The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

PUBLISHED TITLES IN THE GREAT DISCOVERIES SERIES

 

David Foster Wallace

Everything and More: A Compact History of
∞

 

Sherwin B. Nuland

The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis

 

Michio Kaku

Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time

 

Barbara Goldsmith

Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie

 

Rebecca Goldstein

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

 

Madison Smartt Bell

Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution

 

George Johnson

Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe

 

David Leavitt

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

 

William T. Vollmann

Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and

The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

 

David Quammen

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution

 

FORTHCOMING TITLES

 

Richard Reeves on Rutherford and the Atom

 

Daniel Mendelsohn on Archimedes and the Science of the Ancient Greeks

 

Lawrence Krauss on the Science of Richard Feynman

 

General Editors: Edwin Barber and Jesse Cohen

Home and Dry:
an introduction

The Fabric Falls:
1837–1839

The Kiwi's Egg:
1842–1844

Point of Attachment:
1846–1851

A Duck for Mr. Darwin:
1848–1857

His Abominable Volume:
1858–1859

The Fittest Idea:
1860 to the future

The Last Beetle:
1876–1882

Source Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

an introduction

C
harles Darwin holds a peculiar position in the history of science and society. His name is a household word but his ideas—with a single exception—aren't household ideas. He's central, he's iconic, but that's not to say that he's widely and well understood. If the scientific community issued bank notes, true enough, the face on the dollar bill would be Darwin's. It's a good face, an amiably stolid face, like George Washington's as engraved from the painting by Gilbert Stuart; yet it conceals, like Washington's, deep veins of complexity and tension. Everyone knows something about who Darwin was, what he did, what he said, and the thing that most people think they know is: He concocted “the theory of evolution.” This isn't quite wrong, just confused and imprecise, but it misses those points about Darwin's work that are most profoundly original, and dangerous, and thrilling.

Both as hero and as bugaboo, Darwin is taken for granted in a way that Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Linnaeus, Charles Lyell, Gregor Mendel, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Alfred Wegener, Frederick Hubble, James Watson, and Francis Crick are not. One measure of his supposed familiarity is the careless use, within common discourse, of the terms “Darwinism” and “Darwinian,” which presume at reducing to trademark simplicity a diverse body of work that can't be so easily reduced. Forget about Darwinism, it doesn't exist. Not unless you define it by arbitrary stipulation—these concepts included, those concepts not—in a way that Darwin himself never did. And what is Darwinian? Well, a fascination with fancy pigeons is Darwinian, in the sense that our man, during one period, became entranced by his aviary full of pouters and fantails and runts. A fondness for long solitary strolls, not far from home, is Darwinian. Recurrent bouts of unexplained vomiting are, as you'll see, very Darwinian. My point is this: Charles Darwin didn't found a movement or a religion. He never assembled a creed of scientific axioms and chiseled them onto a stone tablet beneath his own name. He was a reclusive biologist who wrote books. Sometimes he made mistakes. Sometimes he changed his mind. Sometimes he worked on little subjects and sometimes on big ones. True, most of his published writings share a single underlying theme—the unity of all life, reflecting the processes of evolution. But he particularized that theme in a variety of concepts, some of which interlock nicely and remain valuable to biology, some of which don't. It's better to examine his ideas individually than to try to bundle them as a brand.

Copernicus, among the great scientists mentioned above, is the one whose impact most closely resembles Darwin's, in that Darwin continued the revolution Copernicus began, alerting humans to the fact that we don't occupy central position in the universe. Darwin extended that recognition from cosmology to biology. “People often talk,” he muttered to himself, in an early notebook, “of the wonderful event of intellectual Man appearing.” Darwin, for his part, wasn't so impressed by the emergence of “intellectual Man,” adding contrarily that “the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful.” This heretical comment shows that, from the start of his musings about how species originate, Darwin denied mankind its self-assigned demigod status and included us in the jumble of struggle and change. He was no humanist (though he was always humane). For sheer wonder, give him not the brain of
Homo sapiens
but the orienteering and architectural instincts of the honey bee.

I say Darwin “continued” rather than “completed” the Copernican revolution against anthropocentrism because the battle is still going on. Many people, even among those who would say they accept Darwin's theory of evolution (whatever they take it to be), decline to absorb the full implications of what he wrote. His biggest idea, bigger than mere evolution, was just too big, too harsh and threatening. That idea was what he called “natural selection” and identified as the primary mechanism of evolutionary change. According to Darwin's view (since reaffirmed by a century and a half of further biological evidence), natural selection is a purposeless process but an efficacious one. Impersonal, blind to the future, it has no goals, only results. Its sole standards of valuation are survival and reproductive success. From scattershot variations, culled and accreted, it produces pragmatic forms of order. Its driving factors are hyperfecundity and mortal competition; its products and byproducts are adaptation, complexity, and diversity. It embodies a deep chanciness that is contradictory to the notion that Earth's living creatures, their capacities (including human capacities), their histories, their indigenousness to particular locales, and their interrelations all reflect some sort of divinely preordained plan. Creationist proselytizers pursuing Christian political agendas are therefore right to regard it with loathing and alarm.

Those creationist proselytizers aren't alone in their dissent from evolutionary thinking. They've had reason to feel encouraged, within recent years, by the high level of lingering resistance—at least in the United States—to what Darwin articulated back in 1859. Their political challenges (within various state legislatures and local school boards) have been persistent but mostly unsuccessful. Important court cases (such as
Edwards v. Aguillard,
in 1987, wherein the U.S. Supreme Court declared Louisiana's creationism-in-the-schools law unconstitutional, and
Kitzmiller v. Dover
, in 2005) have gone against them. But they're correct about one thing: Broader public opinion harbors a startling level of ambivalence on this subject. Postmodern America is a hotbed of pre-evolutionary views.

You may have heard loose assertions to the effect that a third of all Americans—or is it 40 percent, or more?—don't accept the reality of evolution. Here are some hard numbers: 45, 47, 44. The Gallup organization, in November 2004, after more than a thousand telephone interviews, found that 45 percent of their respondents agreed with the statement: “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” For short: creationism. Another statement, offered alternatively, said that humans “have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” For short: theistic evolution. That option satisfied 38 percent of the people polled. Just 13 percent agreed with a statement that humans have developed from other life forms
without
guidance by God. For short: materialistic evolution. (And the remainder had no classifiable opinion. For short: Go away, we're watching TV.)

The most striking thing about these poll results is not that resistance to evolutionary theory registered so high in one poll or another; the most striking thing is that it remained virtually unchanged in six parallel samplings over the course of a generation. Back in 1982, presenting the very same options, Gallup found 44 percent of respondents agreeing that God, not evolution, had created human beings. In 1999, the percentage peaked at 47, and it has never fallen lower than 44. If these polls can be trusted, almost half the American populace chooses to understand the origin of our species as though Charles Darwin never lived. Another major increment, ranging between 37 and 40 percent over the years, prefers the “guided by God” option, theistic evolution, which is still utterly contrary to what Darwin proposed. Summarizing the arithmetic: Between 81 percent and 87 percent of Americans reject Darwin's view of human evolution.

Gallup isn't alone in measuring this phenomenon. A more recent poll, conducted in July 2005 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, along with a partner organization, found 42 percent (among 2,000 Americans interviewed) affirming that “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” Another 18 percent subscribed to theistic evolution, at least with respect to humans, specifying that the process must have been “guided by a supreme being.” So the Pew results are slightly less negative in total than Gallup's: only a 60 percent rejection of Charles Darwin, instead of 80-some.

Maybe the polls are invalid. Maybe the numbers would be much different in England or Sweden or India. Maybe the same distinctly American mixture of skepticism and evangelicism that led to the Scopes trial, in 1925, continues to animate many citizens who would simply rather take their biology from scripture than from science. Maybe the question of human evolution is misleading and inordinately touchy; maybe Gallup and Pew should be asking whether God created, let's say,
tree kangaroos
in their present form. Or maybe…who knows? I don't claim to have any definitive explanation for such an extreme level of skepticism and willful antipathy toward such a well-established scientific discovery. Frankly, it mystifies me. But certainly those Gallup results—combined with the continuing political offensive against teaching evolutionary biology in public schools—testify that Charles Darwin isn't just perennially significant. He's also urgently relevant to education and governance.

Speaking personally for a moment: I come to the subject by a roundabout route. I'm not a biologist. I'm not a historian. I have virtually no academic training in science. Nevertheless, for the past twenty-five years, I've made my living primarily as a science journalist, learning what evolutionary biology and ecology I know by self-education (that is, reading, especially of scientific journals) and pestiferous questioning of experts. During those years, I've had a privileged sort of opportunity: much field time with field biologists. On assignment to various magazines, and while doing research for books, I've been welcomed to tramp through tropical forests, ascend rivers from Mongolia to the Amazon, stroll across equatorial savannahs, prowl remote islands, and otherwise knock around outdoors with some of the world's brightest and hardiest natural scientists. Besides advancing (slowly) my understanding of certain ecosystems and species, and of some of the underpinning concepts of ecology and evolutionary biology, these experiences have shown me that field biologists are, on the whole, a guild of extraordinary people—smart, passionate, patient, congenial, and physically as well as intellectually tough. Some people admire soldiers, or surgeons, or firemen, or astrophysicists, or medical missionaries, or cowboys. I admire field biologists.

This is part of what brings me to Darwin. He himself was a field biologist, of course, during one crucial period of his life: the four years, nine months, and five days he spent as a naturalist aboard the
Beagle
, a British naval ship sent out to chart certain stretches of South American coastline. That voyage lasted from 1831 until 1836. Darwin was in his mid-twenties, just the right age for maximum exertion in difficult circumstances and maximum absorption of new facts and impressions. While the
Beagle
's captain and crew did their work, young Mr. Darwin collected marine specimens with a plankton net dragged behind the ship and made long excursions ashore for further collecting and observing. Inexperienced at the start, he gradually became a methodical and keenly percipient scientist. He visited Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and a number of small oceanic islands, including the Cape Verdes, the Azores, Tahiti, Mauritius, St. Helena, and the Galápagos. Landing at Falmouth in southwestern England on October 2, 1836, he would never leave Great Britain again. His days of gallivanting field biology were over. He was home and dry, and quite happy to remain so, at least for a while. Other biologists of his era (such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, about whom more below) might spend a decade at punishing fieldwork in the Amazon or Borneo or wherever; but for Darwin, five years was a bellyful. Most of his scientific labor, throughout the rest of his life, would entail research reading, correspondence, experimentation, dissection, observation in the meadows and woodlands not far from home, and thinking. Partly because of health problems, partly by intellectual disposition, he became largely an indoor guy.

Indoors was where he developed his ideas. So, notwithstanding my bias toward field biologists, and the importance of those vivid early experiences in fueling Darwin's later thought, I've made a counterintuitive choice: to omit the voyage (except as background) from this account, and to take up the story just afterward. Why ignore the most famous episode of Darwin's life? Three reasons. First, because it
is
the most famous. Whatever else you may know about Charles Darwin, you probably know that he once sailed on a ship called the
Beagle
, visited the Galápagos Islands, and saw there some interesting reptiles and birds. My second reason is a matter of economy and scope. To say it more plainly: brevity. Darwin's life story has been told many times, by some excellent biographers (notably Janet Browne, in her magisterial two-volume
Charles Darwin
, and the team of Adrian Desmond and James Moore, in their trenchant 800-page
Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
) and by some less excellent ones, but most people haven't read that story even once. Of course in each telling it's a slightly different story, depending on selection, omission, and the biases and purposes of the teller. My purpose has been to create a concise treatment, part narrative and part essay, accurate but pleasantly readable, of this huge and deeply complicated subject. I wanted to sketch, in not many pages, the growth and development of a man of ideas, with particular focus on just one of them. Third reason for skipping the
Beagle
years: Darwin's later intellectual adventures are, in my opinion, even more exciting than the romps across Patagonia and the Galápagos.

Chief among those adventures is the discovery of natural selection. That idea, taken freshly, with its full implications, is marvelous and shocking and grim. It's even more marvelous when you consider its provenance: a deeply radical insight from a deeply cautious man. The shy patriarch with the bald head and the full beard, the breeder of pigeons and primroses, the very private Englishman who wound up buried in Westminster Abbey, the fellow with a good face for bank notes, presents to us a comfortably dowdy image; but not everything about Charles Darwin is so comfortable. At the core of his work is a difficult, scary materialism. That's one of the themes I try to explore in this book. Another is that it was difficult and scary even to him.