps, was an opportunity to investigate the springs of emotion.

  A young student, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, heard the story and saw the chance to test Rousseau’s ideas. He took the forlorn boy to Paris and set out to try to raise him to the spiritual level of his fellow citizens.

  Itard had trained as a tradesman, but took up medicine at the time of the French Revolution and later became a pioneer in the study of diseases of the ear, nose and throat. In stark contrast to Rousseau he was convinced that the essence of the human condition lay in the ability to sense the feelings of others and, armed with that talent, to build a society in which passions could be kept in check for the good of all. In his ‘Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man’ he set out his theory that ‘MAN can find only in the bosom of society the eminent station that was destined for him in nature … that moral superiority which has been said to be natural to man, is merely the result of civilization’.

  The doctor took young Victor - whom he named after one of the few sounds, ‘o’ (as in the French word for water), he was able to recognise - into his household and attempted to train him to express, and respond to, emotions. He was soon disappointed. The boy was ‘insensible to every species of moral affection, his discernment was never excited but by the stimulus of gluttony; his pleasure, an agreeable sensation of the organs of taste; his intelligence, a susceptibility of producing incoherent ideas, connected with his physical wants; in a word, his whole existence was a life purely animal’.

  Itard laboured for five years with both kindness and cruelty (the latter based on his charge’s fear of heights) to transform the boy from monster into Frenchman, but with little success. Victor’s behaviour stayed strange: he was obsessed with the sound of cracking walnuts but ignored gunshots close to his ears, and loved to rock water back and forth in a cup. He never learned to speak and showed no gratitude for food or shelter. The sole sign he made of any response to the sentiments of others was that, when Itard’s housekeeper was in tears after the death of her husband, Victor appeared to comfort her. Apart from that he stayed apart from his fellow men.

  His protector insisted that the young man’s failure to adapt to the inner worlds of those around him and to express his own feelings arose because he had been rescued too late to pick up the skills needed, but that view was too optimistic. The lad would nowadays be diagnosed as deeply autistic; as unable to respond to, or give, the signs - the smiles or frowns or conversations - that bind people to their parents, to their friends and to the community in which they live. The dire effects of the illness show how the expression of our own emotions and our response to those of others makes us what we are.

  The term ‘autism’ was invented in the 1940s to describe a condition in which children fail to interact or to smile or express sentiments apart from anger and unhappiness. They speak with difficulty or not at all and are filled with obsessions about particular foods, places or clothes. About a third suffer from epilepsy. Three out of four of those with a grave form of the illness struggle to cope with society throughout their lives. Autism shades from the severe disturbance shown by Itard’s Wild Boy himself, through Asperger’s syndrome, in which the language problems are less marked, to general problems in the development of normal conduct. Often, the problem is noticed when parents become concerned by their child’s depression or rage. Some autists, once unkindly referred to as idiots savants, have remarkable talents in drawing or in particular mathematical tasks, but their gifts do no more than disguise their deeper problems. Once, the illness was said to be rare, with one child in two thousand affected, but now the diagnosis is made far more often, with an incidence of one in a hundred in Britain.

  Autists cannot understand the signals of their fellows or make the full complement of their own. All children have that difficulty in their earliest years. As Darwin wrote in the Sketch of an Infant, ‘No one can have attended to very young children without being struck at the unabashed manner in which they fixedly stare without blinking their eyes at a new face; an old person can look in this manner only at an animal or inanimate object. This, I believe, is the result of young children not thinking in the least about themselves, and therefore not being in the least shy, though they are sometimes afraid of strangers.’ For most infants such self-absorption soon passes but an autistic child is locked into that phase for life. Many, when they look at other people, ignore the eyes, the flags of sentiment. They are just as unconcerned when someone else gazes long and hard at them.

  The Expression of the Emotions used the blush as a prime example of a social cue but embarrassment plays a lesser part in life today. Yawns - unacceptable in a nineteenth-century parlour - are more frequent. We do not know why we open our mouths when tired or bored (although the book discusses the gesture as a threat in baboons). Yawn and the world yawns with you and even to read about it can spark the gesture off, as about half the readers of this book can now attest. The habit begins at about the age of six. Not, however, for children with autism, for a yawn sparks off far fewer responses among them than among the general population. Such failures of empathy lie behind many of their problems.

  Psychologists talk of ‘theory of mind’, the ability to infer the mental state of others from smiles, frowns, gestures and speech. People with autism have little or no insight into the inner world of their fellows and cannot express their own internal universe in a way that makes much sense to those around them. They are blind to the messages written on another’s countenance and find it hard to separate gestures of anger, fear, sadness or joy. Like chimpanzees (but unlike dogs) some autistic children cannot understand what is meant when their parent or doctor points at an object. They are denied even that simple social talent.

  Autists also find it harder to tell people apart or to recognise a photograph of themselves. A certain group of brain cells is activated when monkeys or men see or copy the movements of others or observe an expression of pain, fear or disgust. They are also involved in the shared response to a yawn or a smile. These mirror neurons, as they are called, are almost silent in children with the severe form of the disease. Perhaps they are part of the system that helps us see into the souls of those around us. In their failure they condemn people with autism to a world whose other denizens act in a mysterious and unpredictable way.

  Nobody knows what causes autism and the condition has no cure, even if some of its symptoms such as insomnia or depression can be treated. The illness is four times more frequent in boys than girls, but shows no fit with race, social class or parental education. Infection, immune problems, vaccines, heavy metals, drug use while pregnant, Caesarean births and defective family structure in Freudian mode (the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim spoke of ‘refrigerator mothers’) have all been blamed but those claims do not stand up. Some say that the brain of a typical autistic child grows too fast too soon, but then slows down. The amygdalae - those detectors of fear - are overactive in some patients, but many other parts of the brain have also been implicated. Problems with serotonin, that universal alibi for disorders of emotion, may be to blame, for some autist
ic children synthesise the stuff less well than normal. Certain drugs used against depression can help, as a further hint of a tie between social isolation and the emotional universe.

  Genes are without doubt involved in some patients, even if not more than a tenth or so of cases can be ascribed to a definite genetic cause. If an identical twin has autism its sib is at a seven-in-ten risk while the figure risk for non-identicals is far lower. The incidence increases by twenty times above average in the brothers and sisters of those with autism and some among them are tactless, aloof or silent but are not diagnosed as ill.

  Such behaviour sometimes presents itself as part of a larger medical problem. FragileX syndrome is the commonest cause of mental disability among boys. It comes from a huge multiplication of a short segment of DNA upon the X chromosome. Some patients have symptoms quite like those of autism and some individuals diagnosed with that condition may in fact have the chromosomal abnormality. Other deletions, duplications or reversals of a segment of chromosome are behind other cases of the illness. Often, these arise anew in the children compared with their parents. Some badly affected patients have problems with a gene involved in the transmission of impulses between nerves. A few may have errors elsewhere in the DNA - and dozens of genes, with a variety of tasks, have been blamed. One candidate belongs to a group of genes that is multiplied in number in humans compared with all other mammals, is active in the brain and is damaged in at least a few autistic children. In spite of such hints the biology of autism remains obscure and there are likely to be several explanations for a condition that is not a single disease but many.

  Autistic children are an experiment in emotion. Their isolation is mental rather than physical, for they are cut off by an inability to respond to the flow of information that passes between others. A world full of autists could not function, for all societies depend on a silent dialogue in which every member’s intentions are overtly or otherwise expressed. Civilisation turns on the ability to bear another’s company.

  Those who break civilisation’s rules must be punished; and part of that invariably involves the manipulation of a criminal’s mental state. Prisons are, of their nature, places in which social interactions are forcibly reduced. Solitary confinement is a penalty far more severe than mere imprisonment, for it is autism imposed: a permanent denial of what it means to be human, inflicted upon someone who once experienced the full range of human emotion. The penalty is bitter indeed and is much appealed to by punitive societies, from medieval England to the modern United States. Charles Dickens visited such a penitentiary in Philadelphia and wrote that ‘I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.’ The infamous ‘Supermax’ at Marion, Illinois, a jail built to hold the most violent offenders, together with political prisoners such as Black Panthers and members of the American Indian Movement, allowed almost nobody out of their cells for twenty years, even to exercise. It closed in 2007, but some of its forty and more replacements are just as brutal. Some even feed their inmates on tasteless ‘Nutraloaf ’ further to reduce their contact with the world of the senses. Many inmates - like autists - become anxious, agitated and angry, and may end in insanity, killing themselves should the chance arise.

  If Zacarias Moussaoui, sentenced to life in solitary for his supposed ties to the Twin Towers outrage, were allowed reading material in his soundproofed Colorado cell he might learn something from both Dickens and Darwin about why he feels such hatred for those who do not share his views. As books are not available, he may wish instead to spend his solitary hours in contemplation of the expression of a condemned prisoner as the electricity passes through his head, which is said - in an echo of the great naturalist’s own observations - to be of ungovernable horror.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE WELL-BRED

  Charles Darwin was worried about his plans for marriage. Perhaps the whole idea was a mistake because of the time that would be wasted on family life at the expense of science. His diary records how he agonised over the pros and cons of matrimony, and his decision to ‘Marry, marry, marry!’ And marry, in the end, he did.

  His spouse was his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. In falling for a relative he stuck to a clan tradition. The Darwins, like many among the Victorian upper crust, had long preferred to share a bed with their kin. Charles’s grandfather Josiah Wedgwood set up home with his third cousin Sarah Wedgwood. Their daughter, Susannah, chose Robert Darwin, Charles’s father. Charles’s uncle - Emma’s father - had nine offspring, four of whom married cousins. The evolutionist’s own marriage was in the end happy, with ten children (and when his wife was in her forties he wrote that ‘Emma has been very neglectful of late for we have not had a child for more than one whole year’). Even so, in Queen Victoria’s fecund days the Darwin-Wedgwood dynasty did less well than most, for among the sixty-two uncles, cousins and aunts (Emma and Charles included) who descended from Josiah, thirty-eight had no progeny that survived to adulthood.

  Six years after his wife’s last confinement Darwin began to think about the dangers of inbreeding, in particular as they applied to his own choice of spouse. His concern was picked up from another of his cousins, Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, who had pointed out the potential dangers of marriage within the clan.

  Charles was anxious about his children. His tenth and last, Charles the younger, died while a baby; he was ‘backward in walking & talking, but intelligent and observant’. Henrietta had a digestive illness not unlike that of her father and took to her bed for years, and he feared that his son Leonard was ‘rather slow and backward’ (which did not prevent his later marriage to his own cousin or his acceptance of the Presidency of the Eugenics Society), while Horace had ‘attacks, many times a day, of shuddering & gasping & hysterical sobbing, semi-convulsive movements, with much distress of feeling’. His second daughter, Elizabeth, ‘shivers & makes as many extraordinary grimaces as ever’. George’s problem was an irregular pulse, which hinted at ‘some deep flaw in his constitution’ and, worst of all, his beloved Annie expired at the age of ten, throwing her parents into despair. As he wrote, ‘When we hear it said that a man carries in his constitution the seeds of an inherited disease there is much literal truth in the expression.’ Once he even wrote to a friend that ‘We are a wretched family & ought to be exterminated.’ Might his own illness and that of his sons and daughters be due to his own and his ancestors’ choice of a relative as life-partner? Was inbreeding a universal threat?

  His first statement of concern came three years after The Origin, as an afterword to his book On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. The last paragraph of that hefty work, most of it devoted to botanical minutiae, ends: ‘Nature thus tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation. This conclusion seems to be of high importance, and perhaps justifies the lengthy details given in this volume. For may we not further infer as probable, in accordance with the belief of the vast majority of the breeders of our domestic productions, that marriage between near relatives is likewise in some way injurious,—that some unknown great good is derived from the union of individuals which have been kept distinct for many generations?’

  The idea that children born to related parents might suffer harm was already in the air. The first study of its risks came in 1851 when Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) found, in work years ahead of its time, an increased incidence of deafness among the progeny of cousins. Sir Arthur Mitchell, the Deputy Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland, had earlier claimed that in the inbred fishing communities of north-east Scotland the average hat size was six and seven-eighths, a quarter-inch less than that of their more open-minded agricultural neighbours; proof, he thought, of the malign effects of the marriage of kin upon the mental powers.

  Sex within the household has a venerable history. The Pharaohs lived through generations of
the habit in an attempt to preserve the bloodline of a God. Akhenaten, who lived around 1300 BC, first married his cousin Nefertiti, then a lesser wife, Kiya, and then three of his own daughters by Nefertiti and then (perhaps) his own mother. The story is confused by difficulties with sorting out quite who was who (and one of his supposed wives was in fact male), but incestuous affairs were without doubt common in ancient Egypt. Cleopatra herself may have been the scion of ten generations of brother-sister unions. The practice is condemned in Leviticus, where the Children of Israel were enjoined that ‘After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do.’

  The belief that the children of cousins are bound to be unfit, and the desire of all rulers to control their citizens’ private lives, still fuels a jaundiced view of the joys of sex within the household. In 2008, a British government minister, in reference to the Pakistani population of Bradford, made the quite unjustified claim that ‘If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there will be a genetic problem.’ Many of his fellow citizens share that vague Galtonian sense that inbreeding is harmful. Most of their alarm rests on anecdote rather than on science.

  All states are interested in how their subjects behave in the bedroom. For years, England based its marital rules on those of the Church of England, which descend from those of the Israelites, themselves established to put an end to the habits of the Pharaohs. In 1907, after hundreds of hours of parliamentary discussion, the statutes were at last clarified. The new legislation removed absurd anomalies such as the biologically senseless law that forbade a widower to marry his dead wife’s sister but it also firmed up the prohibition against sex with close kin, be it father with daughter, or brother with sister.

  Politicians often act on the basis of prejudice. Darwin did not. When faced with a scientific question - about sex or anything else - he set out not to speculate but to discover. To learn more about inbreeding he turned again to plants. The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom appeared in 1876. It gives an account of experiments on a wide variety of hermaphrodite plants forced to mate with themselves. His verdict was clear: ‘The first and most important of the conclusions which may be drawn from the observations given in this volume, is that cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious.’ It was ‘as unmistakably plain that innumerable flowers are adapted for cross-fertilisation, as that the teeth and talons of a carnivorous animal are adapted for catching prey’. The exchange of genes between unrelated individuals was the rule and selfing an expensive exception. What was true of plants must, he imagined, apply to animals, men and women included.