Darwin's Origin of Species

by Janet Browne

  Alfred Russel Wallace played an important role in Darwin’s thinking in this regard. After Wallace’s return to England in 1862 the two had become good friends, each respecting the other’s achievement. Nevertheless, Wallace bowed to what must have seemed the inevitable. Much of the shock of evolution had died down by the time of his return. Darwin’s Origin of Species occupied the front line and the word ‘Darwinism’ was already circulating as a synonym for evolutionary theory. Wallace’s position was therefore different from that of Lyell, Hooker or Huxley, and perhaps uncomfortable, being neither disciple nor primary author. Eventually he wrote one of the best nineteenth-century texts on natural selection, modestly calling it Darwinism (1889). Somehow he never gained the celebrity or status in Victorian science that Darwin achieved and is often regarded by historians as an outsider, a fascinating figure who joined the establishment only briefly. Increasingly he and Darwin agreed to differ on particular points. Wallace revealed that he did not like the expression ‘natural selection’ and in 1868 persuaded Darwin to introduce the expression ‘survival of the fittest’, taken from Herbert Spencer’s writings.

  Their main difference was over the origin of human beings. Wallace wrote two compelling articles on human evolution in the 1860s. In the second, published in the 1869 Quarterly Review, he declared that natural selection was insufficient to explain all the evolutionary beginnings of humankind. He proposed instead that natural selection pushed our apish ancestors only to the threshold of humani ty. At that point, physical evolution stopped and something else took over: the power of mind. The human mind alone continued to advance, human societies emerged, cultural imperatives increased, a mental and moral domain became significant and civilization took shape. Not every society developed at the same rate – primitives were slow, Caucasians fast. For all his genuine social democratic principles, Wallace believed in a hierarchy of savage and civilized. Darwin was taken aback. ‘I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,’ he exclaimed in surprise. It was partly the impact of seeing this article that encouraged him to express his own views fully in The Descent of Man. He was determined to show that everything human – language, morality, religious sense, maternal affection, civilization, appreciation of beauty – had emerged from animals.

  The book was large and Darwin solicited assistance from many friends and scholars already working within evolutionary anthropology, such as Huxley or the talented German-speaking naturalists Ernst Haeckel and Carl Vogt. The text included an important new idea that he called ‘sexual selection’. This accounted, as he thought, not only for the differences between males and females – the secondary sexual characteristics as they are usually called – but also the differences between human races. Darwin used the terminology of his day, writing of racial characteristics and racial ‘types’. He felt certain that sexual selection was ‘the main agent in forming the races of man’.

  The idea was relatively simple. Animals, he said, possess many trifling features that are developed only because they contribute to reproductive success. These features have no adaptive or survival value. The classic example is the male peacock that develops large tail feathers to enhance its chances in the mating game even though the same feathers actively impede its ability to fly from predators. The female peahen, argued Darwin, chooses the most well-adorned mate and thereby passes his characteristics on to the next generation. It was a system, he stressed, that depended on individual choice. In The Descent of Man Darwin devoted nearly half the book to establishing the existence of this sexual selection in birds, mammals and insects. Wallace disagreed with him on several substantial points, particularly the purpose of protective coloration in birds and insects.

  Darwin then extended the idea to explain the divergence of early humans into the racial groups that physical anthropologists described. Preference for certain skin colours was a good example. Early men would choose wives according to local ideas of beauty, he suggested. The skin colour of an entire population would gradually shift as a consequence. ‘The strongest and most vigorous men… would generally have been able to select the more attractive women… who would rear on average a greater number of children.’7 Societies would have dissimilar ideas about what constituted attractiveness and so the physical features of various groups would gradually diverge. In effect, humans would make themselves. The same argument applied to mental characteristics, pushing some groups away from the tribal life towards more ‘civilized’ values and patterns of behaviour.

  Darwin ventured on to thorny ground when he applied these notions to human culture and behaviour. His naturalism recast the notion of human diversity into strictly evolutionary and biological terms, reinforcing nineteenth-century beliefs in racial superiority, where whites rested comfortably at the top of the scale. He also revealed that he believed in innate male superiority, honed by aeons of hunting and fighting. Whereas he felt that much of the animal kingdom was governed by female choice – that female birds choose their mate according to display, song or nestbuilding behaviour – he regarded advanced human society as patriarchal. In civilized regimes he felt it was self-evident that men, because of their well-developed intellectual and entrepreneurial capacities, ruled the social order and that they would do the choosing. In this way he applied biology to human culture and saw in every society a ‘natural’ basis for male-centred behaviour. After publication, early feminists and suffragettes bitterly attacked this doctrine, feeling that women were being ‘naturalized’ into a purely biological, submissive role. Many medical writers understood Darwin to be supporting the assumption that women’s brains were smaller and less evolutionarily developed than men’s, or that the female body was especially prone to disorders if the reproductive functions were denied.

  The rest of the book tackled hot topics such as the development of human morals from animal emotions and the onset of speech (which drew Darwin into more debate with Friedrich Max Müller). Darwin needed to show that language was not a fundamental dividing line between mankind and animals. Unlike Müller, Darwin thought that speech emerged from imitating natural sounds. ‘It does not appear altogether incredible, that some unusually wise apelike animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger. And this would have been a first step in the formation of a language.’8 Darwin was daring when dealing with the religious sense, proposing that this was ultimately nothing more than a primitive urge to bestow a cause on inexplicable natural events.

  He also discussed likely fossil intermediaries between ape and human and mapped out a provisional family tree, in which he took information mostly from fellow evolutionists like Haeckel and Huxley. Even though there were by then a few isolated fragments of Neanderthal skulls available for study in European museums, these had not yet been identified as from ancestral humans. Huxley, for instance, regarded the original puzzling fragment from the Neander river valley as part of the thickened skull of a congenital idiot. The real advances in understanding fossil mankind were to take place several decades after Darwin’s death. Nevertheless, Darwin put forward a proposal. At some point, Darwin suggested, anthropoid apes descended from the trees, started walking erect, began using their hands to hold or hunt, and developed their brains.

  The early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail… our progenitors, no doubt, were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest-clad spot. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons.9

  The book closed with a flourish. At the end, he echoed Huxley’s battle with the Bishop of Oxford at the British Association some ten years previously by saying that he would rather be descended from a brave little monkey than from a savage who delights in torturing his enemies.

  Scholars nowadays agree that The Descent of Man offered a far-reaching natur
alistic account of human evolution but did not change many minds. The people who already accepted evolution continued to believe. Those who did not accept evolution continued to disbelieve. Few readers wished to shrink the gap between mankind and animals quite so dramatically however. If these ideas were accepted, wrote the Edinburgh Review, the constitution of society would be destroyed. Wallace was generous about the book, praising it in letters and in reviews. Most reviewers noted Darwin’s evident sincerity and depth of learning. Nevertheless there must have been a sense of déjà vu. The animal–human boundary, the human soul and the divine origin of human morals had been the main topics of debate for ten or twelve years. Young rationalist thinkers like Leslie Stephen spoke for many of the coming generation by saying ‘What possible difference can it make whether I am sprung from an ape or an angel?’

  With The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which appeared a year later, Darwin completed the account of evolution he began with Origin of Species. None of his other later writings had anything like the same public effect, although several of his final pieces, for instance on mental processes in infants, stimulated researchers. His last book was on earthworms (1881), one of the most popular books he ever published, full of natural history observations made on worms from his own garden, a symbolic and peaceful occupation that provided him with much pleasure in his fading years. Towards the end he slowed down, preferred to work on plants, and be with his family. In his seventies he enjoyed writing a little autobiography, not intending it for publication. In it he reviewed his life with great charm and modesty. Yet what a life it had been. Few men reach such heights of intellectual power or have their views discussed so widely and with such vigour. Even if people did not think that they were descended from apes, they talked about it ceaselessly.

  For those who did believe, Darwin became a kind of prophet, a secular saint. From the middle of the 1870s his life took on many of the trappings of celebrity culture, rather as Charles Dickens, opera singer Jenny Lind or other famous figures in the Victorian period discovered to their cost. Darwin’s portrait was circulated in illustrated magazines, he received requests for autographs, free copies of his books, money and advice, and his home was visited by sightseers, keen to catch a glimpse of a man whose work had so notably contributed to nineteenth-century debate. The years of controversy generated extraordinary fame. Young scientists increasingly asked to be admitted to his presence for a kind of personal benediction, either to eat lunch with the family, or to enter his study, which became in people’s minds an inner sanctum, the place where great thought had taken place.

  Loved by his family, appreciated and admired by his friends, an intellectual beacon to many, in turn respected and reviled, Darwin came to the end of his life knowing that he had brought about an extraordinary transformation in scientific thought. His identity had become subsumed in that of his book. ‘If I had been a friend of myself, I should have hated me,’ he remarked with some humour to Huxley at the height of the controversy. ‘I wish I could feel all was deserved by me.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Legacy

  Twenty-three years after publishing the book that made him famous, Darwin died at home, aged seventy-three. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in London, the more usual location for state funerals, royal marriages and national celebrations. Such a burial site for the author of On the Origin of Species was ironic in many ways, for the nation was well aware of Darwin’s reputation for having undermined church authority. By the time of his death, however, Darwin was fêted as a great scientific celebrity, a grand old man of science, someone who had looked further and seen more than others, of an intellectual rank as great as Newton, and certainly deserving to be honoured in the country’s primary commemorative setting. Professors, churchmen, politicians, medical luminaries, aristocrats and members of the public crowded the Abbey to see him to the grave. ‘Happy is the man that findeth wisdom’ sang the choir. It is hardly possible nowadays for us to guess whether Darwin died a happy man but he was certainly revered for his achievement and personal character, the very model of what a man of science ought to be.

  However, despite this reverence, the cultural world was entering a different phase, recognizably more modern in tone. The fierce religious controversies of earlier days were subsiding. By regarding the Bible as an allegorical text filled with spiritual meaning, it became possible for Christian believers to retain their belief in the truth of God’s message while also appreciating scientific findings as a different kind of truth. Moreover, the power of the Church itself was on the wane. Many of these changes were retrospectively attributed to the Origin of Species. Honours paid to Darwin at his funeral liberally acknowledged his important role in constructing the modern frame of mind.

  His scientific legacy, though, was not nearly as secure. As fresh areas of research opened up in the biological sciences, and new kinds of professionals took up a wider range of problems with more sophisticated techniques, the original thesis of natural selection was modified almost beyond recognition. There was dispute about the central concepts of competition, success and ‘fitness’, particularly in the way these interlaced with contemporary political ideologies. Alternative evolutionary systems based on direct responses to the environment came into play. Indeed, it is frequently said that Darwinism was eclipsed by other systems of evolutionary thought towards the end of the nineteenth century, not to be restored until a ‘new synthesis’ was put forward in the 1940s.

  Much of this eclipse rested on fresh critiques of the main struts of Darwin’s original proposals. Social Darwinism was criticized as it climbed to pre-eminence in political thought around 1900. Wallace came to reject the competitive aspects of Darwinian biology as applied to human society and supported utopian socialist principles. Elsewhere J. Keir Hardy argued that progress took place via group selection in which individuals felt sympathy for one another. In Russia, the prevailing ideology was that the main struggle for existence was not species against species, but species against the environment. The émigré Russian Prince, Peter Kropotkin, pushed this furthest in Mutual Aid (1902), arguing that evolution’s main driving force was cooperation, exactly the reverse of competition. Socialist thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw insisted on the moral superiority of Lamarckian ideas, where the effects of the environment were believed to be more important in shaping human character than inbuilt biological properties. J. B. S. Haldane confidently declared ‘Darwinism is dead’.

  The operating mechanism of selection was criticized too, encouraged by the work of the young critic and writer Samuel Butler (1835–1902). Butler’s Evolution Old and New (1879) downplayed Charles Darwin’s scheme in favour of those of Dr Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. Butler proposed that Charles Darwin was merely one in a long line of evolutionary thinkers, and that Origin of Species misdirected biologists to seek struggle and mechanistic answers where older schemes had far more to offer in recognizing that organisms might respond adaptively to the environment. Butler and Darwin had argued fiercely in the last years of Darwin’s life over the text of a biography of Dr Erasmus Darwin, a quarrel that had begun in an unfortunate breach of etiquette on Darwin’s part and quickly came to represent a clash between generations and world systems – for Darwin was unable to control Butler as he was accustomed to control his other disciples. It ended in complete personal estrangement. This quarrel intrigues historians because of the way it reveals cracks opening up in the Darwinian edifice. Butler’s views chimed neatly with increasing debate over the relative roles of heredity and environment, not only in biological theory but also in understanding human mental development from child to adult and the structure of society. Galton’s catchphrase of ‘nature or nurture’ (biology or environment) became an issue of considerable concern.

  Furthermore, even though there was great enthusiasm among naturalists for reconstructing the history of life on earth, it soon appeared to be the case that non-Darwinian, pre-directed paths of evolution were mor
e attractive. Palaeontologists took a lead in this area, probably because of the spectacular fossil discoveries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the American West. The American palaeontologist Theodore Eimer claimed that evolutionary history had not taken the shape of a Darwinian branching tree but proceeded in a straight line. In his eyes, natural selection was powerless except to weed out obviously deleterious trends. A much-discussed example was that of the Irish Elk, which was thought to have become extinct because of the dramatic over-development of its antlers – the suggestion was that the antlers had acquired a momentum of their own and eventually became a liability not an advantage.

  Alpheus Hyatt, another noted fossil expert, similarly argued that adaptive trends almost always carried on beyond their usefulness. Ultimately, he said, a species would be driven to ‘racial senility’ and extinction. His colleague, Edward Drinker Cope, alternatively felt that evolution roughly followed the same course as the embryo of an individual, sometimes accelerating, sometimes dropping back. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the world’s greatest natural history museums, and a committed Darwinist, believed that each group of organisms experienced a period of rapid diversification at the start of its history, which then stabilized into several steady lines of development. Like Eimer and Cope he did not see in the fossil record any of the multiple branching described by Darwin. Indeed, he claimed entirely different animal groups might progress along roughly the same routes, in the development of horns for example.

  Such straight-line evolutionary histories, with their subtexts of inbuilt senescence or death from over-specialization, lent authoritative support to increasingly pessimistic views about the human future. Primitive cultures could now be regarded as in the ‘infancy’ of their development. More advanced societies might be set on lines of development that led them through the heights of civilization to corruption or decay. Those who transgressed society’s conventions, such as criminals, homosexuals or the mentally deranged, could be categorized as ‘throwbacks’ to some racial past. As optimism in continued progress drained away, such concerns were vividly expressed in late nineteenth-century fiction. H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895) took a traveller into a future where humans had deteriorated into two species, the brutal underground Morlocks and the effete overground Eloi, a parable of the political and social divisions that Wells discerned in his own day. Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) played on largely the same themes, while Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy drew powerfully on the idea of hereditary degeneration and the inflexible pull of biological forces on humanity.