A Brief History of Creation

by Bill Mesler

  The book’s author was a brilliant geologist named Charles Lyell. For Lyell, geology meant something entirely different from what it meant to geologists like Sedgwick. Sedgwick was well versed in the clamors and catastrophes of the natural world, earthquakes and floods and the like. But these were, for him, isolated events, and geology was a science based on fixed positions on maps, immutable through all of time. In contrast, Lyell saw geology as a science of change, of natural processes that were constantly reshaping the world, forming entirely new mountains and seas and rivers. Treating these processes as clues, Lyell arrived at his most revolutionary contention of all, calculating that the world was at the least three hundred million years old.

  Isolated at sea and immune from other distractions, Darwin immersed himself in Lyell’s book. Early in their voyage, on the Island of St. Jago (modern-day Santiago) in Cape Verde, he had come across a layer of shell and coral 30 feet above sea level that contained the petrified remains of mollusks. Darwin saw these as evidence of Lyell’s contention that landmasses were rising. Everywhere the Beagle went, Darwin seemed to stumble upon the geological processes that Lyell described. With Lyell’s observations on his mind, he began to see the world anew. He grew ever more inquisitive, seeking out his own answers, even to questions that Lyell himself supposed he had answered. In the solitude of his cabin after his explorations on St. Jago, Darwin wondered whether, instead of the reefs rising, it was the ocean that was sinking.

  JAMES WAS ONE OF the biggest volcanic islands in the Galápagos. Because he had found his St. Jago fossils amid volcanic sediment, any sign of volcanic activity in the Galápagos intrigued Darwin. In the three weeks before he arrived on James, he had seen volcanic cones that rose 60 feet in the air like “the Iron furnaces near Wolverhampton.” He guessed that the islands might hold two thousand cones like these, and the beach on which the Beagle had left Darwin’s small group was flanked by two such craters, both unusually large. Darwin guessed that their past eruptions had formed the cove itself—that the Earth was living, moving, its convulsions shaping the very island upon which he stood.

  After two days of exploring the volcanic beaches of James, Darwin realized he wasn’t going to find fossil deposits like those he had discovered at St. Jago. So he set about collecting specimens. Other than the occasional stunted tree that seemed to be clinging just barely to life, there were few signs of indigenous species around the craters. Even insects were scarce. Only tortoises were abundant, great lumbering creatures that could grow as long as 3 feet. These held little interest for Darwin, who assumed incorrectly that the species was not native to the islands, but had been brought by colonizers. They were, however, a great source of food. Until the Beagle’s return ten days later, Darwin and his companions survived on almost nothing besides turtle meat fried in turtle fat.

  Soon the party began venturing deeper into the interior. One hike took Darwin and his companions about 2,000 feet above sea level and 6 miles from the shore. They encountered a group of Spanish whalers who took them to see a salt lake at the bottom of a crater, the water barely concealing “beautifully crystallized, white salt” and surrounded by “a border of bright green succulent plants.” Amid the bushes surrounding the lake, they encountered a local historical curiosity, the skull of a whaling captain who had been murdered by his crew. Two days later, Halley’s Comet streaked across the sky. Darwin noted the event in his notebook with but a single word, “comet.” It was the Earth, not the heavens, that captivated Charles Darwin.

  Darwin had promised his former professors, Henslow and Sedgwick, that he would return with all the plant and animal specimens he could. Both were exceedingly curious about what Darwin would find in the Galápagos. By the time he arrived in the islands, he needed little encouragement. The wildlife of South America had entranced him. Off the coast of Patagonia, the Beagle had been surrounded by a vast migration of butterflies so thick that some sailors shouted it was “snowing butterflies.” At sea, Darwin had seen phosphorescent jellyfish that glowed in the dark of night. Other nights, they passed over patches of phosphorescence, beautiful and luminous, emanating from deep beneath the surface of the ocean.

  In Patagonia, Darwin had purchased fossilized bones of strange and exotic creatures. A fossilized skull looked like it could be the head of giant rat, bigger than anything Darwin had ever imagined. He also came to possess the bones of an animal that seemed to be a large camel, which left him wondering about the natural changes the continent must have undergone to lead to the extinctions of such species. He mused about Buffon’s notion from Natural History, that the wildlife of the Americas was weak and had no vigor. In his notebook, Darwin wrote that if Buffon could have seen what he saw, surely he would have thought differently.

  Away from the volcanoes on St. Jago, Darwin discovered that the island was teeming with life. He gathered almost any plant he could lay his hands on but collected only the most interesting animals, since he had to perform his own taxidermy and had to share his cabin with the carcasses until they could be preserved. Birds were common on the islands and made up the bulk of his collection. Because they were so unaccustomed to humans, hunting them was almost too easy. Darwin once managed to get so close to a hawk that he was able to prod it with the point of his gun.

  Nearly everywhere he went in the Galápagos, Darwin found one particular bird species thriving.* In his journal, he called them thenka, the Spanish name for birds he had encountered on the mainland in South America, which he had assumed to be mockingbirds. By the time he arrived on James, these birds were beginning to arouse a particular fascination in him. Two weeks earlier, the Beagle had stopped at the prison colony on Charles Island. The prisoners had claimed that each island was home to a different kind of tortoise that could be identified by its shell. The vice-governor said he could tell which island he was on by the tortoises alone. Darwin put little stock in the claims. James afforded plenty of opportunity to study the tortoises up close, and they seemed identical to those he had already seen. But when Darwin began to notice little differences in the mockingbirds, he was reminded of his conversations on Charles. Those of each island seemed to have a beak distinctive from those of the others. Some beaks were much larger or smaller than others. Even the beaks’ shapes varied, from narrow and pointed to wide and downward curved. By the time he arrived on James, he had begun recording the exact island where each of his birds originated.

  Darwin had by then finished reading the next volume of Principles of Geology, which Henslow had sent to him in Uruguay. Lyell was a lawyer by trade, and in his second volume he turned his formidable skills at argument and logic to tearing down the transmutational assertions of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lyell saw in the geology of the Earth a great transformational force, yet he saw no such force when it came to the plants and animals that inhabited it. Lamarck looked at the fossil record as proof that species had changed over time. Lyell contended that what Lamarck was really seeing was evidence of extinctions, followed by acts of creation, where God brought new, more able species into being. These new creations explained what seemed to be rather abrupt changes in the fossil record. There were no natural links between species dying out and new species appearing. The appearance of each new species was a miracle.

  In the Galápagos, Darwin began to part ways, ever so cautiously, with Lyell’s opinions about transmutation. In the mockingbirds of the islands, he began to see evidence of a gradual transformation of species, shaped by the demands of the changing environment that Lyell assumed. But he wasn’t yet quite sure. The birds had differences, but in Darwin’s view they were still merely variants of the same species. He noted his confusion in his ornithological journal. If these birds indeed turned out to be not simply variants, but distinct species, “such facts would undermine the stability of Species.” Their close proximity on each of the islands and their apparent strong similarity could not be mere chance, but evidence that the birds shared a common ancestor, from which they had evolved. Darwin was beginning to see
Lyell’s processes of change at work on not just Earth’s geology, but life itself. In the Galápagos, he would write, “We seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on earth.” Nineteen years would pass before he explained what he meant by that sentence.

  FROM THE GALÁPAGOS, the Beagle spent the final year of its journey sailing across the Pacific and around the horn of Africa, arriving in England in October of 1836, at the port of Falmouth. A steady stream of accounts of the expedition appeared in newspapers, and Darwin returned to find that his reputation had bloomed while he was away. For five years, he had maintained a correspondence with Henslow, and his geological observations so impressed his former professor that Henslow had gathered them into a pamphlet that he shared with other naturalists. Lyell was one of those who received a copy. He couldn’t wait to meet the young man who described himself as Lyell’s “disciple.”

  Within a month of Darwin’s return, the two dined at Lyell’s London home. They got on famously from the very beginning, forming a friendship that would last their lifetimes. Lyell listened in rapt fascination as Darwin regaled him with stories of earthquakes in foreign lands. Lyell offered to shepherd the young man in his new career. He also advised Darwin to stay in London, where Darwin would be close to the array of specialists whose help he would need in deciphering all that he had seen and learned. Lyell invited one of the specialists he had in mind to dinner that evening, a young anatomist named Richard Owen, who would four years later coin the term “Dinosauria,” or “terrible reptiles.” Before Darwin left that night, Lyell, the head of the Geological Society of England, offered him one last piece of advice that seemed premature: waste no time heading a scientific organization. He was already certain that Darwin would go far.

  Lyell and Darwin became nearly inseparable. For a spell, it seemed as if they met every day. Lyell helped guide his new protégé as best he could. Memberships in the most esteemed scientific organizations started piling up, including the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical Society, and, of course, Lyell’s Geological Society. Darwin also received a royal grant to help him write an account of his adventure and his observations that would be published as part of a multivolume memoir that FitzRoy had planned.

  Darwin began putting his fieldwork data in order. To catalog the fossils he had found in Patagonia, he enlisted Richard Owen’s help. Boxes of Darwin’s fossils began arriving at the Royal College of Surgeons, which Owen headed. Darwin could still only guess as to what exactly the odd collection of interesting-looking bones would eventually yield. Owens soon informed Darwin that his collection contained pieces of a giant llama and the head of gigantic rodent that would have been about the size of a hippopotamus. Lyell gloriously paraded his protégé’s finds before the Geological Society in an exhibit he called “Darwin’s Menagerie.” For Lyell, these fossilized bones were evidence of a fascinating “law of succession,” in which God arranged his creations on the planet Earth in a kind of geographic order. Though similar in shape and structure, each was still unique, and unrelated by ancestry.

  Darwin, however, was already beginning to suspect that all of his animal specimens were merely branches of a single family tree, each related by blood and genealogical history. These were still just speculations, but his instincts told him the giant llama had to be a cousin at least of the llamas that still lived on the South American continent. There had to be some connection, and an explanation that could be found in the decipherable laws of nature. It was not enough to simply see these variations as the work of divine creation. Owen, for his part, was a committed vitalist who believed that all living things contained an inherent “organizing energy” that governed bodily processes like growth and decay. Conservative and religious, he was, like Lyell, an ardent opponent of evolutionary concepts. Both would eventually change their minds. Owen would swing so far in the other direction as to one day attack Darwin for not embracing the implications that his evolutionary theory held for the origin of life.

  IN MAY OF 1838, FitzRoy’s four-volume account of the expedition was published under the title Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle. The first two volumes consisted of FitzRoy’s memoirs of the Beagle’s expeditions, including the ship’s first voyage under the command of Stokes. The last volume was a lengthy appendix. Darwin’s account made up the third volume and quickly began to outstrip the others in popularity. It was soon published on its own as the Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle. Later, it became, simply, The Voyage of the Beagle.

  The description of the visit to the Galápagos filled only a small portion of Darwin’s account, but it was the most historically significant. Of particular interest was a sentence about some birds he by then believed to be finches. “One might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago,” he wrote, “one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” It was a tantalizing—if cautious—glimpse of his increasing doubts about the notion of fixed species.

  The animal specimens Darwin brought back took longer to decipher than his fossilized bones. In all, he brought back 80 stuffed mammals and 450 birds, which he entrusted to the Zoological Society of London. Despite having just added a new museum in the city’s posh West End, the Zoological Society took them only reluctantly, and processing was slow. The society was turning into an organizational nightmare. It had put out a call for submissions for exhibitions but was unable to cope with a torrent of animal specimens that seemed to arrive daily from hunters and naturalists around the world, all of which needed to be tagged, described, and stored. Eventually, though, Darwin’s specimens found their way into some of the surest hands the organization had, those of the taxidermist John Gould. A self-educated former gardener, Gould had pulled himself up through his skill at taxidermy, becoming the Zoological Society’s first curator and preserver. He was also a fine painter who had authored and illustrated several popular books on birds.

  The little birds Darwin had retrieved from the Galápagos were of particular interest to Gould, just as they were to Darwin. Gould concluded that these birds were actually thirteen distinct species of finches and three of mockingbirds, none of which existed outside their respective islands in the Galápagos. The differences in their beaks reflected the food sources unique to each island: some were perfect for consuming various types of cactus seeds; others, for eating insects. Darwin finally had the answer he’d been waiting for, and he was confronted by evidence of evolution even more striking than that given by his fossils. Darwin was sure that each bird was related, that they all shared a common ancestor. At some point, a species of finch had made its way to the Galápagos and transformed itself into thirteen separate species. Only their beaks had adapted to the environment. But how? He stumbled upon a clue in the most unlikely place, an essay on political economy that had been suggested by a friend of his older brother Erasmus.

  FREETHINKING ABOLITIONIST, portly poet, outgoing and generous, Erasmus Darwin was in many ways the mirror image of the grandfather for whom he had been named. Though he and his brother Charles differed little when it came to subjects like politics and religion, Erasmus was always the more daring. Like their grandfather, he was willing to strain the boundaries of respectability. Also like their grandfather—and their father—he was a physician, though he suffered from the same chronic bouts of illness that would one day haunt his brother. Their father, fearing that his son’s medical career was too severe a strain on Erasmus’s “body and mind,” advised his son to take early retirement. By the time Charles returned from the Beagle expedition, Erasmus had followed their father’s suggestion and given up practicing medicine. He had not yet turned thirty.

  But Erasmus remained active in society and in Whig political circles. Money was no impediment. Both he and Charles had at their disposal the large family fortune that stemmed from the industrial successes of
their maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. Though Erasmus would eventually die a bachelor—and with an opium addiction—he was linked romantically to a number of freethinking women, including the radical political economist Harriet Martineau, who was mistakenly implicated as the mysterious author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The two began a long affair, and a lifelong friendship. The prospect of marriage to the outspoken, modern Martineau worried Erasmus’s father, who asked Charles to keep an eye on his brother. Over the coming years, Charles became, if not her friend, a close acquaintance.

  Harriet Martineau was one of the most prominent intellectual disciples of the Reverend Thomas Malthus. A former economist for the British East India Company, Malthus had argued that increasing population growth would inevitably lead to increasing poverty, as the labor surplus would lead to a massive reduction in wages. The weak and the poor would be weeded out in the struggle for survival that was the natural state of human society. Starvation, disease, war, and even infanticide were, in Malthus’s vision, natural checks on this delicate economic balance. His ideas earned him a place as the most influential economist of his time and spawned a reform movement that eventually led to a strengthening of the English “Poor Laws,” which established a system of workhouses for the most indigent.

  Malthus’s seminal book was An Essay on the Principle of Population. After a number of conversations with Martineau about Malthus, Darwin got around to reading the book in late 1838. Almost immediately, he had an epiphany. The struggle that Malthus identified in human society was the same as the struggle for survival that Darwin observed in nature. Darwin would later write in his autobiography, it “at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be a new species. Here then I had at last got hold of a theory by which to work.” In his private notebooks, Darwin began reexamining the earlier theories of transmutation that had enraptured his grandfather. By applying Malthusian principles to the natural world, he finally grasped the basic mechanism of transmutation that had eluded his predecessors in the world of evolutionary theory. The variations in living creatures were the product of natural selection.