by Janet Browne
Hard on the heels of natural selection, came one further notion, the new idea he called the ‘principle of divergence’. This principle was quick enough to characterize. He said that it was always advantageous for living beings to diversify: ‘The more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution and habits, by so much will they be better enabled to seize on many and widely diversified places in the polity of nature, and so be enabled to increase in numbers.’8 Competition for the same ‘places’ in nature (niches) forced animals and plants to specialize, which in turn stimulated a multiplication of places and greater efficiency in the use of resources. In a worryingly brutal phrase he went on to liken individual animals and plants to steel wedges thrusting ever harder into the softly yielding face of nature. Here lay the roots of some of the harshest economic and social doctrines that would take shape from his writings. Darwin shattered all previous images of pastoral harmony. In his world, the urge to succeed was brutal. Individuals needed to kill to survive.
In explaining divergence for his book, Darwin also introduced one of the most powerful and lasting metaphors of his career. He characterized the history of living beings as a tree, describing extinct ancestral forms as if they were the roots and trunk, each main group of organisms as the branches, and all the multitude of species in existence at the present day as the green leaves and buds: a smoothly spreading evolutionary tree that linked nature and history into a single indivisible living whole, spanning the ages. ‘The great tree of life’, he declared, ‘which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.’ His ability to visualize the evolution of life in this way became almost synonymous with understanding it. He made his point with a diagram – the only diagram in the book – which he called ‘an odd looking affair but indispensable to show the nature of the very complex affinities of past and present animals’. This showed how a number of ancestral forms might diverge over time, some becoming extinct and others contributing to the next generation – the stark dotted lines hardly indicating the luscious pictures of trees that would soon cascade from naturalists’ pens. At the deepest, most satisfyingly symbolic level, Darwin replaced the ancient imagery of the tree of knowledge, the tree of life, with something similar. His tree was time. It was history. It was knowledge. It was life. But it was not divine.
With the core of his theory set out, Darwin let the book sweep onward through a wide range of biological topics. Embryology became intelligible: ‘Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals’. Darwin was proud of this part of his argument and careful to make sure he got it right. He asked his new friend Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) to read the chapter before publication. ‘The facts seem to me to come out very strong for mutability of species,’ he told Hooker when discussing the same chapter.9 Palaeontology, comparative anatomy and taxonomy would also be transformed, he wrote in anticipation. The anatomical affinities and groupings sought by taxonomists were not just abstract notions, he said, nor were they the physical expression of some divine plan drawn up by the creator, as renowned naturalists like Louis Agassiz or Richard Owen suggested. Instead, the resemblances were caused by genuine blood relationships. Vestigial organs like the appendix in human beings were explained as anatomical remnants left over by history. To Darwin it seemed unlikely that a divine architect would deliberately create such wasteful, purposeless features.
Similarly, the geographical patterns and relationships that plants and animals traced over the globe could be explained on the grounds that species for the most part spread and change. The practical naturalist in him emerged and spoke plainly – the barnacle scholar, the pigeon-lover, the plant experimenter and Beagle collector, the traveller at last approaching his goal. Much of the theory’s value, he argued, lay in the way it explained and united so many different aspects of the natural world.
Most important in many eyes was his chapter on difficulties. Including such a chapter was an adroit step. In this Darwin discussed many of the problems that would immediately enter a reader’s mind, such as the absence of intermediary stages in the fossil record or the unknown mechanisms that might allow the inheritance of mental traits like instincts and the difficulty of envisaging the gradual emergence of complex organs like the eye. Darwin himself had worried endlessly over the same problems. ‘The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,’ he confessed to his close friend, the American botanist Asa Gray in 1860.10 The lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record, for example, was a real puzzler, only explained by what philosophers call a negative argument. He claimed that such organisms would be so rare and transitory, and geological preservation so infrequent and accidental, that it would be highly unlikely to find specimens. Their absence, he stated, could not legitimately overturn his theory. As it happens, he was correct in this surmise. Even with the discovery of fossils like the Archaeopteryx, a bird-like reptile in the Solnhofen limestones of Germany, now recognized as a genuine intermediary, the incidence of missing links is still very limited.
This chapter on difficulties was welcomed by reviewers for its honesty. Nevertheless, it was also strategically significant. Darwin chose to write only about the ‘difficulties’ that he could answer, however tentatively. The difficulties were all of a biological nature. He expected a barrage of factual challenges and provided his answers straight away.
Deliberately, he omitted the two issues that would have occurred to everybody. He avoided any discussion of what evolutionary theory might have to say about human origins, and he sidestepped any debate about a divine presence in the natural world. He remembered the bitter disputes over Vestiges. No matter how seriously and cautiously he might treat evolutionary questions he knew that anything he said was bound to ignite furious controversy. So in this book, he was completely silent on the subject of human origins, although he did refer in several places to mankind as an example of specific biological details. Not wishing to appear too revolutionary, however, or openly to attack the cherished beliefs of the faithful, he remarked in the conclusion that, if his views were accepted, ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’.11
Similarly he purposefully avoided the first origin of life. He had no systematic history of beginnings to offer, no primeval soup or creative spark. At the end of his book he did mention the likelihood of all ancestral organisms originating in one primordial form. Such ancient origins, he privately believed, were lost in the mists of time and were essentially irreclaimable. When he needed to, he spoke cautiously of the creator, aware that his book might otherwise be labelled subversive. But he was careful not to allow the creator any active role in subsequent biological proceedings. In the first edition of Origin of Species Darwin mentioned the origin of this one primordial form as if it were an entirely natural process. In the second edition he used more obviously religious terminology, including an anonymous comment, in actuality made to him in a letter by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, that it was possible to conceive of a creator who allowed species to ‘make themselves’; and that the first organic forms had acquired life from the ‘breath of the creator’.12 He evidently did not wish to be perceived as an atheist. For a book that would claim in its title to address the origin of species, Darwin’s text in fact refused to propose any theory of absolute origins.
By the end, he had set out one of the most densely impressive proposals of the century. Although in the first edition he did not compare his work directly with those who had gone before, his theory was none the less distinctive. He differed from Lamarck, and his evolutionary grandfather Dr Erasmus Darwin, in that he steered clear of any doctrine of necessary progression or inner striving towards perfection. While Darwin cautiously made space in his scheme for some direct effect of the environment on organisms – the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was popularly assu
med to be the main feature of Lamarck’s system – the chief difference between them was that Darwin did not allow his organisms any future goal, no teleology or divine power pulling them forwards, no internal effort or act of will that might drive the adaptive changes in specific directions. In Darwin’s view organisms shifted randomly. A well-adapted organism might be extremely simple. An insect was as wonderfully adapted as a man.
More significantly he felt sure that he differed from Robert Chambers, the anonymous Mr Vestiges, in the solidity of his information, the tightly organized and well-developed theory of change, and his decision to limit the book’s scope to one restricted problem and not deal with grand questions of the evolution of the universe, the first sparks of life or the future of the human mind. This certainly made his book dull in comparison with Vestiges. But in return it gave him superior standing in scientific circles. Tellingly, he differed most notably from Chambers in putting his name to the text. On the Origin of Species was issued with the name of an author on the title page, an author already established as an accredited expert in the field and whose intellectual standing was made plain by the initials of his Cambridge degree and membership of learned societies. The same factors also went some way towards establishing his social and educational difference from Wallace.
There could be no mistaking the weight of thought that lay behind every word, the judicious strategies, the powerful, transformative metaphors, the interlocking double-punch of detail and breadth of vision. Although he subsequently complained that he had been rushed into Origin of Species, that it was nothing but an abstract, that his evidence was truncated, and his footnotes and sources were omitted, the book was undeniably Darwin’s masterpiece.
‘When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history,’ he declared fervently in the closing pages. ‘I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.’
When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!13
All his hopes came to a crescendo. One particularly attractive spot that he visited during walks with Emma in the countryside around Down House filled his mind.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us… There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.14
He hardly anticipated how austere, tragic, dangerous and supremely beautiful his work would appear to others.
Yet who would publish such a book? Hesitantly, in the early months of 1859, Darwin asked Lyell if John Murray might be interested, the same John Murray who published Lyell’s books and who in 1845 had issued the second edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches. Murray was ideal for several reasons. He and Darwin had enjoyed a businesslike relationship over the Journal of Researches. Murray was interested in science, especially geology and chemistry, and well accustomed to initiating shrewd publishing moves like the Home and Colonial Library, a series of edifying works for the middle classes, and the famous Handbooks, the first holiday guidebooks for Victorians, predating Baedekers by a few years.
More than this, Murray was rapidly becoming one of the most important scientific publishers of the Victorian era. His doors in Albemarle Street, in the centre of literary London, were open to authors of all shades of opinion. Murray offered a contract and Darwin gratefully accepted, the start of a relationship that lasted for the rest of his life.
The constant writing, however, was eating away at Darwin’s health. ‘My God how I long for my stomach’s sake to wash my hands of it – for at least one long spell,’ he complained. ‘I am becoming as weak as a child,’ he groaned to Hooker, ‘miserably unwell & shattered.’ The summer of 1859 passed in a turmoil of proof-reading. All Darwin’s doubts about his writing style returned with a vengeance. ‘There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement and proposition in a wrong or awkward form’, he reflected afterwards.15 Emma Darwin helped whenever she could. She read the Origin in full during the proof stage and loyally tried to help her husband convey his thoughts accurately to readers. There is no evidence that she tried to censor his text. On the contrary, the two of them discussed awkward sentences in the evenings until they found a form that captured what he was really trying to say, and she would tease him about his poor use of commas. Lyell read the proofs while he travelled around the continent on his summer holidays.
At the last minute Darwin adjusted the title according to Murray’s recommendation. Darwin’s first suggestion was apparently too complicated: ‘An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection’. Common sense suggested to Murray that the words ‘abstract’, ‘essay’ and ‘varieties’ should go, and that ‘natural selection’, a term with which Murray thought the public would not be familiar, ought to be explained. The agreed title was hardly less cumbersome: On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
He was in an absorbed, slavish, overworked state, he told William Darwin Fox in a letter. ‘My abominable volume… has cost me so much labour that I almost hate it.’ Sometimes he recoiled from seeing nature the way his selection theory demanded. ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low & horridly cruel works of nature!’ he once exclaimed to Hooker.16 ‘I have been so wearied and exhausted of late,’ he complained in September 1859. ‘I have for months doubted whether I have not been throwing away time & labour for nothing.’
Then, on 1 October 1859, he recorded in his diary, ‘Finished proofs’, and calculated that the whole process had taken thirteen months and ten days from start to finish. On 2 October he left Down House, exhausted and sickly, and made his way to a water cure establishment in Ilkley, at the foot of the Yorkshire moors. ‘I am worn out and must have rest… Hydropathy and rest – perhaps that will make a man of me.’17
His book was published in London on 24 November 1859. Darwin was in Ilkley on the day of publication, returning home a fortnight later.
CHAPTER 4
Controversy
The tidal wave of comment began almost immediately. Despite all Darwin’s carefully amassed evidence, and his repeated invitations to the reader to consider the issue impartially, Victorians found it nearly impossible to accept the idea of gradual change in animals and plants, and equally hard to displace God from the creative process. Yet this volume, and the ensuing debate, placed the issue of evolution before the public in a form that could not be ignored. The essence of Darwin’s proposal was that living beings should not be regarded as the carefully constructed creations of a divine authority but as the products of entirely natural processes. As might be expected, there were scientific, theological and philosophical objections from all quarters, often mixed up together. Were human b
eings to be included? Should science be allowed to address questions that up until then were the business of theologians? What was the purpose of our world if there were no reason for the existence of virtue? How could an ape be my grandfather?
Journalists, men of letters, merchants, businessmen, educators and ordinary men and women added their voices to the throng. Bishops, poets, kennel-hands and governesses read the book. Even Queen Victoria took an interest, although she confided to her daughter that she expected it would be too difficult to understand. Nor was the reaction confined to Britain. In France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia and North America, and progressively all over the globe, people from every walk of life discussed the idea of evolution by natural selection and relocated this controversial issue within their own cultural contexts. It was one of the first genuinely public debates about science to stretch across general society. These varied responses, evocative of the cultural diversity of the nineteenth century, remind us that the introduction of new ideas is rarely straightforward and that the past histories of science have involved many different forms of publication, many different audiences and many different languages as well as the ideas themselves.