Darwin's Origin of Species

by Janet Browne

  For there is no disguising the fact that Wallace came from the other end of the Victorian social scale. Self-educated, and with no private income, he made an unsteady living by collecting natural history specimens to sell to museums and collectors. His first collecting trip had been to Brazil with his friend, the naturalist Henry Walter Bates, to comb the Amazonian rainforest for rare birds and insects. Then, in 1853, he struck out independently to the Malay Archipelago, where he stayed for eight years, travelling some 14,000 miles within the region. It was the possibility of acquiring some Malaysian fowl that originally brought him into Darwin’s network, and they had occasionally corresponded about specimens. When Lyell had drawn Darwin’s attention to Wallace’s earlier article in April 1856, Darwin wrote to Wallace to praise it and, in passing, mentioned his current work on definitions of species and varieties, a topic of great practical interest to naturalists at the time. It was probably this polite expression of interest that encouraged Wallace to send his evolutionary essay to Darwin in 1858.

  Wallace’s personal circumstances and aspirations were very different from Darwin’s. Nevertheless, he read many of the same books, encountered many of the same biological problems during his overseas travels and shared much the same forward-looking Victorian milieu. Inspired by Vestiges’ world of constant progressive development, he eagerly adopted the concept of transmutation. He hoped to find in Sumatra or Borneo evidence that humanity had formerly emerged from the great apes of the region. Fine observational skills had already led him to match the geographical distribution of butterflies in the Amazon river basin with their variation, an observation that served the same function in his intellectual development as Darwin’s Galápagos finches. He read Lyell and saw, like Darwin, that gradual geological change might indicate equally gradual changes in species. He read Darwin’s account of the Beagle voyage. He read Malthus, and took from him the same notion of differential survival. Wallace even had a ‘Malthusian moment’ akin to Darwin’s flash of inspiration. Suffering from malarial fever, Wallace was resting one day from an attack of the ‘chills’, pondering the human demography of the islands around Papua New Guinea, when he suddenly realized that the Papuan population was being gradually exterminated by invasions of Malays. As for Darwin, so for Wallace: everything fell into place. He wrote, using the same vocabulary as Darwin, of a ‘war’ in nature, competition between individuals and the triumph of the more successful form.

  Sitting alone in his study, always working, always concentrating on the job in hand, Darwin had allowed himself to feel that he was in no danger of being pre-empted, no need to hurry, until the letter came from Wallace. Yet as Lyell hinted, there were plenty of proponents for advanced schemes of thought if one had eyes to see.

  Great currents of change were making their presence felt in Britain. High-level critical thought about the Bible was spreading as the biblical scholars of Europe investigated sacred texts as if they were solely historical documents. Inside the secluded quadrangles of Oxford colleges, the Reverend Baden Powell frankly discounted miracles, while John Henry Newman converted to Catholicism and initiated the Tractarian movement. George Eliot’s translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846) presented the Son of God to English readers as if he were an ordinary man. One by one, Victorian thinkers claimed the right to investigate the world around them without recourse to either God’s miraculous powers, or the Bible’s word, or the church’s doctrinal authority. Some, like Tennyson or Matthew Arnold, began seriously to doubt the religious system in which they had been raised. In the elite world of British literature and letters this movement ultimately manifested itself in the book entitled Essays and Reviews (1860), in which seven eminent theologians challenged traditional interpretations of scripture. Anxious doubts, secular inclinations and dissatisfaction with conventional doctrines were launched among intellectuals long before Darwin came on the scene.

  The men and women of the influential liberal magazine, the Westminster Review, led by the charismatic editor John Chapman, and Mary Ann Evans (the novelist George Eliot), for example, were fascinated by the idea of inbuilt natural laws and steady advance in human society. Their friends, the historian Henry Buckle (1821–62) and philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), extolled development in society and nature. Buckle considered the history of nations, telling his readers that civilized societies will always overcome the less developed. From the barbarism of Ancient Rome to Victorian parliamentary democracy, Buckle’s history books argued for progressive improvement. In Spencer’s writings, the same ideas took the form of a law of development that he applied to animals and plants as readily as to politics, economics, technology and human society. In 1852 he published ‘The development hypothesis’ in which he supported a general Lamarckian theory of animal transmutation, followed by a Malthusian-style essay on the ‘Theory of Population’ in the Westminster Review, where he wrote about population pressure driving the weakest to the wall. His anti-theological Principles of Psychology (1855) followed shortly afterwards, and by the end of the decade he had begun an ambitious, lifelong re-evaluation of metaphysics, the first part of which was published in 1862. Spencer believed that biological and social progress formed one broad evolutionary continuum – that they were governed by the same immutable laws and controlled by the same forces of nature. Darwin had never taken any of his writings seriously.

  Spencer was not the only one to think like this. George Henry Lewes, the editor of the forward-looking Leader, regular contributor to the Westminster, and George Eliot’s lifelong partner, delved into anatomy and physiology, proposing that human thought was merely a by-product of the brain’s physiological activity rather than a gift from God. Supported by William Benjamin Carpenter, another physiologist, Lewes pushed divine agencies right to the background. Harriet Martineau shocked pious readers by declaring her religious doubts. Charles Kingsley, the author and radical clergyman, brought his social-realist novel Alton Locke (1850) to a climax with the hero’s nightmarish dream of a metamorphosis from jellyfish to man. These lively modernist thinkers rejected natural theology, the system of explanation entrenched in the old universities, and opted for something more flexible and personal, a god who reigned unobtrusively in the background, who did not need the rigmarole of church doctrine.

  By 1850 or so transmutation seemed less threatening to forward-looking thinkers such as these. Freshly sanitized by the mid-Victorian gloss of industry and commercial confidence, the dangerous, volatile air of the 1830s and 1840s lifted. Prosperity and progress appeared as motifs of the age. Middle-class liberals advocated self-improvement, literacy and education on the one hand, and public lectures and museums on the other. Medical men wondered about the possibility of the spontaneous generation of the smallest cellular beings and discussed Louis Pasteur’s experiments with interest. Darwin’s old acquaintance Robert Grant moved to London to become professor of zoology at University College London and lectured on the evolutionary scale of nature, until too old to continue. A fair number of leading intellectuals embraced doctrines of self-advancement, economic progress and the onward thrust of civilization to a greater or lesser degree, without necessarily overstepping the divide between faith and disbelief, and unknown numbers of less public figures, such as Alfred Russel Wallace, were contemplating the world through newly secular eyes. Obvious technological advances and economic expansion reinforced the point. Samuel Smiles’s book Self-Help – the bible of the improving middle classes – highlighted the belief in entrepreneurial improvement sweeping into every arena of mid- century existence.

  Darwin’s unexpected collision with Wallace had one immediate effect. He was catapulted into writing Origin of Species. Immediately after the double Linnean Society paper had been read, he took his wife and family away for a brief holiday to recover from the death of baby Charles. Then, in the space of thirteen months, he produced a compact, tightly argued book.

  In essence, Darwin drastically compressed the long manuscript he had already written. Afterwa
rds he regretted losing so much of the solid scientific evidence he had struggled to collect and always regarded Origin as an enforced ‘abstract’. For many years afterwards he still planned to publish the original long manuscript that had been interrupted by Wallace’s letter.

  Darwin called this shorter book ‘one long argument’. And what an argument it was. Few scientific texts have been so closely woven, so packed with factual information and studded with richly inventive metaphor. Darwin’s literary technique has long been noted for its resemblance to Great Expectations or Middlemarch in the complexity of its interlacing themes and his ability to handle so many continuous threads at the same time. Hardly daring to hope that he might initiate a transformation in scientific thought, he nevertheless rose magnificently to the occasion. His voice was in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble and dark. His imagination soared beyond the confines of his house and garden, beyond his debilitating illnesses and the fragile health of his children. At his most determined, he questioned everything his contemporaries believed about living nature, calling forth a picture of origins completely shorn of the Garden of Eden and dispensing with the image of a heavenly clock- maker patiently constructing living beings to occupy the earth below. He abandoned what John Herschel devoutly called the ‘mystery of mysteries’ and replaced Paley’s vision of perfect adaptation with imperfection and chance. Animals and plants should not be regarded as the product of a special design or special creation. ‘I am fully convinced that species are not immutable,’ he stated in the opening pages.

  Further than this, Darwin’s underlying theme was gradualism. Everything happened little by little, just as Lyell claimed. Everything was linked by one and the same explanation. Time, chance and reproduction ruled the earth. Struggle, too. Those who sought a radically new manifesto for the living world were sure to find it in his words: no one could afterwards regard organic beings and their natural setting with anything like the same eyes as before; nor could anyone fail to notice the way that Darwin’s biology mirrored the British nation in all its competitive, entrepreneurial, factory spirit; or that his appeal to natural law unmistakably contributed to the general push towards secularization and supported contemporary claims of science to understand the world in its own terms.

  Another kind of narrative emerged as well, often mentioned by reviewers. Darwin wrote as he always wrote, in the same likeable, autobiographical style he had developed during the Beagle voyage and brought alive in his Journal of Researches. Much later on, his son Francis Darwin said this pleasant style of writing was characteristic of his father in ‘its simplicity, bordering on naiveté, and in its absence of pretence… His courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader is remarkable, and it must be partly this quality which revealed his personal sweetness of character to so many who had never seen him.’2 Although his theories might frighten, his style was thoroughly sympathetic and genial, creating a distinctive magic between author and reader. He appeared in his book just as he appeared in life: as a reputable scientific gentleman, courteous, trustworthy and friendly, a man who did not speak lightly of the momentous questions coming under his gaze, a champion of common sense, honest to his data, and scornful of ‘mere conjecture’. This humane style of writing was one of his greatest gifts, immensely appealing to British readers who saw in it all the best qualities of their ancient literary tradition and contemporary Victorian values. It served him well during the controversial years to come, defusing personal animosity and allowing even the harshest of critics at least to acknowledge his sincerity and meticulous investigation.

  As an argument, Origin of Species was divided into two unequal halves. The first, shorter half set out the apparent facts of nature and led up to Darwin’s presentation of the theory of natural selection in Chapter Four. The remainder of the book showed how the theory could explain or illuminate key biological areas such as embryology, classification, palaeontology and geographical distribution. An evocative conclusion invited readers to consider his point of view without prejudice. Unusually for a scientific book, Darwin also provided a frank discussion of the many stumbling blocks that would probably occur to readers, in a chapter called ‘Difficulties on the Theory’. He admitted, ‘Some of them are so grave that to this day I can never reflect on them without being staggered… I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to such startling lengths.’3

  This structure was carefully thought out. Natural selection is not self-evident in nature nor is it the kind of theory in which one can say ‘look here and see’. Darwin had no crucial experiment that conclusively demonstrated evolution in action. He had no mathematical equations to establish his case. All these were to come a century later. Everything in his book required the reader’s imagination. Like Lyell in his Principles of Geology, he had to rely on an analogy between what was known and what was not known. He depended on probabilities. He used words of persuasion, invited revisualization. Instance after instance was said to be ‘quite inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation’.

  The sheer variability of organisms came first. Every pig or cow, every blade of corn, as he described it, was in some way slightly variable. No two animals or plants were exactly alike. Farmers and horticulturists made use of these slight variations in individuals to improve a huge range of cultivated stock. Most of his readers would have agreed. The vast agricultural and horticultural wealth of the nation was based on exactly these activities, and large numbers of ordinary men and women possessed direct experience of the commonplace household animals and plants he described: dogs, gooseberries, cattle, garden flowers. ‘Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please,’ he said, and quoted Sir John Sebright, who claimed with respect to pigeons that ‘he would produce any given feather in three years, but it would take him six years to obtain head and beak’.4

  The biggest problem here, and one on which future critics alighted, was that Darwin had no knowledge of how the variations arose. He wrote Origin of Species long before the modern science of genetics was developed. The only thing that he could do was to demonstrate that variations indisputably did occur in domestic organisms. So his early pages were crammed full of examples drawn from every branch of natural history – a factual overkill that even reviewers noted. To this he added a matching account of variability in wild animals and plants. All his notes about barnacles’ innards, donkey’s stripes, primroses and oxlips took their place. Privately, he characterized this as a ‘short & dry chapter’.5

  The real point came next. Too many offspring were born. The living world teemed with deadly competition and slaughter, the same elemental energies, red in tooth and claw, that Tennyson characterized in In Memoriam. ‘What war between insect and insect, between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey – all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees’, wrote Darwin.6 God’s harmony was an illusion. Unsure whether he would be believed, he produced another flood of examples. Limited resources, limited places in nature, and continued natural fecundity gave rise to a battle for survival.

  This was the point where he proposed the theory of natural selection. Harking back to the earliest and most powerful metaphor he had explored in his transmutation notebooks of the 1830s, Darwin declared that there was an important analogy between what happened in the farmyard and garden and in the natural world. In the same way as mankind can mould and adjust domesticated species to suit passing needs or tastes, so nature can pick the best adapted. The ones ‘selected’ to survive would be the parents of the next generation.

  It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up
all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.7

  Ruminatively, Darwin elsewhere acknowledged the problems that this anthropomorphic language would generate. He often personified natural selection in Origin of Species. While this was perhaps unavoidable in the general sense, he frequently gave the impression that natural selection was an active agent. To some, it might even be thought of as God, a divine gardener in the sky, as it were, who chose the variants that were to succeed. Years afterwards Darwin admitted that this was not his intention and that he ought to have used a more neutral expression like ‘natural preservation’. The same entanglement occurred when he used the word ‘adaptation’, which hinted at some form of purposeful strategy in animals and plants, the exact opposite of what he meant. Later, he used ‘contrivance’ as a partial solution. Over and over, Darwin struggled with his vocabulary. The language he had to hand was the language of Milton and Shakespeare, steeped in teleology and purpose, not the objective, value- free terminology sought by science.

  He was not even able to speak of ‘evolution’ as such, because at that time the term was mostly used to describe the unfolding of hidden embryological structures; it was the ensuing debate around his published work that gave the word its modern meaning. In Origin of Species Darwin generally referred to ‘descent with modification’. Equally, he did not at first use what ultimately became the most famous phrase of all, ‘survival of the fittest’. This was coined a few years afterwards, by Herbert Spencer in 1864, after which Wallace suggested Darwin should substitute it for ‘natural selection’. All these verbal ambiguities would lead readers in directions that Darwin did not intend. It is not clear from his remaining manuscripts how far he was even aware of the full extent of the difficulties.