In 1844, a sensational book, fundamentally pseudoscience, called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published. Robert Chambers, the encyclopedist and amateur geologist who was its anonymous author, claimed that he had traced human ancestry all the way back to … frogs. Chambers’ reasoning was half-baked (although no more so than Erasmus Darwin’s) but its audacity attracted a great deal of attention. Nagging doubts about Creation were beginning to bubble to the surface, and Darwin felt that he should write down his own theory in as irrefutable a form as possible. He expanded a short essay, begun two years before, into a two-part work entitled “On the Variation of Organic Beings under Domestication and in the Natural State” and “On the Evidence Favourable and Opposed to the View That Species Are Naturally Formed Races Descended from Common Stock.” However, he was not ready to publish. He wrote a letter to Emma that he asked be considered as a codicil to his will. In the event of his death, he wanted her todevote £400 to its publication and further will yourself … take trouble in promoting it—I wish that my sketch be given to some competent person, with this sum to induce him to take trouble in its improvement and enlargement.19
He felt he was on to something important, but feared—perhaps especially in view of his frequent bouts of illness—that he would not live to complete the work.
In what superficially seems an odd next move, he now put his evolutionary studies aside and for the next eight years devoted his life almost exclusively to barnacles. His great friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, would later observe to Darwin’s son, Francis, “Your father had Barnacles on the brain from Chili [Chile] onwards!”20 It was this exhaustive project that really earned him his credentials as a naturalist. Another close friend, the anatomist and brilliant polemicist Thomas Henry Huxley, observed that Darwinnever did a wiser thing … Like the rest of us, he had no proper training in biological science, and it has always struck me as a remarkable instance of his scientific insight, that he saw the necessity of giving himself such training, and of his courage, that he did not shirk the labour of obtaining it … It was a piece of critical self-discipline, the effect of which manifested itself in everything [he] wrote afterwards, and saved him from endless errors of detail.21
Darwin had not been the only scientist to get a jolt from Chambers’ Vestiges. Alfred Russel Wallace, a surveyor who had become a naturalist, was also unimpressed with Chambers’ arguments, but also intrigued by the notion that there was a knowable process at work in the evolution of life. In 1847, he traveled to the Amazon in search of factual support for this idea. A fire on the ship taking him back to England consumed every one of his specimens. Wallace persevered, setting off to the Malay Peninsula to gather a new collection. In the September 1855 issue of Annals and Magazine of Natural History, his paper “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” appeared.
By this time, Darwin had been wrestling with such problems for two decades. Now, it was entirely possible that his claims of priority to the solution of life’s greatest mystery would be snatched away. If science were in the business of conferring sainthood, the conduct of Darwin and Wallace towards one another would have earned it for them both. Darwin wrote a letter of hearty congratulation to Wallace in which he mentioned how long he’d been working on the same problem.
Darwin’s friends Huxley and Hooker prodded him to quit stalling and write the paper that would make an ironclad case for evolution. He complied and was nearing its completion in 1858, while Wallace, now in Indonesia and sick with malaria, tossed and turned, grappling with the question “Why do some die and some live?”22 Emerging from his stupor, he understood natural selection. He wrote “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” and promptly mailed it to Darwin, asking him to use his judgment about what should be done with it. Darwin was distressed to see how very close Wallace’s work was to his own writings of 1839 and 1842. In 1844 he had combined them into an essay, but it remained unpublished. Darwin turned to his friends for guidance on how to deal ethically with this dilemma. Hooker and Lyell came up with a wise solution: Present both the Wallace paper and a version of Darwin’s unpublished 1844 essay at the next meeting of the Linnaean Society and publish them together in the Society’s Proceedings.23 Thereafter, Wallace always spoke of evolution as being Darwin’s theory and Darwin always credited Wallace with its independent discovery. Darwin now applied himself to the task of writing the book that would cause so much trouble.
On November 24, 1859, The Origin of Species was published. The first edition of 1,250 copies was snapped up by the booksellers. Darwin had been careful to make only one reference to humans in the whole book: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”24 Anything more from his pen on this delicate matter would have to wait another twelve years, for the publication of The Descent of Man. His restraint fooled no one. Given its formidable armamentarium of data, there could be no reconciling The Origin with a literal rendition of Genesis.
Chapter 4
A GOSPEL OF DIRT
I detest all systems that depreciate human
nature. If it be a delusion that there is
something in the constitution of man that is
venerable and worthy of its author, let me live
and die in that delusion, rather than have my
eyes opened to see my species in a humiliating
and disgusting light. Every good man feels his
indignation rise against those who disparage his
kindred or his country; why should it not rise
against those who disparage his kind?
THOMAS REID
letter of 17751
When I view all beings not as special creations,
but as the lineal descendants of some few
beings which lived long before the first bed of
the Cambrian [geological] system was
deposited, they seem to me to become
ennobled.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Origin of Species, Chapter XV2
Mankind has conducted an experiment of gigantic proportions,” Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species. He was struck by the success of “husbandry,” as it is tellingly called, in generating new varieties of animals and plants useful for humans. Nature provides the varieties and we select who shall reproduce, which traits we want preferentially to propagate into future generations. By transferring pollen from flower to flower with a camel’s hair brush, or by letting the stallion in with the mare, humans take it upon themselves to determine who shall mate with whom. Indigestible crops, weakling horses, scrawny turkeys, sheep with knotty coats, and cows that are grudging with their milk are discouraged from reproducing. Generation after generation, by cumulative selection, humans impress their interests on the heredity of the plants and animals whose breeding they control. But Nature, too, selects those plants and animals which by its lights happen to be more favorably adapted than their fellows; such fortunate beings preferentially reproduce, leave more offspring and, as time goes on, supplant the competition. Artificial selection helps us to understand how natural selection works.