Charles Darwin

From Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psiyohos

"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching," Charles Darwin recalled his father once telling him, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." It was an inauspicious beginning for one of history's greatest scientists.

Charles Darwin's grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, the scientist, poet, inventor, doctor and polymath. One of Erasmus's sons, Charles, planned to become a doctor like his father, but he died from an infection after accidentally cutting himself during an autopsy. So Erasmus's younger son, Robert, dutifully followed in his older brother's footsteps. In turn, Robert expected his own son — whom he named after his late brother — to practice medicine, too. But the Charles Darwin who would become famous couldn't stomach cadaver dissection. He couldn't stomach surgery, either. In his autobiography, he recounted two occasions when he tried and failed to observe operations, and the patients' own suffering played a part, "this being long before the blessed days of chloroform." When he finally confessed to his father that he would never be a doctor, he heard the rat-catching speech.

Charles Darwin studied for awhile at Cambridge, where he found a mentor in the young professor John Henslow. Then Darwin got the chance to set sail aboard the Beagle. Despite misgivings about his son's lack of direction, Robert Darwin consented to let his Charles go. Charles expected to return to England and become a country gentleman and parson. (He halfway succeeded — he remained a country gentleman the rest of his days.) His role on the voyage was, in a large part, to serve as company for Captain Robert FitzRoy.

Many descriptions of Darwin and FitzRoy have portrayed FitzRoy as pious and disapproving of the unorthodox young Darwin, but that really wasn't the case. Darwin took the Bible pretty seriously at that point, while Fitzroy actually entertained doubts about its accuracy. The captain also presented Darwin with the first volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology. And Darwin enjoyed considerable favoritism under FitzRoy's command. The ship's senior surgeon, Robert McCormick, was supposed to serve as the official naturalist, but Darwin slowly edged him out. In one instance, FitzRoy sent a couple small boats to inspect a tiny island. Darwin got to ride in the first boat with FitzRoy and see all the delicious sights. Arriving in the second boat, McCormick only got an order to catch some fish for dinner. Even worse, Darwin started assembling his own collection of natural history specimens and, unlike the surgeon, he could retain ownership of what he collected because he was wealthy enough to pay his own way on the ship. McCormick eventually quit the Beagle in disgust. It wasn't the only time Darwin enjoyed preferential treatment; some of his fellow students at Cambridge resented the favor bestowed on him by Henslow. In fairness, however, Darwin's enthusiasm likely matched the favorable treatment.

Although Darwin once described the captain as "affected with strong peculiarities of temper," the two remained good friends throughout the voyage and for years afterwards. It wasn't until FitzRoy got orthodox religion that he and Darwin had a falling out. The relationship also soured over FitzRoy's feeling that Darwin gave him too little credit for the Beagle trip when the two were publishing their memoirs of the voyage.

Darwin always considered the Beagle voyage the defining experience of his life, and he was right; it provided him with the evidence that would forever change biology. It may also have ruined his health. Some historians have speculated that a bite from a poisonous insect during the trip might have been the cause of his chronic illness in later years, but he could have suffered from another problem (or problems) altogether. He might have had an ulcer, diverticulitis, or gall-bladder disease — or all three. Whatever the case, Darwin felt his health was never the same after the trip. (He spent much of it on land — good thing, considering his stomach never completely adjusted to the motion of a ship.) After his hearty youth, Darwin spent much of the rest of his life fretting over his own poor health and that of his children. After a courtship best described as pallid, he married his cousin Emma. As he got older, he worried that he and Emma had passed along weak constitutions to their children.

Legend holds that Darwin happened upon one of science's most important theories when the Beagle visited the Galapagos Islands. In fact, Darwin devised no great evolutionary theory until after his return to England, and he was not the first person to propose evolution; it was widely discussed — at least in scientific circles — long before he published any of his theories. The question was, how did evolution occur? Charles Darwin is a household name because he proposed a viable mechanism for evolution, namely natural selection.

Here's how natural selection works: In any population, there will be variations. Individuals born with certain characteristics, e.g., strong legs, keen eyesight, good camouflage, will enjoy an advantage over their peers. If these individuals can pass these traits on to their offspring, their offspring will enjoy the same advantages. If the surrounding environment gradually changes, it may come to pass that new characteristics are more advantageous than old ones, for instance, a new color that makes better camouflage. As the environment changes, individuals with these new characteristics do better, live longer and produce more offspring until the population eventually looks very different from its original version. If the population changes enough to satisfy some taxonomist, it will be classified as a new species. In other words, new species arise when the environment favors new characteristics over old ones.

What sounds pretty simple was in fact controversial for Darwin's time (and it still is today in some parts of the Western world). His theory essentially stated that life on earth is the result of billions of years of adaptations to changing environments. What this theory implied, and what Darwin stated more clearly in his book The Descent of Man, is that humans, like every other organism on earth, are the result of evolution. In short, Darwin's idea was unflattering. Even worse, it contradicted what was known as natural theology, the belief that nature is evidence of God's kindness; Darwin realized that the struggle for existence often had cruel consequences: "We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life." His theory also conflicted with the 19th-century confidence in the "designfulness" that organisms exhibited for their environments, a design that looked intentional. Through extensive research, Darwin found many instances of imperfect adaptation, including superfluous organs unable to fulfill their apparent functions (toothbuds in whale embryos, the human appendix). He also found striking similarities across a wide variety of organisms: "We cannot believe that the same bones in the arm of the monkey, in the fore leg of the horse, in the wing of the bat, and in the flipper of the seal, are of special use to these animals. We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance."

Darwin could have published his theory of evolution in the early 1840s, but something stopped him in his tracks. In 1844, Robert Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a quasi-scientific book supporting evolution. The reaction to it was fierce. Even one of Darwin's own mentors, Adam Sedgwick, wrote a scornful review. Historians differ on whether this episode caused Darwin to put his own manuscript on hold. Whether or not it did, the delay likely worked to his advantage as he built a stronger case for evolution. What did he really know, for instance, about comparative anatomy, he asked himself. He had to find out. As the years passed, he kept gathering evidence. Then, in 1858, he was nearly scooped. The eager young Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin a copy of his own manuscript on species change. Darwin found himself reviewing a document that read like an eloquent abstract of the book he still planned to write. The manuscript couldn't have arrived at a worse time. Three of Darwin's children were critically ill, and one of them died. In the midst of all this, Darwin's friends tactfully arranged a compromise in which Wallace's paper and some of Darwin's writings showing his own discovery of natural selection were read at the same Linnean Society meeting. Darwin followed up a year later with The Origin of Species.

Darwin's theory of evolution didn't enjoy overwhelming acceptance among scientists until the 20th century. Ironically, while some refused to accept Darwin's theories, others were all too happy to accept his teachings — and exploit them. Another myth attached to Darwin is that he coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." He didn't (Herbert Spencer did, and Spencer actually believed in Lamarck's explanation of evolution more than natural selection). Darwin developed the theory of natural selection to explain differences between species, but many of his contemporaries, including Spencer and Darwin's own cousin Francis Galton, used his ideas to promote Social Darwinism and eugenics. Social Darwinism maintains that certain groups of people are poorer than others and more likely to be used as slave labor because they're "less evolved" and therefore inferior. (Keep in mind that racism masquerading as science didn't get its start with Social Darwinism. Before that, it thrived in the form of the "Great Chain of Being.")

Still, it would be misleading to paint Darwin as something like a modern-day liberal. He deplored slavery, but overlooked the Victorian class system that kept many of his fellow Britons in a state of relentless poverty. He argued that members of the aristocracy looked prettier than the rest because they could pick out better-looking spouses from all the other classes. Like other Victorian men, he considered his own society superior to others, and considered men superior to women — all the while he relied on his daughter Henrietta to edit his manuscripts.

Though there's little doubt that Darwin developed the theory of natural selection independently — and assembled a library of evidence to support it — he was not the first to propose it. After he published The Origin of Species in 1859, Darwin learned of others who described some form of natural selection in obscure publications earlier in the 19th century. In later editions of the book, Darwin acknowledged more than 30 predecessors in evolutionary theory, including Patrick Matthew and William Wells. Recent research has shown that the geologist James Hutton also anticipated the theory, though Darwin almost certainly never knew that.

From Darwin and the Barnacle by Rebecca Stott

The theory of natural selection wasn't Darwin's only contribution to science. He devoted much of his life to one study or another, and he after he married, he often engaged his family in his research. When his children were infants, he scrutinized their expressions, including the observations in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. When the kids were older, he enlisted their help in conducting experiments; to study cross-pollination, Darwin had them sprinkle bumblebees with flour and chase after the bugs to see where they headed next. Even as a young man, he made wide-ranging contributions to science. While aboard the Beagle, his observations led him to ponder the formation of coral atolls, and lay the foundations for modern theories on coral reefs. It's possible he might have enjoyed a distinguished career in geology even if he hadn't discovered natural selection; he was elected secretary of the Geological Society of London in 1838 and served three years, editing papers for publication in the society's Proceedings. But he made the occasional geological blunder as well. Darwin was initially critical of Agassiz's Ice Age theory, believing icebergs — not glaciers — were responsible for many modern landforms. In the fact of mounting evidence, however, Darwin eventually recanted and supported Agassiz. (Agazziz never returned the favor by supporting evolution.)

In 1846, he began working on monographs about cirripedes (marine invertebrates including barnacles). Darwin's interest in barnacles began during his Beagle voyage, when he discovered a tiny burrowing barnacle, illustrated at right, in a conch shell. Darwin's casual curiosity transmogrified into an eight-year commitment during which he dissected hundreds of barnacles, established friendships throughout the science community, published four volumes and became the world's foremost barnacle expert. His cirripede research won him the Royal Medal and even the admiration of Richard Owen, the man who would become his nemesis later in life. Although convinced that species change over time, he shrewdly avoided evolutionary theory in his cirripede monographs, deciding to first establish a reputation as a scrupulous researcher. By the time he published The Origin of Species, he had already won the respect of scientists who might otherwise have ignored his work.

Despite poor health, Darwin enjoyed a pretty comfortable existence, able to live off the family fortune while he pursued his research. He was indulgent with his children, generous with his friends and kind to his domestic staff. Like many of us, he didn't care for his own likeness, remarking about one photo of himself, "If I really have as bad an expression as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising."

Contrary to what some modern creationists claim, Darwin had no deathbed conversion to Christianity, he issued no last-minute retraction of his theory. But although his theory of natural selection posed perhaps the greatest challenge to a literal belief in scripture, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, in recognition of his remarkable achievements. Darwin refused to discuss his own beliefs about a supreme being in public, once writing to his friend Asa Gray, "I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton." Yet he closed The Origin of Species on a more inspirational note:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally 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.

For more information:
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place by Janet Browne
Darwin and the Science of Evolution by Patrick Tort
Darwin and the Barnacle by Rebecca Stott
Autobiography of Charles Darwin by Francis Darwin
Charles Darwin, Geologist by Sandra Herbert
Natural History Special Issue: Darwin and Evolution
The Mismeasure of Man: The Definitive Refutation to the Argument of the Bell Curve by Stephen Jay Gould
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
Fossils, Finches and Fuegians by Richard Darwin Keynes
Human Origins: The Search for Our Beginnings by Herbert Thomas
Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
The Flamingo's Smile by Stephen Jay Gould
Song of the Dodo by David Quammen
A Bedside Nature edited by Walter Gratzer
The Meaning of Fossils by Martin J.S. Rudwick
Great Feuds in Science by Hal Hellman
Evolution by Edward J. Larson
Evolution's Workshop by Edward J. Larson
Galileo's Finger by Peter Atkins
The Dragon Seekers by Christopher McGowan
The Life of Erasmus Darwin by Charles Darwin, edited by Desmond King-Hele
Life on the Earth by John Phillips
Making Modern Science by Bowler and Morus
"In Retrospect: An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge" by Paul N. Pearson in Nature Magazine, October 16, 2003 issue
"Darwin and the 20-Year Publication Gap" by Lucy Odling-Smee in Nature Magazine, March 29, 2007 issue
Victorian Sensation by James A. Secord
The Monk in the Garden by Robin Marantz Henig
Evolution by Linda Gamlin
Voyages of Discovery by Tony Rice
The Great Naturalists edited by Robert Huxley
Darwin's Cheque Found in Portrait Frame (http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061218/full/061218-2.html)

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Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated November 3, 2007