No expense, then, has been spared to bring you historical truth, inasmuch as so weighty a characteristic as truth can be attributed to something as ethereal as history. Except for the giant squid, of course. That happened in a different timeline, when the malign forces were getting extremely desperate and strayed into Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea through some obscure warp in L-space.
The most important similarity between the two Darwins is less exciting, but essential to our tale. The real Charles Darwin, like his fictional counterpart, began by writing the wrong book. In fact, he wrote eight wrong books. They were very nice books, very worthy … of great scientific value … and they did his reputation no harm at all … but they weren’t about natural selection, his term for what later scientists would call ‘evolution’. Still, that book was brewing merrily away in the back of his mind, and until he was ready to bring it off the back burner, he had plenty of other things to write about.
It had been FitzRoy who had put the idea of authorship into his head. The Beagle’s captain had signed himself up to write the story of his round-the-world voyage, based on the ship’s log. He had also agreed to edit an accompanying book about a previous survey by the same vessel – the one where Stokes had shot himself. As the Beagle headed north-west from Cape town, stopped briefly at Bahía in Brazil, and turned north-east across the Atlantic towards its final destination in Falmouth, FitzRoy suggested to Darwin that the latter’s diary might form the basis of a third volume on the natural history of the voyage, completing the trilogy.
Darwin was nervous but excited at the prospect of becoming an author. He had another book in mind, too, on geology. He’d been thinking about it ever since his revelation on the island of St Jago.
As soon as the ship had returned to England, FitzRoy got married and went on honeymoon, but he also made an impressive start to his book. Darwin began to worry that his own slow writing would delay the whole project, but FitzRoy’s early enthusiasm soon ground to a halt. Between January and September 1837 Charles worked flat out, overtook the captain, and towards the year’s end he sent his finished manuscript to the printer’s. It took FitzRoy more than a year to catch up, so Darwin’s contribution was held back, finally seeing the light of day in 1839 as volume 3 of the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, with the subtitle Volume 3: Journal and Remarks, 1832–1836. After a few months the publishers reissued it on its own as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle. It may have been the wrong book, but writing it had one very useful effect on Darwin’s thinking. It forced him to try to make sense of all the things he had seen. Was there some overarching principle that could explain it all?
Next came his geology book, which eventually turned into three: one on coral reefs, one on volcanic islands, and one on the geology of South America. These established his scientific credentials and led to him winning a major Royal Society prize. Darwin was now recognised as one of the leading scientists in the land.
He was also making ever more extensive notes on the transmutation of species, but he still was in no hurry to publish. Quite the contrary. Elsewhere, political forces were at work aiming to destroy the influence of the Church, and one of their key points was that living creatures could easily have arisen without the intervention of a creator. Darwin, being (at that point in his life) a good Christian, was totally averse to anything that might seem to ally him with such people. He could not publicly espouse transmutation without risking serious damage to the Anglican Church, and nothing in the world would induce him to contemplate that. But his deep insight about natural selection wouldn’t go away, so he continued developing it as a kind of hobby.
He did mention the insight to various scientific friends and acquaintances, among them Lyell, and also Joseph Dalton Hooker, who didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. But he did tell Darwin, ‘I shall be delighted to hear how you think this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on this subject.’ And he later said, rather acerbically, that ‘No one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely examined many.’ Darwin took this advice to heart and cast around for new species to become an expert on. In 1846 he sent the final proofs of his geology books back to the printer and celebrated by collecting the last bottle of preserved specimens from the Beagle voyage. At the top of the bottle he noticed a crustacean from the Chonos Archipelago – a barnacle.
That would do. It was as good as anything else.
Hooker helped Darwin set up his microscope and make some preliminary anatomical observations. Darwin asked Hooker to name the new beast, and together they decided on Arthrobalanus.1 ‘Mr Arthrobalanus’, as they privately called it, turned out to be somewhat unusual. ‘I believe Arthrobalanus has no ovisac at all!’ Charles wrote. ‘The appearance of one is entirely owing to the splitting & tucking up of the posterior penis.’ To resolve the mystery he took other barnacles from the bottle and looked at them, too. Now he was doing comparative anatomy of barnacles, and enjoying the hands-on experience immensely. This was better than writing.
By Christmas he had decided to study every barnacle known to humanity – the entire order of Cirripedia. Which turned out to be rather a lot, so he settled for the British ones. Even these were rather a lot, and in the end the task took eight years.
He might have finished earlier, but in 1848 he got interested in barnacle sex, and that was very peculiar indeed. Most barnacles were hermaphrodites, able to assume either sex. But some species had good old-fashioned males and females. Except that the males spent much of their lives embedded in the females.
Not only that: some supposedly hermaphrodite species also had tiny males that somehow assisted in the reproductive process.
Now Darwin became very excited, because he had convinced himself that what he was observing was a relic of evolution, as a hermaphrodite ancestor gradually developed separate sexes. A ‘missing link’ for barnacle sex. He could reconstruct the barnacles’ family tree, and what he thought he saw reinforced his views on natural selection. So even when he tried to do respectable science, and become a taxonomist, transmutation insisted in getting in on the act. In fact, if anything convinced Darwin he was right about transmutation, it was barnacles.
He became ill, but continued working on barnacles. In 1851 he published two books about them – one on fossil barnacles for the Palaeontographical Society, the other on the living ones for the Royal Society. By 1854 he had produced a sequel to each of them.
These were Darwin’s eight wrong books:
Not a hint of transmutation of species, the struggle for life, or natural selection.
Yet, in a strange way, all of his books – even the geological ones – were crucial steps towards the work that was now putting itself together inside his head. Darwin’s ninth book would be pure dynamite. He wanted desperately to write it, but he had already decided that it would be far too dangerous to be published.
It is a common dilemma in science: whether to publish and be damned, or not to publish and be pre-empted. You can have the credit for a truly revolutionary idea, or a quiet life, but not both. Darwin was wary of publicity, and he was scared that putting his views into print might damage the Church. But there is nothing that more effectively galvanises a scientist than the fear that somebody else will pip them to the winning post. In this case, that somebody was Alfred Russel Wallace.
Wallace was another Victorian explorer, equally keen on natural history. Mostly because he could sell it. Unlike Darwin, he was not ‘gentry’, and had no independent income. He was the son of an impecunious lawyer2 and had been taken on at age fourteen as a builder’s apprentice. He spent his evenings drinking free coffee in the Hall of Science off Tottenham Court Road in London. This was a socialist organisation, dedicated to the overthrow of private property and the downfall of the Church. Wallace’s experiences as a youth reinforced a left-wing
view of politics. He financed his own travels, and made a living by selling the specimens he collected – butterflies, beetles (a thousand labelled specimens per box, the dealers demanded3), even bird skins. He went on a collecting expedition to the Amazon in 1848, and again to the Malay Archipelago in 1854. There, in Borneo, he sought orang-utans. The idea that humans were somehow related to the great apes was simmering away in the collective subconscious, and Wallace wanted to investigate a potential human ancestor.4
One miserable Borneo day, when a tropical monsoon raged outside and Wallace was stuck indoors, he put together a little scientific paper outlining some modest ideas that had just popped into his head. It eventually appeared in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, a rather ordinary publication, and it was about the ‘introduction’ of species. Lyell, aware of Darwin’s secret interest in such matters, pointed the paper out to him, and Charles began to read it. Then another of Charles’s regular correspondents, Edward Blyth, wrote from Calcutta with the same recommendation. ‘What do you think of Wallace’s paper in the Ann M.N.H.? Good! Upon the whole!’ Darwin had met Wallace shortly before one of the latter’s expeditions – he couldn’t remember which – and he could see that the Ann M.N.H. paper had useful things to say about relationships between similar species. Especially the role of geography. But apart from that, he felt that the paper contained nothing new, and made an entry to that effect in one of his notebooks. Anyway, it seemed to Darwin that Wallace was talking about creation, not evolution. Nevertheless, he wrote to Wallace, encouraging him to continue developing his theory.
This was a Really Bad Idea.
Encouraged by Lyell and others, who were now warning him that if he delayed too long, others might snatch the prize, Darwin was putting together ever more elaborate essays on natural selection, but he continued to dither about publication. All that changed in an instant in June 1858, when the postman dropped a bombshell through Charles’s letterbox. It was a package from Wallace, containing a twenty-page letter, sent from the Moluccas. Wallace had taken Darwin’s advice to heart. And he had come up with a very similar theory. Very similar indeed.
Calamity. Darwin declared that his life’s work was ‘smashed’. ‘Your words have come true with a vengeance,’ he wrote to Lyell. The more he read Wallace’s notes, the closer the ideas seemed to his own. ‘If Wallace had my MS [manuscript] sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract!’ Darwin moaned in a letter to Lyell.
Staid Victorians would soon consider both Wallace and Darwin to be out of their minds, and Wallace certainly came close, for he was suffering from malaria when he composed his letter to Darwin. As a good socialist, Wallace had been taught not to trust the reasoning of Malthus, who had argued that the world’s ability to feed itself grew linearly, while the population grew exponentially – implying that eventually the population would win and there would be too little food to go round. Socialists believed that human ingenuity could postpone such an event indefinitely. But by the 1850s even socialists were beginning to view Malthus in a more favourable light; after all, the threat of overpopulation was a very good reason to promote contraception, which made excellent sense to every good socialist. Half-delirious with fever, Wallace thought about the rich variety of species he had encountered, wondered how that fitted in with Malthus, put two and two together, and realised that you could have selective breeding without the need for a breeder.
As it turned out, he didn’t have quite the same view as Darwin. Wallace thought that the main selective pressure came from the struggle to survive in a hostile environment – drought, storm, flood, whatever. It was this struggle that removed unfit creatures from the breeding pool. Darwin had a rather blunter view of the selection mechanism: competition among the organisms themselves. It wasn’t quite ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ as Tennyson had written in his In Memoriam of 1850, but the claws were unsheathed and there was a certain pinkness to the teeth. To Darwin, the environment set a background of limited resources, but it was the creatures themselves that selected each other for the chop when they competed for those resources. Wallace’s political leanings made him detect a purpose in natural selection: to ‘realise the ideal of a perfect man’. Darwin refused even to contemplate this kind of utopian hogwash.
Wallace hadn’t mentioned publishing his theory, but Darwin now felt obliged to recommend it to him. At that point it looked as if Charles had compounded his Really Bad Idea, but for once the universe was kind. Lyell, searching for a compromise, suggested that the two men might agree to publish their discoveries simultaneously. Darwin was concerned that this might make it look as if he’d pinched Wallace’s theory, worried himself to distraction, and finally handed the negotiating over to Lyell and Hooker and washed his hands of it.
Fortunately, Wallace was a true gentleman (the accident of breeding notwithstanding) and he agreed that it would be unfair to Darwin to do anything else. He hadn’t realised that Darwin had been working on exactly the same theory for many years, and he had no wish to steal such an eminent scientist’s thunder, perish the very thought. Darwin quickly put together a short version of his own work, and Hooker and Lyell got the two papers inserted into the schedule of the Linnaean Society, a relatively new association for natural history. The Society was about to shut up shop for the summer, but the council fitted in an extra meeting at the last minute, and the two papers were duly read to an audience of about thirty fellows.
What did the fellows make of them? The President reported later that 1858 had been a rather dull year, not ‘marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, our department of science’.
No matter. Darwin’s fear of controversy was now irrelevant, because the cat was out of the bag, and there was no chance whatsoever that the beast could be stuffed back in. Yet, as it happened, the anticipated controversy didn’t quite materialise. The meeting of the Linnaean Society had been rushed, and the fellows had departed muttering vaguely under their breaths, feeling that they ought to be outraged by such blasphemous ideas … yet puzzled because the enormously respected (and respectable) Hooker and Lyell clearly felt that both papers had some merit.
And the ideas struck home with some. In particular, the Vice-President promptly removed all mention of the fixity of species from a paper he was working on.
Now that Darwin had been forced to put his head above the parapet, he would lose nothing by publishing the book that he had previously decided not to write, but had constantly been thinking about anyway. He had intended it to be a vast, multi-volume treatise with extensive references to scientific literature, examining every aspect of his theory. It was going to be called Natural Selection (a conscious or subconscious reference to Paley’s Natural Theology?). But time was pressing. He polished up his existing essay, changing the title to On the Origin of Species and Varieties by Means of Natural Selection. Then, on the insistent advice of his publisher John Murray, he cut out the ‘and Varieties’. The first print run of 1250 copies went on sale in November 1859. Darwin sent Wallace a complimentary copy, with a note: ‘God knows what the public will think.’
In the event, the book sold out before publication. Over 1500 advance orders came in for those 1250 copies, and Darwin promptly started working on revisions for a second edition. Charles Kingsley, author of The Water-Babies, country rector, and Christian socialist, loved it, and wrote a lavish letter: ‘[It is] just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that He created primal forms capable of self-development … as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas5 which He himself had made.’ Kingsley was something of a maverick, because of his socialist views, so praise from this source was something of a poisoned chalice.
The reviews, steadfast in their Christian orthodoxy, were distinctly less favourable. Even though Origin hardly mentions humanity, all the usual complaints about men and monkeys, and insults to God and His Church, were trotted out. What particularly galled the rev
iewers was that ordinary people were buying the thing. It was all right for the upper classes to toy with radical views, it had an attractive frisson of naughtiness and was perfectly harmless among gentlemen of breeding, though not ladies of course; but those same views might put ideas into the common folk’s heads, if they were exposed to them, and upset the established order. For Heaven’s sake, the book was even selling to commuters outside Waterloo railway station! It must be suppressed!
Too late. Murray geared up to print 3000 copies of the second edition, whose likely sales were not going to suffer from public controversy. And the people who mattered most to Darwin – Lyell, Hooker, and the anti-religious ‘evangelist’ Thomas Henry Huxley – were impressed, and pretty much convinced. While Charles stayed out of the public debate, Huxley set to with a will. He was determined to advance the cause of atheism, and Origin gave him a point of leverage. The radical atheists loved the book, of course: its overall message and scientific weightiness were enough for them, and they weren’t too concerned about fine points. Hewett Watson declared Darwin to be ‘the greatest revolutionist in natural history of this century’.
In the introduction to Origin, Darwin begins by telling his readers the background to his discovery:
When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts, in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species – that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out of this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it.
Science of Discworld III Page 15
