Chapter Content
Okay, so like, let me tell you about this fascinating guy, Charles Darwin. You know, the evolution dude? So, there's this story about how this magazine editor, Whitwell Elwin, he got a copy of Darwin's new book, right? And he thought, "Hmm, this is kinda interesting, but, like, who's gonna care about this super specific stuff?" So, he suggests to Darwin, "Hey, why don't you write about pigeons? Everybody loves pigeons!" Can you imagine?
Anyway, Darwin, thankfully, ignored that advice. And in late November, boom, "On the Origin of Species" hits the shelves. It cost 15 shillings, and the first edition, like, sold out the first day! And it's been in print, basically, ever since. The controversies? They've never stopped. Which is, like, totally amazing when you consider that this was a guy who, you know, really, really loved earthworms. And if he hadn't, on a whim, gone and sailed around the world, he probably would have just been some quiet, obscure country vicar.
So, Darwin was born in England, in this little town called Shrewsbury. His dad was a respected doctor, and his mom was from the Wedgwood pottery family. But she, sadly, passed away when he was just a kid. He had a pretty privileged upbringing, but he wasn't exactly a stellar student. His dad was, like, super bummed about it. Apparently, he once wrote, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." Ouch!
He tried studying medicine, because his dad insisted, but, uh, Darwin couldn’t handle the sight of blood. He'd faint! And seeing patients in pain? It really messed with him. He even witnessed, like, this surgery on a kid, without anesthesia, and it scarred him, like, forever. He then tried law, but he found it, you know, incredibly boring, so that was a no-go. Eventually, he managed to get a theology degree from Cambridge, but it wasn't exactly a smooth ride.
So, a career as a country parson seemed to be on the horizon. But then, out of the blue, this amazing opportunity shows up. The captain of the HMS Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, invites Darwin to join him on a voyage. FitzRoy wanted someone educated to hang out with, like, a tablemate, you know? And get this – FitzRoy chose Darwin partly because he liked the shape of his nose! He thought it meant Darwin had a strong character. Seriously! Darwin wasn't even his first choice, but the guy he really wanted backed out. FitzRoy was only 23 and Darwin was 22 when they set sail, which is pretty young, if you ask me.
FitzRoy's main job was to map the coastline, but he was also, like, obsessed with finding proof for the Bible's creation story. Darwin, with his theology training, was supposed to help with that. But things got complicated, because Darwin turned out to have some pretty liberal views, and he wasn't exactly a die-hard Christian. So, yeah, they clashed.
Darwin was on the Beagle for five years, and it was, you know, a life-changing experience. But it wasn't exactly smooth sailing, literally! He and FitzRoy were crammed into this tiny cabin, and FitzRoy was, like, a total hothead. They were constantly arguing, almost to the point of, as Darwin put it, "going mad." Even under the best circumstances, being on a ship could be pretty depressing. The Beagle's previous captain had, you know, shot himself. And FitzRoy? He came from a family with a history of depression. It was, like, intense. Even when he *wasn't* depressed, FitzRoy was…well, difficult. When they got back, he immediately married this girl he'd been secretly in love with for years, but he never once mentioned her to Darwin during their five years together. Not even her name!
But, all things considered, the voyage was a success. Darwin's adventurous spirit was stoked, and he collected a ton of specimens, enough to keep him busy for the rest of his life. He found these amazing fossils, including the best-preserved giant sloth ever. He experienced a near-fatal earthquake in Chile. He discovered a new kind of dolphin, which he, you know, respectfully named Fitzroy's dolphin. And he made detailed geological observations of the Andes, coming up with a new theory about how coral reefs form. He also started to think about how incredibly ancient the Earth was, which was a big deal because it suggested that life had been evolving for a really long time. He got home five years and two days after he left, and never left England again.
Now, Darwin didn't come up with the theory of evolution *on* the Beagle. The idea had been around for a while. His grandfather, Erasmus, even wrote about it in a poem. The idea really started to click for Darwin after he got back to England and read Thomas Malthus's "Essay on the Principle of Population." Malthus argued that population grows faster than food supply. Darwin realized that life was a constant struggle for survival, and that natural selection determined which species thrived and which ones died out. Basically, organisms compete for resources, and the ones with the best traits are the ones that survive and pass on those traits. Simple, right? But it explained, like, so much. As T.H. Huxley supposedly said when he read "Origin of Species," "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"
Interestingly, Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest" in his book, though he liked it. Herbert Spencer came up with it later. He also didn't use the word "evolution" all that much, preferring "descent with modification" until later editions. And get this – the whole idea wasn't inspired by the finches on the Galapagos Islands, at least not directly. The usual story is that Darwin noticed the finches on different islands had different beaks, adapted to the local food sources. Like, some had short, strong beaks for cracking nuts, while others had long, pointy beaks for digging out bugs. And that made him realize that they weren't just created that way, but had somehow, you know, adapted themselves.
Well, the birds did shape themselves, but Darwin didn't see it initially. When Darwin was on the Beagle, he was just a fresh-faced college grad, not a trained naturalist. So, he didn't realize that all the Galapagos birds were related. It was his friend, the ornithologist John Gould, who pointed that out. And Darwin didn't even keep track of which bird came from which island! He made the same mistake with the tortoises. It took him years to sort out the mess.
Because of these screw-ups, and because he had to sort through all the specimens he brought back, it wasn't until five years after he got back to England that Darwin finally started to draft his new theory. Two years later, he expanded it into a 230-page "abstract." Then, he did something weird. He put his notes aside and spent the next 15 years working on other stuff. He had ten kids. He wrote a huge book about barnacles. Apparently, he complained that he hated barnacles more than anyone else. And he got, like, this mysterious illness. He felt tired, dizzy, and "unwell." He had nausea, heart palpitations, migraines, fatigue, and all sorts of other symptoms.
Nobody knows for sure what was wrong with him. Some people think he had Chagas disease, a tropical parasite he might have caught in South America. Others think it was a psychosomatic thing. Whatever it was, it was bad. He could only work for short periods of time.
He tried all sorts of weird treatments: cold water baths, vinegar, electric shocks, which, you know, just made things worse. He basically became a recluse, rarely leaving his house in Kent. The first thing he did when he moved in was put a mirror outside his study window, so he could see if anyone was coming and avoid them if he needed to.
Darwin didn't publish his theory because he knew it would be a huge shock to society. In the same year that Darwin locked away his manuscript, there was this book called "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" that caused a huge uproar because it suggested that humans might have evolved from lower primates without any divine help. The author, anticipating the controversy, hid his identity. Nobody knew who wrote it for 40 years! Some people thought it was Darwin, others thought it was Prince Albert. Turns out, it was a successful Scottish publisher named Robert Chambers, who didn't want to be associated with it because he ran a company that published the Bible. "Vestiges" was attacked by religious figures and academics alike. Even T.H. Huxley trashed it, without knowing who wrote it.
Darwin's manuscript might never have been published, but then, something unexpected happened. In the summer of 1858, Darwin got a package from the Far East. Inside was a letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, along with a draft of his paper, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type." The paper basically laid out the theory of natural selection, and it was eerily similar to Darwin's unpublished manuscript. Some of the sentences were even the same! "I never saw a more striking coincidence," Darwin wrote, despondently. "Even his terms now stand as heads to my chapters."
Wallace didn't exactly, like, appear out of nowhere. The two had been corresponding, and Wallace had sent Darwin specimens that he thought might be of interest. In their letters, Darwin had hinted that he was working on something related to the origin of species. He told Wallace that it had been nearly 20 years since he had first worked on the topic, but then added that he was preparing to publish his work. But he hadn't actually planned to do that!
Wallace didn't get the hint and he couldn't know that his theory was almost identical to Darwin's theory, which he had been researching for 20 years.
Darwin was in a really tough spot. If he rushed to publish his own work, he would be stealing from an innocent admirer who was on the other side of the world. If he stepped aside, like a gentleman, he would lose credit for his own independent research. Wallace admitted that his theory was a flash of inspiration, whereas Darwin's theory was the result of years of careful study. It just wasn't fair.
To make matters worse, Darwin's young son, Charles, caught scarlet fever. On June 28, the boy died. Despite his grief, Darwin dashed off letters to his friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, offering to give way to Wallace. He added that if he did so, it meant that all of his work "will be smashed." Lyell and Hooker came up with a compromise. They presented summaries of both Darwin's and Wallace's ideas at a meeting of the Linnean Society, which was trying to re-establish itself as a scientific authority. On July 1, Darwin and Wallace's theories were revealed. Darwin didn't attend. He was burying his son.
The Darwin-Wallace paper was one of seven papers presented that night, and there were only about 30 people in the audience. If they realized they were witnessing one of the most important moments in the history of science, they didn't show it. There was no discussion, and the announcement caused no stir. Darwin later noted that only one person mentioned the papers, a professor from Dublin named Haughton. His conclusion? "All that was new in them was false, and all that was true was old."
Wallace, who was still in the Far East, didn't find out about any of this for a while. He took it all in stride, seemingly pleased to be associated with the discovery of evolution. He even referred to the theory as "Darwinism."
There was someone else who threatened Darwin's claim to being the first to discover evolution. His name was Patrick Matthew. Incredibly, he had proposed natural selection theory way back around the same time Darwin began his voyage on the Beagle. Unfortunately, he did it in a book called "On Naval Timber and Arboriculture." Nobody noticed. When he saw Darwin being hailed as the discoverer of evolution, he wrote a letter to the "Gardener's Chronicle." Darwin apologized, saying that he doubted anyone, himself included, had heard of Matthew's ideas, since they were mentioned so briefly in an appendix to a book about timber.
Wallace remained a naturalist and thinker for the next 50 years, but he eventually lost interest in science and turned his attention to spiritualism and the possibility of life on other planets. So, Darwin essentially got the credit for evolution by default.
Darwin himself was tormented by his own ideas. He called himself "the Devil's chaplain," and said that revealing evolution made him feel like he was "confessing a murder." Plus, it really upset his religious wife. But, he set to work expanding his manuscript into a book. He originally called it "An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties Through Natural Selection," but the title was a little too long. John Murray, the publisher, initially wanted to print only 500 copies. But after reading the manuscript and making the title catchier, Murray increased the first print run to 1,250 copies.
"On the Origin of Species" was an immediate commercial success, but it didn't cause much of a stir. Darwin's theory faced two major challenges: first, it wasn't accepted by Lord Kelvin for many years. And second, there was very little fossil evidence to support it. Critics asked, where were all the transitional forms that Darwin's theory so clearly implied? If species were constantly evolving, there should be fossils showing that process, but there weren't. It seemed that until the famous Cambrian explosion, there was no life on Earth.
Darwin insisted that there must have been a vibrant array of life forms in the early oceans, we just hadn't found them yet. Darwin believed it was the only plausible explanation, but others wanted more proof. He theorized that the Precambrian seas were too clear to allow for the deposition of sediment, and therefore, no fossils were preserved.
Even Darwin's friends were uneasy with some of his conclusions. Adam Sedgwick, his geology teacher at Cambridge, said that Darwin's book gave him "more pain than pleasure." The prominent paleontologist Louis Agassiz dismissed it as pure speculation. Even Lyell sadly concluded that "Darwin goes too far."
T.H. Huxley didn't like Darwin's insistence on the long geological timescales of evolution, because he was a saltationist, meaning that he believed evolution happened suddenly, not gradually. Saltationists had a hard time believing that complex organs could arise slowly, in stages. What use was one-tenth of a wing, or half an eye? They thought such organs could only be useful in their completed form.
Huxley's saltationism was pretty extreme, and a little surprising, because it was pretty close to a really conservative religious idea called the "argument from design," which was first proposed by the British theologian William Paley. Paley argued that if you found a watch on the ground, even if you'd never seen one before, you would immediately realize that it was made by someone intelligent. He believed that nature was the same way: its complexity was proof of intelligent design. This idea was incredibly influential in the 19th century, and it troubled Darwin. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that even the thought of the eye gave him the chills. In "Origin of Species", he admitted that natural selection's ability to gradually produce such an organ "seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."
Nevertheless, Darwin not only maintained that all change was gradual, but also increased the length of time that he thought evolution had been happening, with each successive reprinting of "Origin of Species". This caused his supporters to lose faith in him, leaving him with few. According to scientist and historian Jeffrey Schwartz, Darwin essentially lost his support among his colleagues in natural history and geology.
Ironically, Darwin named his book "On the Origin of Species," but he couldn't explain how new species originated. Darwin's theory implied a mechanism by which a species could become stronger, better, or faster – in short, more adapted – but it didn't explain how new species came into being. A Scottish engineer named Fleeming Jenkin thought about this and pointed out a serious flaw in Darwin's argument. Darwin argued that the (beneficial) traits that appear in one generation are passed on to the next, and that is how species became stronger.
Jenkin pointed out that a beneficial trait from a previous generation would not be dominant in subsequent generations, but would actually be diluted in the mixing process. If you pour a cup of water into whiskey, you don't make the whiskey stronger, you dilute it. The beneficial traits passed from parents to children would weaken with each successive generation, until they disappeared completely. So, from a dynamic point of view, Darwin's theory did not hold water, and could only explain static things. Specific phenomena occurred during evolution, but they disappeared quickly because organisms were always inclined to make everything normal again. In order for natural selection to work, it would need some alternative mechanism, which had not yet been discovered.
Unknown to Darwin and everyone else, an answer to this problem would be provided by an isolated monk named Gregor Mendel, in a remote part of Central Europe, 1200 kilometers away.
Mendel was born in 1822 to a poor farming family in a remote town in the Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). Secondary school textbooks have described him as a simple country monk with a keen eye for observation, whose discoveries were in large part accidental. He noticed some interesting genetic traits as he grew peas in the monastery garden. In fact, Mendel was a trained scientist. He had studied physics and mathematics at the Olmutz Philosophical Institute and at the University of Vienna, and he scientifically organized everything he studied. Moreover, the monastery in which he served from 1843 onward became a famous academic center. The monastery had a library with 20,000 books, and a tradition of serious scientific research.
Before beginning his experiments, Mendel spent two years growing the specimens he would study. He selected seven different kinds of peas, and after ensuring they would reproduce purely, he and two full-time assistants began repeatedly planting and cross-breeding 30,000 of these pea plants. It was extremely meticulous work. To prevent unexpected pollination, they had to diligently document the peas' seeds, pods, leaves, stems, and flowers during the growing process, as well as the tiniest differences in their appearance. Mendel knew very well the meaning of what he was doing.
He never used the word "gene," though he invented the terms "dominant" and "recessive." His insight was that each seed contains two "hereditary factors", or what he called "elements", one dominant and one recessive, which, once combined, would produce an expected hereditary form.
He translated these results into precise mathematical formulas. All told, Mendel spent eight years working on this research, and then performed similar experiments on flowers, corn, and other plants to test his findings. If anything, Mendel's research method was too scientific. So much so that when he presented his paper in February and March 1865, at the monthly meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno, the 40 or so attendees listened politely to his presentation, but were clearly unmoved, even though plant cultivation was actually something that they were very interested in.
After Mendel's report was published, he eagerly sent a copy to the great Swiss botanist, Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli. In a sense, Nägeli's support was critical for the future of Mendel's theory. Unfortunately, Nägeli did not realize the importance of Mendel's discovery, and suggested that Mendel grow plants of the genus Hieracium. Mendel did as he was told, but soon discovered that Hieracium plants do not have the characteristics essential for studying heredity. Apparently, Nägeli had not carefully read Mendel's paper, or perhaps hadn't read it at all. Discouraged, Mendel abandoned hereditary research, and instead turned to growing good seeds, and to research on bees, mice, and sunspots for the rest of his life. Finally, he was elected abbot of the monastery.
Mendel's findings were not as completely neglected as is sometimes thought. His research was gloriously included in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" - which at the time was a record of scientific thought, far more important than it is today - and was repeatedly cited in an important paper written by the German William Obers-Focke. In fact, because Mendel's ideas never sank into the ocean of scientific thought, they were easily rediscovered when the world was ready to accept them.
Together, Darwin and Mendel laid the foundation for all of the life sciences in the 20th century, but neither of them realized it. Darwin discovered that all organisms are interrelated, and that they are all "descended from one common ancestor". Mendel's work, on the other hand, provided the mechanism that explained how all this happens. The two of them could have helped each other. Mendel had a German edition of "The Origin of Species", and he is said to have read it. Therefore, he must have realized that his work was relevant to Darwin's theory, but he doesn't seem to have tried to contact Darwin. As for Darwin, he is known to have studied Focke's influential paper, which repeatedly mentioned Mendel's work, but he did not connect them to his own research.
In the eyes of the general public, the idea that humans evolved from apes is an important feature of Darwin's doctrine. But actually it's not. It was only a casual point in Darwin's doctrine. Even so, it did not require much imagination to understand this meaning of the theory for human evolution, and this quickly became a topic of heated discussion.
On June 30, a Saturday, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Oxford, the moment of truth had come. Huxley attended the meeting at the invitation of Robert Chambers, the author of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation". At the time, Huxley did not know about Chamber's relationship with the controversial work. As usual, Darwin did not attend. The meeting was held at the Oxford University Museum of Zoology. More than 1000 people crammed into the venue, and hundreds more could not get in. They all realized that a major event was about to happen, even though they first had to listen to a drowsy two-hour opening speech by John William Draper, the president of New York University, whose topic was "On the Intellectual Development of Europe with consideration to Mr. Darwin's View."
Finally, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford stood up to speak. Richard Owen, a fervent anti-Darwinist, had visited Wilberforce's house the previous evening. Richard Owen agreed with Wilberforce (or so everyone thought). Like many sensational events, there are many conflicting versions of this incident. But the most popular version is that Wilberforce, impeccably dressed and with a dignified demeanor, turned to Huxley, and smilingly asked him if he dared to claim to have evolved from an ape on either his grandmother's or grandfather's side. Wilberforce had intended to say something witty, but it was misinterpreted as an aggressive provocation. According to Huxley himself, he turned to the person sitting next to him and said quietly, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands". Then he stood up meaningfully.
However, others recalled that Huxley shook with anger. He declared that in any case, he would rather be related to an ape than to a person who used his prestige to spread glib and irrelevant nonsense in the serious halls of science. The highly inflammable response greatly offended Wilberforce, and caused an uproar. A Mrs. Brewster fainted on the spot. Robert FitzRoy, who was Darwin's companion on the Beagle 25 years before, wandered around in the hall, holding up a Bible, and shouting: "The Bible, the Bible!" (He was the newly appointed head of the Meteorological Office, and was preparing to submit a paper on storms). Interestingly, both sides claimed to have thoroughly defeated the other afterwards.
In "The Descent of Man," which he completed in 1871, Darwin finally made explicit the kinship between man and apes. It was a bold conclusion, because at that time there was no fossil record to support such a view. The only early human fossils that had been discovered at the time were the famous Neanderthal bones discovered in Germany, as well as a few incomplete mandibles, and many influential authorities even doubted whether they were the fossils of ancient humans. "The Descent of Man" was generally a more controversial book than "The Origin of Species", but by the time it came out, people were less easily excited, and the discussions triggered by the book were far less intense than before.
However, Darwin spent most of his later life researching other subjects, most of which only lightly touched on the issue of natural selection. He spent a lot of time collecting bird droppings in order to study how seeds were transferred from one continent to another, and he spent several years studying the behavior of earthworms. He used to play the piano for earthworms, not to please them, but to study the effects of sound and vibration on them. He was the first to discover that earthworms played a vital role in fertilizing the soil. "It is difficult to find another animal in the history of the world that has played a more important role than earthworms." In his book, "The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms", which was actually more widely distributed than "The Origin of Species", he wrote the preceding quote. His other works include, "On the Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects" (1862), "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872) - which sold almost 5300 copies on its first day - "The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom" (1876) - the subject of which was very close to Mendel's work, but his views were far less insightful than Mendel's - and "The Power of Movement in Plants." Finally, he devoted a lot of effort to studying the results of inbreeding - an area of research that was purely of personal interest to him. Because Darwin's wife was his cousin, he suspected that some of the physiological and mental problems that appeared in his children must have been caused by consanguineous marriage.
Darwin won many honors during his lifetime, but not because of the "Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man". The Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal for his contributions to geology, zoology, and botany, not for his theory of evolution. The Linnean Society also excluded the radical views in his theory when it awarded him honorary title. Although he was buried in Westminster Abbey after his death - next to Newton - he was never awarded a knighthood during his lifetime. Darwin died in late April. Mendel died two years later.
It wasn't until the 1930s and 40s, with the slightly swaggering arrival of a doctrine called "modern synthesis" (which synthesized Darwin's, Mendel's, and some others' ideas), that Darwin's theory began to be widely accepted. Mendel, on the other hand, was obscure during his lifetime, and was shown deep grief shortly after his death. In 1900, three European scientists almost simultaneously rediscovered Mendel's theory. One of them was a Dutch scientist named Hugo de Vries, who appropriated Mendel's work, and was then exposed by a rival, causing a public scandal. Once the truth came to light, it was realized that the honor should go to a forgotten monk.
The world was ready to begin to understand how we came into this world, and how we are formed in the competition between each other. Until the early 20th century, or even for some time afterward, it was truly astounding that even the world's best scientists could not tell you unequivocally where babies came from.
And these were the people, you might recall, who thought that science was about to reach its end.