The Reluctant Mr. Darwin

by David Quammen

  Indoors was where he developed his ideas. So, notwithstanding my bias toward field biologists, and the importance of those vivid early experiences in fueling Darwin’s later thought, I’ve made a counterintuitive choice: to omit the voyage (except as background) from this account, and to take up the story just afterward. Why ignore the most famous episode of Darwin’s life? Three reasons. First, because it is the most famous. Whatever else you may know about Charles Darwin, you probably know that he once sailed on a ship called the Beagle, visited the Galápagos Islands, and saw there some interesting reptiles and birds. My second reason is a matter of economy and scope. To say it more plainly: brevity. Darwin’s life story has been told many times, by some excellent biographers (notably Janet Browne, in her magisterial two-volume Charles Darwin, and the team of Adrian Desmond and James Moore, in their trenchant 800-page Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist) and by some less excellent ones, but most people haven’t read that story even once. Of course in each telling it’s a slightly different story, depending on selection, omission, and the biases and purposes of the teller. My purpose has been to create a concise treatment, part narrative and part essay, accurate but pleasantly readable, of this huge and deeply complicated subject. I wanted to sketch, in not many pages, the growth and development of a man of ideas, with particular focus on just one of them. Third reason for skipping the Beagle years: Darwin’s later intellectual adventures are, in my opinion, even more exciting than the romps across Patagonia and the Galápagos.

  Chief among those adventures is the discovery of natural selection. That idea, taken freshly, with its full implications, is marvelous and shocking and grim. It’s even more marvelous when you consider its provenance: a deeply radical insight from a deeply cautious man. The shy patriarch with the bald head and the full beard, the breeder of pigeons and primroses, the very private Englishman who wound up buried in Westminster Abbey, the fellow with a good face for bank notes, presents to us a comfortably dowdy image; but not everything about Charles Darwin is so comfortable. At the core of his work is a difficult, scary materialism. That’s one of the themes I try to explore in this book. Another is that it was difficult and scary even to him.

  The Fabric Falls

  1837–1839

  1

  In the early weeks of 1837, Charles Darwin was a busy young man living in London. Ambitious, intellectually awakened from a drowsy postadolescence, excited by opportunity, he was newly defining his life. He didn’t yet recognize the awful scope of the idea that was growing inside him. On February 12, he turned twenty-eight.

  Darwin had been home from his round-the-world journey aboard the survey ship Beagle just since the previous October. He was glad to be back on solid ground, walking floors that didn’t tilt with the waves. During the course of the trip, which had originally been projected to last only two or three years but ended up stretching to half a decade, he had transformed himself drastically—from an unfocused graduate of divinity schooling at Cambridge, with a gentleman’s passion for bird shooting and a collector’s enthusiasm for rare beetles, into a serious student of geology and natural history. Even his widowered father, the grumpy and obese Dr. Robert Darwin, saw a difference. The doctor had once scolded him for being a feckless young sport, who cared only for bird-hunting and rat-catching and would be “a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” But now Charles’s reputation as a scientific traveler had preceded him home, and papa was placated. On first glimpse of his son after the voyage, Dr. Darwin turned to Charles’s sisters and said, “Why, the shape of his head is quite altered.” If it wasn’t true phrenologically, it was apt as metaphor. The shape of his thinking had changed. It would soon change even more.

  After a brief visit with his father and sisters at the family home in Shrewsbury (a medium-sized town up in Shropshire), and then a short stay in Cambridge near his old university chums, Darwin had come to the big city and rented rooms in a house on Great Marlborough Street, within walking distance of important scientific institutions such as the Zoological Society and the British Museum. He hated London, with its Dickensian smog and clatter, but he had purposes for tolerating it. His days were full of follow-up chores involving his scientific harvest from the Beagle voyage. That harvest included facts, notes, and ideas, but also mammal pelts, bird skins, pickled reptiles and fish, dried plants, and fossils. He had sent back crates, bottles, and casks of specimens from South America during the ship’s years of surveying there, and had brought more with him on board, most of which were now farmed out to experts for identification and study. He had been a scientific nobody when he set sail on the Beagle, as unofficial naturalist (there was another naturalist, more official though less ardent, until that fellow resigned in a jealous huff) and social companion to the captain; but he’d proved himself vastly competent. His productive collecting in exotic locales and his sharply observant letters had given him some buzz in scientific circles even before he got home. He was considered a talented comer, and the uptake on his specimens was good. Richard Owen, a brilliant anatomist at the Royal College of Surgeons, had agreed to describe the fossil mammals. George Waterhouse, a museum curator, took on the living mammal species and the insects. John Gould, a respected ornithologist, would do the birds. Thomas Bell, a dentist turned zoology professor, got the reptiles. Darwin himself had meanwhile begun writing a book. This was a big step for him, implying a new level of confidence in his own observations and voice. A book, imagine. Yes, because he’d seen things that few other people ever had. He’d gathered impressions and data, carefully. It would be a pastiche of travel narrative, cultural portraiture, geology, and natural history derived from his diary of the voyage.

  The unwritten book was already under contract to a publisher—as arranged by the Beagle’s captain, Robert FitzRoy, a very capable man but a cantankerous one, aristocratic and tippy. It had been FitzRoy’s perfectionism, as well as complicating circumstances, that stretched a two-year voyage almost to five. Now the captain wanted a multi-volume record of his ship’s recent expeditions, and he was glad to slot Darwin’s book into the package; FitzRoy himself would do another volume, if he ever got around to it. Darwin set himself going and, energized by the prospect of becoming a published author, scribbled hard. The Beagle diary was his core material, but he wanted to add narrative flow, a few ideas, and some polish. He confided to a Cambridge friend, William Darwin Fox (who happened also to be a second cousin), his discovery that “writing is most tedious & difficult work.” But he had one advantage that made the task easier: a sizable annual allowance from his father. He wasn’t pressed to go looking, at least not yet, for a day job.

  Socially he was in demand, as a returned traveler with stories to tell who happened also to be an eligible bachelor. For a while, that suited him fine. Charles Lyell, the rising star of English geologists, whose three-volume Principles of Geology was changing the way people thought about earth sciences, had welcomed him as a new friend and protégé. The inventor Charles Babbage began inviting him to fancy parties. Darwin’s elder brother Erasmus, trained as a physician but with no desire to practice (and no need, thanks to their father’s money), was already ensconced as a bon vivant in the city. Erasmus, hosting small gatherings at his own place on Great Marlborough Street, pulled Charles into a circle of bright people that included the political writer Harriet Martineau and the crusty Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. Leonard Horner, an eminent educator and scientist, had a house full of unmarried daughters to which Darwin paid some flirtatious visits, though not as many as Mr. Horner would have liked. Darwin’s five years on the Beagle had been lonesome, notwithstanding the meals with FitzRoy and the cramped cabin he’d shared with an officer and a midshipman, and during these first months in London he made up for it, basking in clever dinner-table chat, flattering attention, and female company. With Lyell vouching for him, he was elected to the Athenaeum Club (in the same group, speaking of Dickensian milieu, that included Charles Dickens himself), and that became his refuge f
or dining quietly and reading the journals. He attended meetings of the Zoological Society and the Geological Society, sometimes presenting a short paper himself. None of it kept him from progress on the book. He had taught himself discipline, as well as a lot of geology and biology, aboard the Beagle.

  Just days after settling into London, he met with John Gould to talk about his bird specimens. Gould called his attention to a bunch that Darwin had collected in the Galápagos archipelago, six hundred miles off the west coast of South America, during the ship’s brief stop there in late September and October 1835, on the way home by circumnavigation. They were all smallish and brownish, these birds, but with various shapes and sizes of beaks. Darwin had taken them to be a mixed assortment of wrens, grosbeaks, orioles, and finches, and hadn’t bothered to label which ones came from which islands. The lack of labeling had been, in retrospect, a frustrating mistake. But as a field naturalist with wide-angle interests, uncommitted to any theory, he hadn’t known just what he was looking for. In January 1837, four months after the Beagle’s return, he’d heard Gould deliver a preliminary report on the wren-grosbeak-oriole bunch at a Zoological Society meeting. It contained a surprise: They were all finches, Gould said. Big beaks and little beaks, sharp beaks and blunt beaks, there were a dozen species, closely related but distinct, representing some unfamiliar new group. Now, at the private consultation with Darwin in March, Gould went further: thirteen species of finches, all unknown to science. And not only that. Among another bunch, which Darwin had recognized as mockingbirds, Gould found three distinct mockingbird species. Unlike the finches, the mockingbirds had reached Gould with island-of-origin tags; because they were less diverse, less confusingly intermixed in the wild, Darwin had been more meticulous as he collected them. Funny thing about these mockingbirds, said Gould. Each species, according to your labels, inhabits a different island.

  That was weird, thrilling news. One species per island, all new? It confirmed something Darwin had whispered to himself in his ornithological notes while the Beagle was still at sea. Isn’t it strange, he wrote, that these different kinds of bird, distinct but related, filling similar roles, live separately on closely neighboring islands? Maybe, contrary to received wisdom about the origin of all forms of life, they’re just varieties derived from a common stock. Maybe they weren’t created in the theological sense—that is, by a divine act of special creation for each. Maybe they just…happened. “If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks,” Darwin told himself, and no one else, “the Zoology of Archipelagoes will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of species.”

  He was more right than he knew. Species weren’t stable, and islands held some of the best clues.

  Other bits of unsettling data came to him, around the same time, in reports on his other specimens. Richard Owen had identified a giant extinct ground sloth, a giant extinct armadillo, and what he took to be a giant extinct capybara among Darwin’s fossils from the South American mainland. It seemed oddly coincidental—to Darwin, if not to Owen—that such extinct forms should be found in the same geographical areas inhabited by living versions of sloth, capybara, and armadillo. John Gould announced at the next Zoological Society meeting, on March 14, that Mr. Darwin had discovered a new species of flightless bird, a smallish rhea—Gould named it Rhea darwinii—in southern Patagonia, just adjacent to the distributional range of the larger rhea, already known. In the meantime Thomas Bell was finding island-by-island differences among the Galápagos iguanas. And now Darwin remembered something the vice-governor of the islands had told him about the giant tortoises: They too were distinguishable, island by island, from the shapes of their shells. Darwin put these facts together and asked himself why? Why should forms closely resembling one another, alive or extinct, be found clustered side by side?

  It’s not possible to say exactly when Charles Darwin became an evolutionist. He didn’t blurt out his Eureka! in a letter, or a journal paper, or a fevered talk to one of the societies. At this point he was circumspect, uneasy, and mum. He had reason to be. England was a tumultuous place in the late 1830s, with a badly depressed economy, a new Poor Law replacing old-fashioned charity with grim workhouses, and a Chartist movement (named for its “People’s Charter,” a platform of working-class empowerment) staging mass protests to demand democratic reforms. Early evolutionary ideas about progressive change among species, as suggested by French zoologists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, had been absorbed by English and Scottish radicals into their arguments for progressive social change, causing nervy discomfort to the Whigs who controlled Parliament and the Anglican prelates who ran the national Church, with all its wealth and other vested interests. And their discomfort couldn’t be lightly ignored. Christianity as interpreted by Anglican leaders was not just the predominant religion in England; it was the official religion. The country hadn’t had a revolution since 1688, and Chartism plus economic depression suggested that another might be imminent. Darwin, taking his first steps over the line between tradition and evolution, found himself occupying ground near those battle lines of class and religious warfare. He moved carefully. Didn’t announce his apostasy. Still, it’s possible to approximate the timing of this intellectual conversion: March of 1837, soon after his talks with Gould and Owen. Species changed, one into another. He knew it. He just didn’t know how.

  Months afterward he made another note, regarding the curious characteristics of his South American fossils and the Galápagos species he’d seen: “These facts origin (especially latter) of all my views.” But for now, he was keeping those views to himself.

  2

  He didn’t use the word “evolution,” not until later, not for decades. In July of that year he began what he called his notebooks on the “transmutation” of species. The first of them was a pocket-size booklet bound in brown leather with a metal clasp, small enough to be carried in a jacket, private enough to hold wild ideas and heretical doubts.

  On the cover he labeled it simply “B.” Notebook “A,” begun about the same time, was devoted to geology. As a heading on the first page of “B” he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. This first Erasmus was a well-known physician and popular poet, a colorful fellow of big appetites—libidinous, gouty, unconventional in his views—who fathered a pack of legitimate and illegitimate kids and wrote erotic verse about plants. The name Erasmus had been passed down to an uncle, and then to Charles’s brother, while Charles himself got a different legacy: the propensity for scientific speculation. Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that “all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,” and that the common lineage possessed a capacity “of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,” with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring. Erasmus Darwin had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence, but now he served his grandson both as a family forerunner in transmutationist thinking and as a point of departure. Charles’s version would be clear, persuasive, and eventually supported by evidence—or he wouldn’t let it see print.

  He wrote the notebook entries in telegraphic style without much concern for punctuation or grammar. There were insertions, cross-outs, abbreviations, bad spellings. He had trouble with “heredetary,” and with “Scicily” (or was it “Siicily”?), an island less unique zoologically than the Galápagos, though harder to spell. He was brainstorming. The written words were just a record for his own memory. He started with big questions. “Why is life short.” And, following Grandpa Erasmus: Why is sex so important? From there he went straight to a crucial insight—that the mixing bowl of sexual reproduction somehow allows creatures to vary. Offspring differ from their parents. Siblings differ from one another, unless they happen to be identical twins. Body patterns cha
nge slightly from generation to generation; so do aspects of intellect and instinct. One result: “adaptation.” To what eventual effect? Put a single pair of cats or dogs onto an island, Darwin suggested, and let them breed there, slowly increasing in number despite the pressure of enemies; then “who will dare say what result.” He dared, but only to himself: “According to this view animals, on separate islands, ought to become different if kept long enough.” There was something about islands. Their simplicity and isolation and anomalous faunas, like premises of a thought experiment, helped clear the head.

  For instance, take the Galápagos tortoises and mockingbirds, or the miniature foxes he’d seen in the Falklands. “Each species changes,” Darwin wrote. This alone was a bold statement, explicitly contradicting orthodox tenets, both in science and in religion. Furthermore, changing species diverge continually from one another, he hazarded, producing the gaps between genera and still broader categories of classification, such as family, order, class: the diversity of life. On one notebook page he drew a rough diagram of a lineage, like a tree trunk, splitting into limbs and branches. The end of each branch he labeled with a letter, representing a species. Birds and mammals, vertebrates and insects, even animals and plants—they were all branches from a single primordial trunk. His mind was flying. Then he wrote: “Heaven knows whether this agrees with Nature: Cuidado.” Not so fast, Charles. Be careful.