Here is the most fabulous site, with all Charles Darwin's works available online. There is no end to research on Darwin and a recent set of book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement give a clue to some of the latest thinking.
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| Darwin in 1854 Public domain |
The context
Science is not value-free, and the language and concepts of Darwinism are those of the economic and social doctrines of the time. Darwin's Origin of Species was published at a particularly sensitive time, when scientists were making a bid for cultural supremacy.The keystone of traditional naturalism was Archdeacon William Paley’s Natural Theology, which Darwin studied at Cambridge. The argument was simple and apparently convincing:
- Life was good because through the kindness of God, all human beings were adapted to their surroundings;
- Animals, including humans, are complex beings from the divine workshop, exquisitely fitted to their place in the world.
- This proves there must be a designer.
The voyage of the Beagle
On 27 December 1831 a tiny ship named the Beagle left Plymouth. The volatile, bad-tempered, depressive captain, Robert FitzRoy, was starting on a two year survey, commissioned by the Admiralty, of Tierra del Fuego and the southern coasts of South America. On board the ship were three inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, who had been ‘collected’ by Fitzroy on an earlier expedition, and were being shipped back to their country of origin to fulfil the captain’s vision of establishing Christianity there. Also on board as Fitzroy’s companion was Charles Darwin a young naturalist intended for the church, whose father, a Shrewsbury doctor, had only reluctantly sanctioned his going. Darwin’s aim was to collect as many specimens as he could and donate them to a prominent institution, and thus establish himself as a scientific celebrity. In this period there was no clear distinction between collecting, hunting and plundering.
Darwin was away from home for five years. While at sea, he was often sick, and lay listening to the shrieks of men being flogged and reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology.
In December 1832 the Beagle arrived in Tierra del Fuego. Darwin never forgot his first sight of ‘wild men’: ‘They are as savage as the most curious person would desire’; ‘like the troubled spirits of another world.’ But both Darwin and Fitzroy were convinced that the Fuegians were the same species as Europeans. It was this fact that made the whole experience so painfully interesting to him as it seemed to reinforce the essential fragility of civilization. But it also confirmed his Whig belief in the possibility of progress and his recognition of the underlying unity of the human race became one of the building blocks of his theory of evolution.
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| HMS Beagle at Tierra del Fuego by Conrad Martens Public domain |
In June 1834 the Beagle sailed into the Pacific. In September the ship began to head west and reached the Galapagos Islands on the 15th. At first he did not recognize the significance of what he saw – the fact that different species of tortoises, iguanas, and finches were found on the different islands. He shot birds, but when he examined their corpses he assumed that the differences were insignificant anomalies.
By the time the Beagle was heading homewards, Darwin had abandoned the prospect of becoming a clergyman; he wanted to become a proper naturalist like Lyell.
Between the Beagle and Origin
On 2 October 1836 the Beagle arrived at Falmouth. Darwin was now well known because his letters to one of his scientific friends had been published. He was eagerly received by geologists, became friendly with Lyell and Richard Owen, and was elected a fellow of the Geological Society. He became a celebrity in London scientific circles.Darwin’s intellectual breakthrough arose out of a meeting at the Zoological Society in March 1837 where his findings were discussed. The problems focussed on the rheas (flightless birds) he had brought back from Patagonia and the Galapagos finches (initially thought to be mockingbirds) and iguanas. Equally significant were the pampas fossils. Vital questions were raised. Why the divergence into different species? What was the relationship between modern and extinct species?
The solution clearly involved transmutation of species, a theory already put forward by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, but heretical among British naturalists in the 1830s. He hit on the concept of the mechanism for this transmutation in September and October 1838 when he read Thomas Malthus's Essay on Population: those who died (human or animal) were the weakest, those who lived the strongest, or best adapted; over a long period of time variations might become fixed and a whole species might adapt to its current situation. The theory also fitted well with Darwin’s own background in competitive, entrepreneurial England. By 1842 he was using the phrase natural selection – a theory which ruled out the need for God.
For next forty years following the Beagle’s return he wrote 19 books and hundreds of scientific papers, totalling 6 million words. Their subjects ranged from barnacles, orchids, insect-eating plants and earthworms to the expression of emotion in dogs, apes and people. Together they contributed to his revolutionary idea. He wrote an essay in 1842 but did not publish it. In January 1844 (now living at Down House) he wrote to his new friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker:
‘I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable… think I have found out (here’s presumption) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.'In this letter he set out succinctly the thesis of Origins: the mutability of species and the mechanism of natural selection. To Darwin’s relief, Hooker’s response was matter-of-fact, but he still felt no rush to publish. But he still felt no rush to publish.
Then in October 1844 the Scottish journalist Robert Chambers published anonymously his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which promptly became both fashionable and notorious. Darwin was stunned to find that, in spite of his amateurish zoology and geology, Chambers’ thesis was the same as his: he suggested that everything currently in existence had developed from earlier forms. The book ran into many editions and stimulated great debate. It clearly influenced Tennyson's In Memoriam. Ideas of extinction and evolution were very much in the air years before the publication of Origins.
Alfred Russel Wallace
Unlike Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace had to earn his own living. He was born at Usk, Monmouthshire, the son of an attorney who had fallen on hard times. He had to leave his grammar school and never attended university. In 1837 he joined his brother in the surveying trade. He became associated with the newly-formed Mechanics’ Institute. Wallace had always been interested in natural history and had been made a curator of the Neath Philosophical and Literary Institute’s museum.Inspired by William H. Edward’s Voyage up the River Amazon, he began plans for a collecting expedition. He and his friend, the entomologist, Henry Walter Bates, sailed from Liverpool for Pará on 25 April 1848.
Like Darwin, Wallace had read Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, and it converted him to biological evolution. He hoped that in the Amazon he would be able to trace the progress of evolution. In the Amazon he first came into contact with native peoples unaffected by European influence. He became fascinated by the way humans and all living organisms adapted to their environments.
Wallace spent four years in the Amazon but most of the materials he had collected were destroyed in a fire at sea. This deprived him of the opportunity to study the question that now fascinated him – the mechanism of organic change. But he made his reputation with two books published in 1853, Palm Trees of the Amazon and A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.
Through a grant from the Royal Geographical Society he was able to sail to Singapore for the Malay Archipelago in 1854. Over a period of eight years he visited every important island. He collected 126,500 natural history specimens, including more than 200 new species of birds and well over 1000 new insects. At Ternate he pondered a book he had read much earlier, Malthus's Essay on Population, the very book that had enabled Darwin to reach the concept of natural selection.
Wallace is important because he discovered evolution at the same time as Darwin and also because his study of the distribution of species led him to discover the boundary that separates the ecozones of Asia and Wallacea, a transitional zone between Asia and Australia. West of the line are found organisms related to Asiatic species; to the east, a mixture of species of Asian and Australian origin is present. This was named ‘Wallace’s Line' by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1868.
In September 1855 Wallace published a paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, based partly on his earlier research in the Amazon basin. Darwin read it but was not particularly impressed as it did not reveal anything that was not previously known.
The writing of Origin
However, everything changed in June 1858 when Darwin received a letter from Wallace from Ternate enclosing an essay written in February
‘which, line by line, spelled out virtually the same theory of evolution by natural selection that Darwin believed was his alone. … He was well and truly forestalled.’ Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, The Power of Place (Pimlico, 2002), 14-16.As Wallace had requested, he despatched the essay to Lyell, who discussed the matter with Hooker. On 30 June the two men forwarded to the Linnean Society three papers that were read at a meeting of the Society, to little reaction. These were (a) extracts from Darwin’s sketch of 1844, (2) Darwin’s letter written in September 1857 to his friend the American biologist, Asa Gray, (3) Wallace’s essay.
This was a genuine attempt to be fair to Wallace, but also to show that Darwin had developed his theory before he received the communication from Wallace. In August Darwin began writing, and he finished in May 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published by John Murray in November under Darwin’s name – he did not take refuge in anonymity.
In his conclusion, Darwin summed up his argument
'that species have changed and are slowly changing by the preservation and accumulation of successive slight favourable variations'. (The Origin of Species and the Voyage of the Beagle, New York and London: Everyman, 2003, p. 906)And he hinted - though no more - at the full implications of this theory when he wrote
'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.'(Ibid, p. 912)(He was to set out his theory of human evolution more explicitly in his Descent of Man (1871).
The overall message was arguably grim, but the final paragraph was lyrical.
'Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having originally been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.' (Ibid, p. 913)The reception of Origin
The book sold well, though not on the scale of Vestiges of Creation or even of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. It was very useful that Mudie’s Circulating Library agreed to distribute it. Darwin received a letter of approbation from Charles Kingsley, who was the first churchman publicly to endorse evolution. Marx and Engels called it a ‘bitter satire’ on man and nature': Marx noted that ‘Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society.’ Others were appalled at the laissez-faire message and believed that the book would gratify the free-market fanatics. There was great distress among Darwin’s old friends, such as his former professor Adam Sedgwick at Cambridge, and among many, though not all, of the Anglican hierarchy, and this probably cost Darwin a knighthood. Richard Owen wrote a long, venomous anonymous review in the April 1860 edition of the Edinburgh Review.
The culture war
Darwin’s friend and 'bulldog', T. H. Huxley, was determined to use the book in his war with the Church. In February 1860 he gave a
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| Thomas Henry Huxley Public domain |
‘Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.’
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| Bishop Samuel Wilberforce public domain |
'If I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm by preference for the ape.'
Though not all observers thought Huxley had won the argument, a powerful mythology built up round the debate – part of the scientists’ war on the Church. Darwin wrote to Huxley ‘By Jove you seem to have done it well.’ But see here for an argument that this is not the whole story. At this stage Darwin was offering not proof but a hypothesis.
Darwin’s funeral
Darwin died 19 April 1882. The next day the papers announced that he would be buried in the family vault in St Mary’s churchyard at Downe. But the arrangements were taken over by Huxley and Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the high-priests of the new scientific clerisy, who wanted him to be given the funeral appropriate to his stature. Lyell had been buried in Westminster Abbey in 1875 – they wanted the same honour for Darwin. Pressure came from Huxley and from Darwin's neighbour (who was also President of the Linnean Society), Sir John Lubbock, City Banker and Liberal MP. The newspapers joined the crusade, urging it as a patriotic necessity. Foreign tributes poured in and made the same point. The papers went out of their way to assert that there was no necessary conflict between Christianity and evolution. The church newspapers made the same point, whatever their private misgivings.Darwin was buried on Wednesday 26 April. The queen stayed away – but the monarch did not attend the funerals of commoners. Gladstone did not attend, though the Tory leader, Lord Salisbury did. But Parliament emptied and the embassies sent representatives. Darwin was buried beneath the Newton monument.
The following Sunday the bishop of Carlisle pointed out to his congregation that
‘Had this death occurred in France, no priest would have taken part in the funeral, or if he had, no scientific man would have been present’.By 1885 £4,500 was raised for a statue of Darwin to stand in the Natural History Museum. When it was unveiled the Prince of Wales was there, and all the Darwin family except Emma. Darwin's interment can be interpreted as the victory of the scientists in the culture wars - but also as the Church’s ability to adapt to the times.
PS: Darwin's legacy is still controversial as A. N. Wilson's book on Darwin shows. Wilson has a vast knowledge of the Victorian period but he is no scientist and as this review argues, he distorts and misrepresents Darwin's views. And here's another deeply critical review, not from a scientist this time but from a noted scholar of the Victorian period.
Wallace the heretic
Wallace's life took a different turn from Darwin's. In the 1860s he broke with the scientific establishment when he took up with spiritualism. In 1876 the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ruled spiritualism out of bounds and Wallace never attended another meeting. But he believed that he had demonstrated its reality through empirical scientific observation. He held to a less materialist view of evolution than Darwin: mind was a spiritual entity added to the body not evolved with it.Conclusion
- Darwin and Wallace arrived independently at the concept of evolution, though it was Darwin who coined the term 'natural selection'.
- Their findings reached a public that was half prepared because of the discovery of the dinosaur fossils and the publication of Chambers's Vestiges of Creation.
- Although some scientists waged a culture war against the clerical establishment, it is an over-simplification to assume that all clergy were opposed to evolution.
