by Adam Gopnik
As one reads The Voyage of the “Beagle,” Darwin's Argus- eyed, relentless sheer seeing—his endless observations of spiders and vultures and snakes and beetles, of what it takes to check on the fatness of a tortoise or a lizard's method of swimming—is what is overwhelming. He seems to see everything, and as we accompany him, our eyes are opened, too. The discipline and practiced mind-fulness that are necessary just to see all this—and in three “strata” too, in geology and botany as well as zoology, among the animals, plants, and stones as much as among the beasts and birds and bugs—are dearly bought. It seems transparent, and we think, “Oh, I could do that too.” That's not where the greatness or genius resides. But it does, really.
Not long ago I found myself reading some of the “naturalist” sections of Voyage of the “Beagle” on a family holiday in the Caribbean, and I decided to test myself. I went out snorkeling one morning in the reef near the hotel, a well- breathed touristic reef of tropical fish, and struggled to keep track of all I saw—the many kinds of fish, and a few striking plants—and to recall how the fish behaved. Within ten minutes my mind was dazed by the effort. There is, first of all, the scrim of observer effect to get through: the fish are reacting to you as much as to their environment; you are the environment, for a moment. Even after you have paid the price of stillness for long enough to win some serenity, fish fly by, blindingly and the twists and turns of schools and kinds—is that a zebra fish? is the other striped one the same sort, only smaller?—make you wince with effort. And then all the little inconveniences of nature—you practicing your breathing, keeping the view clean—interfere and affect your efforts at observation. After an hour I was scarcely able to squeeze out a coherent three sentences on what I had seen.
Imagine Darwin's tenacity and mental discipline, then, which show through in the seemingly artless pages of recorded nature in The Voyage. Nausea and heat stroke and hunger and exhaustion must have affected him time after time—there were very few untroubled or serene days on his voyage—and though some of the animals were “tame,” far more were secretive. Yet he unspools page after page of pure observation that takes the breath away. The humble naturalist's task is, just from the sheer physical challenge, where all real mental work begins, harder than the cosmic poet's, or the natural philosopher's.
Could any of the other naturalists who had been considered for the job have done nearly as much, or as well? The discipline of observation was widespread in Darwin's visual culture. As much as Lincoln grew up in a rhetorical culture, Darwin, in a more closemouthed and less self- dramatizing country, grew up in a culture of close observation. He lived in a society of seeing, as Lincoln lived in a society of speaking. We are still startled to see how relentlessly the Victorians sketched and drew; Ruskin took it for granted that the educated class he was speaking to knew all about how to shade one side of a tree cast in sunlight. (Perhaps this is why the greatest portrait photographs of all are mostly Victorian; the camera was the ideal picture box for tongue- tied people with active eyes and a fear of showmanship; you could even hide your head.)
Yet Darwin is, with Ruskin, the greatest pure observer and describer of his time. He always strikes a note of first- person faux-naïf that is as winning as it is calculated. He can show faces and movement, and search for their meaning to a human correlate:
This Trigonocephalus [snake] has, therefore, in some respects the structure of a viper, with the habits of a rattlesnake: the noise however being produced by a simpler device. The expression of this snake's face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw anything more ugly excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness.
A scale of hideousness—keyed to human faces, things that resemble them can be judged sweet or evil.
He can capture locomotion: “The Tinochorus [rumicivorus] has a close affinity with quails. But as soon as the bird is seen flying, its whole appearance changes; the long pointed wings, so different from those in the gallinaceous order, the irregular manner of flight, and plaintive cry uttered at the moment of the rising, recall the idea of a snipe.” Looking at the amateur Ruskin's sketches of Venetian architecture, we are similarly wowed by the filigree and surface rendering, the love for ornament and chase work.
It is certainly true that he did not have yet a fully developed theory until years later—Frank J. Sulloway has brilliantly disproved the idea that Darwin had seen his variety of finches on the islands and drawn his conclusions there. Yet intimations of his future beliefs exist, and suggest the subtlety with which Darwin addressed the subject before he was sure he could persuade the world, or even himself, that it was so. In an overlooked footnote Darwin hints, delicately, at what is becoming his view on the mutability of species. Commenting on how greatly different the species of plants and animals are on either side of the Andes, he blandly remarks that this difference shows that species have been created on either side of the mountains and adds, “The whole reasoning, of course, is founded on the assumption of the immutability of species; otherwise the difference in the species in the two regions might be considered as superinduced during a length of time.” Superinduced during a length of time is evolution in an opaque phrase—deliberately boxed into a footnote and obscured by an odd word.
Superinduced is still so strange a word that, I notice as I type, the spell- checker on my word processing program does not recognize it. It was a very unusual word even in its time. A search through contemporary writing turns it up at last in John Stuart Mill, who uses it quoting Coleridge, whom Darwin, we know, read enthusiastically, and from whom he must have derived it. Superinduced, it turns out, is a fancy way of saying “added,” with a special added note of “magically superimposed.” Using the word was a clever way of very obscurely implying the possibility of mutable species without even vaguely committing to it as an empirical position.
Such hints aside, Darwin's themes, his point of view, his observational issues in The Voyage, are not evolution or competition but behavior and time, the eccentricity of nature, and the possibility of slow change (though not yet imagined to be under the pressure of adaptation or competition). He thinks that the natural world is weirder than you might expect it to be. Giant rats are there, hawks that are almost hawks—the world is a peculiar place, inhabited by colorful eccentrics. And there is, still, a certain “natural theology.” “Among the scenes which are deeply im pressed on my mind,” he writes, “none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego, where Death and Decay prevail. Both are temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature:—no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”
We tend to write and celebrate “revolutionary science”—great leaps of courageous imagination on the part of a handful of visionaries alter our understanding of the universe. But most science, including most of the science of The “Beagle,” is “normal” science, small observations of established things that add to or alter in some small way what's already well understood. Yet how impressive it is, when viewed in the context of the ignorance and superstition that still raged and drove the scientist Joseph Priestly from his home in the north of England a generation before, to simply see the slow work of the naturalists, the fussy young and old men collecting beetles and watching butterflies. They are building a coral reef of small facts and observational detail, of study and scrutiny, that will protect knowledge of the larger kind, too. The harmless acts of observation built the coral of natural science, which became the jagged end of objectivity, a sharpened tool. The gentleman's hobby, the fu
sty naturalists with their notebooks, produced an incontrovertible mass of fact. Pettifogging observation made the antibodies that immunized theory against a fatuous dismissal. The birds differed; the bugs had adapted; the bones were there.
But Darwin was also capable, in a quiet way, of immensely ambitious theory making from a tiny load of empirical experience. He intuited, on his voyage, on a tiny summit of evidence, the history of, exactly, the coral reefs. The reefs were mystifying structures; they were made up of the carcasses of millions of tiny sea creatures that were known to live only in shallow water, and yet the accumulated coral spanned vast depths. How could that be accounted for? Darwin, just back from the Beagle in 1836, proposed that the islands were actually the tips of submerged volcanoes. He created the so- called subsidence theory: as volcanoes gradually sank, they offered their now just- visible summits as perfect tables on which coral could grow. A coral reef is just a funeral wreath around the tip of a defunct mountain.
It was a brilliant, simple, but immensely bold theory, and was immediately championed by Lyell himself, who helped sell it to the entire British geological establishment. It was Darwin's first intellectual triumph, and buoyed him through the long coming years when he worked on what became The Origin. It was also, as the historian David Dobbs points out, a Herschelian theory, after the Victorian astronomer and philosopher John Herschel, who pioneered the notion that science is a collection of stories about facts, not a mere collection of data dumps. Darwin's theory about subsidence jumped far beyond any data that lay at hand; Darwin had seen relatively few coral reefs, and of course neither he nor anyone else could ever have observed a volcano sink and a reef form around it. It was the first instance of the power of what would become typical Darwinian reasoning: what looks big, beautiful, and designed is just chance plus time—a volcano sinks, and tiny animals take advantage.
Like most Englishmen of his class and time, Darwin was a prisoner of respectabilities and of encircling embarrassments. Home from the voyage, safe within his own city house and garden, though, he was far from diffident or unsure. The tone of his notebooks, as of his private letters, became ironic, impatient, quicktempered, and he rushed to confident speculations on the basis of small evidence.
Few documents are more fun to read than his notebooks of the late 1830s, where his ideas about evolution are already alive and you see his mind at work, unafraid. They are among the golden books of science, as much fun to read as a notebook of sketches. They were composed in what he later called “a mental riot,” where, as he said at the time, he chose “to let conjecture run wild.” He thinks wild thoughts—that there's nothing so remarkable about man, with all his brainpower, appearing on earth; the amazing thing is that mind appeared at all. Man's rise is “nothing compared to [that of] the first thinking being.” He follows strange lines of thought: what if animals are as worthy of humane treatment as the slaves he had seen treated so cruelly on his voyage? After all, all living things “may partake from our origin in one common ancestor; we may be all netted together.” Netted together—drawn together not in one neat hierarchical chain of being but entrapped in one common web of life. The ladder of life is replaced in a phrase with the growing bush of organisms. “Plato,” he writes, “says in Phaedo that our ‘necessary ideas’ arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience.—read monkeys for preexistence.” Read monkeys for preexistence. Metaphysics is instantly collapsed into biology.
Darwin's notebooks of 1838 mark the real beginnings of his evolutionary thought and are a monument in the history of the modern mind—but they are among the most charming and ingenuous monuments ever made, a coral reef of many small free speculations that has since turned into bedrock. The more purely observational Darwin of the Beagle is gone, and his mind now races from poetry to psychology to philosophy and back again. The line between the empirical and the philosophical—for that matter between the scientific and the literary—is broken, “disrespected” as kids say today, in a way that makes something genuinely new to thought. Philosophical concepts are tested by natural facts, and natural facts are always searched for what they mean about man and history.
This process is obviously part of what every natural philosopher might do—but few before the young Darwin are quite as stunningly specific in their natural facts, or as searchingly unorthodox in their philosophies. Darwin sweeps through poetry and observation, seeking in The Faerie Queene for evidence about the origins of expressions, and in Burke's essay on the Sublime and Beautiful for truth on the question of why people cry. The young Darwin is unafraid of blunt speculation: “Blushing is intimately concerned with thinking of ones appearance—does the thought drive blood to surface exposed, face of man, face, / upper / bosom in women: like erection …” He goes to the keeper for information about the sexual behavior of monkeys in the newly chartered London zoo: “A very green monkey (from Senegal he thinks Callitrix Sebe??) he has seen place its head downwards to look up women's petticoats.” He struggles to place philosophy on a natural footing: “Origin of man now proved.— Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understand baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.” His mind is testing, probing, reading, and taking in evidence equally from the classics and from his own observation.
At the core is a new practice—the old philosophical ideas of aesthetics and attraction, of what sexual allure is and what makes beautiful things look beautiful to us, can be tested not by more philosophy but by actual evidence from observation. And behind the new practice looms a new idea, his “theory”—that mankind is not a shining poem apart but one page in the long history of life, which blends seamlessly from one era to another and one species to another, and where when man wiggles his ears he is recalling his primeval past: He who understand baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.
The flights of philosophy to observation and back are rapid and winning. He takes a passage in which Hume argues that some ideas become unconscious to mean that some ideas “order muscles to do the action,” make instinctive grimaces that men share with animals. But then he tests the abstract idea against his experience of monkeys: “Another little old American monkey / Mycelis / I gave nut, but held it between fingers, the peevish expression was most curious. remember the expostulatory angry look of black spider monkey when touched…. The ourang outang, under same circumstances, threw itself down on its back & kicked &cryed like naughty child.—do monkeys cry?—(They whine like children.)” And then he draws what will remain his conclusion: “Expression is an hereditary habitual movement consequent on some action, which the progenitor did when excited or disturbed by the same cause, which, now, excites the expression.” Babies sneer to show the canine teeth, though those teeth no longer really threaten, because our ancestral animals made their threats in that way, too.
There are, as Howard E. Gruber in his commentary on the notebooks has written, only occasional gestures toward adaptation; Darwin hasn't settled on its importance, yet. But he is already a materialist and aware of the extent of his materialism. “Mine is a bold theory,” he admits at one moment, but it is not a crude one: matter, the ancestral past, shapes our minds and our appetites; our minds make ideas, and the ideas change matter. He sees that the constant human need for causation makes “savages” think that a god must cause thunder and lightning. But what really interests him is that the inborn urge toward explanation makes it happen, that even science begins in the basic struggle to understand, the theory- making propensity common to all living things: “All science is reason acting/systematizing/on principles, which even animals practically know (art precedes science—art is experience & observation).” (Art is “experience & observation” in the sense, one gathers, that it can record behavior without supplying explanation—we don't need to know what causes Hamlet to find him interesting.)
He mocks man's arrogance. In one of the “transmutation” notebooks he writes: “If all men were dead then monkeys make men.—Men make angels.” (That is, the monke
ys would seem the most astounding of all creatures, set apart from the rest of creation, while creatures with gifts like man's would be seen as supernatural.) But he doesn't deny men's agency, or our minds. There is a lovely, telling small note where, just after his reflections on monkey expressions, he writes: “Nothing shows how little happiness depends on the senses [more] than the fact that no one, looking back to his life, would say how many good dinners… he had had; he would say how many happy days he had spent in such a place.” We have sensual experience, animal appetites, and arrive at the idea of happiness. Happiness is made of many dinners, but the dinner provokes a concept larger than just their enumeration. Sensation becomes conceptual thought. The mind turns good dinners into happy days.
It was in 1838, amid this quiet riot of thought, that Darwin had the two experiences that locked him in place for the next two decades. On the one hand, he read Thomas Malthus on population, and “got a theory,” or a guide to it; on the other, he decided to get married, to his cousin Emma, which would lead, for a time, away from theory altogether.
“Poor Malthus!” Sydney Smith had written almost four years before, on the occasion of the clergyman's death. “Everybody regrets him;—in science and in conduct equally a philosopher, one of the most practically wise men I ever met, shamefully mistaken and unjustly calumniated.” Malthus's “Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he is thought to argue—whether this is actually the argument he intended to make is still debated, or whether he was actually “shamefully mistaken,” horrifically misunderstood—that as population grows geometrically while food production can increase only arithmetically, starvation is the only cure for overpopulation. (Compare Scrooge in A Christmas Carol: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”)