Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History Read online

Conventional scientific biography is a remarkably misleading source of information about great thinkers. It tends to depict them as simple, rational machines pursuing their insights with steadfast devotion, under the drive of an internal mechanism subject to no influence but the constraints of objective data. Thus, Darwin waited twenty years—so the usual argument runs—simply because he had not completed his work. He was satisfied with his theory, but theory is cheap. He was determined not to publish until he had amassed an overwhelming dossier of data in its support, and this took time.

  But Darwin’s activities during the twenty years in question display the inadequacy of this traditional view. In particular, he devoted eight full years to writing four large volumes on the taxonomy and natural history of barnacles. Before this single fact, the traditionalists can only offer pap—something like: Darwin felt that he had to understand species thoroughly before proclaiming how they change; this he could do only by working out for himself the classification of a difficult group of organisms—but not for eight years, and not while he sat on the most revolutionary notion in the history of biology. Darwin’s own assessment of the four volumes stands in his autobiography.

  Besides discovering several new and remarkable forms, I made out the homologies of the various parts … and I proved the existence in certain genera of minute males complemental to and parasitic on the hermaphrodites.… Nevertheless, I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time.

  So complex an issue as the motivation for Darwin’s delay has no simple resolution, but I feel sure of one thing: the negative effect of fear must have played at least as great a role as the positive need for additional documentation. Of what, then, was Darwin afraid?

  When Darwin achieved his Malthusian insight, he was twenty-nine years old. He held no professional position, but he had acquired the admiration of his colleagues for his astute work aboard the Beagle. He was not about to compromise a promising career by promulgating a heresy that he could not prove.

  What then was his heresy? A belief in evolution itself is the obvious answer. Yet this cannot be a major part of the solution; for, contrary to popular belief, evolution was a very common heresy during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was widely and openly discussed, opposed, to be sure, by a large majority, but admitted or at least considered by most of the great naturalists.

  An extraordinary pair of Darwin’s early notebooks may contain the answer (see H. E. Gruber and P. H. Barrett, Darwin on Man, for text and extensive commentary). These so-called M and N notebooks were written in 1838 and 1839, while Darwin was compiling the transmutation notebooks that formed the basis for his sketches of 1842 and 1844. They contain his thoughts on philosophy, esthetics, psychology, and anthropology. On rereading them in 1856, Darwin described them as “full of metaphysics on morals.” They include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism—the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. No notion could be more upsetting to the deepest traditions of Western thought than the statement that mind—however complex and powerful—is simply a product of brain. Consider, for example, John Milton’s vision of mind as separate from and superior to the body that it inhabits for a time (Il Penseroso, 1633).

  Or let my lamp, at midnight hour,

  Be seen in some high lonely tower,

  Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,

  With thrice-great Hermes,1 or unsphere

  The spirit of Plato, to unfold

  What worlds or what vast regions hold

  The immortal mind that hath forsook

  Her mansion in this fleshly nook.

  The notebooks prove that Darwin was interested in philosophy and aware of its implications. He knew that the primary feature distinguishing his theory from all other evolutionary doctrines was its uncompromising philosophical materialism. Other evolutionists spoke of vital forces, directed history, organic striving, and the essential irreducibility of mind—a panoply of concepts that traditional Christianity could accept in compromise, for they permitted a Christian God to work by evolution instead of creation. Darwin spoke only of random variation and natural selection.

  In the notebooks Darwin resolutely applied his materialistic theory of evolution to all phenomena of life, including what he termed “the citadel itself”—the human mind. And if mind has no real existence beyond the brain, can God be anything more than an illusion invented by an illusion? In one of his transmutation notebooks, he wrote:

  Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist! … Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.

  This belief was so heretical that Darwin even sidestepped it in The Origin of Species (1859), where he ventured only the cryptic comment that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” He gave vent to his beliefs, only when he could hide them no longer, in the Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). A. R. Wallace, the codiscoverer of natural selection, could never bring himself to apply it to the human mind, which he viewed as the only divine contribution to the history of life. Yet Darwin cut through 2,000 years of philosophy and religion in the most remarkable epigram of the M notebook:

  Plato says in Phaedo that our “imaginary ideas” arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence.

  In his commentary on the M and N notebooks, Gruber labels materialism as “at that time more outrageous than evolution.” He documents the persecution of materialistic beliefs during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and concludes:

  In virtually every branch of knowledge, repressive methods were used: lectures were proscribed, publication was hampered, professorships were denied, fierce invective and ridicule appeared in the press. Scholars and scienlists learned the lesson and responded to the pressures on them. The ones with unpopular ideas sometimes recanted, published anonymously, presented their ideas in weakened forms, or delayed publication for many years.

  Darwin had experienced a direct example as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh in 1827. His friend W. A. Browne read a paper with a materialistic perspective on life and mind before the Plinian Society. After much debate, all references to Browne’s paper, including the record (from the previous meeting) of his intention to deliver it, were expunged from the minutes. Darwin learned his lesson, for he wrote in the M notebook:

  To avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock.

  The most ardent materialists of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels, were quick to recognize what Darwin had accomplished and to exploit its radical content. In 1869, Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin’s Origin:

  Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.

  A common bit of folklore—that Marx offered to dedicate volume 2 of Das Kapital to Darwin (and that Darwin refused)—turns out to be false. But Marx and Darwin did correspond, and Marx held Darwin in very high regard. (I have seen Darwin’s copy of Das Kapital in his library at Down House. It is inscribed by Marx who calls himself a “sincere admirer” of Darwin. Its pages are uncut. Darwin was no devotee of the German language.)

  Darwin was, indeed, a gentle revolutionary. Not only did he delay his work for so long, but he also assiduously avoided any public statement about the philosophical implications of his theory. In 1880, he wrote:

  It seems to me (rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and Theism hardly have any effect on the public; and that freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of human understanding which follows th
e progress of science. I have therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself to science.

  Yet the content of his work was so disruptive to traditional Western thought that we have yet to encompass it all. Arthur Koestler’s campaign against Darwin, for example, rests upon a reluctance to accept Darwin’s materialism and an ardent desire once again to invest living matter with some special property (see The Ghost in the Machine or The Case of the Midwife Toad). This, I confess, I do not understand. Wonder and knowledge are both to be cherished. Shall we appreciate any less the beauty of nature because its harmony is unplanned? And shall the potential of mind cease to inspire our awe and fear because several billion neurons reside in our skulls?

  2 | Darwin’s Sea Change, or Five Years at the Captain’s Table

  GROUCHO MARX ALWAYS delighted audiences with such outrageously obvious questions as “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” But the apparently obvious can often be deceptive. If I remember correctly, the answer to who framed the Monroe Doctrine? is John Quincy Adams. Most biologists would answer “Charles Darwin” when asked, “Who was the naturalist aboard the H.M.S. Beagle?” And they would all be wrong. Let me not sound too shocking at the outset. Darwin was on the Beagle and he did devote his attention to natural history. But he was brought on board for another purpose, and the ship’s surgeon, Robert McKormick, originally held the official position of naturalist. Herein lies a tale; not just a nit-picking footnote to academic history, but a discovery of some significance. Anthropologist J. W. Gruber reported the evidence in “Who Was the Beagle’s Naturalist?” written in 1969 for the British Journal for the History of Science. In 1975, historian of science H. L. Burstyn attempted to answer the obvious corollary: If Darwin wasn’t the Beagle’s naturalist, why was he on board?

  No document specifically identifies McKormick as an official naturalist, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. The British navy, at the time, had a well-established tradition of surgeon-naturalists, and McKormick had deliberately educated himself for such a role. He was an adequate, if not brilliant, naturalist and performed his tasks with distinction on other voyages, including Ross’s Antarctic expedition (1839–1843) to locate the position of the South Magnetic Pole. Moreover, Gruber has found a letter from the Edinburgh naturalist Robert Jameson addressed to “My dear Sir” and full of advice to the Beagle’s naturalist on collection and preservation of specimens. In the traditional view, no one but Darwin himself could have been the recipient. Fortunately, the name of the addressee is on the original folio. It was written to McKormick.

  Darwin, to cut the suspense, sailed on the Beagle as a companion to Captain Fitzroy. But why would a British captain want to take as a companion for a five-year journey a man he had only met the previous month? Two features of naval voyages during the 1830s must have set Fitzroy’s decision. First of all, voyages lasted for many years, with long stretches between ports and very limited contact by mail with friends and family at home. Secondly (and however strange it may seem to our psychologically more enlightened century), British naval tradition dictated that a captain have virtually no social contact with anyone down the chain of command. He usually dined alone and met with his officers primarily to discuss ship’s business and to converse in the most formal and “correct” manner.

  Now Fitzroy, when he set sail with Darwin, was only 26 years old. He knew the psychological toll that prolonged lack of human contact could take from captains. The Beagle’s previous skipper had broken down and shot himself to death during the Southern Hemisphere winter of 1828, his third year away from home. Moreover, as Darwin himself affirmed in a letter to his sister, Fitzroy was worried about “his hereditary predisposition” to mental derangement. His illustrious uncle, the Viscount Castlereagh (suppressor of the Irish rebellion of 1798 and Foreign Secretary during the defeat of Napoleon), had slit his own throat in 1822. In fact, Fitzroy did break down and temporarily relinquish his command during the Beagle’s voyage—while Darwin was laid up with illness in Valparaiso.

  Since Fitzroy had so little social contact with any of the ship’s official personnel, he could gain it only by taking along a “supernumerary” passenger by his own arrangement. But the Admiralty frowned upon private passengers, even captains’ wives; a gentleman companion brought for no other stated purpose would never do. Fitzroy had taken other supernumeraries aboard—a draftsman and an instrument-maker among others—but neither could serve as a companion because they were not of the right social class. Fitzroy was an aristocrat, and he traced his ancestry directly to King Charles II. Only a gentleman could share his meals, and a gentleman Darwin surely was.

  But how could Fitzroy entice a gentleman to accompany him on a voyage of five years’ duration? Only by providing an opportunity for some justifying activity that could not be pursued elsewhere. And what else but natural history?—even though the Beagle had an official naturalist. Hence, Fitzroy advertised among his aristocratic friends for a gentleman naturalist. It was, as Burstyn argues, “A polite fiction to explain his guest’s presence and an activity attractive enough to lure a gentleman on board for a long voyage.” Darwin’s sponsor, J. S. Henslow, understood perfectly. He wrote to Darwin: “Capt. F. wants a man (I understand) more as a companion than a mere collector.” Darwin and Fitzroy met, they hit it off, and the pact was sealed. Darwin sailed as Fitzroy’s companion, primarily to share his table at mealtime for every shipboard dinner during five long years. Fitzroy, in addition, was an ambitious young man. He wished to make his mark by setting a new standard for excellence in exploratory voyages. (“The object of the expedition,” Darwin wrote, “was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego … to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and of some islands in the Pacific—and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the world.”) By augmenting the official crew with technicians and engineers brought at his own expense, Fitzroy used his wealth and prestige to reach his goal. A “supernumerary” naturalist meshed well with Fitzroy’s scheme to beef up the Beagle’s scientific mettle.

  Poor McKormick’s fate was sealed. Initially, he and Darwin cooperated, but their ways inevitably parted. Darwin had all the advantages. He had the captain’s ear. He had a servant. At ports of call, he had the money to move ashore and hire native collectors, while McKormick was bound to the ship and his official duties. Darwin’s private efforts began to outstrip McKormick’s official collections, and McKormick, in disgust, decided to go home. In April 1832, at Rio de Janeiro, he was “invalided out” and sent home to England aboard H.M.S. Tyne. Darwin understood the euphemism and wrote to his sister of McKormick’s “being invalided, i.e. being disagreeable to the Captain.… He is no loss.”

  Darwin did not care for McKormick’s brand of science. He wrote to Henslow in May 1832: “He was a philosopher of rather antient [sic] date; at St. Jago by his own account he made general remarks during the first fortnight and collected particular facts during the last.” In fact, Darwin didn’t seem to care for McKormick at all. “My friend the doctor is an ass, but we jog on very amicably; at present he is in great tribulation, whether his cabin shall be painted french gray or dead white—I hear little except this subject from him.”

  If nothing else, this story illustrates the importance of social class as a consideration in the history of science. How different would the science of biology be today if Darwin had been the offspring of a tradesman and not the son of a very wealthy physician. Darwin’s personal riches gave him the freedom to pursue research without encumbrance. Since his various illnesses often permitted only two to three hours of fruitful work per day, any need to make an honest living would probably have shut him off from research entirely. We now learn that Darwin’s social standing also played a crucial role at a turning point in his career. Fitzroy was more interested in his mealtime companion’s social graces than his competence in natural history.

  Might something deeper be hidden in the unrecorded mealtime conversations of Darwin and Fitzroy?
Scientists have a strong bias for attributing creative insights to the constraints of empirical evidence. Hence, tortoises and finches have always received the nod as primary agents in the transformation of Darwin’s world view, for he joined the Beagle as a naïvely pious student for the ministry, but opened his first notebook on the transmutation of species less than a year after his return. I suggest that Fitzroy himself might have been an even more important catalyst.

  Darwin and Fitzroy maintained a tense relationship at best. Only the severe constraints of gentlemanly cordiality and pre-Victorian suppression of emotion kept the two men on decent terms with each other. Fitzroy was a martinet and an ardent Tory. Darwin was an equally committed Whig. Darwin scrupulously avoided any discussion with Fitzroy of the great Reform Bill then pending in Parliament. But slavery brought them into open conflict. One evening, Fitzroy told Darwin that he had witnessed proof of slavery’s benevolence. One of Brazil’s largest slaveholders had assembled his captives and asked them whether they wished to be freed. Unanimously, they had responded “no.” When Darwin had the temerity to wonder what a response made in the owner’s presence was worth, Fitzroy exploded and informed Darwin that anyone who doubted his word was not fit to eat with him. Darwin moved out and joined the mates, but Fitzroy backed down and sent a formal apology a few days later.

  We know that Darwin bristled in the face of Fitzroy’s strong opinions. But he was Fitzroy’s guest and, in one peculiar sense, his subordinate, for a captain at sea was an absolute and unquestioned tyrant in Fitzroy’s time. Darwin could not express his dissent. For five long years, one of the most brilliant men in recorded history kept his peace. Late in life, Darwin recalled in his autobiography that “the difficulty of living on good terms with a Captain of a Man-of-War is much increased by its being almost mutinous to answer him as one would answer anyone else; and by the awe in which he is held—or was held in my time, by all on board.”