The Lying Stones of Marrakech (30 page)

I do not know what
g
-score might be given to Darwin by a modern Spearmanian. I do know, however, that we must follow the alternative view of independent multiplicity to grasp Darwin's triumph in the light of such unpromising beginnings (unpromising in the apparently hopeless sense of little talent with maximal opportunity, rather than the more tractable Horatio Alger mode of great promise in difficult circumstances).

Moreover, the theory of multiplicity has an important historical and philosophical consequence for understanding human achievement. If Spearman had been correct, and if intelligence could be construed as a single, innately provided, and largely invariant scalar quantity that could be plotted as a single linear order, then we might frame a predictive and largely biological model of achievement with a predominant basis in bloodlines and a substrate in neurology. But the theory of multiplicity demands an entirely different style of biographical analysis that builds a totality from narrative details.

If the sum of a person's achievement must be sought in a subtle combination of differing attributes, each affected in marvelously varying ways by complexities of external circumstances and the interplay of psyche and society, then no account of particular accomplishment can be drawn simply by prediction based on an overall inherited mental rank. Achieved brilliance must arise from (1) a happy combination of fortunate strength in several independent attributes, joined with (2) an equally fortuitous combination of external circumstances (personal, familial, societal, and historical), so that (3) such a unique mental convergence can lead one mind and personality to solve a major puzzle about the construction of natural reality. Explanations of this kind can only be achieved in the mode of dense narrative. No shortcuts exist; the answer lies in a particular concatenation of details—and these must be elucidated and integrated descriptively.

I used to think that the last section of Darwin's autobiography (on “mental qualities”) represented little more than a lie, enforced by conventions of Victorian public modesty, since Darwin could not speak openly about his strengths. The very last line may indeed be regarded as a tad disingenuous:
“With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.”

In rereading this section while writing this essay, I have changed my mind. I now view Darwin's assessment of his strengths and weaknesses as probably quite accurate, but set in the false context of his own belief in something close to a Spearmanian definition of brilliance. He had internalized a fairly stereotypical notion of an acme in scientific reasoning (based largely upon mathematical ability and lightning-quick powers of deduction), and he recognized that he possessed no great strength in these areas. He understood what he could do well, but granted these powers only secondary rank and importance. If Darwin had embraced the notion of intelligence as a plethora of largely independent attributes, and had also recognized (as he did for the evolution of organisms) that great achievement also requires a happy concatenation of uncontrollable external circumstances, then he might not have been so surprised by his own success.

Darwin begins the last section of his autobiography with deep regret for his negatives:

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance, Huxley…. My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I could never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics.

He then almost apologizes for his much humbler positive qualities:

Some of my critics have said, “Oh, he is a good observer, but he has no power of reasoning!” I do not think that this can be true, for the ‘Origin of Species' is one long argument from the beginning to the end, and it has convinced not a few able men. No one could have written it without having some power of reasoning. I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully. My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts. What is more important, my love of natural science has been steady and ardent…. From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I
observed…. These causes combined have given me the patience to reflect or ponder for any number of years over any unexplained problem.

The beginning of the final paragraph beautifully summarizes the argument that I advocate here—sublime achievement as a unique joining, at a favorable social and historical moment, of a synergistic set of disparate mental attributes. But Darwin does not accept this definition and therefore views his achievement—which he does not deny, for he was not, internally at least, a modest man—as something of a puzzle:

Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions.

Janet Browne did not write her book with such a theory of intelligence and accomplishment explicitly in mind, but her biography of Darwin explains his achievements better than any previous work because she has provided the requisite thick description of both the various attributes of mind (multiple intelligences) that motivated Darwin's work and powered his conclusions, and the conjunction of numerous external factors that fed his triumph.

Darwin's multiple intelligences:
As the greatest veil-coverers of recent times, the Victorians did not only hide their sexual habits. More generally, they concealed most displays of passion about anything. Since passion may be the common ground for Darwin's diverse strengths, and since he so carefully constructed an external persona of dispassionate gentility, this wellspring of his greatness can easily be missed. But the sheer accumulative density of Browne's documentation eventually prevails.

We come to understand, first of all, Darwin's enormous energy—whether overt and physical during his active youth on the
Beagle
, or cerebral when he became an invalid for most of his adult life. (Some people just seem to live at a higher plane of intensity, and must see most of us as we view the languorous world of a sloth—see chapter 4 on Buffon.) We often miss this theme with Darwin because he led such a quiet life as an adult and spent so much time prostrated by illness. But I am, of course, speaking about an internal drive. Our minds are blank or unproductive most of the time (filled with so much Joycean buzz that we can't sort out a useful theme). Darwin must have been thinking with useful focus all the time, even on his sickbed. I don't quite understand how
this intense energy meshes with Darwin's placidity of personality (as expressed so strongly from earliest days), the geniality that makes him so immensely likable among history's geniuses—usually a far more prickly lot. Perhaps he just kept the prickly parts under wrap because he had been schooled as such an eminent Victorian. Perhaps (a more likely alternative, I think) emotional placidity and level of intrinsic energy just represent different and separable aspects of human personalities.

In any case, this “energy”—expressed as passion, range, thoroughness, zeal, even ruthlessness at times—drove Darwin's achievements. He expressed the most overt form in roving over South America, trekking for weeks across mountains and deserts because he heard some rumor about fossil bones at the other end—and then, with equal restlessness, thinking and thinking about his results until he could encompass them in a broad theoretical conception. (For example, Darwin developed a correct theory for the origin of coral reefs—his first great contribution to science—by reading and pondering before he ever reached Pacific atolls for direct observation.)

Back in London, Darwin virtually moved into the Athenaeum Club by day, using its excellent library as his private preserve, reading the best books on all subjects from cover to cover. Browne writes:

Something of Darwin's mettle also showed through in the way he set off on a lifetime's program of reading in areas formerly holding only faint attractions. He tackled David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke in turn; Herbert Mayo's
Philosophy of Living
(1837), Sir Thomas Browne's
Religio Medici
, and John Abercrombie's
Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth
(1838) came between Gibbon and Sir Walter Scott.

As Darwin read theory and philosophy in all fields, he also began an almost obsessive querying and recording of anyone in any station who might supply information about natural history:

He asked Mark, Dr. Darwin's [his father's] coachman, for his opinion on dogs, and Thomas Eyton for his views on owls and pigs. He made Fox [his cousin] struggle with a deluge of farmyard questions of all shapes and sizes. He struck up a correspondence with his Uncle Jos about Staffordshire worms…. Darwin elaborated this way of proceeding into one of the most distinctive aspects of his
life's work. When seeking information on any new topic, he learned to go straight to the breeders and gardeners, the zookeepers, Highland ghillies, and pigeon fanciers of Victorian Britain, who possessed great practical expertise and, as Darwin fondly imagined, hardly any interest in pursuing larger theoretical explanations…. Being a gentleman—being able to use his social position to draw out material from people rarely considered scientific authorities in their own right—was important. His notebooks began bulging with details methodically appropriated from a world of expertise normally kept separate from high science.

Darwin pushed himself through these intense cycles of reading, pondering, noting, asking, corresponding, and experimenting over and over again in his career. He proceeded in this way when he wrote four volumes on the taxonomy of barnacles in the late 1840s and mid-1850s, when he experimented on the biogeography of floating seeds in the 1850s, on fertilization of orchids by insects in the early 1860s, and when he bred pigeons, studied insectivorous and climbing plants, and measured rates of formation of soil by worms.

He coordinated all the multiple intelligences that can seek, obtain, and order such information with his great weapon, a secret to all but a few within his innermost circle until he published
The Origin of Species
in 1859—the truth of evolution explained by the mechanism of natural selection. I don't think that he could have made sense of so much, or been able to keep going with such concentration and intensity, without a master key of this kind. He must have used yet another extraordinary intelligence to wrest this great truth from nature. But once he did so, he could then bring all his other mentalities to bear upon a quest never matched for expansiveness and import: to reformulate all understanding of nature, from bacterial physiology to human psychology, as a history of physical continuity, “descent with modification” in his words. Had he not noted, with justified youthful hubris in an early notebook, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke”?

Darwin's fortunate circumstances:
All the world's brilliance, and all the soul's energy, cannot combine to produce historical impact without a happy coincidence of external factors that cannot be fully controlled: health and peace to live into adulthood, sufficient social acceptability to gain a hearing, and life in a century able to understand (though not necessarily, at least at first, to believe). George Eliot, in the preface to
Middlemarch
, wrote about the pain of brilliant women without opportunity:

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.

Darwin experienced the good fortune of membership in that currently politically incorrect but ever-so-blessed group—upper-class white males of substantial wealth and maximal opportunity. This subject, a staple of recent Darwinian biographies, has been particularly well treated by Adrian Desmond and James Moore in their biography,
Darwin
(Warner Books, 1992). Though the theme is now familiar to me, I never cease to be amazed by the pervasive, silent, and apparently frictionless functioning (in smoothness of operation, not lack of emotionality) of the Victorian gentleman's world—the clubs, the networks, the mutual favors, the exclusions of some people, with never a word mentioned. Darwin just slid into this world and stuck there. He used his wealth, his illnesses, his country residence, his protective wife for one overarching purpose: to shield himself from ordinary responsibility and to acquire precious time for intellectual work. Darwin knew what he was doing and wrote in his autobiography: “I have had ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread. Even ill-health, though it has annihilated several years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement.”

Janet Browne's greatest contribution lies in her new emphasis upon a theme that has always been recognized but, strangely, never exploited as a major focus for a Darwin biography—the dynamics of immediate family. I had never realized, for example, just how wealthy and powerful Darwin's father had been. I had known that he was a famous physician, but I hadn't appreciated his role as the most prominent moneylender in the county. He was a fair and patient man, but nearly everyone who was anyone owed him something. And I feel even more enlightened about the warm and enabling (in the good sense) relationship of Charles and his remarkable wife, Emma, whose unwritten biography remains, in my view, one of the strangest absences in our scholarship about nineteenth-century life. (Sources exist in abundance for more than a few Ph.D.s. We even know the cumulative results of thirty years of nightly backgammon games between Charles and Emma; for Charles, as I have said, was an ardent recorder of details!) Much has been written about Emma and other family ties as sources of Charles's hesitancies and cautions (and I accept,
as substantially true, the old cliché that Charles delayed publication because he feared the impact of his freethinking ideas upon the psyche of his devout wife). But we need to give more attention and study to Darwin's family as promoters of his astonishing achievement.