Darwin Among the Machines (5 page)

In the absence of any understanding of how collectively nonran-dom behavior can emerge, without the guidance of external (or natural) selection, from initially random events, Butler's interpretation of evolution appeared to be attempting a resurrection of the argument from design. In his rebellion against Darwinism (which Butler labeled neo-Darwinism, not to be confused with various neo-Darwinisms in circulation today) Butler was not retreating to the shelter of theology but thinking freely ahead for himself. “Butler's whole nature revolted against the idea that the universe was without intelligence,” explained H. F. Jones.
¹⁴
The evolution of intelligence and the intelligence of evolution evidenced common principles of which life was at the same time both the cause and the result. Concerning the development of species, Butler wrote in
Luck, or Cunning?
that “they thus very gradually, but nonetheless effectually, design themselves.”
¹⁵
Butler espoused a theory of species-level intelligence and grappled with the behavior of complex and self-organizing systems, as these lingering mysteries have more recently been framed. He favored Erasmus Darwin over Charles.

“From thus meditating on the great similarity of the structure of the warm-blooded animals, and at the same time of the great changes they undergo both before and after their nativity; and by considering in how minute a portion of time many of the changes of animals above described have been produced,” asked Darwin, “would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which
THE GREAT
F
IRST
C
AUSE
endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering
down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!”
¹⁶
This was not Charles Darwin in his
Origin of Species
of 1859, but Erasmus Darwin in his
Zoonomia
of 1794. On one level,
Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life
was an encyclopedic medical text, a massive catalog of the great diversity of disease, contrasted by the appalling insufficiencies of what eighteenth-century medicine could do to help. On another level,
Zoonomia
was an attempt to construct “a theory founded upon nature, that should bind together the scattered facts of medical knowledge, and converge into one point of view the laws of organic life.”
¹⁷

“The great C
REATOR
of all things has infinitely diversified the works of his hands, but has at the same time stamped a certain similitude on the features of nature, that demonstrates to us, that
the whole is one family of one parent
,” wrote Darwin in the preface to his book. “Shall we conjecture, that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?”
¹⁸
He elaborated further in the third edition of 1801: “I suppose that fibrils with formative appetencies, and molecules with formative aptitudes or propensities, produced by, or detached from, various essential parts of their respective systems, float in the vegetable or insect blood. . . . As these fibrils or molecules floated in the circulating blood of the parents, they were collected separately by appropriated glands of the male or female; and that finally on their mixture in the matrix the new embryon was generated, resembling in some parts the form of the father, and in other parts the form of the mother, according to the quantity or activity of the fibrils or molecules at the time of their conjunction.”
¹⁹

Erasmus (the father of fourteen children) was emphatic about the importance to genetic diversity of sex, noting that “if vegetables could only have been produced by buds and bulbs, and not by sexual generation, that there would not at this time have existed one thousandth part of their present number of species.”
²⁰
He developed some peculiar ideas about the effects of imagination on hereditary characteristics, offering clinical advice as to how “the sex of the embryon . . . may be made a male or a female by affecting the imagination of the father at the time of impregnation . . . but the manner of accomplishing this cannot be unfolded with sufficient delicacy for the public eye.”
²¹
He focused his literary attentions, more or less discreetly, on the sexual life of plants and noted that the sexual exuberance of flowers reaches into the warm-blooded kingdom of, for instance, birds: “The final cause of this contest among the males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species, which should thence become improved.”
²²

Erasmus Darwin identified the essential principles of natural selection, descent with modification, and other pillars of evolutionary thought. “The great globe itself, and all that it inhabit, appear to be in a perpetual state of mutation and improvement,” he noted in
The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society
in 1803.
²³
His evolutionary timescale was more realistic than that of his grandson Charles, and he was careful to emphasize that the study of evolution, rather than diminishing the power of God, served to glorify his work. “The world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution of the whole by the Almighty fiat,” he wrote in 1794. “What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of T
HE
G
REAT
A
RCHITECT
! T
HE
C
AUSE OF
C
AUSES
! P
ARENT OF
P
ARENTS
! E
NS
E
NTTUM
! For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves.”
²⁴

Erasmus Darwinism, however widely acclaimed at the time, has been obscured by a lingering confusion, perpetuated by both Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler, that equates the work of Erasmus Darwin with the errors of his follower Lamarck. A respected French naturalist and protégé of Buffon, Lamarck made lasting contributions to science, dividing the animal kingdom into vertebrates and invertebrates and assigning the label
biology
to the study of life. He is most famous, however, for his mistaken belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the classic example being that giraffes grew taller by stretching their necks. Lamarckism reflected the prevailing views of the time and, indeed, was supported by Charles Darwin's provisional hypothesis of pangenesis, published in 1868. The views of Erasmus were in some respects less Lamarckian, and closer to the modern synthesis, than those expressed much later by Charles. But Erasmus failed to develop a concise packaging for his argument. He either published his observations as lengthy footnotes to his unwieldy poems or concealed them within his
Zoonomia
, expanded to fourteen hundred pages in the third edition of 1801. Sixty years later, Charles Darwin would be justly proclaimed a prophet, but, as Butler argued in
Evolution, Old and New
, he had inherited—not invented—the evolutionary faith.

From an otherwise modest position as surgeon of Lichfield, fifteen miles north of Birmingham, Dr. Erasmus Darwin became one of the foremost physicians of his time. Refusing the king's invitation to move to London, he kept up his daily rounds, dispensing his skills with uncommon generosity and moving as freely among all social circles as the bad state of the roads allowed. He lobbied prominently against
the institution of slavery and for the humane treatment of the insane. Abstaining from both alcoholic spirits
and
Christianity, he embraced science and invention with an intellectual appetite exceeding his visible but less publicly celebrated appetites for female company and food. “Eat or be eaten,” he is said to have advised his patients, following his own prescription to the extent that his dining table was modified to accommodate his girth. “In his youth Dr. Darwin was fond of sacrificing to both Bacchus and Venus,” reported an anonymous contemporary, “but he soon discovered that he could not continue his devotions to both these deities without destroying his health and constitution. He therefore resolved to relinquish Bacchus, but his affection for Venus was retained to the last period of life.”
²⁵

Erasmus Darwin was a ringleader of the Industrial Revolution, helping to spark the evolution of machines as surely as some unknown Cambrian ancestor of ours ignited the diversification of metazoan life. As Charles's son Francis Darwin (1848–1925) remarked, “Erasmus had a strong love of all kinds of mechanism, for which Charles Darwin had no taste.”
²⁶
In the 1760s, inspired by the Birmingham visits of Benjamin Franklin and drawing on his friendships with Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, James Keir, William Small, and James Watt, Darwin founded the Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal association of natural philosophers and industrialists whose meetings were scheduled to allow the full moon to assist its members home. The group of self-styled “Lunaticks” formed a nucleus for the industrialization of Britain, and either directly or via the interlocking relationships of the Lunar Society Erasmus Darwin had a hand in the origin of almost every species of mechanism explicit or implicit in the technologies of today.

Amid the peculiar triumphs and routine horrors of an eighteenth-century medical practice, Erasmus Darwin's notebooks contain rough sketches for pumps, steam turbines, horizontal-axis windmills, canal lifts, speaking machines, internal combustion engines, a compressed-air-powered ornithopter, a hydrogen-oxygen rocket motor, and even an automatic water closet that flushes itself when one opens the door to leave. Driven to inspiration during his tedious rounds (“I, imprison'd in a post-chaise, am joggl'd, and jostl'd and bump'd, and bruised along the King's highroad”),
²⁷
Darwin proposed several improvements to horse-drawn carriages, although a misadventure with one of his prototypes in 1768 left him lame for the remainder of his life. Anticipating Samuel Butler, he owned a horse named Doctor, and with steam power on the horizon, he was for a time obsessed with the vision of a steam-driven “fiery chariot” that would replace
the horse. “As I was riding Home yesterday,” he wrote to Matthew Boulton, “I consid'd the Scheme of ye fiery Chariot—and ye longer I contemplated this favourite Idea, ye [more] practicable it appear'd to me.”

“I am quite mad of this Scheme,” Darwin continued, providing Boulton with a prospectus for a three-wheeled vehicle propelled by twin cylinders and an ingeniously differential rear-wheel drive. “By ye management of the steam cocks ye motion may be accelerated, retarded, destroy'd, revised, instantly & easyly. And if this answers in Practise as it does in theory, ye Machine can not fail of success.” Boulton, the original pioneer of mass production (from belt buckles to steam engines), was too far in debt to act on Darwin's suggestion at the time, but the concept would resurface, like Darwinism, first in the age of railroads and then in the age of automobiles. A few years later, when James Watt developed the condenser engine, it was Darwin who promoted the Boulton & Watt partnership that brought the Industrial Revolution—and, soon enough, the “fiery chariot”—to life. Below Darwin's signature was appended a prophetic postscript: “I think four wheels would be better—adieu.”
²⁸

Science fiction, as well as the automobile, owes Erasmus Darwin a founding credit. In a preface to the first (and anonymous) edition of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
(1818), Percy Shelley acknowledged that “the event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.”
²⁹
In her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley, who wrote the novel at age nineteen, also acknowledged Darwin, noting, “I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”
³⁰

Darwin's electrotherapy treatments, widely noted in Shelley's time, still bring Dr. Frankenstein's experiments to mind. “Two thick brass wires, about 2 ft long, communicate from each extremity of the [Galvanic] pillar to each temple. The temples must be moistened with brine,” wrote Darwin to the duchess of Devonshire in 1800. “The shock is so great as to make a flash in the eyes, and to be felt th[r]ough both the temples. . . . I have one patient here, a lady from near Scarborough, who has used it daily for giddyness with good success.”
³¹
Darwin found that electric shocks could cure hepatic paralysis and renew the mobility of injured limbs. Luigi Galvani had shown the
power of electric fluid to animate the legs of frogs; what additional powers might Darwin's experiments unleash? A notice in the Birmingham
Gazette
on 23 October 1762 invited anyone “whom the Love of Science may induce” to visit Dr. Darwin's laboratory: “The body of the Malefactor, who is order'd to be executed at Lichfield on Monday the 25th instant, will be afterwards conveyed to the house of Dr. Darwin, who will begin a Course of Anatomical Lectures, at Four o'clock on Tuesday evening, and continue them every Day as long as the Body can be preserved.”
³²