Angels and Ages

by Adam Gopnik

  The delay set in between Darwin's first intimations of his great idea, the idea of evolution by natural selection, which first crystallized for him in 1838, and the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. By legend the two events were in the long run one: Darwin saw the adapted beaks of his many finches, brooded on what they meant, came up with a theory, sought evidence for it, and was prodded into print at last by an unwelcome letter from an obscure naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who had managed to arrive at the same idea.

  It seems to have been more complicated than that. One reason Darwin spent so long getting ready to write his masterpiece without getting it written was that he knew what it would mean for faith and life, and as Janet Browne's now-standard biog ra phy makes plain, he was frightened of being attacked by the powerful and the bigoted. Darwin was not a brave man—had the Inquisition been in place in Britain, he never would have published—but he wasn't a humble man or a cautious thinker, either.

  But another reason seems to have haunted him. His own religious doubts were not rooted in his work. His scruples, like those of most thoughtful men of the time, had already been raised by the discoveries of geology, which had shown that the world was much older than had been thought; by the “higher criticism” of the Bible, which showed that the scriptures were much more inconsistent than one might like; and above all, by his sense that religion could not explain human suffering. For Darwin the problem of pain, and the fact of pebbles, was already more powerful than the possibility of previous evolution. Still, he sensed that his account would end any intellectually credible idea of divine creation, and he wanted to break belief without harming the believer, particularly his wife, Emma, whom he loved devotedly and with whom he had shared, before he sat down to write, a private tragedy that seemed tolerable to her only through faith. The problem he faced was also a rhetorical one: how to say something that had never been said before in a way that made it sound like something everybody had always known—how to make an idea potentially scary and subversive sound as sane and straightforward as he believed it to be.

  He did it, and doing it was, in some part, a triumph of style. Darwin is the one indisputably great scientist whose scientific work is still read by amateurs. We still read the four essential Darwin volumes—The Voyage of the H.M.S. “Beagle” (1839), On the Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)—to get a sense of what Darwinism is all about in a way that we cannot read, say, Newton or Galileo to understand physics. Of course, the theory of evolution by natural selection would have been true even if it had been scratched in Morse code on the head of a pin. But it would not then be Darwinism: a “view of life,” in its author's words, not an ideology. (An ideology has axioms and algorithms; a view of life has approaches and approximations.)

  Darwin was not a writer just by inclination; he was, uniquely among the great scientists, an author by trade. His books, even some of the most technical ones, were published by a commercial publisher, and he was subject to the same trials as other writers: editors who cut too much, royalty statements that showed too little. Darwin really was one of the great natural English prose stylists. He wasn't a poet in that vaguely humane sense of someone who has a nice way with an image; he was a man who had learned to cast his thesis in a succession of incidents so that action and argument became one. And as with all good writing, the traces of a lifetime's struggles for sense and sanity remain on the page.

  Reading Darwin as a writer shows us a craftsman of enormous resource and a lot of quiet mischief. But it can also remind us that recent efforts to humanize him—to assure readers that the truth is not so hard to take, that Darwinism does not expel us into a void of cold chance—are unnecessary. The most humane and poetic side of Darwinism is already there because he put it there when he wrote it down.

  By the spring of 1838, Charles Darwin was at the peak of the first wave of his public reputation. The greater wave would come in 1859, after the publication of The Origin, which turned a naturalist into a sage. This first, earlier one came after his return from his voyage round the world on the Beagle, and turned on the wealth of specimens he had brought back. Oddly, given what would happen later, Darwin at this moment was seen more as an intrepid explorer than as a man of ideas, a naturalist rather than a natural philosopher; the credit, and the awards, for analyzing and ordering his specimens all went elsewhere.

  He didn't care. More than anything else in life, Charles Darwin liked to look at things. He liked to look at things the way an artist likes to draw, the way a composer likes to play the piano, the way a cook likes to chop onions: it is the simple root physical activity that makes the other, higher- order acts not just possible but pleasurable. We get a very partial and misleading image of Darwin if we think of him as the sage of the Mount, a Tennyson or Car-lyle, one more nineteenth- century Nestor grappling with big ideas about life, mortality, and the generations, an image we can form if we scour his big books too much in search of big stuff. The true inner Darwin is most visible in the books that seem, to the modern reader, as much a puzzle, a self-denial, as Charles Dodgson's logic and math texts can seem compared with the Alice books. (And like Darwin's, Dodgson's dull books are the steel and sinew in his inspired ones; logic is to Dodgson/Carroll what looking is to Darwin.) Darwin shows himself as himself as much in dauntingly titled works, like On the Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881, and actually a thrilling read if you like the heroism of worms—the comma in the title is perfectly placed) and On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects (1862), as he does in his four “great” books—he shows himself best by seeing others. He looks, as hard as he can, and sees processes, not just plants—his worms are actors, makers of vegetable mold and capable of primitive consciousness and, as we'll see, even a certain innate musicality— and this act of looking and organizing is for him the probity of intelligence.

  Darwin was a conventional man from an unconventional family. His grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, were, as Jenny Uglow shows in her beautiful book The Lunar Men, close to the beating heart of the north of England's Enlightenment in its most progressive phase. In the reaction that overwhelmed the country after the French Revolution, their circles were persecuted, but the family tradition remained one of plain speech and freethinking. The idea of the evolution of life was one that Charles Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus, had written a poem about just five years before his birth:

  First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

  Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

  These, as successive generations bloom,

  New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;

  Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

  And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing

  Yet Darwin also went to some lengths to make himself seem just another Victorian gentleman naturalist, ear pressed to the ground for the rumble of obedient earthworms. He lived in the country on an independent income, like Jane Austen gentry, surrounded by loyal servants and faithful gardeners. (“I have always felt it to be a curious fact,” his son Francis wrote later, “that … the chief of the moderns, should have written and worked in so essentially a non- modern spirit and manner.”) He was an extremely English Englishman, with an Englishman's desire never to sound like a know- it- all coupled with the En glishman's conviction that he alone knows it all. Yet, unusual for a man of “vision,” he also always wanted to be liked. He wrote once to his son Willy that “you will surely find that the greatest pleasure in life is in being beloved; & this depends almost more on pleasant manners, than on being kind with grave & gruff manners…. Depend upon it, that the only way to acquire pleasant manners is to try to please everybody you come near, your school- fellows, servants & everyone.”

  This is odd advice to give even a Victorian child; not “to thine own self be true�
� but “be pleasing to all.” Approval was always important to him. Writing to his close friend Joseph Dalton Hooker after receiving the Royal Medal for Natural Science in 1853, ostensibly for his laborious work on barnacles, he wrote, “I cared very little indeed for the announcement it [the official letter] contained. I then opened yours, & such is the effect of warmth, friendship, & kindness from one that is loved, that the very same fact, told as you told it, made me glow with pleasure till my very heart throbbed.”

  Darwin's desire to love and to be beloved, to please everybody— while of course, like all of us, getting his own way and pleasing only himself—-is easy to trace to his childhood. He grew up in a loud, competitive family; the single fundamental reality of his childhood, after the death of his mother when he was eight, seems to have been his constant sense that he was alive only to disappoint his demanding, imposing doctor father. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat- catching,” his father said to him when he was a teenager, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family”—words that should be pinned as a reproachful reminder to the lapel of every father with a disorganized adolescent, not least because it was exactly in those activities, taken to a higher dimension, that the son would find himself and solve the mystery of species. Learning how dogs got bred and how rats tried to run away taught him more about how species change than formal education in the biology of the day could have.

  If one word could sum up Lincoln's character, it would be shrewd; if one word, Darwin's, it would be sensitive. Lincoln grasped instantly people's capacities, their intentions, their weak points and their strengths. Darwin was a tentative judge of people, but he was acutely aware of their moods and emotions, and things that other people just passed right over hit him hard. Questions that seemed a little simpleminded to other people—what is morality? why do children laugh when they're tickled? what makes us blush, or shrug?—pressed on him to ask again why those things happened.

  And always he loved to look. As a boy he was obsessed with beetles in a way that other boys are obsessed with marbles. He collected them, sought them out, leaped across small rivers onto rotting logs in search of them, and triumphed when he found a strange one. A famous story tells of how the young Charles was once so engrossed with collecting beetles that he put one in his mouth to leave his hands free to search for others. The beetle turned out to be of the kind that emits a strong acid in its own defense, which it did in young Charles's mouth. The boy hardly seems to have cared.

  Yet—and this is what set him apart from most of the naturalists of his day, with their stamp- collector's mentalité—Darwin always thought as he saw; “I am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation,” he wrote once. Darwin's turn of mind was encyclopedically visual, relentlessly explanatory—he asked a why question about everything he looked at, but his answer to every why question that he asked was to look again at exactly what. Intelligence comes in two kinds: the ability to break down a general proposition into specific instances and the ability to sum up specific instances in a general proposition—the analytic ability and the aphoristic gift. Men like John Maynard Keynes and Samuel Johnson had both; most of the rest of us are lucky to have a bit of just one. (G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw both had the supreme gift of summing up an argument in a phrase, but couldn't for the life of them see the practical consequences of an idea that sounded good when you said it—for example, what an honor- and- agriculture society would actually be like in modern times, or what the result of a planned economy run by a Superman would actually become.)

  Darwin had both kinds of intelligence, but what makes him exceptional in intellectual history is that neither kind came in crisp, neat tones of conventional smartness. He could break things down, and he could build things up, but he couldn't do either one simply or neatly. This was surely the source of his father's frustration with him, and of his frustration with himself; it is exactly the trait that, most often, makes bright kids look dumb. Darwin was smart without being quick—he had no aphoristic intelligence, no ability to make a concise summary of a point. His intelligence worked at length, over time, and in the accumulation of incidents rather than in the incisive example. This was why even as an adult Darwin believed himself to be, despite the evidence of all his books, which are industry and accomplishment enough for any man, a slow or awkward writer. He wasn't, any more than George Eliot was; he was just a particular kind of writer, not a phrase maker or a caricaturist but an argument maker and a pointillist.

  The great event of his professional life was the five- year voyage on the Beagle; it gave him the time to look and the space to draw out his understanding. Alongside the irascible Captain FitzRoy for the first time in his life he wasn't under academic pressure, the pressure to be smart and prevail in a conventional setting, the kind of pressure that he had been under in medical school, where he had also failed ignominiously. He found himself on that trip, as all of us do at some point in life, and everything that happened afterward depended on the confidence that he'd won and on the realization that he'd had that the world is a strange, older, and more varied place than anyone had let on.

  On his trip he looked at nature and read about rocks—he read the first volume of Charles Lyell's revolutionary book Principles of Geology, which explained that the earth is much more ancient than anyone had imagined and made Darwin think in terms of deep time as he looked at local formations. This double vision, short biological generations set against deep geologic aeons, was crucial to everything he would do afterward, and the fun of the Beagle voyage is that the juxtaposition was immediate, right there for the seeing, not bookish and learned.

  Today, we read his account ofthat trip, The Voyage of the “Beagle,” searching for the occasional gestures toward an “evolutionary” view. We read it knowing what's coming, as we read the early Lincoln looking for signs and portents of what was to come for him. But what really knocks us out now is how much pure observation, pure plain looking, there is in Darwin's book. The poetry lies in the sweep of seeing. Over the course of several pages in The Voyage of the “Beagle,” we get an invocation of fireflies, an explanation of a leaping beetle, and an evocation of tropical sights:

  At these times the fireflies are seen flitting about from hedge to hedge. On a dark night the light can be seen at about two hundred paces distant. It is remarkable that in all the different kinds of glowworms, shining elaters, and various marine animals (such as the crustacea, medusæ, nereidæ, a coralline of the genus Clytia, and Pyrosma), which I have observed, the light has been of a well- marked green colour.… I found that this insect emitted the most brilliant flashes when irritated…. The flash was almost co- instantaneous in the two rings, but it was just perceptible first in the anterior one….

  I amused myself one day by observing the springing powers of this insect, which have not, as it appears to me, been properly described. The elater, when placed on its back and preparing to spring, moved its head and thorax backwards, so that the pectoral spine was drawn out, and rested on the edge of its sheath. The same backward movement being continued, the spine, by the full action of the muscles, was bent like a spring; and the insect at this moment rested on the extremity of its heads and wings- cases. The effort being suddenly relaxed, the head and thorax flew up, and in consequence, the base of the wing- cases struck the supporting surface with such force, that the insect by the reaction was jerked upwards to the height of one or two inches….

  During the day I was particularly struck with a remark of Humboldt's who often alludes to “the thin vapour which, without changing the transparency of the air, renders its tints more harmonious, and softens its effects.” This is an appearance which I have never observed in the temperate zones. The atmosphere, seen through a short space of half or three- quarters of a mile, was perfectly lucid, but at a greater distance all colours were blended into a most beautiful haze, of a pale French grey, mingled with a little blue.

  This is much h
arder to write than it seems; the range of reference, the precision of description—watch a bug jump and then try to put down exactly how he does it—weaving together references to Humboldt and tuning your fork to “a pale French grey.” “The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, /” Shakespeare tells us, “Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name.” The naturalist's eye takes the same trip, only observation more than imagination occupies the seat, and gives to earthy somethings a local habitation, too, and, more than a name, a place in the whole.

  It is normal now to mock slightly the writing of science as the sum of observation. For the past fifty or so years, philosophers of science and students of the scientific method have done all they can to end the idea that science is just accumulated observation, pure “induction” that leads eventually to a theory. The great philosopher of science Karl Popper, in a famous essay, pointed out that even the command “Observe!” is meaningless: observation demands a point of view, a problem, an issue. All seeing is impregnated with thinking. Physicists “observe” their particles only as we observe our athletes, in action in orchestrated moments. If science were simply a bucket into which descriptions fell, it would be a heap of facts. It is in the jump beyond, to a general rule, a theory, even a vision, that science advances. It is in the leap of the data, not the heap of the data, as Muhammad Ali might have put it, that the advance lies.

  All of this is true, and a necessary corrective to an overly naive view of “inductive” science—the old idea, usually associated with the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon, of science as unprejudiced observation rather than theory- laden thought. “Without speculation there is no good and original observation,” as Darwin himself said. But as usual in life, the truth lies more often in the mushy middle than in the clear outline of the edge, and no one can do more than Darwin to remind us of the role of good old- fashioned observation in science—encyclopedic gathering together of close- order facts whose ultimate meaning, or even possible likeness, isn't clear to the observer when he makes them. The data has its music, too.