The Act of Creation (17 page)

If [the] individual cannot propagate he has no issue -- so with species.
If species  generate other species, their race is not
utterly cut off -- otherwise all die.
Absolute knowledge that species die and others replace them.
. . . The permanent variations produced by confined breeding and
changing circumstances are continued and produced according to the
adaptation [to] such circumstances and therefore . . . death of species
is a consequence . . . of non-adaptation [to] circumstances.
If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow
brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine -- our slaves in
the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements -- they may
partake our origin in one common ancestor -- we may be all melted away.
. . . Organized beings represent [a] tree irregularly branched
. . . [This is probably an echo of Lamarck's 'branching series
irregularly graded'.]
species according to Lamarck disappear as collections made perfect.
If all men were dead, then monkeys may make men, men make angels.
Let man visit orang-outang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see
its intelligence when spoken, as if it understood every word . . . see
its affection to those it knows, see its passion and rage, sulkiness
and . . . despair; let him look at savage, roasting his parent, naked,
artless, not improving yet improvable; and then let him dare to boast
of his proud pre-eminence.
Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the
interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider
him created from animals.

By now he is fully committed. Moreover (after all, he is only
twenty-eight) he sees himself in the future role of a hero and possible
martyr:

Mention persecution of early astronomers. Then add chief good of
individual scientific men is to push their science a few years in
advance of their age (differently from literary men). Must remember
that if they believe and do not openly avow their belief,
they do as much to retard.

That was easily said, but in fact Darwin did retard the publication
of his theory by twenty years, until his hand was forced. The reasons
were chronic illness, other pressing work, and, in his own words:
'I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some
time to write even the briefest sketch of it.' To counteract 'prejudice'
he had to assemble and build massive pillars of fact in support of the
slender bridge of his theory. For, contrary to the pious assertions in the
preface, the bridge had come first and the pillars afterwards -- as was
nearly always the case in the history of scientific thought. The result
proved that this caution was justified. Without those pillars, assembled
with heroic patience and effort, the bridge would have collapsed in the
ensuing storm. Here is one of the cases where the process of elaboration,
verification, and confirmation -- the long donkey-work following the brief
flash of insight -- is more decisive than the discovery itself. That is
why Darwin is remembered, whereas Wallace, who made the same discovery,
is all but forgotten.
Given the long line of evolutionists, from Anaximander to Charles's own
grandfather Erasmus, wherein lies Darwin's greatness, the originality of
his contribution? In picking up, one might say, the disjointed threads,
plaiting them into a braid, and then weaving an enormous carpet around
it. The main thread was the evolutionist's credo that the various species
in the animal and vegetable kingdom 'had not been independently created,
but had descended, like varieties, from other species'. [17] Now this
doctrine disposed of the idea of the Creator putting down separately
the first serpent, giraffe and walrus as ready-made products on the
earth; but it gave no explanation of the
reasons
which caused the
common ancestor to transform itself gradually into serpents, walruses,
and giraffes. Only Lamarck had attempted to provide a comprehensive
reason for evolution in his four 'laws'. They said, in essence, that
an animal's physical characteristics and particularities of behaviour
are shaped by its
needs
, that is, by adaptation to its natural
environment; that specialized organs grow and decline in proportion to
their use or disuse; and that these adaptive changes which the animal
acquires in its lifetime are
inherited
by its offspring.
Contrary to popular belief, Darwin had no objection against the last
point, the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics' -- decried as a
mortal heresy by neo-Darwinians. On the contrary, in his
Variations of
Animals and Plants under Domestication
, and in the later editions of
the
Origin
, he gave a series of examples of what he believed to
be inherited characteristics in the offspring, due to adaptive changes
in their ancestors. But he refused to accept such direct adaptations
as the only, or even the main cause of evolution, because the evidence
seemed to speak against it. Evidence showed that a great variety of
species lived under identical environmental conditions; and vice versa,
that the same species could be found under widely varying conditions. If
species evolved, as Lamarck's theory proposed, by direct adaptations
to the environment, then their variety remained unexplained. Evolution
was a fact; but what caused it? What was the nature of the force which
transformed animals and plants into new shapes?
The second thread that he picked up was of almost as trivial a nature
for a country-bred English gentleman as Archimedes's daily bath: domestic
Breeding. The improvement of domestic breeds is achieved by the selective
mating of favourable variations:

It seemed to me probable that a careful study of domesticated animals
and of cultivated plants would offer the best chance of making out
this complicated problem. Nor have I been disappointed; in this and in
all other perplexing cases I have invariably found that our knowledge,
imperfect though it be, of variation under domestication, afforded the
best and safest clue. I may venture to express my conviction of the
high value of such studies, although they have been very commonly
neglected by naturalists.  [18] (my italics)

We might say that Darwin had discovered 'evolution through artificial
selection'. Incidentally the discovery is again not quite as original as
the last sentence might suggest. Darwin's notebooks of that period show
that he had been reading and pondering Lamarck; and twenty years earlier,
in his
Philosophie Zoologique
, Lamarck had written:

What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day when we
suddenly change the environment in which some species of living plants
is situated . . . Where in nature do we find our cabbages, lettuces,
etc., in the same state as in our kitchen gardens? And is not the case
the same with regard to many animals which have been altered or gready
modified by domestication? [19]

Whether Darwin read this passage from Lamarck, or similar passages, we
do not know. But the question is irrelevant except for historians who
specialize in priority claims. At any rate, Darwin now set out to collect
facts about domestic breeding 'patiently and indiscrimnately', not only
from technical journals but from 'skilful breeders and gardeners'. A
great number of the 'facts' were spurious, and some of his theorizings
were as wild and fantastic as Kepler's speculations on the broom-like
sweeping force emanating from the sun:

The cat had its tail cut off at Shrewsbury and its kittens had all
short tails; but one a little longer than the rest; they all died. She
had kittens before and afterwards with tails.
My father says on authority of Mr. Wynne, the bitch's offspring is
affected by previous marriages with impure breed . . .
Dr. Smith says he is certain that when white men and Hottentots
or Negroes cross at Cape of Good Hope, the children cannot be made
intermediate. The first children partake more of the mother, the later
ones of the father.

In his book on
Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication
we are further informed that a cow having lost its horn owing to an
infected wound, gave birth 'to three calves, each with a small bony lump
in place of a horn'.
A contemporary biologist has commented on Darwin's 'amiable
credulity'. [20] It is a character trait which he shared with
Tycho, Kepler, Freud, Pasteur, and a large number of other
great scientists. Ernest Jones [21] remarked in an essay about
Freud that creative genius seems to be a mixture of scepticism and
naïveté scepticism regarding the dogmas implied in traditional
modes of thought, combined with the willingness of a wide-open mind to
consider far-fetched theories. Darwin himself, as one of his biographers
remarked, 'was able to give ultimate answers because he asked ultimate
questions. His colleagues, the systematizers, knew more than he about
particular species and varieties, comparative anatomy and morphology. But
they had deliberately eschewed such ultimate questions as the pattern of
creation, or the reasons for any particular form, on the grounds that
these were not the proper subjects of science. Darwin, uninhibited
by these restrictions, could range more widely and deeply into the
mysteries of Nature. . . . It was with the sharp eyes of the primitive,
the open mind of the innocent, that he looked at his subject, daring to
ask questions that his more learned and sophisticated colleagues could
not have thought to ask' (Himmelfarb). [22]
However, the study of domestic breeding led into another cul-de-sac;
for, in the case of domestic animals,
man
acts as the agent of
selection; but who or what selects the favourable variations for breeding
in the case of undomesticated animals or plants? 'How selection could
be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some
time a mystery to me.'
The deadlock lasted a year and three months. He tried a number of
hypotheses, but none of them worked. He toyed with the idea of some
universal law, according to which species were born, matured, and
died, just as individuals do. 'There is nothing stranger in the death
of a species than in the death of individuals.' Then he assumed, by a
perverse analogy, that since nothing is preserved of an individual who
dies without leaving offspring, so a species too will die out unless
it gives rise to another species. But they were wrong guesses, and his
thoughts kept running in circles in the blocked matrix -- as Sultan's
did until his eyes fell on the stick.
In Darwin's case the stick was Malthus's "An Essay on the Principle
of Population." It had been published in 1797 -- more than forty years
earlier. When Darwin read the essay -- among other books which he read
'for amusement', as he said -- he saw in a flash the 'natural selector',
the causative agent of evolution, for which he had been searching:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly
survive; and as consequently there is a frequently recurring struggle
for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary ever so slightly
in a manner profitable to itself . . . will have a better chance of
survival, and thus be naturally selected (Darwin's italics). Thus
favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable
ones to be destroyed. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which
to work. [23]

He had found the third thread. Now the pattern of the theory was complete:
what remained to be done was its elaboration -- the weaving of the huge
carpet which took him most of the rest of his life.
The odd thing about the story is -- as others have pointed out -- that
Darwin had completely misunderstood Malthus. The struggle for existence,
in which Darwin discovered the causative mechanism of evolutionary
improvement
, Malthus himself had regarded as a cause of misery,
frustration, and
decline
. The increase of population was for
Malthus an unmitigated evil and an obstacle to progress. The essay had
actually been written as a polemic against Condorcet and Godwin, who had
argued the perfectability of the human species. Domestic breeding, Malthus
retorted, could improve animals and plants only to a very limited degree;
but a carnation could never be made to reach the size of a cabbage, and
similar limits were set to human progress. Thus the struggle for existence
was for Malthus not the whiphand of evolution, but a scourge. What Darwin
found in Malthus's essay he had read into it himself -- as Kepler had
read his brooms and planetary lodestones into the skies.
Even odder is the fact that Wallace arrived at the same discovery also
by way of Malthus. Alfred Russell Wallace was even more gullible,
and at the beginning of his career even more of a dilettante than
the young Darwin. He was fourteen years younger than Darwin; he had
been educated at an indifferent grammar school and learned the trade
of land-surveying. Before he took up that occupation, he had shown no
interest in nature, and 'it took another four years for him to advance
beyond the recognition of rose and buttercup, and to learn, from a
shilling booklet published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge, the elementary classifications of botany'. [24]
At twenty-one he became a schoolteacher of sorts. In that year he read,
among other books, Darwin's
Journal of a Naturalist's Voyage on the
Beagle
and Malthus's "Essay on Population." But his mind did not
click. He struck up a friendship with the entymologist Henry Walter Bates
and became an expert collector of beetles. This led him to speculate about
'the almost infinite number of specific forms [among beetles], the endless
modifications of structure, shape, colour, and surface-markings . . . and
their innumerable adaptations to diverse environments'; he was 'bitten
by the passion for species' [25] and the secret of their origin. Like
Darwin he became an evolutionist by an act of faith; like Darwin he
was searching for its cause; like Darwin he embarked -- with his friend
Bates -- on a naturalist expedition to collect insects, shells, birds,
and animals; like Darwin he wrote a book about it (