Charles Darwin: Voyaging

"This book may be the best scientific biography that I’ve ever read. I was quite surprised, as Janet’s previous publications have been largely scholarly ones, though well written. Then, somehow, when she wrote this biography she came into her own. She was able to write in an almost novelistic way, except this is fact and not fiction. It’s just absolutely engrossing. The first volume, Voyaging , is about Darwin’s early life and the voyage of the Beagle. In the first part of his life, he is a man of action. He’s catching beetles as a kid, he’s travelling around England trying to study theology and failing to do so. Finally he becomes the companion to the ship’s captain, Captain Fitzroy – not the naturalist on the Beagle, that was someone else. On the voyage he did a lot of collecting, he rode into South America. He left the ship as often as he could as he had terrible seasickness. He collected fossils, he shot animals and so on. Then he got back to England in 1836 and basically sat in his study for the rest of his life. The second volume is called The Power of Place , and it’s about his life at Down House where he stayed permanently after then. He never left England again. He just sat there and produced this magnificent theory. It shows the power of the life of the mind. Despite not being peripatetic, he had an extremely rich life through his correspondence, his children, his family. Also a slightly tragic existence, with the death of his beloved daughter. But he continued the adventure in his head, and produced not only The Origin but a number of other books, many of which are quite good. He got material, but far more often people would send him letters. He would write to someone saying, “Is it true that in Kazakhstan you found a donkey that was born with stripes on it?” And the guy would write back and say, “Yes, I have a donkey with stripes on it”. From that Darwin would deduce that the ancestral horse, that gave rise to the donkey, had stripes and this was an ancestral trait that had reappeared. It was this constant accumulation of detail. It must have been quite exciting. His mail alone must have been very interesting. Plus he was doing experiments, and getting his kids to do them – like soaking seeds in seawater to see if they could survive the long periods it would take them to get across the ocean. Yes, it’s incredible how much he managed to get done, because he was an invalid for the greater part of his adult life. There has been a lot of speculation about what made him sick. Janet doesn’t go into that much, but people are starting to think he had something called cyclical vomiting syndrome. He had all sorts of horrible symptoms – constant vomiting, headaches, depression, fits of crying. There’s also a discussion of this delay in the Gould book I recommended, Ever Since Darwin . I think the best guess is that the delay wasn’t because his wife was religious. But I think his wife’s religiosity was the reason why there is nothing in The Origin about the evolution of humans. There’s only one sentence, which says something like “light will be shed on the origin of man”. That’s it! It is manifestly clear that he did that on purpose, because he didn’t want to get into religious controversies at that stage of his career. He wanted to convince people that evolution had occurred, and obviously the conclusion would be that humans had also evolved. But it was only 12 years later, in 1871, that he published The Descent of Man , which was much more explicit about the evolutionary origin of humans. I think the reason he had been delaying is because he wanted to be absolutely sure that he was right. Darwin was very careful to make statements that were completely accurate. So throughout The Origin , you will see him hedging, saying, “Well, maybe this is wrong,” or, “Here’s a possible objection you may raise as a reader”. It’s part of his rhetorical strategy, but it’s also part of being a good scientist. He’s always trying to find out what would prove him wrong and deal with those objections. There’s even a chapter in The Origin called “Difficulties on Theory” about the problems with it. One of these was the evolution of a bee colony, with all these sterile workers helping their mother. How can sterility possibly be of evolutionary advantage? Even for us today, he’s a model scientist in the care with which he does things. This is all described in Janet’s book in a way that you cannot get from reading just The Origin . She provides a view of the man, his life and the adversities that he overcame, everything that fed into this revolutionary work of human thought. When he was younger he was probably religious by default, in the way that most liberal people were religious in Britain back then. He was actually going to train to be a minister, but didn’t like it very much. As he became older, he started shedding all these appurtenances of belief. He would still use words like Creator. For example, he says in The Origin that the Creator breathed life into one or more original forms of life. People take that to mean that he was religious. But if you read his autobiography, or his letters to [Thomas] Huxley and others, it’s clear that he didn’t believe in any kind of personal God at all. He says, for example, that he could not believe that a God could exist who would design a cat that would torture mice, or a wasp whose larvae eat their prey from the inside. The horrors of nature convinced him that the world was a naturalistic, materialistic phenomenon. I doubt there was any vestige of real religion left in Darwin by the time he was a middle-aged man. He didn’t go to church even though his wife, Emma, did. And he never made any expression of religious belief. Creationists are always trying to promulgate the myth that Darwin was religious, but there’s simply no evidence for it. Almost all of us who have read Darwin realise that. He may have called himself an agnostic – which is, by the way, a term invented by his friend Huxley – because atheist was a strong word back then. But I don’t think he believed in God, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t think he was going to go anywhere after he died. They want him to be religious in the same way that they want Christopher Hitchens to be religious. Hitchens is seriously ill and may die, and they’re thinking, “This’ll show him!” So they like to think that Darwin, despite the fact that he came up with this theory, still believed in God. Remember that evolution is not anathema to all religious people. A lot of religious people accept evolution. They’re accommodationists. People like to think there is no inherent conflict between science – in particular evolution – and religion, and to show that Darwin could have been a religious man shows that religion and science can be friends. I don’t think they can, no. To me, they are completely conflictual world views. People always point to the fact that Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, is an evangelical Christian. They use him as an example that religion and science are not incompatible, because here you have a religious scientist. They’re trying to do the same with Darwin. To me, showing that somebody can hold two diametrically opposed views of truth in their head at the same time doesn’t show these two views are compatible, but simply that humans have a remarkable ability to compartmentalise."