Charles Darwin Read online

  Dedication

  Death to the weak! That is the watchword of what we might call the equestrian order established in every nation of the earth, for there is a wealthy class in every country, and that death-sentence is deeply engraved on the heart of every nobleman or millionaire . . . Take a few steps farther down the ladder of creation: if a barnyard fowl falls sick, the other hens hunt it around, attack it, scratch out its feathers and peck it to death.

  Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin,

  Wellcome Library, London: Punch, 28 December 1861.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prelude

  1. A Symbol

  2. The Old Hat

  3. What He Owed to Edinburgh

  4. Cambridge: Charles Darwin, Gent

  5. The Voyage of the Beagle

  6. ‘Blackbirds . . . gross-beaks . . . wren’

  7. The Ladder by Which You Mounted

  8. Lost in the Vicinity of Bloomsbury

  9. Half-Embedded in the Flesh of their Wives

  10. An Essay by Mr Wallace

  11. A Poker and a Rabbit

  12. Is It True?

  13. The Oxford Debate and its Aftermath

  14. Adios, Theory

  15. Immense Generalizations

  16. Evolution Old and New

  17. Mutual Aid

  Photos Section

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by A. N. Wilson

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prelude

  DARWIN WAS WRONG. That was the unlooked-for conclusion to which I was inexorably led while writing this book.

  To write the life of this Victorian Titan was an ambition which had been at the back of my mind for a quarter of a century. In 1999, I published a book about the Victorian crisis of faith, whose title was borrowed from a poem by Thomas Hardy – God’s Funeral. Subsequently, I wrote a general survey of the period – The Victorians – and later a biography of their monarch and figurehead, Victoria. It was irresistible to return to their most famous intellectual revolutionary, the more so since the last major biographies appeared a good while back, and had been published before the monumental Cambridge Darwin project, the publication of his complete correspondence, had got far under way.

  It was certainly not my intention when I began detailed reading for this book to part company from the mainstream of scientific opinion which still claims to believe, and in some senses does believe, the central contentions of Darwin’s most famous book, On the Origin of Species.

  There were a number of reasons why it did not even cross my mind that I would come to disbelieve in Darwin’s theories. The first reason is that I am not a scientist, and I am inevitably dependent on scientists for what I know about the subject. So are we all – including scientists. In fact, if you are a professional scientist, you will have even less time than a layperson to read at all deeply in areas of science other than your own, since there is so much, in every branch of science, being explored and discovered every year.

  In the last half-century, we have lived through a neo-Darwinian Golden Age: another reason why it would be a bold person – or so I supposed before I started reading up the subject – who came to question Darwin’s two central claims. These are, first, that by a gradual process of evolution one species evolves into another (the process is always gradual); the core of the theory is that nature does not make leaps – Natura non facit saltum. Secondly, Darwin believed that nature is in a state of perpetual warfare and struggle; that progress in evolution, and the perfecting of a species, takes place as a result of everlasting fight. ‘The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ is the second half of Darwin’s title for The Origin of Species. Even if you realize that by ‘Favoured Races’ he was not, at this stage, referring to human beings, the phraseology has a strange ring to it.

  The Golden Age of Darwinism saw the publication of Julian Huxley’s Evolution in Action (1963) which I remember reading when I was a schoolboy, and which seemed to me then entirely convincing. It was a shorter version of his 1942 groundbreaking book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. This was a synthesis between basic Victorian Darwinism and the discoveries of modern genetics which, when Huxley wrote, were still in their infancy relative to our level of knowledge today. The most coherent expression of this belief in the synthesis is The Theory of Evolution by John Maynard Smith, which was revised in 1993. Since those classics, there has been an abundance of books, articles, television programmes expounding the ideas of Darwin. Although Darwin’s original ideas are in fact, when you come to read much of this material, very heavily revised and indeed changed, in the writings of the Darwinians the central contention remains the same: Darwin was right; species evolve by a series of micro-changes, and this explanation is sufficient for everything. The Darwinian Process explains all. Perhaps the most readable and pugnacious proponent of this viewpoint is Richard Dawkins, who since publishing such books as The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker in the 1970s has seemed to put the truth of the Darwinian position beyond question.

  Nothing, however, is beyond question. As I quarried the history of Darwin himself, it was inevitable that I should wish to see how his ideas stood up in the light of contemporary scientific knowledge. This book, I quickly came to see, was very different from a biography of a painter or a politician. If our tastes have changed, today, and we no longer admire G. F. Watts, for example, as much as his contemporaries did, it does not mean he was a bad painter. Lord Palmerston’s way of being Prime Minister might not work today, but we can still esteem him in his own time and place.

  Science is not, however, a matter of passing taste. It is a matter of verifiable fact. With any scientist in the past, we are bound to ask whether their insights and theories still seem plausible. And in the case of Darwin this is doubly true, since his name is invoked so frequently by current evolutionary theorists.

  I soon came to realize, when I started my reading, that in fact there is no consensus among scientists about the theory of evolution. Most would recognize that Darwin was a great pioneer of evolutionary biology. And everyone must recognize that he was a prodigiously wide-ranging and observant naturalist, whose voyage in HMS Beagle, when he was a very young man, brought back a wealth of specimens and changed many branches of natural science. Everyone must recognize that he was among the foremost experts on the earthworm. And his book on The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals is a masterpiece.

  When it comes to the two books which give the world the adjective ‘Darwinian’, however, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), opinions vary enormously in the scientific world. Until I got down to doing my reading, I had assumed that, broadly speaking, scientific opinion accepted the truth of Darwin’s central theories, and that objections to it were motivated not by scientific doubts but by some other set of ideas – most likely religious ones. In so far as Darwin’s contemporaries rejected him on solely religious grounds, that is part of the story. (Very few did.) In so far as people today question Darwin, on religious grounds, that – it seemed to me – belonged to a different book. What interests me is whether he got it right scientifically. And there it is obvious that we are entitled to judge him not merely by the assessments made of his work by scientific and professional contemporaries – nearly all of them rejected it. We are entitled to ask how much our contemporary state of knowledge would lead us to question The Origin of Species.

  And this is where I was so astonished. One of the modern scientists whose work I had followed, lightly, over the years was my name
sake (no relation) E. O. Wilson, one of the foremost entomologists in the history of science. Not only was this Harvard professor a great scientist, but he also wrote sociobiology. I am not sure how convincing I have found the Social Darwinism. Certainly, Wilson has received many brickbats, accusing him of racism, misogyny and so forth.

  Sociobiology and Social Darwinism, in particular, are contentious areas, sure enough. Darwin was beyond question a racist in modern-day terms, but I would be cautious about judging men and women of the nineteenth century by the standards of the twenty-first. Even before I came to write the Victorian story of Darwin himself, however, I started to become aware of the violent dissent within the ranks of the Darwinians of our time.

  Perhaps the most arresting example happened in the early stages of my work, when I realized that E. O. Wilson, who had, forty years previously, been broadly supportive of Richard Dawkins’s belief in a ‘selfish gene’, had broken ranks and begun to think that, far from evolutionary progress being dependent on selfishness and struggle, it sometimes owed quite a bit to co-operation. Ants don’t build anthills by fighting one another; nor bees hives. In The Social Conquest of Earth, E. O. Wilson dared to put forward a ‘multi-level selection theory’, as opposed to the idea of genes themselves being ‘selfish’. ‘There is no such thing as a good or bad gene,’ he opined. Dawkins cited 137 other scientists who agreed with him, and denounced Wilson for ‘an act of wanton arrogance’1 for daring to depart from orthodoxy. Wilson responded in a BBC TV interview by claiming that Dawkins was no longer a scientist, but a . . . ‘journalist’.2 Ouch.

  Scientists were not, then, at one over the status of Darwin’s ideas. If they were reduced to trading insults with one another, it surely suggested a theory which had collapsed: one camp accused the other of making ‘unsubstantiated assertions resting on the surface of a quaking marsh of unsupported claims’. The other retorted that the enemy had ‘ideas so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with’.3

  When I read more of what the evolutionists had to say, both about their subject and about one another, I realized that Darwin’s position as the great man of life-sciences looked uncertain. Geology has moved on since his friend and mentor Sir Charles Lyell pioneered the subject in the early nineteenth century. But we do not dismiss Lyell, since he discovered so much. What, exactly, did Darwin discover? Or is his theory just that – simply a theory?

  Wilson’s slow but inexorable journey to disbelief in Darwin’s ‘struggle for life’ theory gave me pause. Then I came to read the work of Stephen Jay Gould. His book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002) was based on a lifetime’s palaeontological research. Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge developed a theory of what they called ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The little two-word phrase is a deadly one for the orthodox believer in Darwin. In The Origin, Darwin admitted that the fossil evidence to support his theory was sparse. Gould, one of the foremost palaeontologists of modern times, revealed that it was not sparse: it was non-existent. What the fossil evidence demonstrated, beyond doubt and contrary to what Darwin had claimed, was that nature did make leaps. It hopped. Species did not, apparently, evolve little by little, though micro-mutation did indeed take place within species. The famous finches and their beaks, gradually evolving to adapt themselves to different Galápagos Islands, are a case in point.

  Gould wrote in 1980, ‘The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.’4 Eldredge, in 1995, would write,

  No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seemed to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere!5

  Then I read Michael Denton’s now classic work Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985). Where necessary, in the pages that follow, I have summarized some of Denton’s arguments. Denton does not deny that evolution occurs. He points out that we observe it taking place within species. Darwin’s theory that all species have emerged by a series of gradual, infinitely slow, infinitely small mutations is simply not borne out by the evidence. Moreover it is not merely scientists who have provided us with reasons to doubt Darwin. Thomas Nagel is only one philosopher, possibly the most distinguished, to question the plausibility of Darwinism (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, 2012). Do we need catch-all theories, such as Darwin’s, which seem to explain everything at once?

  It is probably worth saying that Nagel is not a religious believer. His fields have been political philosophy and the philosophy of mind. What he has come to question is the extremely simplistic, reductionist ‘explanations’ of complex phenomena – above all, consciousness – which Darwinism offers. ‘The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.’6

  I did not, and do not, want to write a destructive book, but I now found it was not possible to tell the story from the position of a simple belief in The Origin of Species. After a few months of agonizing over the matter, I decided that this makes my task much more difficult than that of my predecessors in the Darwinian field, but also more interesting. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that Darwin’s errors sprang from the mindset of his particular age and milieu. They were programmed to have a particular view of the world by the economic and social world in which they lived. Darwin was frank enough to say that his theory came to him, not as a result of his biological researches, but from reading an economist – Thomas Malthus.

  In time, I came to see Darwin as two men. One was the observant naturalist, who spent nearly a decade writing a book about barnacles. The other was the theorist. The theorist is the one whose name is invoked in our day to justify the theories of those who espouse them. Often these theories have nothing to do with science. I therefore find myself writing, the biography not merely of a man, but of his idea; and not merely of his idea, but of his age.

  1

  A Symbol

  ANY TOURIST IN London is likely, at some point, to visit the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. Standing in its vast hall, you could almost be in a Romanesque cathedral. You are greeted, however, by the statue of a man who was credited by his closest associates with having undermined the very grounds for religious belief: Charles Darwin. The huge museum, with its skeletons of creatures long since extinct from the earth’s surfaces and its prodigious collection of specimens, continues to grow, and to be adapted, as a reflection of the state of modern scientific knowledge. Yet it remains an essentially Victorian museum – Victorian not merely in its architectural style, but in its aims and purpose.

  The collections of specimens – of insects, birds, skeletons, fossils, many of them made and donated by Darwin himself – were originally housed in the British Museum in Bloomsbury. The construction of a separate museum constituted to celebrate the advances made in biology and botany and geology and zoology in the nineteenth century was the inspiration of Richard Owen (1804–92). Not only was Owen one of the great naturalists, and great anatomists, of his age, he was also an administrator of genius, a wheeler-dealer, a getter-of-things-done. It was the energy and resolve of this former poor apothecary’s assistant, later Hunterian Professor of Anatomy, which led to the accumulation of enough funds to build the museum, and to cajole the government into recognizing what this building was. It was a monument to the fact that the Victorian Age had seen advances in scientific knowledge which were without historical parallel.


  The statue of Darwin which sits in the hall at the bottom of the stairs in Owen’s great museum was made by the sculptor Sir Edgar Boehm. It was unveiled a year after the museum opened, and the speech was made by the President of the Royal Society, Thomas Huxley. ‘Whatever be the ultimate verdict of posterity upon this or that opinion which Mr Darwin has propounded,’ Huxley said; ‘whatever adumbrations or anticipations of his doctrines may be found in the writings of his predecessors; the broad fact remains that, since the publication and by reason of the publication, of “The Origin of Species”, the fundamental conceptions and the aims of the students of living Nature have been completely changed. From that work has sprung a great renewal, a true “instauratio magna” of the zoological and botanical sciences.’1

  Huxley’s words were both true and provocatively paradoxical. They were erecting the statue in the museum which was the creation of Owen, a man who had helped Darwin hugely in his early career but whom Darwin was to describe in his Autobiography as a bitter enemy.2 The placing of Darwin’s statue in this particular place was an act of deliberate renunciation not merely of Owen personally, but of his whole attitude to science. Owen, dubbed the ‘British Cuvier’ by Huxley (who meant it as an insult), was committed to the museum as the primary institution through which science moved forward.3

  To each nation, their own pioneer. Many French people, sixty years before Darwin published The Origin of Species, would have echoed Honoré de Balzac’s hymn to the great Parisian museologist, and seen in Georges Cuvier’s assemblage of dinosaur-skeletons and palaeontological relics the true beginnings of modern evolutionary science, and with it their changed perception of what it meant to be a human being on the planet earth.

  Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones, has, like Cadmus, rebuilt cities by means of teeth, peopled anew a thousand forests with all the wonders of zoology thanks to a few chips of coal and rediscovered races of giants in a mammoth’s foot. These figures rise from the soil, tower up and people whole regions whose dimensions are in harmony with their colossal stature. He writes poems in numbers, he is sublime in the way he places cyphers after a seven [that is, he greatly increases the biblical number of seven days of creation] . . . And suddenly . . . lost worlds are unfolded before us! After countless dynasties of gigantic creatures, after generations of fishes, innumerable clans of molluscs, comes at last the human race, the degenerate product of a grandiose type whose mould was perhaps broken by the Creator Himself . . . We wonder, crushed as we are by so many worlds in ruin, what can our glories avail, our hatreds and our loves, and if it is worth living at all if we are to become, for future generations, an imperceptible speck in the past.4