by Paul Johnson
By the early 1830s, evolution was rapidly becoming the consensus of scientists studying organic life. The term was first used, or rather emphasized, in a heavyweight publication in Lyell’s Principles of Geology, when he insisted that “the testacea [shellfish] of the ocean existed first, until some of them, by gradual evolution, were improved into those inhabiting the land.” Darwin, on his Beagle travels, encountered innumerable examples of evolution at all levels, including the highest—hence his emotional belief that the gap between savages and civilized men was greater than that between wild and domesticated animals. He saw, in short, that evolution had occurred. What he wanted to discover was why it had occurred, as a prelude to finding out how it had occurred.
Darwin never got to the latter question because, as we shall see, he missed a vital trick in the game he was playing. But reading Malthus, he concluded, gave him the answer to why: Species evolved because they had to, to survive at all. He read it in what, from his account, was a state of emotional fervor. It tied in exactly with his feelings on first seeing the “savages” of Tierra del Fuego. Life was a ferocious struggle not only between species but within them. This was because the fecundity of production in life forms greatly exceeded any increase in their food supplies. And the struggle itself was the engine of evolution, for it meant that only those forms whose variations gave them an edge over their competitors survived, and the process produced not only improved species but also new ones. The phenomenon was not wholly unlike the coral accumulation, which raised atolls and reefs, and it certainly tied in with the variations and developments of finches’ beaks in the Galápagos. For the first time Darwin was able to come to a grand conclusion that united the thrusts of his most exciting discoveries during the Beagle voyage and turned their dynamic power into a mighty engine of scientific explanation. The process of creation that the Bible attributed to God was not necessary because nature did it herself. By a process of selection over countless generations, nature pushed forward those creatures best able to compete, in countless different and often forceful, cruel, and savage ways, for the available food supplies. There was no controlling spirit: The process was autonomous. There was no designer. The improved forms were the result of automatic selection over innumerable generations. The process had been going on throughout history and affected every form of life from plants and sea slugs up to the higher animals and even (one must say this in a whisper to oneself) man himself.
It was still going on. In the Argentine pampas, Darwin had witnessed the descendants of the Spanish settlers hunting down the remaining aboriginal Indians, whom they were soon to exterminate completely in this part of South America. The bows and arrows of the Indians were no match for the firearms of the Argentine soldiers, any more than a Galápagos finch with an inferior beak could compete with a bird with one stronger and better adapted to the war for food. Darwin now had a working theory for his task of understanding evolution. He called it natural selection, and he soon began to see that all his various studies over the whole range of organic forms fitted into it. But a tremendous amount of further study was needed before it could be put to the public backed by the overwhelming proof of the countless examples required. He set to work.
At this point we must pause. That natural selection was and is a remarkable explanation of evolution is not to be doubted. What is more questionable is the horror scenario with which Darwin accompanied it, treating this as not merely occasional and often accidental but as essential and inveterate. To him the horror was unavoidable, which was why he averted his gaze from the spectacle of heavily armed soldiers exterminating Indians. It was nature’s way. But was it? Here we must look more closely at Darwin’s emotional detonator, Malthus’s essay. Malthus wrote at the end of a century in which educated Europeans, especially Englishmen, had become vaguely aware that the population around them was increasing steadily. Fewer children were dying at birth or in infancy. Doctors were much more likely to save lives than hitherto, at every phase of the life cycle. Men and women were living longer. The evidence of population growth was ubiquitous. Smallish medieval towns had already expanded into vast cities, like Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, and Manchester, all of which were still growing fast. London was inflating itself into a megalopolis. There were disturbing aspects of this increase, which was statistically confirmed by censuses, albeit inadequate ones. The poor were no longer tucked away in the countryside but were horrifically visible in city streets and burgeoning slums: long, trailing families of dirty, hungry children, begging and stealing. Travelers reported similar phenomena elsewhere: in Naples, for example, the largest city in southern Europe and “the metropolis of beggars,” as one of them put it.
The phenomenon was profoundly disturbing, and the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a Cambridge graduate and wrangler (honors graduate in math) with a passion for economics, was the first to articulate this concern. He did so in a dramatic manner that appealed strongly to the theatrical, emotional side of Darwin’s nature. Malthus’s theory had a quite simple statistical basis. Without restraints, the reproductive forces in nature increased in geometrical progression. Food supplies, by contrast, increased only in arithmetical progression. At the rate we were going, he argued, the number of mouths would double every twenty-five years. The amount of food would rise only marginally. The result: mass starvation, famine, pestilence, war, and every kind of catastrophe.
Malthus’s aim was to discourage charity and reform the existing poor laws, which, he argued, encouraged the destitute to breed and so aggravated the problem. That was not Darwin’s concern. What struck him was the contrast between geometrical progression (breeding) and arithmetical progression (food supplies). Not being a mathematician, he did not check the reasoning and accuracy behind Malthus’s law. Was he not a Cambridge wrangler? In fact, Malthus’s law was nonsense. He did not prove it. He stated it. What strikes one reading Malthus is the lack of hard evidence throughout. Why did this not strike Darwin? A mystery. Malthus’s only “proof” was the population expansion of the United States. In 1750 the total white population was 1 million. In 1775 it was 2 million. In 1800 it was 4.3 million. Here was his evidence of population doubling every twenty-five years, with annual rates reaching 3 percent. But this did not take into account immigration, still less the reason for mass immigration, the opening up of the Midwest, the largest and richest uncultivated arable region in the world, capable of producing grain and livestock for the entire planet. If Malthus had troubled to inquire further, he would have discovered that the food consumption of the United States had been, and was, increasing per capita all the time, in quantity and quality. He might also have discovered that in England and Wales, living standards, especially food consumption, had been increasing throughout the eighteenth century despite the rise in population, thanks largely to the agricultural revolution, which had enormously raised productivity per acre, both in animal and cereal production, as well as bringing more wasteland into use. It was also worth pointing out that in England and Wales, presumably Malthus’s chief concern, the population had risen from 5.75 million in 1700 to 6 million in 1750 and then to 9.25 million in 1800. It had not doubled in one hundred years, let alone twenty-five.
Ireland would have been a much better example for Malthus to cite. Its population was rising fast and its dependence on a single crop, the potato, increasing. The Irish population in 1700 had been 2.5 million. By 1750 it was 3 million, and by 1800 it had risen to 4.5 million. So in a century, it had nearly doubled. This was nothing like Malthus’s assumption of a doubling every twenty-five years. Had this occurred, the Irish population in 1800 would have been 40 million! In fact the rate of Irish population increase rose after Malthus wrote and undoubtedly was causing concern by 1838 when Darwin read him. In the late 1840s, it produced the kind of catastrophe Malthus predicted. But this was caused by the potato blight, which actually led to more deaths in other countries, such as Poland, where the rise in population was much less. There was no point at
which Malthus’s geometrical/arithmetical rule could be made to square with the known facts. And he had no reason whatsoever to extrapolate from the high American rates to give a doubling effect every twenty-five years everywhere and in perpetuity.
Quite apart from his tragic ignorance of mathematics, or rather his lack of feeling for figures, it is odd that Darwin should have paid so much attention to this superficial, albeit powerful, tract. Odder still that he should have extrapolated still further than Malthus and applied the geometrical/arithmetical ratio to the whole of organic nature, not just human populations. For in the first place, Darwin knew perfectly well that no clear contrast could be made between organic birth rates and food production, because organic and especially animal matter is always a key element in the food chain, and more births mean more food. Darwin should have known and must (I think) have known that it is often the increase in food that produces the higher birth rates. His grandfather certainly knew this. Furthermore, from his own studies, Darwin was aware how rapidly and spectacularly food supplies could be increased by selective breeding and cultivation. Gooseberries, for instance, about which he knew a lot, had been doubled and quadrupled in size and weight in very much less than twenty-five years. Over the past century, England had produced many striking examples of food supplies in a given acreage rising in geometrical progression. But Darwin did not think about these things. He swallowed Malthusianism because it fitted his emotional need; he did not apply the tests and deploy the skepticism that a scientist should. It was a rare lapse from the discipline of his profession. But it was an important one. Oddly enough, the same mistake was made by his chief competitor in the quest for the answer to the why of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace. He was moving the same way as Darwin by a similar training in different parts of the world, including tropical rain forests, and a little later than Darwin read Malthus, and had a similar shock, which precipitated him toward natural selection. Wallace, too, was no mathematician—quite the contrary. He was also, more so than even Darwin was, emotionally prone to the horror scenario and so fell into the same error. Of course the invalidity of Malthus did not affect the validity of natural selection as a good working theory to show why evolution occurred. But its effect on Darwin, by binding him to that scenario, had malign consequences, to which we shall come.
In the meantime, Darwin, while working hard to extend his investigations into natural selection, planned to raise the population on his own account. He decided to get married. He came to this conclusion at about the same time he read Malthus, in 1838, but whereas his reaction to Malthus was emotional, his pondering on marriage was strictly scientific, or at least cerebral. In July, under the heading “This is the Question,” he wrote down the arguments in two parallel columns headed “Marry” and “Not Marry.” His not marry considerations were, loss of freedom and “choice of Society,” “Loss of Time” and “cannot read in the Evenings” and “less money for books,” etc. His “Marry” column was much stronger: “My God it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working & nothing after all—No, no, won’t do.” By contrast, “Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps—Compare this Vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.” No doubt about the outcome: “Marry. Q.E.D.”
But to whom? This secondary question was not difficult to answer. The enormous Darwin-Wedgwood extended family always had plenty of maids and bachelors available. Darwin soon picked his first cousin Emma, granddaughter of the Wedgwood founder and daughter of the owner of the Maer manor and estate. He proposed on November 11 and was promptly accepted. He called her “the most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals.” She said, “He is the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts.” She liked the fact that he was “perfectly sweet tempered,” not “fastidious,” and “humane to animals.” His only fault was that “he has a great dislike to going to the play.” Neither had been quick to marry, and both were glad to, Emma being thirty and Charles thirty-one. On both sides, the heads of the family were delighted, and coughed up handsomely. Joshua Wedgwood II pledged £5,000 in investment capital to bring in income plus an annual allowance of £400. The doctor pledged £10,000 to bring in an annual income of £600. Thus the couple began life with the modern equivalent of $1,250,000 in investment capital and an annual income of $83,000. There was every possibility of these sums being substantially increased.
So Charles Darwin’s lifelong run of good luck continued. Emma was clever, educated, equable, hardworking, industrious, economical, and not least, sensitive. She provided Darwin with ten children, with considerable effort but without fuss or complaint. She attracted him sexually and continued to do so. This was just as well. His Beagle journals show he was highly sexed, noting the Latin American women as “angels gliding down the street,” gowns fitting “the figure closely” with “very white silk stockings and very pretty feet,” plus “black and brilliant eyes.” A new note crept into his scientific jottings as he decided on marriage: “sexual desire makes saliva to flow yes certainly . . . one’s tendency to kiss, & almost bite, that which one sexually loves is probably connected with flow of saliva, & hence with action of mouth & jaws—Lascivious women are described as biting: so do stallions always.” There were also notes on blushing, particularly on the “upper bosom in women,” which he compared to “erection” in men.
If Charles and Emma grew to love each other after their marriage rather than before, that was not unusual for the time, and there was no doubt about the reality of the affection when it came. It was a joke between them that marriage was a form of slavery, but a precious kind. Both came from families that for three generations had opposed the slave trade. Emma had always been by upbringing and inclination a passionate antislaver, and Darwin was to become one as a result of what he had witnessed on his travels. So there was a special irony in his references to her as his “chattel,” and she, for her part, called him frequently her “nigger” or “hairy nigger.” On slavery they were at one, because Darwin carefully avoided raising with her the implications of his division of the races into “civilized” and “savage” ones, and the application of natural selection to the survival or extinction of what he called “inferior” or “lesser” varieties of the human species—“the lower races.”
There was, however, no concealing what she called his “materialism” or lack of religious fervor. Like many other educated men of his generation, Darwin had been slowly, almost imperceptibly, but surely, losing religious faith. To what extent this was hastened by his scientific enquiries, it is impossible to say. He did not object to going to church. But he did not read the Bible or believe in it, except the guidance in conduct provided by the New Testament, whose influence lingered, probably until his death. When he went to Cambridge, he had been reasonably content with the idea of ordination as his future role in life and had been prepared to sign the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. But that was certainly no longer true in the late 1830s. By then his religious posture was best described as indifferent. The word agnostic, which best described it, was not coined until 1861 by his follower T. H. Huxley. Emma’s use of the term materialist was not inaccurate. Darwin was concerned with the physical realities of life on earth and probing their mysteries. He was temperamentally disinclined to probe the possibilities of life after death or to speculate on “salvation.” The one point on which he felt strongly, with growing passion as his life proceeded, was the doctrine of everlasting punishment. He thought it not only untrue but positively evil, and he was prepared to say so among his intimates. By contrast, Emma was, had always been, and remained a sincere and trusting Christian, in dogma a curious combination of nonconformist and Anglican—not uncommon at the time, especially among women of her class and cultural background—but in her rules of personal conduct, a believer whose religion was paramount and ubiquitous in guiding her.
Being vaguely aware of all this, the doctor, Darwin’s father, advised his son in the summer of 1838, before he proposed to Emma, to conceal his religious doubts from her, now and later. In his experience, a husband who made plain his feelings risked damaging the marriage, especially during those periodic crises, usually caused by ill health, to which all unions were liable. A wife who feared for her husband’s salvation through disbelief would worry that the death of either would part them finally for all eternity, and this could become a source of great unhappiness for both. So the doctor advised. But Darwin chose to come clean with Emma and wrote her a letter revealing at least some aspects of his uncertainties. It was this that led her to pronounce him, with strong approval, “transparent.” She replied: