by Paul Johnson
This last point is a reminder that one of Darwin’s intellectual weaknesses was to accept the Lamarckian doctrine that acquired characteristics could be inherited, later shown conclusively to be baseless. He thought the lesson applied particularly to women, who should be encouraged to learn things and read widely before they had children, so as to be sure to pass on what they had acquired. One of the points about Descent that strikes one particularly today is the evidently low opinion Darwin held of female intelligence, among human beings if not necessarily of insects. This is all the more remarkable in that Emma Darwin was in some ways a wiser person than himself (one might say, in many ways).
He makes the point of superior male intelligence again and again. Man is always “attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses or hands.” Lists of the greatest in poetry, painting, sculpture, or music (composition or performance) would prove this; they “would not bear comparison” and “the average of mental power in man must be above that of women.” His source was his cousin Galton’s work Hereditary Genius. Men have higher energy, perseverance and courage—more patience, too. Both natural and sexual selection reinforced male powers—“Thus, man has ultimately become superior to woman.” Then, in an extraordinary sentence, he says it is “fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise, it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.”
Darwin’s comments on different races often makes equally painful or hilarious reading. Many Hottentot women, he asserts, are steatopygous—that is, “the posterior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner.” He instances the woman “so immensely developed behind that when seated on level ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along until she came to a slope.” For this reason she “was considered a beauty.”
There are many such anecdotes. Thus: “With the Tahitians, to be called long-nose is considered as an insult.” From time to time the especially savage Fuegans make their appearance as stage props. And Darwin is especially severe with savages over their sexual habits: “It need hardly be added that, with all savages, female slaves serve as concubines.” Certain tribes practice “communal marriages; that is, all the men and women in the tribe are husbands and wives to one another.” He adds: “The licentiousness of many savages is no doubt astonishing, but it seems to me that more evidence is requisite.” He quotes experts, “whose judgment is worth much more than mine,” as believing communal marriage “was the original and universal form throughout the world, including therein the intermarriage of brothers and sisters.” One wonders whether Darwin put this sort of information in to titillate or frighten the reader, rather like the imaginary “fifteen million elephants” of Origin. He soon follows it with a passage about “capturing wives” as a matter of “honour” also becoming “a universal habit.” However, he thinks that “the feeling of jealousy all through the animal kingdom” is so strong that “I cannot believe that absolutely promiscuous intercourse prevailed in times past.” His conclusion is that “although savages are now extremely licentious,” many tribes “practise some form of marriage, but of a far more lax nature than that of civilised nations.” In a footnote, he credits “the Rev. Mr Shooter” to the effect that “the Kafir buy their wives” and “girls are severely beaten by their fathers if they will not accept a chosen husband” but all the same, they have some “power of choice” and “ugly, though rich, men have been known to fail in getting wives.” Then he gets on to body hair and skin color, and so to his summary and conclusion. This ends, one is delighted to see, with a final virtuoso performance by the Fuegan, “absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint,” a monster “who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.” He reflects: “Such were our ancestors.”
The Expression of the Emotions is a much shorter book than Descent and took only four months to write, though based on work going back nearly thirty years. It came out in London in November 1872, in America in 1873, and was translated into Russian in 1872, into German, Dutch, and Polish in 1873, French in 1874, and Italian in 1890. As a result of the remarkable boosting of Darwin in recent years, translations have appeared in Chinese in 1996, Spanish in 1998, and Portuguese in 2000. It is, in a way, an essential part of the natural selection trilogy, in that its central argument seems to prove that “some expressions” of men cannot be understood “except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.” It has a further interest in that Darwin goes to some lengths explaining how he compiled the book by observing infants, by consulting the keepers of insane asylums and experts on “galvanising” (electrotherapy), by looking at large numbers of photos and art prints, and by getting experts all over the world to answer a set of sixteen queries. He goes into some detail about the answers received from those who have studied the Maoris, the Dyaks, the Malays, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Kafirs and Fingoes of Africa. The Fuegans make their usual appearance, as do various tribes from the United States. The photographs are striking, though they give the book a period appearance, as does much of the text.
The best parts of the book by far concern animals: weeping elephants, enraged gorillas, disappointed chimpanzees, terrified cats, grinning dogs, and other phenomena, described by Darwin with the pleasure and skill he always brings to nonhuman behavior and which he finds so difficult to display with man. And his animal anecdotes are more credible than the ones he tells about men and women. The man who vomited when told he had inherited a fortune, “though no odour of alcohol could be detected,” the lion tamer whose hair fell out in a single night, and the Indian whose locks precipitately changed from black to white while awaiting execution do not seem very plausible figures; nor do we quite believe Darwin’s general assertion that “martyrs, in the ecstasy of their religious fervour,” are often “insensible to the most horrid tortures.” Sometimes, indeed, one suspects Darwin led a very sheltered existence, as when he asserts, “No poor man would laugh or smile on suddenly hearing that a large fortune had been bequeathed to him.” But of course he did lead a sheltered existence as a rule, and poor men did not come his way often. He lived among the cultured well-to-do.
By the time Expression was published, Darwin had, or thought he had, accomplished his life’s work. He had certainly established, to the satisfaction of most educated people, that evolution was a fact, and he had persuaded many of them, albeit still a minority, that evolution embraced all creatures, including man. He had also put across the why of evolution, natural selection, as the general if not exclusive explanation of why it occurred. But he had not discovered exactly, or even vaguely, how it operated. We now turn to the great missed opportunity of his crowded and fruitful life.
CHAPTER SIX
How the Great Botanist Missed an Opportunity
Darwin was a polymath. It was his great strength. Without the breadth as well as the depth of his knowledge, it is doubtful whether Origin could have succeeded. But his polymathy was of varying richness and intensity. He switched from one kind of work to another so often in his life and worked on two or three projects simultaneously or intermittently as a matter of habit, so it is not possible, despite his notebooks and diaries, to calculate exactly how much time he spent on each science. But it is likely that more than four fifths of his time went to plants, insects, and small creatures. He loved such work, and he instinctively recognized that he was better at it than at any other form of investigation. He was particularly intrigued when the work involved two branches of study, the interrelationship between insects and plants in the process of fertilization. His son Francis, who wrote his life, says he regarded such study, indulged in when he was suppose
d to be hard at work on natural selection, as “culpable idleness.” In fact, it occupied a good deal of his time, mental energy, and imaginative effort from the late 1830s onward, and after 1872 when he felt he had done his bit on evolution and its dynamics, it became his chief occupation by far.
He started to publish on plant fertilization in 1857–58, when he wrote on the kidney bean for the Gardeners’ Chronicle. In 1860 he switched to orchids, and after he built his new orchid house at Down, he devoted six months entirely to the project, finishing in April 1862 the book he called The Fertilisation of Orchids. Orchids are beautiful things, and the pleasure Darwin got in finding out their secret history and how insects served them conveys itself to the reader, so it is highly enjoyable even to nongardeners and completely convincing. When Darwin deals with orchids as opposed to “savages,” one feels he knows exactly what he is writing about. As a pendant to the orchid book, he worked for eleven years on a technical treatise eventually published in 1876 called The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom. His son Francis says that the whole project arose out of an accidental observation. Darwin had very sharp eyes, as photographs suggest, and he loved to pounce on and dig into anything unusual, even if the visual registration did not ring a bell to his mind for two or three days (as with Fleming’s discovery of penicillin). In this case, the unusual happened twice before he noticed it, and that was uncharacteristic but made the eventual double take all the more sharp and satisfying.
He next moved on to the details of the sexual life of plants, especially primroses, and if Disraeli had known this, he might have taken Darwin more seriously, for the primrose was his favorite flower, and he grew masses of splendid varieties at Hughenden. Darwin said he got more pleasure out of this research than anything else he did, and he learned a lot about plant hermaphrodites, heterocycles, hybridization, and infertility. He published a paper on this in 1863 but went on working at it, and a book, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, appeared in 1877. He also got a great deal of pleasure from studying climbing plants and worked out in enormous detail exactly why and how they climbed, what and when, and the consequences. Simultaneously he worked on insectivorous plants, and he got very excited about the way in which vegetation, in moving purposefully and attacking insect prey, behaves almost like animals. These investigations produced two books, Insectivorous Plants (1876) and The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). The latter was a formidable work: over six hundred pages and nearly two hundred illustrations.
Darwin loved working on plants because he had everything necessary at hand: greenhouses, special hothouse areas, ample soil for plantings, gardeners to assist, and notes going back forty years. He also had children, and later grandchildren, of various ages to perform special tasks. Plants led to his last object of inquiry into invertebrates: worms. Here again, he had been interested in worms for the best part of half a century, and in his last years, they occupied his mind more than any other aspect of nature. He had published a paper on worms for the Geological Society journal in 1838. Now he tied up worms with botany by working on a book called The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. He wrote: “This is a subject of but small importance; and I know not whether it will interest many readers. But it has interested me.” In fact, to visit Down House during the worm years, one would have thought no more important creature ever existed. Large parts of the garden were devoted to producing, nourishing, and classifying worms. The billiard room was made into a worm sanctuary. The billiard table itself was covered in pots with glass tops wherein particularly important worms were kept for observation. The entire family was made worm conscious. Darwin wanted to know everything about worms: their sense of touch, their appetites, their hearing, eyesight, and emotions. He would get up at night, pad downstairs in his nightshirt, and flash paraffin lamps at them. He used oil lamps, too, matches, candles, and “dark” lanterns, which he equipped with various colored slides. He experimented with endless kinds of food, from minced meat to fish paste. They would not eat bread or cheese or apples. What they liked were greens, especially cabbage. They loved carrots. He got Emma to play the piano to them, but they took no notice. They failed to respond to firecrackers, children’s percussion caps, or sparklers. His son Frank played his bassoon, and another son, Bernard, blew a tin whistle. Nothing. His daughter Bessy sang and called out loud: “Worms! Worms!” Again, no response. Darwin found they would try to get away from bright lights and slither underground. But they were not interested in a red-hot poker held nearby. He discovered they liked touching each other, and their sexuality was stronger than their aversion to strong light. They obviously enjoyed their food. He thought that they could acquire a notion of an object by touching it in many places. They could, he argued, solve problems. They were rather like a man “born blind and deaf.” Thus, once again, he proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that the difference between human beings and lowly organisms was not as great as people thought. Worms, like barnacles, could think, in their own way. The book proved surprisingly popular, and Darwin enormously enjoyed the entire project, even including the writing.
In fact it is likely that Darwin’s botanical and quasi-botanical studies such as worms were the most pleasurable part of his entire work. He was a better botanist than anything else. This makes it all the more tragic that he never became aware of the importance of the work being done by the greatest botanist of his time, perhaps of all time, Gregor Mendel.
He was thirteen years younger than Darwin, born in 1822 in Austria but spending his scientific life in Brünn, now Brno in the Czech Republic. His father was a farmer, and Mendel acquired his love of plants in the orchard, gardens, and fields of his father’s farm. After a mixed academic career, he became an Augustinian monk (like Luther) in 1843 and was ordained a priest four years later. Able and well organized, he rose to be abbot of his monastery. He began working and experimenting in the monastery garden in 1856. The monks loved fresh peas, and Mendel tried to produce new and more nourishing and delightful varieties. The monastery and the school where he taught had good scientific libraries, which took in foreign publications: Mendel possessed both the Origin and the Descent, writing notes in the margin, and was familiar with the Gardeners’ Journal. But he was aware of most of the principles of heredity before he read Darwin. He described his specialty as “plant hybridization” and determined to find out everything about it himself. In short he was a man after Darwin’s own heart. There was one difference, though. Mendel was a natural mathematician and early grasped the importance of statistics in working out hereditary processes.
Mendel and some scientific-minded friends, early in the 1860s, formed the Natural Science Society of Brünn, which from 1862 began to publish its own journal. In two meetings in February and March 1865, he told the society that all previous attempts to discover the principles of hybridization had been misconceived:
Not one has been carried out on a scale and manner as to find exactly the number of forms under which the offspring of hybrids appear, or to arrange these forms in exact order according to their different generations, or to discover exactly what are their statistical relationships.
Mendel dismissed existing work on heredity as amateurish and formulated his own, new rules using his pea plantings and blendings as the master guide. He studied particularly color in the blossoms and axils of the leaves, the varying size of the plants at particular points in their growth, and the color, size, and shape of the seeds. He also noted the position of flowers on the stem and the placing of the pods. He discovered that significant variations in all the visible alternatives were due to the pairing of what he concluded were the elementary units of heredity—what we would call genes. He realized that these basic units obey comparatively simple statistical laws and that such laws apply to all organic species, including human beings. Mendel’s first law, as it is now known, is that the reproductive cells of the
hybrids are always divided into two groups: half transmit one parental unit, and half the other. This principle of segregation explains why it is possible to predict exactly what happens when single pairs of alternative characteristics operate through a number of generations. He discovered that when several pairs of alternative traits are studied, these several pairs are transmitted to the progeny in all the possible combinations. He pinpointed seven pairs of different traits in his garden pea varieties, recombined them at random on paper according to another law, the principle of independent assortment, and worked out mathematically the statistical consequences of what he was doing. Then he confirmed the figures by experiment with real pea varieties. His various hypotheses were shown to be entirely valid, even though we now know that independent assortment operates as a law only in certain conditions. Nevertheless, the general thrust of his work proved valid as one of the fundamental laws of nature. He had, in short, discovered how natural selection, or indeed any form of selection, worked. Thus he had completed Darwin’s work on evolution, and in a manner that would have appealed strongly to Darwin’s tastes and favorite methodologies—by careful practical work in a comparatively small garden using a common plant. Darwin could have done exactly the same at Down. The mathematics might have presented a problem, but not an insuperable one.
