There were hagiographers at work in the heyday of whiggish
history of science, but for decades that breed has been nearly
extinct. Nevertheless at least one of their saints remains
exalted. Only the most flamboyant postmodernists and feminist
epistemologists still try to topple Charles
Darwin from his
eminence. Those efforts are aimed, moreover, not so much at
Darwin himself or his scientific results as at the social
context of his achievements: Victorian society, capitalism,
empire, the idea that there is something biological (rather than
purely social) about differences between the sexes. Yet the tide
of trendy iconoclasm, too, is receding. Historians of science are
again engaging with the science.
To be sure, denunciation of Darwin
by creationists continues
unabated, no less today
than in the 1860s.
But it is of far less intellectual consequence now,
evolutionary biology having in the meantime grown enormously—far
beyond what even Darwin could have imagined. He is one of the
most written-about scientists, and now there is the triumphant
publication of
The Power of Place,
the second and final volume of Janet Browne’s
biography.
Browne
has had
access, heretofore unavailable, to Darwin research and documents, especially the
Darwin correspondence. She is uniquely
qualified to write this story, by her background in biology and
history, by virtue of her manifest literary gifts, and by her
long and fruitful absorption in it. The result, as Ernst Mayr
said of Voyaging (1996)—the first of her two volumes—is a “masterpiece.” Darwin’s intellectual progress and
the formation of his character are here explored to unprecedented
depth. It is no surprise that surprises emerge, not all of them
pleasant.
The kindly Charles Darwin, this most unassuming, most
self-abnegating, most grateful of scientific heroes, had
among his many benefactors two who were truly
indispensable to his career. The first was his Cambridge
university teacher and friend, the cleric and professor of botany
John Stevens Henslow, a lifelong promoter of
his former pupil in
the power centers of science. It was Henslow who proposed young
Darwin, a rank novice, for the position of gentleman-naturalist
on the epochal five-year (1831–1836) globe-girdling voyage of
HMS Beagle. That voyage yielded priceless geographic and
hydrologic data;
but Darwin’s findings eventually changed
forever the way educated people view themselves.
The other influential mentor
was the celebrated
geologist Charles Lyell. His ideas about earth-history and
mechanisms of geologic change, along with Thomas Malthus’s
contention that populations tend to grow to the limit of their food
supply, were crucial to Darwin’s
mature theory of evolution.
Henslow and Lyell, Darwin’s seniors, predeceased
him. Because he was himself already an eminence, and because of
his debts to these two, he should have been their visible public
mourner, a celebrant, a pallbearer at their funerals. He was
physically able to be that. But Darwin excused himself, and,
characteristically,
sent substitutes.
Browne’s two volumes present many such
deflationary examples. When
it came to his work,
Charles Darwin was a
shameless exploiter. He manipulated family, friends, and
supporters. They in turn influenced scientific—and ultimately
public—opinion on his behalf. Nevertheless, the wonder of this
work, 1,200 pages in total, is that the Darwin who emerges, in the round,
remains the saint of science portrayed in less critical, less
richly documented accounts. He was, to be sure, flawed, but the
quality of his work, the
adamantine honesty of his methods and his writing, and the
clarity of his insights into the living world, hugely
outweighed
his shortcomings. He was lucky in
family—especially in his wife, Emma Wedgwood, in his children,
in friends, in opportunities made possible by his position in
society. He was lucky because his foibles were seen, by everyone
who knew him and his work, as insignificant.
Browne’s second volume is subtitled The Power of Place. This
has a double meaning. “Place” means position; it means birth,
economic standing, social status, opportunities for what is now
called
“networking.” In all
those, Darwin’s endowments were more than adequate. He lived
during the inexorable ascent of the middle class.
The success of
Darwin’s father,
Robert Waring
Darwin, as a physician and investor put the
Shrewsbury Darwins near the top
of social life.
They were cousins and
marital partners of the
Staffordshire Wedgwoods. The Wedgwoods were manufacturing
champions and cultured people. Their superb chinaware was sold
and coveted worldwide. In due course Charles Darwin had available
to him, then, by class and social ties, a significant subset of
Britain’s intellectual elite. Janet Browne untangles the threads
of those reticulated connections, showing how they helped, why
they were indeed essential to, the genesis and success of
Darwin’s eventually subversive discoveries. Someone in a lesser
place might not have succeeded at all.
But “place” has also a literal meaning. It means home, Charles
and Emma Darwin’s home, the house they bought (with money
advanced by Darwin’s father) and made their own. This was
Down House, near Downe village, in Kent.
After Charles had returned from his voyage on the Beagle, he
set himself promptly to hard work. He
wrote up his assiduously maintained journals and produced from
them an excellent and, surprisingly, a best-selling book,
Journal of Researches (1839).
He
wrote and published impeccable geology and natural
history based
on his notes, fossils, and specimen collections from the voyage.
But after his marriage to Emma, he and Emma found London dirty and distracting. Their
quarters were cramped: they became a
family
with small children. Despite Emma’s initial misgivings,
they moved to a house deep in the country. Down House became the
well-found vessel of a Victorian family life, on a rural deep
with which Charles and all the children were thereafter in daily
and intimate contact.
Only the marvelous Victorian postal service could make of this
remote place a node in the expanding network of
nineteenth-century ideas—on nature, including the history of
the earth and its living creatures, on progress, on man in a changing
world. But it was a refuge, too. Here an increasingly
reclusive Darwin, who suffered from lengthening bouts of
sickness,[1]
could attend to his private devil while Emma and the others
(servants, children) managed all details of daily life except
finance. To money management Darwin did attend: with his gift
for recording and absorbing detail, he did the job as well as
his father had. But the private devil was an insistent,
undeniable, irksome need to find an explanation for the
diversity of life, for the origin of species. It had to be an
honest explanation; it could give no quarter to myth, folk tale,
parable, ecstasy, prophetic hyperbole, cultic terrors. An
explanation, therefore, that could be verified or falsified by
the ordinary means of natural science.
The power of this place at Downe was that it made possible both
Darwin’s unimpeded internal struggle with
ideas
and a remarkable output of finished work in descriptive and
experimental biology. Even his enemies, the angry denouncers of
his
ideas about the origin of
species, had to concede its technical
merit. A great strength of Janet Browne’s biography is to
dramatize, via correspondence and other historical material,
the Darwins at
home. She makes the power of the place come alive for us in our
servant-free, anti-Victorian world.
Darwin would surely not have
succeeded in any really different place. It was residence,
sickroom, and dispensary (with Emma’s compassionate nursing always on
call), greenhouse,
zoo, research laboratory. It was the
fully-equipped incubator, during his most challenging years, of
the people he loved most, and who loved him. In Down House,
the
maturing Darwin, a dutiful, cheerful,
conventionally complaisant
personality, reconstructed himself over decades, reluctantly, as
a scientific revolutionist.
Reluctant he was, of course, because although the ideas were his
(and, for a time, those of his co-proponent
Alfred Russel Wallace),
the actual skirmishes with traditionalists and obscurantists had
to be fought by others on Darwin’s behalf. He shrank from any
combat viva voce. Most visibly, they were fought by the
brilliant Thomas Henry Huxley, who earned for his proselytizing
efforts the sobriquet “Darwin’s bulldog.”
Less visibly but quite as
effectively, the battles, polite as they may have been, were
fought by scientific friends and a host of correspondents—by
Lyell, for example, and Joseph Hooker, the leading British
botanist, by the intelligent and upright Asa Gray at Harvard,
defending Darwin against the derogations of Harvard’s Louis
Agassiz, and by philosophers such as Herbert Spencer. Even such
reverend friends as Henslow and his cousin William Darwin Fox
disputed, decorously of course, for him and against orthodoxy
on the species question.
It was no ordinary work of natural history that Darwin had
undertaken. He had become convinced soon after the return
of the
Beagle that the standard account of species could not be
sustained. It made no sense. There were too many species now, too
many species that had flourished in the past and were now
extinct, differences
between adjacent species were minute; the
original idea of “species,” a crudely typological notion, was
flawed. Nature, once something of its real extent was
recognized, was a protean continuum whose shape and content had
changed again and again over an unimaginably long history. This
had happened on a planet whose rocky and watery faces too were
forever changing. The only plausible explanation of diversity,
past and present, was what Darwin and others referred to
(guardedly!) as “transmutation” or “transformation” descent from
predecessors and proliferation of new species. This implied a
branching history, a tree of life. It implied that the species
had not been made as such by God, but that they came into
existence—and expired—by natural processes.
Was this a new idea? No. As is often noted, it was in the
air. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written a
long,
lyrical exposition of it. The French
comparative anatomist, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, was notorious for having proposed an
inclusive theory of transformisme
—of organic evolution. The
idea was discussed, albeit reservedly, by others, including
Darwin’s teachers in Edinburgh, where the youth had tried to
study medicine before moving to Cambridge to study theology. Darwin’s own fear of
announcing his ideas was augmented by the sneering scientific
responses to a popular tract on evolution published (anonymously)
by Robert Chambers. Evolution was an idea that sensible people,
like Carlyle, thought best left unexamined. It was, as he said,
“humiliating.” Not only did it contradict Genesis, it was also a proposal
for which there was then no plausible mechanism. And it was
insulting to some great men of natural history.
Those eminences saw themselves as exploring the works of Deity,
as opening to public view and to prayerful gratitude glimpses of
the breadth of divine intelligence. This “natural theology,”
the disclosure and appreciation of the Designer’s works, was
understood as the overarching purpose of astronomy, geology, the
life sciences. To prate of “transformation,” to treat species as
perishable, transient, or worse—as mere constructs of
classification—was insulting. And Darwin was keenly aware of
this, not least because he was at first a geologist, and knew
what censure transformationist geology had suffered from
orthodoxy. Later, he was painfully aware, and wept over the
awareness, that denial of scripture must wound his beloved Emma.
She had early made this clear to him. After the death of loved
ones, especially of their adored child Anne, Emma’s conviction
that she would meet them again in Heaven helped to sustain her.
If Genesis were wrong, then hopes of future
reunion in eternity, too, might expire. So it seemed to her and
to most everyone else. It was a denial not to be undertaken
lightly. And there was still no plausible mechanism for the
postulated transformations. Lamarck’s notions were inadequate.
The solution grew slowly in Darwin’s mind, but the search was
catalyzed by his reading of Malthus. He was already convinced of
descent with modification, i.e., that organic evolution was the
cause of biological diversity. But Malthus showed that the
potential (“geometrical”) growth of human populations was
constrained by the failure of resources—especially of food—to
grow similarly. Hence there was necessarily an incessant
struggle for resources and
survival. Malthus’s principle of
population provided the motor for natural selection.
Darwin applied these insights to the whole of nature.
Aware of the continuum of life
forms, and of their profuse variation in time and space, he
realized that the struggle to survive must mean a struggle to
reproduce, and that the more successful variants would forever
replace less successful reproducers. Given variation, and a
changing environment, it must follow that old species would
change and eventually
be replaced
by descendants differing
significantly from them. This was an inevitable, natural process
of selection. Evolution occurs, Darwin decided, via natural
selection. The task before him was to test every observable
consequence of the hypothesis; to examine and eliminate, if
eliminable, its flaws; otherwise to abandon it; to establish that
the essential variation does occur, and to explain how it
occurs—in short, to understand the origin and evolution of
species.
That is what he did between the time of the move to Downe and the
time of his death at age seventy-three—the most reviled
and most honored of
all biologists. He was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, near
Isaac Newton. (An irony of greatness, that: Newton, deeply if
idiosyncratically religious, and Darwin, an atheist who would
have insisted on using Huxley’s coinage to describe himself:
agnostic.) The only clear failure of his program was the mechanism of
heredity. He never got it right. Nor was he (or anyone else then)
aware that the key had already been found by an obscure Austrian
botanist, the monk Gregor Johann Mendel.
Janet Browne maps the course of Darwin’s
achievements and shows
how his disparate investigations—on animal husbandry, pigeon
fancying, the sexuality of orchids, the taxonomy, morphology,
and sex of barnacles, the photo- and geotropisms of plant roots
and shoots, the digestive capabilities and mental processes
(including responses to piano music!) of earthworms—all fit the
monumental workplan he had set for himself. She expands our
understanding of the relationship between Darwin and Wallace,
not only of their joint announcement of natural selection, but of
their later disagreements about humanity (Wallace became a
spiritualist), and of Darwin’s continued
respect and benefactions
to Wallace, nevertheless. Copious citation of correspondence
enlarges our understanding of the causes and consequences of
Darwin’s twenty-year delay in publication, and of the astonishing
eventual reception, worldwide, of his Origin of Species.
“Darwinism” is today something of a misattribution. Calling
modern evolutionary biology Darwinism is like calling physics
“Newtonism.” Nevertheless it is true that Darwin’s main arguments
(except those on heredity) lie at the heart of all the life
sciences. To understand science in our culture and in the world
we must understand Darwin’s storm-tossed odyssey, the literal
part in the Beagle, the metaphoric part at Downe. There is no
better account of it than this dazzling new biography.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
The disease remains undiagnosed. Opinions vary about its
identity. Chagas’s disease, possibly contracted during one
of his expeditions in the Brazilian jungle, has been proposed, as
has a psychosomatic digestive syndrome.
Go back to the text.
