The leading bearer of these tidings was Charles Darwin, who was born in western England less than a century after Newton’s death. Unlike Newton, Darwin came from a brainy family. Someone once described a great-grandfather of Darwin as a “Person of Curiosity” who had found a “a human Sceleton [sic] impressed in Stone.” A great-uncle wrote A Concise and Easy Introduction to the Sexual Botany of Linnaeus. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, when he wasn’t chasing women or stuffing himself at the dinner table (from which a crescent had been cut to fit his awesome belly), had written a great deal about medicine and botany. Another grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, a famous pottery manufacturer. And though he hated the sight of blood, Darwin’s father made a good living as a doctor.
As a boy Darwin was an average student, but he watched birds, collected rocks and beetles, and did so many chemistry experiments that his friends had named him “Gas.” He also loved to hunt, and his disgusted father told him, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” He studied medicine in Scotland for a while but didn’t like it, so his father decided to transfer him to the Church, which was the last refuge of wellborn dullards.
Darwin went to Cambridge, as Newton had done, and he studied theology. On the side, however, he took science courses, and these turned him into a keen naturalist. A botany professor took him on field trips and taught him how to observe living plants. At one point Darwin read with great excitement Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equatorial Regions of the New Continent. (The continent was South America.) Many years later Darwin wrote, “My whole course of life is due to having read and reread as a youth [Humboldt’s] ‘Personal Narrative.’ ”
It looked as if Darwin would spend his life as a country parson, hunting beetles six days a week and preaching on Sundays. But then, out of nowhere, came a splendid opportunity to follow Humboldt’s path. On his botany professor’s recommendation, he was invited to serve as naturalist on a scientific expedition. A ship called the Beagle was to sail down the east coast of South America and up the west coast, doing navigation research, and then to sail around the earth. The voyage would last about two years. Charles’s father first opposed this detour from his journey to a parsonage, then grudgingly agreed.
The voyage lasted not two years but five. Whenever the Beagle touched shore, Darwin walked the beach and climbed the hills, gathering specimens and scanning everything in sight. He asked himself a host of questions. Why did coral island atolls form in circles? Why are fossil seashells to be found two miles high in the Andes? Why do mockingbirds and finches on one of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands have sharper beaks than the same species on the next island? (Had God taken all that trouble when he created them?) And (in the back of his mind) were humans merely another kind of animal?
When he was back in England, Darwin thought no more of serving God. (He married a wealthy Wedgwood cousin and lived comfortably on her pottery fortune and what his father left him.) For twenty years he led a double life. In fact he was writing a great book. But as far as most friends knew he was writing lesser pieces and pursuing his hobby, observing worms.
He discussed with almost no one what was really on his mind, “the species problem.” Why, he asked himself, had there been in the past, and why were there now, so many, many kinds of animals and plants? The Bible said that God created every form of life in just a week, but was that true? It seemed unlikely. For instance, the ancient armadillos, whose fossils Darwin had observed, had disappeared and been replaced by modern, slightly different ones. So God’s creation hadn’t been the end of their story. Species seemed to come and go, and this, said Darwin, was the “mystery of mysteries.”
Darwin was not the only person who was wondering how species, including humans, had evolved. The question was in the air, and scientists in several countries were asking it. In 1840 an English novel called attention to the topic. A fashionable lady tells a friend what she has read. “You know,” she says, “all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First there was nothing, then there was something; then — I forget the next — I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came — let me see — did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last. And at the next change there will be something very superior to us — something with wings. Ah! That’s it; we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows.”
Darwin found a clue to the answer he was looking for in a book by Thomas Malthus, another Englishman who had escaped a career as parson. In a well-known Essay on Population, Malthus had written that human beings increase faster than they can increase the production of their food. The number of humans therefore rises until they run out of food, at which point famine, war, and sickness violently stop the rise. When that happens, many die but not all. Some survive.
Reading Malthus, Darwin wondered if that struggle to survive didn’t influence whole species. Imagine a litter of piglets, suckling from their mother. If most of them are rough and tough but one is meek and weak, which will fail to nurse and therefore starve to death? The runt, of course. The others (till the farmer baconizes them) will live to parent more piglets with the useful traits of size and greed. But the flaws of the runt — its gentleness and weakness — will vanish, and a good thing that will be. Darwin called this process “survival of the fittest.” If it happens often, evolution will occur. Pigs in general, as a species, will grow greedier and bigger.
Darwin could explain the fact of evolution, but he didn’t know exactly how it happened. Slowly he accepted the opinion of a French biologist, the long-dead, long-named Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck. Lamarck had held that animals developed traits when they needed them, and passed these acquired traits on to their offspring. If a giraffe, for instance, stretches his neck to reach the highest leaves, his neck grows slightly longer. He passes that extra bit of length on to his offspring, and after many generations all giraffes have necks like…giraffes.
But Lamarck’s conjecture about acquired traits raises problems. For example, Jews and Muslims have been circumcising their sons for thousands of years, but Muslim and Jewish boys still are born with foreskins. As we shall see in chapter 24, a monk in Austria-Hungary was working out how plants and animals inherit traits. Darwin didn’t know about his work.
Just as Darwin was completing his book about the origin of species, he received a shock. Another Briton, Alfred Wallace, mailed him an essay on his own theory of the origin of species, and it perfectly summarized the theory Darwin had been working on for twenty years. For Darwin this looked at first like a disaster, although he had developed his theory in much more detail. The two men civilly agreed to have reports on their work read in 1858 at a meeting of a scientific society. Although they reported an immense finding, Darwin and Wallace got scant attention. As 1858 concluded, the president of the society reported to the members that the year had produced no “striking discoveries.”
The next year Darwin sent a publisher his book, which he called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The publisher was not enthusiastic. When he asked the editor of a journal to give him an opinion the man advised him not to publish. The subject was controversial, he declared, and Darwin ought to write a book on pigeons, on which he was known to have some clever thoughts. He added, “Everyone is interested in pigeons.”
But the publisher went ahead with the Origin. It immediately sold out and the publisher reprinted it. It was widely reviewed and translated into many languages — even Japanese, Darwin happily reported.
What Darwin had to say did not please everybody, and it shocked the clergy of the Church of England. After all, the works of God were their concern. Darwin was diminishing the role of God, who, the Bible said, created all the species in three days. Darwin claimed that nature followed never-changing laws, just as Newton had explained that stars and planets do. That rai
sed a troubling question: if God wasn’t needed to run the heavens or our earth, then what did he do with his time?
The churchmen and some others also were upset to read that God had not created humans “in his own image,” as the Bible said. Darwin hinted, only hinted, in the Origin, that humans had evolved from other — most said “lower” — beasts. A hint was quite enough; they knew that Darwin was implying apes. Some were just amused. Punch magazine ran jokes such as: “I could a tale [readers were meant to think also of tail] unfold.” “Could you? Then lose not a moment, but go instantly to Mr. Darwin. He will be delighted to see you.” But churchmen didn’t think descent from apes was funny.
Six months after Origin appeared, the British Association for the Advancement of Science assembled at Oxford University to discuss the book. Darwin hated controversy so he stayed away. The leading speaker was his enemy, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. Widely known as “Soapy Sam,” Wilberforce was clever on his feet, never troubled by a lack of facts.
In a large lecture hall, packed with scientists, ladies, and Oxford students, the bishop smoothly ridiculed the theory of evolution. He appealed to the audience’s gallantry, asking whether women, as well as men, were descended from beasts. Then he turned to T. H. Huxley, a scientist friend of Darwin who was there to defend the Origin. Unwisely, Wilberforce asked if it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that Huxley claimed descent from a monkey.
Then came Huxley’s turn. First, he soberly defended Darwin’s views. He explained that Darwin didn’t mean to link apes and humans directly but only to show that both had descended, over many thousand generations, from a common ancestor. And then — a famous moment in the history of ideas — Huxley answered Wilberforce’s granddad question. He wouldn’t be ashamed, he said, of “having an ape for his grandfather.” He would be ashamed, he went on, looking at Wilberforce, to have a human ancestor who plunged into scientific matters about which he knew nothing, and who used “aimless rhetoric,” “eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice” to divert attention from the point at issue.
One didn’t speak like that to bishops. Students stood up shouting. A woman fainted and was carried out.
Huxley won only a skirmish, not a war, and many pious Christians would be slow to change their minds on evolution. But the clash of Wilberforce and Huxley (whom people nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog”) dramatized the issue. They alerted many to a new opinion on the origin of species and, it followed, on the beastlike nature of us humans. Many English scientists quickly accepted the theory of evolution, probably saying to themselves, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” Within a decade after Origin appeared, the natural science examinations at Cambridge University no longer asked for “evidence of design” in nature. Instead they asked for an analysis of the struggle for existence. In other countries it took Darwin’s theory about a generation to win many converts.
Meanwhile, Darwin had more to say on evolution. A decade after he produced the Origin, he wrote another book, The Descent of Man. Now he boldly stated that the long-ago ancestor of humans was “an aquatic animal,…with the two sexes united in the same individual.” Our more recent ancestor was a “hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.” This sounded very like an ape, but The Descent of Man caused little stir. The Origin had readied everyone to hear the worst.
Let Darwin tell us what he thought about the human story. At the end of The Descent of Man he wrote, “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having risen, instead of being placed there aboriginally, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”
Chapter 13
Here and there, the people rule.
NOT SO LONG AGO, democracy on planet earth was rare. Far and wide, the few decided for the many, and usually these few were a ruler and an upper crust of wealthy, landed men. It was they who gathered taxes, wrote the laws, branded thieves, and went to war. True, the kings and gentry didn’t always get along, and much of “history” is the story of their wars with one another. But on one thing they agreed: the only people with the right to rule were those who owned the land that others worked. Almost no one dreamed of giving power to the vile and dirty mob: the artisans and weavers, the odds and sods, the country clods. Your ancestors and mine.
In the later decades of the 1700s, though, the long, long reign of kings and gentry neared the end. The world began an age of democratic revolutions, which aimed at putting power in the hands of nearly everybody, rich and poor, male and female, red and white and black.
SURPRISINGLY, THE FIRST of these revolts took place in that far-from-everybody continent, North America. We must give the background.
Two centuries earlier, this continent appeared on maps of the world as just a blur. Great Britain claimed to own a lot of it, and in the 1600s handfuls of Britons, especially Englishmen, left their homes and sailed in little ships across the ocean to North America, where they settled on the eastern coast. Just beyond the sandy shores were virgin forests, the beginnings of three thousand miles of lightly peopled land. Other settlers followed, and the migrant trickle turned into a river. As well as Britons, it included Germans, Frenchmen, Dutch, and Africans.
Except for the Africans, the new arrivals took what land they wanted, or they “bought” it from the woodland Indians. The Indians hadn’t any notion what it meant to “own” the land they lived on, but the new arrivals quickly conned them into “selling” it. Indians sold Manhattan Island (heart of modern New York City) to some Dutchmen for cloth and trinkets worth about a pound and a half of silver. The settlers chopped down trees, erected cabins, and planted corn (that is, maize). Indians showed them how to grow this grain, which was new to Europeans, in the interval before the new arrivals killed them off or drove them west.
The British settlers were ordinary folk. Isaac Allerton, for example, had been a tailor in England. He came to Massachusetts with his family and other “Pilgrims” who were seeking land to farm and the right to worship as they pleased. Allerton served his fellow Pilgrims as their business agent until they decided that he “plaid his owne game” and “hoodwinckte” them, and drove him out. Then he made and lost a fortune trading furs, tobacco, slaves, and rum, up and down the coast.
Another immigrant, Gabriel Leggett, came from southern England, where he probably was a younger son who had no chance of being left the family farm. He came to New York colony and married the daughter of a farmer who had “bought” his land in what is now New York’s South Bronx from Indians. Someone said of Gabriel that he had a “notories ill behaved & wicked meletious nature.” Just the same, he prospered as a farmer and by selling timber to builders in what would later be New York’s Harlem section.
Unlike most humans elsewhere, these transplanted Europeans lived with one another on an equal footing, in a rude democracy. Travelers from other countries were surprised to see that workers not only ate their meals with their bosses but expected to be served the best food in the house. When the wealthy American printer, Benjamin Franklin, traveled in France, the gap between the rich and poor appalled him. He wrote, “I thought often of the Happiness of New England where every Man is a Freeholder, has a Vote in publick Affairs, lives in a tidy, warm House.”
Not all Americans, however, enjoyed respect and equal rights. At best, the whites had mixed opinions of the Indians. They admired the Indians’ forest skills, but whites who lived on lonely farms were prone to think the only good one was a dead one. Sometimes whites attempted to enslave the Indians, but they simply vanished in the forests. The Indian tribes moved west, away from whites. Only the fearsome Iroquois, east of the Great Lakes, held their ground.
In the eyes of the colonists another group of Americans ranked far below the Indians. These were the imported blacks. When the settlers needed farmhands, many of them purchased blacks — s
laves from Africa. The story of these slaves was uniformly tragic. In their homeland, gangs of other blacks had stormed their homes, shackled them, and death-marched them to the coast. White slave dealers there had bought them from their captors, loaded them on ships and chained them down between the decks in heat and filth, and brought them to the New World. One such captain of a slave ship was the Englishman John Newton, who later wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.”
The shock of capture, followed by the horror of the journey to the New World, was too dreadful to imagine. A slave ship captain once recorded that “to our great Amazement about an hundred Men Slaves jump’d over board.” His sailors rescued two-thirds of the slaves, but the others “would not endeavour to save themselves, but resolv’d to die, and sunk directly down.”
Slavers first imported African blacks to the English colonies in 1619, only a dozen years after the first Englishmen arrived there. A white settler in Virginia wrote about it casually, “About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars.” Slavery soon was common in the south and not unusual in the north. For example, the New York farmer Gabriel Leggett owned a dozen slaves. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, later a champion of freedom, had four slaves. One was named Othello.
It was whites of course who shaped the laws concerning slaves. Owners of slaves could, in effect, do anything they wanted to them, even bludgeon them to death. The slaves, of course, served not for years and not for decades but for life, as did their children and their children’s children ever after.
The Human Story Page 23