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  Darwin’s Origin of Species

  A Biography

  Janet Browne is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. She is the author of the landmark two-volume biography of Charles Darwin, Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002).

  Other titles in the Books That Shook the World series:

  Available now:

  Plato’s Republic by Simon Blackburn

  Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens

  The Qur’an by Bruce Lawrence

  Adam Smith’s On the Wealth of Nations by P. J. O’Rourke

  Marx’s Das Kapital by Francis Wheen

  Forthcoming:

  The Bible by Karen Armstrong

  Machiavelli’s The Prince by Philip Bobbitt

  Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey by Alberto Manguel

  Carl von Clausewitz’s On War by Hew Strachan

  Darwin’s

  Origin of Species

  A Biography

  JANET BROWNE

  First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2006 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2007 by Atlantic Books.

  Copyright © Janet Browne 2006

  The moral right of Janet Browne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84354 394 7

  eBook ISBN 978 0 85789 714 5

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on Editions

  Introduction

  1 Beginnings

  2 ‘A theory by which to work’

  3 Publication

  4 Controversy

  5 Legacy

  Notes

  Sources and Further Reading

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Writing this book was a very enjoyable process and I am particularly grateful to my editor Louisa Joyner for her encouragement and support. The rest of the team at Atlantic Books were also fabulously efficient and friendly in seeing it through production. Jane Robertson worked wonders on my prose. Elsewhere, friends at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London have offered much useful advice. Special thanks, as always, are due to Bill Bynum and Michael Neve, very knowledgeable and stimulating Darwinian colleagues. I am also extremely grateful to the students who have, over the years, patiently discussed Darwin with me. This short study is written with them in mind. Most of all, this book is for Kit and Evie, students of other subjects, but only too familiar with Darwin over the dinner table. Their opinions are important to me and I hope this will provide a more connected story.

  A NOTE ON EDITIONS

  Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in November 1859 in London by the firm of John Murray. The publisher’s advertisements indicate that the most likely date of publication was Thursday, 24 November. This first edition is nowadays mostly seen only in rare book collections. Several modern reprints of the first edition text are available in different formats, including on the internet. The first edition has also been reproduced in the twentieth century as an exact photo-facsimile, the most well known being edited and introduced by the biologist Ernst Mayr and published by Harvard University Press in 1959. All quotes in the present volume, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from this facsimile.

  The second edition was produced very soon after the first, on 7 January 1860. Darwin managed to make a few significant corrections. Three thousand copies were printed, making this the largest edition issued in Darwin’s lifetime. Six editions were published by the time of his death in 1882, each one with corrections and alterations. The third edition (1861) is interesting because Darwin added a short ‘Historical Sketch’ in which he described other evolutionary theories. In the fifth edition (1869) he first used the expression ‘survival of the fittest’. The sixth edition, issued in 1872, is usually regarded as the last that Darwin corrected. He intended it to be a popular edition. It was printed in smaller type and cost much less. It was extensively revised and included a whole new chapter in which he answered criticisms. Most modern copies of the Origin of Species are based on this edition.

  At the same time, editions were published by Appleton in New York. These do not completely match the English ones in content because Darwin often supplied corrections and other material either in advance or after each London edition. Translations were issued in eleven different languages during Darwin’s lifetime and he tried to supervise each one, not always successfully. The first French and German translations did not satisfy him and he sought out new translators, hence later editions in those languages are closer to Darwin’s original intentions. The book has received detailed bibliographical attention from Richard Freeman in The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist (2nd edn, Folkestone, Dawson Archon Books, 1977). A sentence- by-sentence analysis covering the changes made to all editions in English in Darwin’s lifetime was published by Morse Peckham, The Origin of Species: A Variorum Text (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).

  INTRODUCTION

  Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is surely one of the greatest scientific books ever written. Yet it does not fit the usual stereotype of what we nowadays expect science to be. It is wonderfully personal in style. It has no graphs or maths, no reference to white-coated figures in a laboratory, no specialized language. The years leading up to its publication were crammed with unexpected setbacks, chance encounters, high emotion and controversy. It sold out to the book trade on publication day and the arguments that it ignited spread like wildfire in the public domain, becoming the first truly international scientific debate in history. Readers attacked it or praised it, and struggled to align their deep-seated religious beliefs with Darwin’s disquieting new ideas. From the start it was acknowledged as an outstanding contribution to the intellectual landscape, broad in scope, full of insight and packed with evidence to support his suggestions – but passionately criticized at the same time for proposing that all living beings originated through entirely natural processes. Apes or angels, Darwin or the Bible, were burning topics for Victorians. Many of these issues are still very much alive today. In fact, the writing and controversial reception of Darwin’s Origin were never set apart in some cold esoteric world of science. Its story, in many ways, is the story of the modern world.

  From today’s perspective, of course, Darwin’s role as one of the makers of present times has never been more evident. His writings challenged everything that had previously been thought about living beings and became a crucial factor in the intellectual, social and religious transformations that took place in the West during the nineteenth century. In time, Darwin grew to be one of the most famous scientists of his day, a Victorian celebrity whose wor
k even in his own lifetime was regarded as a foundation stone for the modern world. Were we descended from apes? Must we give up the story of Adam and Eve and regard our purpose in this world as meaningless, little more than an animal existence? It was not just a question of arguing about the literal truth of the Bible. Few people, even then, believed in the Garden of Eden as a real place. Instead, Darwin seemed to be expelling the divine completely from the Western world, calling into doubt everything then believed about the human soul and our sense of morality. If humans were no longer answerable to God, their creator, were they free to do what they liked, without any moral constraint at all? ‘Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?’ enquired Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in 1860. Darwin was popularly supposed to have assassinated the idea of God and once, jokingly, labelled himself the ‘devil’s chaplain’.

  Retrospectively, it is common to label those stirring times as the ‘Darwinian revolution’. The words usually come with a warning attached, for it is now clear that many of the themes addressed by Darwin were not new, either to him or to his readers. Even so, the label retains much of its meaning in the mind of the public. As so often happens, one man and one book have come to represent a larger transformation in thought. Yet the impact of evolutionary ideas has waxed and waned since Darwin’s death, paradoxically sometimes at the same time. At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, for example, when the evolutionary imperatives of competition and progress were expressed in the social sphere through imperial expansion, free enterprise and eugenic doctrines, and the words ‘survival of the fittest’ were on every lip, many biologists felt that the scientific side of Darwinism was utterly incompatible with early genetics. Paradoxically again, in the 1930s and 1940s, just when a number of avant-garde biologists hoped to produce a new ‘evolutionary synthesis’, there was strong support for rival systems based on environmentalist ideas of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Meanwhile, the John Scopes ‘monkey’ trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, in which the fundamentalist politician William Jennings Bryan led the prosecution against a science teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution, and the agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow the defence, has gone down as a watershed in the relations between science and religion. For a while it was against the law in Tennessee to teach evolution in schools.

  At the start of the twenty-first century, Darwin’s ideas have never been more prominent – although arguments are as heated as ever. Transformed by the modern understanding of heredity, and refined in a thousand different ways as knowledge marches onwards, the idea of natural selection is the cornerstone of most biological thinking across the globe. Palaeontologists trace mass extinctions and bursts of change in the fossil record, molecular studies throw light on the origins and diffusion of early mankind and genes are regarded as an essential key to human behaviour, even to the workings of the mind. Such views naturally generate intense debate. Criticisms are raised against sociobiology and the tendency to reduce everything down to the action of ‘selfish’ genes. Philosophers suggest that selection theory is an invalid form of knowledge, not capable of demonstrable proof. Ordinary people look at the rampant commercial competition and exploitative economic policies around them and wonder whether altruism was ever a basic human trait, whilst modern creationists vigorously challenge the arguments used to support evolution and demand equal time on the school curriculum for the Christian creation story. In a New York Times election poll taken in November 2004, 55 per cent of responders believed that God created human beings in their present form.

  Darwin would recognize many of these developments. However he was no godless radical striving to overthrow everything he knew. In personal terms, he was a highly respectable figure, hardly the kind of man that might be imagined to publish such a far-reaching text. He was never imprisoned for heretical views like the Italian natural philosopher Galileo Galilei. English villagers did not burn straw effigies of him as they did for the political revolutionary Tom Paine. He was not accused of sacrilege by the ecclesiastical courts like Bishop Colenso was. There were no anti- Darwinian riots. Instead, he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London in 1882 as one of the nation’s most revered scientific figures: ‘the greatest Englishman since Newton’ said The Times.

  One notable feature of the so-called Darwinian revolution, indeed, is the way that the man at the centre of the storm was widely applauded in personal terms. Much of this can perhaps be associated with the rise of science as a leading feature of Victorian society. Much can also be linked with the spread of middle-class economic and political values through the era. Perhaps too, despite all the controversy, something must be said for Darwin’s tendency to keep apart from the fray. He hated the cut and thrust of public disagreement even while accepting that science generally progresses through debate and argument. He much preferred to be a countryman, pottering around his garden in Kent. He liked to write letters, see friends and carry out small natural history experiments in his greenhouse or study. In some ways he could almost have stepped out of a novel by Anthony Trollope, a tall, quiet, likeable man with a modest, trustworthy air about him, deeply engaged with his work and family, committed to the idea of scientific truth. From time to time, like many Victorian gentlemen, he was plagued by stomach trouble and mysterious disorders. A good Victorian paterfamilias, he grew a large beard, kept a careful eye on his investments and loved his wife and children. Somewhat surprisingly, he counted several vicars among his relatives and closest acquaintances. He enjoyed being a traveller, husband, father, friend and employer as well as a naturalist and thinker.

  Above all else, he was indisputably an author. As an old man, looking back over the arguments that had surrounded him, he ruefully acknowledged the way in which Origin of Species had dominated the era. ‘It is no doubt the chief work of my life,’ he wrote in his Autobiography. ‘It was from the first highly successful.’

  Darwin’s volume, under the full title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, was published in London by the firm of John Murray on 24 November 1859. It was a rather ordinary-looking volume bound in sturdy green publisher’s cloth, 502 pages long, and somewhat expensively priced for the Victorian book market at 14 shillings – more than a week’s wages for a labourer. The author’s serious intent was obvious. There were no eye-catching natural history illustrations, no pedigree pigs or cows decorating the cover, not even a frontispiece of a prehistoric scene as there might be today in a book on evolution. The modest air suited its author perfectly. ‘I am infinitely pleased & proud at the appearance of my child,’ Darwin told Murray when an advance copy arrived in Yorkshire, where he was taking the water cure. ‘I am so glad that you were so good as to undertake the publication of my book.’

  These quiet words hid a wealth of previous drama and plenty of ferment to come.

  CHAPTER 1

  Beginnings

  The history of On the Origin of Species began long before publication day.

  Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury in February 1809, the fifth child and second son of a prosperous medical doctor, Robert Waring Darwin, and his wife Susannah Wedgwood. The family took a leading role in respectable provincial society and were often to be found visiting relatives, participating in local charitable ventures or taking scenic holidays on the Welsh coast. Darwin recalled his earliest days as very happy ones even though his mother died when he was eight years old. In his Autobiography he said he had few recollections either of her or her death, perhaps because his three older sisters cared for him afterwards with great maternal affection. As far as can be discerned, this major event in his childhood left him with no conspicuous psychological problems. He appears to have been a warm-hearted boy who liked nothing better than to be with his friends and family, had a great love of the countryside, enjoyed reading a wide variety of books and listening to music. He was much loved in return, and all th
e available manuscripts remaining in libraries and archives around the world confirm that he grew up affable, talkative and cordial, despite all the illness and controversy to come, with the gift of making lasting friendships, and able to sustain a close and happy marriage until the end of his life.

  One of his grandfathers was Erasmus Darwin, the poet, early evolutionary thinker and physician. The other was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter. Both made notable contributions to the Industrial Revolution and were key members of the extraordinary intellectual flowering of the eighteenth century. Such a remarkable family tree always excites comment and it has long been popular among historians to trace some of Darwin’s personal ingenuity back to these two male figures in his ancestry. In reality, he bore no resemblance to either of them in character, except that he too was brought up in an intellectual, freethinking and scientific family atmosphere. By the third generation, however, the Wedgwood wealth made a considerable difference. This rather modern combination of manufacturing affluence, gentlemanly social standing, religious scepticism and cultivated background ensured that Darwin always had a place in upper middle-class society and the prospect of a comfortable inheritance, both of which served as very material factors in his later achievements. He was born, so to speak, into the financially secure intelligentsia of Britain.

  Darwin attended Shrewsbury School (a private boys’ school) from 1818 to 1825. As a boy he hoped to become a doctor and sometimes accompanied his father on medical rounds. He loved collecting natural history specimens. At school he enjoyed chemistry, and he and his older brother Erasmus set up a small laboratory at home for performing experiments during the holidays. These enthusiasms were relatively typical for young men of their social class and period; none the less they reveal the start of Darwin’s lasting fascination with science and the natural world. Like many boys, he seemed content otherwise to wander about the countryside following his own interests. The documents preserved from those days suggest that he did not thrive in the rigid classical structure of male education at the time.