Charles Darwin* (8 page)

With the barnacle work finally over, he continued to develop his theory of evolution through reading, consultation with other naturalists, and observation and experimentation in his garden and in the countryside around Down House. By now his house was like the
Beagle
, with Darwin at the helm, Emma as the indispensable first mate. Emma was the “angel in the house,” the ideal Victorian woman. They got along well—when she got morning sickness, he’d get nauseous too—except that she was looser about neatness. (Darwin kept an immaculately clean and ordered study.) In the evenings, she would play piano for him or do needlework in his study, sitting “as quiet as a mouse.”

They always had plenty of help—housemaids, butlers, nurses, gardeners. His boys were sent to private tutors, the best prep schools, and then Cambridge. Even though Ras and others were starting to champion equal education for girls, Darwin was old-fashioned. The girls stayed at home and had governesses who taught music, needlework, etiquette, and French, but no science or math.

All his children, however, assisted in his work. Some of their earliest memories were of playing some practical role, as when the family did experiments with thirty different types of peas, dusting bees with flour to see how many pea plants they visited.

Unbeknownst to Darwin, someone else was researching peas at the same time, with astounding results. In Germany, starting in 1856, priest-scientist Gregor Mendel spent seven years studying some 29,000 pea plants and discovering how they produced variations, how genetic traits were passed down through generations. Mendel is now known as the father of modern genetics, and his work supplies the one puzzle piece that Darwin’s theory was missing—the mechanism (genes) for passing down inherited traits. But Mendel was laboring in obscurity; his work went unnoticed until after his death some thirty years later.

From peas Darwin turned to pigeons. He threw himself into breeding them, with the children’s help, and going to pigeon shows. (Pigeons were considered by the Victorians to be very fashionable birds.)

Darwin also tracked the activity of worms in the soil of Down House gardens. He studied seeds. He analyzed owl poo to see how many seeds could still germinate after being digested. He experimented with seeds soaked in saltwater for many days, proving that they could still germinate and take root . . . which would explain how the seeds of new species traveled from the South American mainland to oceanic islands like the Galápagos.

As the years passed, he was becoming a bit bolder about sharing his new ideas with trusted friends. Some of them tried to persuade Darwin to publish his work soon.

Darwin resisted, consumed with perfectionism: He was “overwhelmed with my riches in facts, and I mean to make my Book as perfect as ever I can.”

His friends were right. If Mr. Vestiges’s book had trod on some of the same ground as Darwin’s theory, Darwin could dismiss it as the work of an amateur, not a man of science. But then in 1858 a true bombshell struck. Darwin received a package from Indonesia. Alfred Russel Wallace was a self-educated naturalist who had loved Darwin’s
Voyage of the Beagle
. Fourteen years younger, from the working class, Wallace supported himself by traveling to the jungles of the world and collecting rare natural history specimens that he would later sell. Darwin didn’t recall ever meeting Wallace but knew him by reputation as someone working on the same questions as he was. In fact, a year earlier, he had asked if Wallace could please get him some skins from Malaysian poultry.

But there were no chicken skins inside this package. Wallace had written a little essay that set out a species origin theory nearly identical to Darwin’s.

Deep in a rainforest somewhere, inspired by “Mr. Vestiges,” Wallace had combined ideas from Lyell and Malthus and applied them to the struggle for survival in nature. Though he did not use the exact term “natural selection,” Wallace had reached a natural, not divine, explanation for the evolution of species over long periods of time. He’d had a sudden, eureka-type intuition.

Now he was seeking advice. Would Darwin be kind enough, Wallace asked ever so politely, to help him with publication?

Oops.

CHAPTER NINE

The Book That Changed the World

DARWIN’S VERY FIRST reaction was a rare burst of anger. Had he been brooding on his theory for twenty years, only to see his life’s work upstaged by someone else?

Yet, always a gentleman, he wanted to do the right thing—give Wallace priority, the important acknowledgment in science that gives someone credit as being the first to make a discovery.

Now Lyell and Hooker, his most loyal friends and men who were at the top of their fields, stepped in. They argued that evolution was simply in the air, finding an explanation for how it happened was only a matter of time, and now time was of the essence. Darwin was wrong, they said, about Victorian society: it was more open-minded than Darwin feared. Science meant progress, new ideas and discoveries. It was urgent for Darwin to establish priority for his evolution theory.

Rather than Darwin handing credit to Wallace on a silver platter, Lyell and Hooker suggested a compromise. They would present
both
men’s work to the world’s oldest biological society, the Linnean Society of London, named for Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, with evidence that Darwin had been working on his theory for years.

Darwin agreed, distracted, haunted by nightmares. At the same time, one of his daughters was seriously ill and his baby son Charles was dying of scarlet fever. He and Emma were staying up nights nursing them.

So, in July 1858, Lyell and Hooker presented Wallace’s essay, extracts from Darwin’s unpublished work of 1844, and an 1857 letter from Darwin to Asa Gray, an important professor of botany at Harvard, in which he had laid out his theory. Darwin was unable to present his own work. On the very day of the meeting he and his family buried baby Charles.

Oddly enough, the presentation didn’t create much of a stir among the thirty eminent men of science at the Linnean Society. Perhaps they didn’t understand what a giant shift in thinking the papers represented. Perhaps they were blurry from hearing five other papers, on botany and zoological matters. Neither Wallace nor Darwin was there to question or debate. Their absence made the event less exciting. The president of the society, in one of those famous misjudgments in history, later summed up 1858 as lacking “any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize.”

The papers were officially published in the society’s journal that August. Wallace, like Darwin, was gracious and honorable. When told of Darwin’s earlier research and the meeting at the Linnean Society, he accepted co-credit for the theory. Having his name permanently linked to Darwin’s was not such a bad thing.

To Darwin’s happy surprise, there was no angry response to his paper. Thus, he immersed himself in finishing the book that would change the world:
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

He worked furiously, harder than ever before, not at a desk, but writing in his horsehair-stuffed armchair with a board over his legs. Coasters on the chair’s feet allowed him to shift around to reach books, microscope, snuffbox, or his working table as needed. He wrote for the next thirteen months.

In the middle of the project he did start vomiting again and was forced to take rest breaks at spas, read popular novels of the day, and take up pool playing.

He wanted his book to be as reader-friendly as possible. So it opened with topics that he knew most people would enjoy—dogs and pigeons. (In fact, one of the readers hired by the publisher advised him to stick to these matters, without all that philosophizing afterward.)

He quoted a pigeon breeder describing his breeding timetable, saying he could produce the type of feathers he desired in a pigeon in three years, but it took six years to breed pigeons with a particular head and beak. Crossbreeding was a process of selection Darwin labeled “artificial”—the breeder was in control. But, he went on, the process of selection could also occur by “natural” means, with the environment doing the selecting. The breeder was removed from the equation.

A breeder could improve a species in three to six years, but those changes would be small ones. Imagine the possibilities through the process of natural selection: over
millions
and
billions
of years a flying dinosaur could become a chicken. The theory of natural selection ran counter to the biblical estimate of the earth’s age. Four thousand years simply wasn’t long enough for these kinds of monumental changes. Living at Down House had brought home for Darwin how “incomprehensively vast” past ages had been—he once calculated that it had taken 300 million years for a nearby valley to form. The mind can barely grasp such numbers, he admitted.

He explained the ideas about the struggle for existence he’d gleaned from Malthus, applying them to the plant and animal kingdoms. The idea of a harmonious universe was an illusion, he said—even the “peaceful” green fields of England were really a battleground, with all organisms fighting to survive.

Over many generations, organisms adapt to their environment. That was key to his theory of evolution—the notion that all species of living things change over time through natural selection. He didn’t invent evolution, but he was the first to work out the mechanism by which it seemed to work. He didn’t even use the word “evolution,” but instead “descent with modification,” meaning that more complicated organisms descended from simpler ones. This was the culmination of all his thoughts since he’d started wondering about the variations among the wildlife he’d encountered in the Galápagos.

Tiny simple organisms were born with mutations, or changes. Some of these enabled the organisms to survive longer and reproduce more. The mutations were passed on via reproduction. So, slowly, over billions of years, as changes accumulated, organisms became more and more complex. Thinking back to the finches on the different islands of the Galápagos, Darwin realized that he had seen evidence of the development of new species. Finches with different beaks were the result of adaptation to a particular food supply. This explained the incredible diversity of life on Earth.

The whole process was random, chancy. This was Darwin’s biggest difference from others speaking of evolution, such as his grandfather, who believed in a creator controlling the modification of species, or Lamarck, who thought creatures could will changes in themselves and pass them down. Darwin’s natural selection was “blind,” even cruel, with no goal except survival and reproductive success.

Darwin had no math equations or decisive experiments to back up his theory. But he gave predictions that could be tested. For example, he thought researchers would discover “intermediate forms” of organisms connected by common descent, species that some would come to call “missing links.”

He anticipated problems people would find in his reasoning and addressed them in “Difficulties on Theory.” A bit as he had in his for-and-against marriage list, he enumerated objections and gave answers. For example, with those intermediate forms of organisms: why don’t we see them everywhere? Darwin asked, “Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well-defined?” Answer: Because natural selection goes “hand in hand” with extinction—each new form will tend to make previous “less favored forms” become extinct.

He showed the various ways his theory could be applied in biology, and asked readers to consider them. Then he drew to a close by calling his book “one long argument” linking two ideas: natural selection and common descent. Creation of animal and plant life did not happen in six days and then stay the same forever—higher forms evolved from the lower forms over enormous periods of time. Tantalizingly, he added, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” This was a bit of a tease—the one and only reference to man in the book. Nor did he make a connection between man and monkeys. He was waiting to go into depth on this topic in a later book.

Now with priority established, he welcomed the contributions of others: “I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.”

His last sentence became famous: “There is grandeur in this view of life ...” he stated; “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”

The strength of the book was his mountain of data from every area of biology known at the time—dozens of examples from nature, from the simplest algae to the most complex flowers, barnacles, primroses, bumble-bees, hummingbirds, gooseberries, and, of course beetles. He observed, described, compared, argued, related experiments he had conducted or read about, quoted hundreds of experts he had consulted. Evidence of such scientifically sound labor put the book in a very different league from the efforts of Mr. Vestiges, and the wealth of evidence he offered distinguished it from Wallace’s essay.

Also strengthening his credibility was that, unlike Mr. Vestiges, Darwin didn’t hide behind a fake name. After all these years, he was finally so confident of his work that he was ready to take complete responsibility.

Most other landmark works of science, such as Newton’s
Principia
or Einstein’s books on his mind-bending theory of relativity, are virtually unreadable for the average person. Darwin’s book, however, was an engrossing read. He mastered the art of persuasive writing, not at all arrogant or stuffy. As one of his sons said later, his writing style “revealed his personal sweetness of character to so many who had never seen him.” He was the ultimate nice guy, and this likeability helped win over people to his argument.

He had hoped his book would be popular, even if controversial, and was prepared to pay for publication himself. But he did find a publisher fascinated with science who understood that controversy could be good for business.