by Janet Browne
As far as the inheritance of individual variations went, Darwin also admitted that Fleeming Jenkin might be right about blending inheritance. Again, he confided in Wallace.
F. Jenkin argued in N. Brit. R. against single variations ever being perpetuated & has convinced me, though not in quite so broad a manner as here put.—I always thought individual differences more important, but I was blind & thought that single variations might be preserved much oftener than I now see is possible or probable.—I mentioned this in my former note merely because I believed that you had come to similar conclusion, & I like much to be in accord with you.—I believe I was mainly deceived by single variations offering such simple illustrations, as when man selects.100
Other issues raised their heads. Friends and reviewers persistently accused him of personifying natural selection. At Wallace’s urging, Darwin therefore used for the first time in the Origin of Species Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest,” although remarking that the benefits of a change in wording so late in the day could only be limited. “I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer’s excellent expression of the survival of the fittest,” he observed. Yet “I doubt whether it [the term ‘natural selection’] could be given up, & with all its faults I should be sorry to see the attempt made.”
The point had actually come up earlier, and Darwin had accepted Wallace’s advice and used the phrase here and there in Variation.101 For this fifth edition of the Origin of Species he faced up to the matter more seriously. Wallace had told him that any comparison between artificial and natural selection was liable to be taken literally, and that the word “selection” necessarily implied a selector—the antithesis of what he and Darwin really meant. The objection, said Wallace, “has been made a score of times by your chief opponents, & I have heard it as often stated myself in conversation.”
Now I think this arises almost entirely from your choice of the term “Nat. Selection” & so constantly comparing it in its effects, to Man’s selection, and also to your so frequently personifying Nature as “selecting,” as “preferring,” as “seeking only the good of the species,” &c. &c. To the few, this is as clear as daylight, & beautifully suggestive, but to many it is evidently a stumbling block. I wish therefore to suggest to you the possibility of entirely avoiding this source of misconception in your great work, (if not now too late) & also in any future editions of the “Origin,” and I think it may be done without difficulty & very effectually by adopting Spencer’s term (which he generally uses in preference to Nat. Selection) viz. “Survival of the fittest.”102
“People will not understand that all such phrases are metaphors,” he continued. In private, Wallace went through his own copy of the Origin crossing out “natural selection” and inserting the words “survival of the fittest.”103 He never possessed the same emotional commitment to the original phrase as Darwin. Indeed, for Darwin to abandon the word “selection” would completely change his meaning.
Nevertheless, Wallace’s opinion mattered to him. Wallace evidently felt that Spencer’s phrase properly encapsulated the numerical relationship between death and survival on which evolution rested. It also made explicit the importance of adaptation to circumstances that both of them believed lay at the heart of the process.104 It was easy to assume some form of improvement in animal structure would result from this process. Some authors were already applying Spencer’s words in this way, as illustrated by the early work of Robert Lawson Tait, the Birmingham surgeon, who asked, “Has natural selection by survival of the fittest failed in the case of Man?” in the Quarterly Journal of Medical Science for 1869. In actuality, Spencer had defined the phrase partly in relation to Darwin’s natural selection. In his Principles of Biology, published in two volumes from 1864 to 1867, he stated, “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr Darwin has called ‘natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.’ ”105
Yet neither Darwin, Spencer, nor Wallace apparently noticed how far the expression was replete with circular reasoning, nearly self-defining as a philosophical and biological tautology, in which the fit survive and the survivors are fit.106 Wallace’s justification was that evolutionary theory needed to be divorced from the notion of an external selector and this was one way to do it. Unsure how far Darwin would move in this direction, he pressed Lyell to add his weight to the argument. Lyell used “survival of the fittest” almost without thinking in a letter to Darwin in 1869.
Of course, Darwin and Wallace were not social innocents, and each believed in his own form of biological determinism and progress. At root, each felt that adaptation generally meant improvement, that push and shove was an intrinsic feature of nature and that the best individual would be the one that survived. Spencer’s words were thus not merely convenient, they were to them for the most part true. Darwin seems to have felt that there was progress in human affairs, while strenuously denying any necessary tendency to advance. Yet there were other issues that apparently bothered him more. Around this time, he made a stark observation to Hooker.
I quite agree how humiliating the slow progress of man is, but everyone has his own pet horror, and this slow progress or even personal annihilation sinks in my mind to insignificance compared with the idea or rather I presume certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing. To think of the progress of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi with a vengeance.107
None of them expected the words to take hold in the way they did. They failed to foresee the social loading that the phrase immediately acquired in human terms, where the “fit” inevitably became associated with the socially successful. Nor did Darwin anticipate the special weight that the publicity surrounding his Origin of Species would give these words. Nonetheless, he did not retract. Between them, Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace generated four words that became an integral part of the Victorian frame of mind.108
While working on this fifth edition, Darwin also encountered major intellectual problems over the age of the earth. William Thomson (the future Lord Kelvin) had asserted on the basis of experimental physics that the earth was not sufficiently old to have allowed evolution to have taken place. To some extent, Thomson was tilting at Lyell—he had never liked Lyell’s endless geological epochs stretching back into eternity. Earlier on, he had attacked Lyell’s gradualism and uniformitarianism, saying that geologists ignored the laws of physics at their peril and that the earth was much younger than usually thought, and deliberately initiating a quarrel between physicists and geologists over who had the best claim to study the earth that turned into a boundary dispute between two developing disciplines. In 1866, thoroughly frustrated by what he regarded as pig-headed obtuseness from the Lyellian-Darwinian fraternity, and propelled by anti-evolutionary, Scottish Presbyterian inclinations, Thomson launched a vigorous polemic against the lot of them, stating that 100 million years was all that physics could allow for the earth’s entire history. As Darwin noted, Thomson intimated that the earth had had a beginning and would come to a sunless end.
Disturbingly for Lyell and his friends, Thomson’s point was supported by Archibald Geikie and James Croll, two good young geologists, and by Thomson’s business partner in Glasgow, Fleeming Jenkin, who combined his critique of Darwin’s theory of inheritance with this form of geochronological attack. In 1868 Geikie and Croll acknowledged the necessity of fitting geological data into the shorter time supplied by physics. Of course, Lyell could not ignore these arguments against him, and he attempted to answer them in the tenth edition of his Principles of Geology (1867–68). Huxley also did his best in an address delivered while president of the Geological Society in 1868. But this was one of Huxley’s froth and fury speeches, taking two steps back for every step forward. Darwin fe
lt temporarily deserted when Huxley declared, “If the geological clock is wrong, all the naturalist will have to do is to modify his notions of the rapidity of change accordingly.”
That was just what Darwin could not do. In the first edition of the Origin of Species he had calculated that the erosion of the Sussex Weald must have taken some 300 million years, a breathtaking length of time that, taken with the rest of the stratigraphical table, provided ample opportunity for gradual organic change. But Darwin’s calculations were wrong. The actual time was much shorter. “Those confounded millions of years,” he had complained to Lyell and deleted the entire example.
So no wonder that “Thomson’s views of the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.”109 The 100 million years that Thomson allowed was not nearly long enough for the exceedingly slow rates of change Darwin envisaged in nature. The fifth edition of the Origin bore witness to his discomfort. Rattled, he tried various ways to speed up evolution. He was aware that he was becoming more environmentalist, more Lamarckian, as it were, and producing a poor-spirited compromise. He roped in George, with his Cambridge mathematics, to make alternative calculations, telling him that the age of the earth was the single most intractable point levelled against his theory during his lifetime.
Five years later Darwin was still protesting that Thomson’s shortened time-span was “an odious spectre.” Some minor relief emerged when Wallace analysed the question afresh, and although Wallace’s proposed solution (based on climate changes and tilting ecliptics) was regarded as unworkable by physicists and naturalists alike, Darwin called it “admirably clear & well put.” One of the first scientific projects that George Darwin undertook as a mathematical fellow at Cambridge was to rework Thomson’s calculations and propose a modification that favoured his father. Although George’s relationship with Thomson was close, he warned scholars not to accept all of Thomson’s results.110 Decades of continuing debate over the age of the earth were resolved only with the discovery of radioactivity early in the twentieth century that, broadly speaking, allowed the earth to be as old as evolutionists needed it to be.
In this manner, assailed by doubts, deliberately introducing more and more environmentally induced changes to species, quickening up his adaptive processes, and using the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which he neither invented nor admired, Darwin produced his fifth edition of the Origin of Species.
Hardly anyone noticed the difference. Only the Athenaeum sourly observed that “attention is not acceptance.” This edition brought the total number of copies of the Origin up to ten thousand, and, perhaps not surprisingly, interest was relatively subdued. Murray said that the booksellers at the November sale purchased only 311 copies of the new edition and eighteen copies of Variation: “wh. I hope you will consider not a bad days work.” Low sales did not concern Murray overly much considering the long-term harvest he was reaping. Nevertheless Darwin was disgruntled. Decisively, Darwin said he was selling his French translation rights to Jean Jacques Moulinie. Clemence Royer’s third edition was too much for him to stomach. Murray smiled. “You have my best wishes for the putting down of your Parisian blasphemers.”
IX
But it was Wallace who provided the biggest jolt. Although they did not meet much during Darwin’s years of illness, they were firm friends, exchanging family news, congratulations, and plenty of natural history information. Of all Darwin’s scientific friendships, this relationship with Wallace was the one most dependent on letters—a relationship begun by letter and continued by letter, where they met on the equal ground of pen and paper. Wallace encountered Lyell, Spencer, and Huxley in person much more often. Wallace privately savoured the knowledge that it was Huxley who had nominated him for the Royal Medal in 1868. “Huxley was as kind and genial a friend and companion as Darwin himself.” With Huxley, however, Wallace “never got over a feeling of awe and inferiority when discussing any problem in evolution or allied subjects—an inferiority which I did not feel either with Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell.”111
Wallace’s regard for Spencer rested on different grounds. “His wonderful exposition of the fundamental laws and conditions, actions and interactions of the material universe seemed to penetrate … deeply into the ‘nature of things.’ ” Wallace would walk over to Spencer’s Bayswater boarding-house (where Spencer lived with “rather a commonplace set of people—retired Indian officers and others”) to talk through a wide range of current projects, and he seems to have been one of the few men who appreciated Spencer’s authentic biological interests, discussing with him recent proposals in the life sciences, such as the origin of flight. He approved of Spencer’s egalitarian and atheist principles. Once Spencer turned up to dinner at Huxley’s house in evening dress, apparently endorsing the traditional social code they each hoped to abolish. Where could he wear it, if not at the houses of friends, Spencer insisted. “Besides, you will please to observe that I am true to principle in that I do not wear a white tie!”
It was to Darwin that Wallace revealed his heartbreak when his engagement to be married was abruptly broken; and his happiness when he found a wife some years afterwards. Both men knew how intimately their lives were joined. Every now and then, they expressed these feelings. “Your modesty and candour are very far from new to me,” said Darwin. “I hope it is a satisfaction to you to reflect,—& very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me—that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in one sense rivals. I believe that I can say this of myself with truth, & I am absolutely sure that it is true of you.”112
Even so, Wallace persisted in taking the lesser role. On one occasion he told Charles Kingsley his views about the resources and stamina that Darwin brought to bear.
As to C Darwin, I know exactly our relative positions, & my great inferiority to him. I compare myself to a Guerilla chief [sic], very well for a skirmish or for a flank movement, & even able to sketch out the plan of a campaign, but reckless of communications & careless about Commissariat;—while Darwin is the great General, who can manoeuvre the largest army, & by attending to his lines of communication with an impregnable base of operations, & forgetting no detail of discipline, arms or supplies, leads on his forces to victory. I feel truly thankful that Darwin had been studying the subject so many years before me, & that I was not left to attempt & to fail, in the great work he has so admirably performed.113
Wallace went to Down House in 1868 for a weekend party that included Edward Blyth, recently returned from Calcutta for health reasons, and John Jenner Weir, the ornithologist and naturalist. Darwin chose these guests tactfully. Blyth had been one of the first to recognise Wallace’s merits, recommending that Darwin should read Wallace’s essays in 1855, and Jenner possessed a fine knowledge of British natural history. “Mr Blyth is a dreadful bore,” Bessy wrote to Henrietta afterwards. “He talks incessantly and is always interrupting. Wallace is very pleasant I think.… we took Mrs. Wallace to church in the morning and the gentlemen went a walk.”114 Wallace welcomed the intimacy with Darwin that this visit brought.
Early in 1869 he sent Darwin a presentation copy of his Malay Archipelago, dedicated to Darwin, “not only as a token of personal esteem and friendship but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works.” The book was “magnificent,” Darwin replied, well worth the labour that Wallace had poured into it. In reading this Darwin was filled with fresh regard for Wallace’s scientific thinking. “You make me sometimes feel young again as if I was once again collecting specimens,” he assured him. “The dedication is a thing for my children’s children to be proud of.”115
So it was all the more unexpected when Wallace’s next publication cut away most of the ground under their combined feet. In April 1869, in a long article in the Quarterly Review, Wallace backtracked on his commitment to natural selection. He claimed that natural selection could not account for the mental attributes of modern humans.
Wallace inserted this
startling new opinion inside a long and deferential discussion of Lyell’s views on species. In the tenth edition of the Principles of Geology Lyell at last announced his complete acceptance of Darwin and Wallace’s theory—a personal wrench, as his friends noted, and a noteworthy statement for an older man to make, for he could as easily have coasted along to his demise without such public acceptance. Wallace praised Lyell’s honesty on the issue. What was more, Lyell completely recast his account of the history of life on earth, admitting that evolution by natural selection provided the only workable hypothesis for naturalists (characteristically mixing up Lamarckism and Darwinism, and making Darwin tetchy).
It was on the grand question of mankind that Wallace felt he could add something more to Lyell’s statement. He said he had changed his mind since his 1864 paper on human origins. Wallace now claimed that at some point during mankind’s early history, physical evolution had stopped and some higher driving force or spirit had taken over. The human mind alone continued to advance, human societies emerged, cultural imperatives took over, a mental and moral nature became significant, and civilisation took shape. Modern mankind thus escaped the fierce scrutiny of natural selection. The development of human thought freed humanity from the inexorable laws of nature. “Here then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man.… he is, indeed, a being apart, since he is not influenced by the great laws which irresistibly modify all other organic beings.” Mankind was composed of a material frame (descended from the apes) and an immaterial spirit (infused by a higher power) that pulled mental and cultural development onwards.