However, according to Tiexeira et al, only ‘one third of all individuals with indeterminate infections [‘indeterminate’ meaning the period following infection that precedes the appearance of clinical signs and symptoms] will develop chronic Chagas’ disease]’.29
ii. Professor John A. Hayman
In an article entitled ‘Darwin’s Illness Revisited’, published in December 2009,30 Professor John A. Hayman, stated:
Chagas’ disease is rejected for several reasons: exposure [i.e. to the infecting agent] was too brief and Darwin had symptoms before he sailed [on the Beagle]. His tolerance of exercise was good and despite being examined by several eminent doctors he showed no evidence of organic disease.
These propositions of Professor Hayman’s may be taken one by one and largely refuted, for the following reasons:
1. In March/April 1835, Darwin spent a month travelling through regions of Chile and Argentina where what later became known as Chagas’ disease was endemic. He also made other protracted excursions into Chagas-infected regions of Central South America.
2. Before HMS Beagle sailed, Darwin complained of ‘palpitation and pain about the heart’. These symptoms were of a transient nature and they in no way resembled the chronic symptoms which would plague him all his life.
3. Although robust in health for most of the Beagle voyage, Darwin subsequently suffered for the remainder of his life from extreme lassitude.
4. It is true that Darwin was examined by a host of eminent doctors but, unfortunately, none of them left behind for posterity any case notes relating to their patient. Nonetheless, the limitations of medical science at the time would have precluded them from being able to make a definitive diagnosis of either megacolon or megaoesophagus in a patient.
NOTES
1. Colp, Darwin’s Illness, p. 156.
2. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
3. Darwin, Francis, op. cit., p.53.
4. Darwin to Hooker, 10 [November 1863], Cor.11, p.666.
5. Darwin to Charles Boner [before 8 January 1870], Cor. 18, p.5.
6. Darwin, Francis, op. cit., p.53.
7. Adler, ‘Darwin’s Illness’, p.1102.
8. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
9. Darwin to Hooker, 31 March 1845, Cor.11, p.166.
10. Adler, op. cit., p. 1103.
11. Ibid, p. 1103.
12. Ibid, p.1103.
13. Darwin, Charles, The Voyage of the Beagle, p.451.
14. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
15. Other vectors of Chagas’ disease are Triatoma dimidiata, which is indigenous to Ecuador and Columbia, and Rhodnius prolixus, which is indigenous to Colombia, Venezuela, and Guyana.
16. Adler, op. cit., p.1103.
17. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
18. Adler, op. cit., p.1103.
19. ‘Nova tripanosomiase humana. Estudos sobre ea morfologia e o ciclo evolutivo do Schizotrypanum cruzi, n. gen., n. sp., ajente etiologico de nova entidade morbida do homem’. Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, 1, pp.15 9–218, in Cox, The Wellcome Trust Illustrated History of Tropical Diseases, pp.199–200.
20. Chagas, ‘Nova tripanosomiase humana. Estudos sobre ea morfologia e o ciclo evolutivo do Schizotrypanum cruzi, n. gen., n. sp., ajente etiologico de nova entidade morbida do homem’. Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, 1, pp.159–218, in Cox, op. cit., p.200.
21. Dias, ‘Estudos sobre o Schizotrypanum cruzi’. Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, 28, 1–110, in Cox, op. cit., p.202.
22. Cox, op. cit., p.193.
23. Tiexeira, Nascimento, and Sturm, ‘Evolution and Pathology in Chagas’ Disease – A Review, Mem Inst Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Vol. 101(5) August 2006, p.470.
24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin’s_health#The_Chagas_hypothesis
25. Oxford Dictionaries Online.
26. Tiexeira, Nascimento, and Sturm, op. cit., p.471.
27. Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization. Source: PAHO/WHO, Program on Communicable Diseases. However, this is not the case to the west or east of the Andes range, where Chagas’ disease was (and is) endemic.
28. Vazquez-Prokopec, Spillmann, Zaidenberg, Kitron, and Gürtler, ‘Cost-Effectiveness of Chagas’ Disease Vector Control Strategies in Northwestern Argentina’, published online, 20 January 2009.
29. Tiexeira, Nascimento, and Sturm, op. cit., p.470.
30. Hayman, ‘Darwin’s Illness Revisited’, British Medical Journal 2009:339:b4968. 13 December 2009.
Chapter 30
Darwin, Emma, and God
Emma regrets that Darwin does not share her religious views
The following letter, written by Emma to Darwin in late November 1838, two months prior to their marriage, indicates that, as far as religion was concerned, there were significant differences between them.
When I am with you I think all melancholy thoughts keep out of my head but since you are gone [i.e. returned to Shrewsbury] some sad ones have forced themselves in, of fear that our opinions on the most important subject should differ widely. My reason tells me that honest & conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us. I thank you from my heart for your openness with me & I should dread the feeling that you were concealing your opinions from the fear of giving me pain. It is perhaps foolish of me to say this much but my own dear Charley, we now do belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you. Will you do me a favour? yes I am sure you will, it is to read our Saviour’s farewell discourse to his disciples which begins at the end of the 13th Chap[ter] of [the Gospel according to St] John. It is so full of love to them & devotion & every beautiful feeling. It is the part of the New Testament I love best.1
This was a reference to Christ’s words, ‘A new commandment I give unto you. That ye love one another; as I have loved you.’2
The following January, Emma returned to the subject.
There is only one subject in the world that ever gives me a moment’s uneasiness & I believe I think about that very little when I am with you & I do hope that though our opinions may not agree upon all points of religion we may sympathize a good deal in our feelings on the subject.3
In his autobiography Darwin indicates that his feelings about Christianity had become polarized during the two years or so prior to his marriage to Emma. Said he, disbelief crept over me at very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.4
In February Emma told Darwin:
Your mind & time are full of the most interesting subjects & thoughts of the most absorbing kind, viz following up yr own discoveries – but which makes it very difficult for you to avoid casting out as interruptions other sorts of thoughts which have no relation to what you are pursuing, or to be able to give your whole attention to both sides of the question.
May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, & which if true are likely to be above our comprehension.5
Reading between the lines, Emma appears to be regretting the fact that her husband Charles, has no time for the Christian doctrine on the grounds that it is scientifically unverifiable. As for Darwin, he agonized over Emma’s letter in the knowledge that his scientific research was leading him to conclusions which distressed his wife greatly, and at a later date, he added to it the words ‘When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed & cryed over this.’6
When Fox asked Darwin to become godfather to his forthcoming child, he received the following reply.
I conceive myself bound to tell you, that we have not had Go
dfathers or Godmothers to our children, not from any objection to their having such – but as we should in that case have been obliged to have stood proxies & we both disliked the statement of believing anything for [on behalf of] another.7
In other words, it was Darwin’s view, and according to him the view of his wife Emma also, that it was for the individual, whether adult or child, to decide what, if any, religion he or she was to adopt. Nevertheless, he told Fox, ‘our children are baptized’.8
Emma is described as a ‘sincerely religious’ person who went regularly to church and took the Sacrament (i.e. participated in the ceremony of Holy Communion). She read the Holy Bible with her children and taught them ‘a simple Unitarian Creed’, though they were ‘baptized and confirmed in the Church of England. In her youth, religion must have largely filled her life ….’9
Emma told her aunt Jessie Sismondi, on 27 August 1845, that Darwin had just completed his journal (Journal of Remarks, commonly known as The Voyage of the Beagle). She herself had just finished reading an autobiography entitled The Life of St Blanco the Martyr. (The correct title of this volume is The Life of the Rev. Joseph Blanco White, published in 1845.)
Joseph Blanco White
Spanish theologian and poet Joseph Blanco White, christened José María Blanco y Crespo, was born in Seville, Spain in 1775 to an English father and a Spanish mother. Having studied for the Catholic priesthood at the University of Seville he was ordained priest in 1800. In that same year, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected Rector of Seville’s Dominican Colegio Mayor de Santo Tomás de Aquino.10 However, he became disillusioned and developed a
growing conviction that Christianity itself, in its Catholic, Spanish and specifically Sevillan form, was a baleful force which, manipulated by a privileged theocracy, blighted human happiness and obstructed social progress.11
In 1805 White arrived in Madrid. However, because of his religious doubts, he decided to flee Spain and, in February 1810, he sailed from Cadiz to Falmouth on the English frigate Lord Howard, never to return to his native land.12
Having read and been inspired by the Reverend William Paley’s Natural Theology, White converted to Anglicanism.13 In 1826 Oriel College, Oxford bestowed upon him the degree of Honorary Master of Arts and admitted him as a fellow of the college. He became a friend of theologian Richard Whateley (who was also a fellow of Oriel) and when, in 1831, the latter became Archbishop of Dublin, White became tutor to his family. However, he subsequently ‘jumped ship’ once again, by embracing Unitarianism and relocating to Liverpool, which had a thriving Unitarian community. White died on 20 May 1841 and was buried at Liverpool’s Renshaw Street (Unitarian) Chapel.14
Emma would have been particularly gratified that White, having sampled both Catholicism and Anglicanism, finally chose to become, like her and her family, a Unitarian. Of The Life of St Blanco the Martyr, she
would advise every scientific man who is preparing a new edition in any rapidly progressive branch of science, in which he has launched many new speculations and theories, to read … and to be grateful that in the department which he has to teach he is not pledged to retain forever the same views, or that the slightest departure from them need not entail on him the penalty of the loss of nearly all worldly advantages, domestic ties, and friendships. How ashamed ought every lover of truth to feel if mere self-love or pride makes him adhere obstinately to his views, after seeing the sacrifices which such a man [as White] was ready to make for what he believed to be the truth. This is the moral I draw from the book.15
Here then was Emma, in a clear allusion to her husband Charles, echoing Paley, by implying that ‘truth’ has a greater validity when uttered by those who have suffered or made sacrifices for it. What an irony this was, in view of the furore which had greeted the publication of Darwin’s own magnum opus Origin, and the suffering which he himself had been forced to endure, having told the truth, as he saw it, in relation to his scientific discoveries!
How was life begun, if not by the Creator?
Darwin was aware, from his early studies of geology, that the Earth was far older than 6,000 years – a figure deduced from genealogical studies, based on Adam and Eve and their descendants, these two persons being, according to the Holy Bible’s Book of Genesis, the first people to inhabit the Earth. (Earth is, in fact, estimated to be about 4.50 billion years old). And, as soon as he saw his first fossil, he would have realized that the Biblical account of creation, as detailed in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis, was simply a figment of its author’s imagination. Nevertheless, he was prepared to believe that a Creator had ‘breathed life’ into the earliest living creature, or creatures.16 Later, however, he appears to suggest that life may have originated without any necessity for the presence of God. This is indicated in a letter which he wrote to Joseph Hooker on 1 February 1871.
It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, [then] at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.17
In other words, if living matter had, in Darwin’s day, emerged from some ‘warm little pond’, then the likelihood is that man or animals would have destroyed it before it had a chance to develop. In the above letter to Hooker, Darwin had, wittingly or unwittingly, anticipated that further research would be done into this subject during the following century, by which time the science of chemistry would have become farther advanced.
The creation of life artificially
Abiogenesis is the theory that, if conditions are appropriate, life can arise spontaneously from non-living molecules. Darwin had once opined to Wallace, as already mentioned, that
if it could be shown that life had generated itself spontaneously then this ‘would be a discovery of transcendent importance’.18
In 1953, Harold C. Urey of the University of Chicago and his twenty-three-year-old graduate student Stanley L. Miller, conducted an experiment in which they simulated conditions believed to be present at the time life on Earth began. In the experiment, electric sparks (i.e. simulating lightning) were continually passed through a flask containing water (heated), methane, ammonia, and hydrogen (but not oxygen, as this did not exist in the atmosphere before plant life began). Two weeks later, Miller and Urey observed that two per cent of the carbon present was now in the form of amino acids – organic compounds which occur naturally in plant and animal tissues and are the basic constituents of proteins.19
When the US Professor Carl Sagan (1934–96), astronomer and astrophysicist, subsequently conducted a similar experiment,
a rich collection of complex organic molecules, including the building blocks of the proteins and the nucleic acids [were created]. Under the right conditions, these building blocks assemble themselves into molecules resembling little proteins and little nucleic acids. These nucleic acids can even make identical copies of themselves.20
This research gives an indication as to how life on Earth began.
Finally, in a letter to US clergyman and writer Francis E. Abbot, Darwin declared, ‘I can never make up my mind how far an inward conviction that there must be some creator or first cause is really trustworthy evidence’.21 In other words, simply to have faith in such a notion was, for Darwin, not enough.
What did Darwin really believe?
That the notion of a Divine Designer was problematical
To Asa Gray on 22 May 1860, Darwin continued to agonize over the apparent contradiction between his theory of evolution and the Christian doctrine of Creator/Designer.
With respect to the theological view of the question of living things; this is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write
atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a family within the insect order hymenoptera] with the express intention of their [larvae] feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of [Sir Isaac] Newton. Let each man hope & believe what he can.
Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws, a child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by [the] action of even more complex laws, and I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become … .22
Charles Darwin Page 26