Charles Darwin* (6 page)

Along with a whole rainforest in miniature, Darwin had sent letters trying out his new ideas. Acting like an unpaid promoter, Henslow had done his former student the enormous favor of getting his samples into the right hands and reading his letters to the right people.

Also, the giant Megatherium head had been exhibited in London and caused a sensation. Vestiges of extinct animals were the rage.

In some ways he was a stranger in a strange land. At eighteen, Princess Victoria was about to become Queen Victoria and begin her sixty-four-year reign. For the rich there were indoor bathrooms, gaslights, lawnmowers, new steam technology, railroad tracks crisscrossing the country, more factories, more shops, more books and magazines. In
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens was to reveal the miseries of the poor, the thousands of orphaned children working in factories or living on the streets of crowded, polluted London.

Soon Darwin moved, with two pet tortoises, to London, just down the street from Ras. After their separation, the two brothers were closer than ever, dashing around town to visit Ras’s many friends. Darwin tried to understand Charles Babbage, inventor of the earliest computer, and with even less success, the early feminist Harriet Martineau.

Darwin’s top priority was to catalog the specimens from his journey. He kept some for himself and distributed the rest among experts he admired. They would identify them and bestow official Latin names.

Among the specimens were many birds from the Galápagos. Darwin had not marked from which specific island the different birds came, because he hadn’t thought it mattered, since the islands were so close. A famous ornithologist named John Gould studied the birds and came to a startling—to Darwin—conclusion.

To the ornithologist, all the Galápagos birds did look closely related. But that did not mean they were one species. After all, horses and donkeys look quite similar and can even mate, yet they still remain separate species. (Their offspring, mules, cannot reproduce.) The differences that Gould discovered among the finches meant they had to belong to separate species—thirteen
different
species of finches.

The most important difference was the shape of their beaks. For instance, some had beaks that were short and good at cracking open seeds; some had much longer beaks that were good for picking bugs out of bark.

Darwin now realized that each bird’s appearance must result from the environment of its native island. Some islands were covered in trees whose bark was bug-infested. Other islands were covered in plants that produced seeds. Not recording the finches’ place of origin had certainly been a mistake. But Darwin still was able to recover enough information on their origin to form a brilliant theory.

Perhaps a single species of finch had flown from the mainland of South America to different islands of the Galápagos. Over time, depending on the environment of the island on which it landed, this single species adapted in different ways that helped it survive on its specific island. The finches on the different islands changed to the point where they became separate species. This was a huge piece of the puzzle, but Darwin had yet to identify the way it happened . . . that was to come later.

Much to his pleasure, he met his hero the geologist Charles Lyell, and even better, became good friends with him. Lyell took him around to all the important men of science, like John Herschel, who wrote that the “mystery of mysteries” in science was how species were “replaced” by others. Most important for Darwin’s career, he became a close friend of botanist Joseph Hooker, on whom he bestowed all his plant specimens.

A bit embarrassed by all the attention, Darwin buried himself in work. While groaning that “writing is the most tedious and difficult work,” he spent his first nine months home polishing his
Beagle
journal. (It came out two years later as volume three of FitzRoy’s account of the
Beagle
’s two voyages.) He had ideas for several more books—on zoology, geology, coral reefs. . . .

He also began keeping a series of small notebooks with him at all times so he could jot down his own thoughts or interesting points others made. Full of misspellings and cross-outs, lacking punctuation, the notebooks were a way of talking to himself. These notebooks include what are now called the Transmutation Notebooks, his first, baby-step attempts to unite his observations that would pave the way to the development of a theory.

Eventually, Darwin filled fifteen of these notebooks, which were labeled alphabetically. The A notebook was devoted to questions about geology. He called the B notebook “Zoonomia,” in homage to his grandfather Erasmus. In it Darwin made a now-famous drawing of a simple tree. It was 1837.

He was a terrible artist and had done no sketching during the voyage of the
Beagle
, but this tree didn’t have to be fancy. Branching out from its trunk were species—modern species at the top, their ancestors at the bottom. It was a Tree of Life, representing how all animals and plants could have descended from a common ancestor. Some simple form of life changed and branched off into more complicated organisms. Above it he wrote the words, “I think.”

In the B notebook, Darwin also speculated, for the first time in his writings, that species survived or died out depending on their ability to
adapt
to their environment.

The C notebook was mostly about heredity, the passing down of traits from one generation to the next. At one point he wrote that once you accepted the possibility that one species might change into another, then the “whole fabric totters and falls!” By fabric he meant the traditional idea of unchanging life on Earth, including the biblical story of Genesis in which all species were created from the very first in their final form. Was man the exception to what he was pondering? No, he didn’t see why man should be excluded from the tree. Man was just another species, part of nature. Knocking human beings off their pedestal, Darwin knew, was not about to go over well. So before going public, Darwin set about finding evidence.

He began visiting zoos, parks, and farms, obsessively interviewing gardeners and animal breeders, gleaning facts about how they purposely sought to improve a particular species. Crossbreeding was a huge craze in Great Britain, with people trying to develop better strains of pigs, flowers, potatoes, whatever. Breeding experts were always happy to talk about methods they used to produce improvements in a species.

Now came an “aha” moment. Darwin realized that over time reproduction could lead not only to improvements within a species but to the beginning of an entirely new species. This process happened all by itself in nature, with nothing controlling it. Random forces! No one in control! It’s easy to understand how frightening this worldview would have been to Victorians.

Darwin was also reading everything he could get his hands on. The dramatic rise of printed matter in England gave him much to choose from, and he made long lists of books, checking each one off as he finished it.

In 1838 he encountered the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s
Essay on the Principle of Population
, first published forty years earlier. This influential clergyman and English scholar wrote about evil—and why it exists in the world. He also talked about the problems of an industrial society, such as overpopulation. A minister, he believed that God created famines. They would keep human population in check, and their purpose was to inspire mankind to strive to improve his situation. Malthus drew parallels to nature. He observed that plants and animals will always produce far more offspring than can survive, given a limited food supply. The weakest will not survive long. The stronger, more able, more industrious individuals will have a better chance of surviving and having offspring.

The struggle for existence—Malthus viewed it in terms of people and society. But what hit a chord with Darwin was the idea of a competitive environment in nature. He immediately drew a line from Malthus’s argument to the “warring of the species,” the struggle for existence among plants and wildlife.

Whoa.

As he wrote later, “Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.” For Darwin, reading Malthus was the closest thing he had to a eureka moment. Things started clicking into place. Species were always reproducing beyond the resources available to them. Which individuals would survive, and which wouldn’t? And why?

Darwin applied what he learned from Malthus to what he already knew about crossbreeding plants and animals. He now printed up a questionnaire about crossbreeding and sent it to everyone he could think of. How did they choose which individuals in a species to breed? What methods did they use for selective breeding?

Darwin took a long view of the information he received. In nature, purely by chance, were new species created? He began seeing patterns in adaptation. For example, in a litter of rabbits some might be born with longer legs. Assuming that long legs were useful to survival, those rabbits would be the ones to live long enough to mate, and some of their children would inherit their longer legs. Over time, in generation after generation of litters, the long-legged rabbits would be dominant. Short-legged rabbits would die out. Might a new species eventually arise that were like rabbits but with longer legs? Could this pattern hold true for all species? Was this how new species formed?

Into the D notebook, he wrote about glowworms, cattle, ducks, and Malthus. “There must be some law that whatever organization an animal has, it tends to multiply and IMPROVE on it,” Darwin concluded. And he wrote about Darwins. He interviewed Dr. Darwin about unfamiliar branches of the family tree, looking for traits and stories, adding to those he already knew.

By E he was referring to “my theory”—through natural selection a species changed over time and developed into a new species.

Darwin paid several visits to the London Zoo to observe an orangutan, Jenny. Jenny and another recent arrival, a chimpanzee, were among the first members of the ape family that the English had ever seen. Viewers were somewhat shocked to watch Jenny interact with her keeper in ways familiar to anyone who knows a small child. Queen Victoria said later she found Jenny “painfully and disagreeably human.”

On one visit Darwin observed Jenny’s reactions while he played a harmonica and gave her peppermints to eat and leaves from a lemon verbena plant to smell. To him her behavior as she pouted and whined to get what she wanted was
exactly
like “a naughty child.” Into a notebook he scribbled, “Man from monkey?”

The notebooks had many more questions than answers.

By notebook N he was writing that biology followed natural laws that could be tested and proven, as laws in physics and astronomy were. “We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws,” he pointed out, “but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.” By “special act” he was referring to God’s creation of a fixed world. He knew the general public wasn’t ready to accept his ideas. He had to keep his notebooks secret, even from Ras and his new best friend, Lyell. Though he didn’t take the precautionary step of writing backward, as Leonardo da Vinci had in his notebooks three hundred years earlier, Darwin had similar motives for keeping his ideas to himself.

Darwin started to have trouble digesting his nightly roast beef. But that didn’t stop him from thinking about his theory, and then thinking about it more. Up until now he had been flailing amid facts; now they were forming patterns. Branching out from alphabetical notebooks, he started writing an essay on the free paper at the posh Athenaeum Club, to which he’d been elected a member at the same time as Charles Dickens.

He lost another eighteen pounds. He was plagued with stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, heart palpitations, trembling. The drugs that doctors gave him, like opium, probably made him worse.

This was the beginning of the long period later known as “Darwin’s Delay,” the years in which he avoided publishing the book about his theory. The delay lasted twenty years. Various factors contributed—he was a master at procrastination; he had a great deal to fear by going public, so he wanted to amass tons of irrefutable examples to prove his theory; and besides, he was busy.

All of this dwelling on reproduction within a species as the driving force of nature merged with something more personal—his own thoughts of marrying.

His former girlfriend Fanny had married someone else almost as soon as he left on the
Beagle
.

Would a wife add to or detract from his life?

He was torn. Ras had never married and seemed happy. It wasn’t as if he needed someone to act as a hostess—Ras did that for him, planning dinner parties in his honor. And his time was completely his own.

Darwin listed the pros and cons of marriage on paper, as if assessing and describing a new kind of beetle. “A nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire” versus giving up traveling to America, going up in a balloon, the “terrible loss of time” away from his studies.

But adventuring had lost its appeal. At age twenty-nine, he was a bachelor who lived in his armchair, whose main hobby was keeping track of his own ailments.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Confessing a Murder”

THE URGE TO mate won out. And he didn’t look far for someone to mate with. After calling on her a few times, Darwin chose to marry his first cousin, thirty-year-old Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Uncle Josiah, and a friend since childhood. After the proposal, she felt “bewildered” and he had a headache. But her answer was yes.

Darwin didn’t want an intimidating wife. Emma, however, was well educated for a woman of her day, could speak four languages, and had even studied piano with the famous composer Frédéric Chopin. Emma was exceedingly pleasant, a natural born caretaker. “I think you will humanize me,” he wrote her, “and soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.”