Charles Darwin* (9 page)

“I am becoming as weak as a child, miserably unwell and shattered,” he wrote during the proofreading process. Emma read it all, pointing out places where she didn’t think he was clear enough. She had mellowed, and sometimes they even came close to joking about their religious differences.

At age fifty-one, he published this green volume of 502 pages called, for short,
On the Origin of Species
. Its main competition for sales that day was Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
. All 1,250 copies of Darwin’s book sold on the first day, though each copy cost more than a week’s pay for a typical working person.

Publication day, November 24, 1859, is considered the birthday of modern biology.

On the Origin of Species
has become one of the most influential books ever written. Sending it out into the world, he wrote, “So much for my abominable volume, which has cost me so much labor that I almost hate it.”

On publication day, he was a limp noodle, on one of his water cures, trying to get his stomach to settle down.

CHAPTER TEN

The Book That Ate Its Author

DARWIN SET OUT to devote the rest of his life to promoting the book, not in person—shudder—but indirectly. With sweet letters, he mailed out copies to his eighty best friends, people he knew would talk it up.

By now Darwin had tentacles everywhere, connections with the most influential scientists, in particular four very distinguished cheerleaders who gave loud roars of approval.

Charles Lyell, devoutly religious, began introducing the book in his lectures despite his personal discomfort with some parts of Darwin’s theory. He would point out how statements in the book were supported by recent discoveries of Stone Age tools in Northern France. The tools, some 600,000 years old, were found in the same deposits as fossils of extinct animals. This was proof that, as Darwin said, man had existed for much longer than previously thought.

To the well-known English biologist Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s theory was so self-evident that he said, “How stupid not to have thought of it before!” What a giant of science was Darwin to connect the dots. Under someone else’s name, Huxley wrote an ecstatic review in the
Times
, the journalistic pillar of the British establishment.

Asa Gray, the most important botanist in America by far, succeeded in circulating Darwin’s ideas in the American scientific community. Darwin said later, “No one other person understands me so thoroughly as Asa Gray. If ever I doubt what I mean myself, I think I shall ask him!”

Joseph Hooker, his fourth cheerleader, promoted Darwin to the botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where he was director. The gardens were a government-owned center of research, and new advances in growing tea, sugar, and cotton were crucial to increasing the power of the British Empire. Getting the support of this prominent crowd was a vote of confidence for Darwin.

The book also made a huge splash with the public, which was growing ever more fascinated with science. People went to lectures on electricity, followed the new developments in chemistry. It was a new age of mass media, and Darwin benefited from an amazing increase in the availability of printed materials (at least 150 magazines and newspapers for sale in London), the increase in literacy, and the new leisure time to ponder the big questions. The right book at the right time—the public was ready.

Ras, ever the loyal brother, said, “I really think it is the most interesting book I ever read.”

His friend Harriet Martineau added, “We must all be glad that he has set the world on this great new track.”

Even Queen Victoria praised one of her daughters for plowing through Mr. Darwin’s book.

Alfred Russel Wallace was Darwin’s fierce backer, at least for a while. The book “will live as long as the
Principia
of Newton,” he wrote. Darwin helped Wallace get a government pension, and they stayed friends, though Wallace drifted away from biology, pulled instead to spiritualism and séances (“rubbish,” per Darwin). Wallace also came to believe in an overriding power that controlled evolution. To this Darwin scrawled a firm, “No!!!”

The Reverend Charles Kingsley, an important writer and prominent Anglican parson, became the first clergyman to state that Darwin’s science was perfectly compatible with religion. Kingsley thought you could accept Darwin’s ideas and still believe in a God “that created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms.” So it was possible to reconcile belief in a divine power with this theory of life
.

But attacks on the book were immediate. The very first review was violently negative, claiming it promoted the “men from monkeys” idea, although Darwin had not even mentioned this notion in
Origin.
(It was Mr. Vestiges who had.)

Captain FitzRoy hated it and blamed himself for giving Darwin his start by taking him on the
Beagle
. Darwin’s old professor Sedgwick hated it too—parts of his former pupil’s work were “utterly false and grievously mischievous.”

Some called the book blasphemous, actually illegal, for seeming to question God. To some the book was dangerous, threatening the stability of the nation; many simply could not wrap their heads around it.

The debate was heated.

In one of the most famous “battle scenes” in science, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce led an attack on Darwin’s theory at Oxford University in 1860. The scene was a crowded meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. “Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?” the bishop mocked, grossly misinterpreting the theory. Thomas Huxley argued the case for Darwin, who was happy to be too ill to attend (“I would as soon have died”).

Both sides came away from the evening feeling victorious. Wilberforce needled Huxley as to whether he was descended from monkeys on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s side. Huxley snapped back that he would “unhesitatingly” prefer an ape as his ancestor rather than a man such as the bishop who used his intelligence and eloquence “for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion.”

Meanwhile a rowdy audience of several hundred cheered and booed, or sometimes shouted, “Monkey, monkey!” Some women fainted. FitzRoy showed up, waving his Bible emotionally in the air, yelling, “The Book! The Book!” (Five years later FitzRoy was to commit suicide at age fifty-nine.)

The uproar only made
Origin
of interest to an even wider audience.

Huxley went on to establish himself as “Darwin’s bulldog” over the next thirty years. He was the public face, the marketer for evolution, especially in his popular lectures to the working class. In a way he did the dirty work for his friend, who so loathed confrontation.

After the meeting in Oxford, Darwin’s book gained much wider acceptance. After 1860 most critics were ministers, attacking the theory on religious grounds. Gradually, the book established itself as a staple scientific text.

In 1863, Henry Walter Bates published a book on the amazing collection of butterflies he had amassed along the Amazon. His discovery of several transitional forms in between different species supplied the first real evidence for Darwin’s prediction of missing links.

Darwin’s ideas took hold and were applied to totally unrelated areas like business, studies on how we acquire language, and psychology. Sigmund Freud was a huge fan, always calling him “the
great
Darwin.” Poets such as Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were intrigued, novelist George Eliot was inspired, and in America Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson appreciated Darwin’s explanations of nature’s mysteries.

Caricatures of Darwin with the body of an ape or monkey started to appear, some good-humored, some not. He collected them. As if they were beetle specimens, he clipped all reviews (more than two thousand), filing them carefully in scrapbooks, complete with indexes, scrawling testy comments in the margins—“false,” “rubbish,” “what a quibble.” He also wrote some five hundred letters a year in support of his work, begging for feedback.

He never considered
On the Origin of Species
quite finished. He was always making improvements to his theory, strengthening his case, including new facts. The book went through six editions in his lifetime. Not until the fifth edition did he start using “survival of the fittest” to describe his natural selection theory. The phrase, so closely associated with Darwin, was coined in 1864 by philosopher Herbert Spencer, and Wallace had urged Darwin to borrow it.

The book would sell 25,000 copies during his lifetime. He had negotiated a very favorable contract for himself, but the pressure drained him. “I am really quite sick of myself,” he wrote. A new neighbor encountered this “shy and nervous man” on his daily walk, in black clothes and a cape, wrapped in a gray shawl. He grew frailer, knowing that the controversy he had started would not be settled any time in the near future.

Very true.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In Need of Soothing

AFTER GETTING HIS masterpiece out there, Darwin spent most of the next twenty years soothing his nerves. How so? By embarking on a scientific exploration of exotic plants.

First he became obsessed with tricky plants like sundews and Venus flytraps that snare and digest flies and spiders with their tentacles. He happily tested their reactions with everything he could think of, including his own urine, mucous, and saliva.

Next up was ten solid months focused on the complex beauty of orchids, or rather their love lives, which were amazingly similar to barnacles’. Based on his observations of wild orchids growing in the countryside around Down House, he published
On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing
. This 1862 tome with such a mouthful of a title was not a page-turner or a bestseller, but it persuaded many botanists still on the fence about evolutionary theory. He showed how the “endless diversity of structure” in species of orchids was all for the purpose of fertilization. Orchids had evolved with each part of a flower adapting to allow pollination by flying insects. This was scientific theory, as opposed to the notion that flowers were divinely designed to give humans pleasure and beauty.

He spoke about orchids briefly at the Linnean Society. Alas, this “brought on 23 hours vomiting,” with loud retching.

In all he did now, he was looking for further evidence to support his theory. Also research was an acceptable excuse to stay home and avoid the spotlight. He spent six years on his next book,
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
, collecting evidence about variations in cucumbers, chickens, goldfish, honeybees—evidence that supported statements in
Origin
. This was not a bestseller either—the public craved more about apes.

More and more Darwin was an invalid, spending hours or days vomiting or more accurately, retching, since little came up except acid, which wore away his teeth. Always cold, he kept a fire going year-round in his study, wearing wool underwear under several layers of clothes. His untrimmed beard grew increasingly out of control.

Somehow he managed to keep writing books. Actually he felt worse if he wasn’t absorbed in work. Emma and his daughters helped extensively with proofreading and other details. In the evenings he tried to relax playing backgammon with Emma; they kept a running score which at one point was 2,795 (him) to 2,490 (her).

He built an expensive hothouse for peaceful hours observing his plants and conducting meticulous experiments. He was no techie. For the most part he preferred old-fashioned equipment. Science was becoming a profession, shifting from private homes to university labs. One son desperately urged him to get more sophisticated equipment but, like his frugal father before him, Darwin didn’t see the point in spending the money, even though by this time he had a great deal of it. Always a compulsive record keeper, he kept financial notebooks for the forty-three years of his marriage, noting every investment, every expense, no matter how tiny.

He was proud of his children and their accomplishments. Most of them went on to have distinguished careers; three of his sons were named Fellows of the Royal Society for their work in science.

In 1864 his “bulldog” Huxley met with Hooker, Spencer, and others to form what became the influential X Club. It was devoted to “science, pure and free, untrammeled by religious dogmas,” and it helped Darwin’s ideas spread further into British culture. Huxley was later to coin the word “agnostic”—someone who believes it’s impossible to know whether God does or does not exist. Darwin applied this label to himself, saying that he really didn’t know: things in nature were “so obscure that we stand in awe before the mystery of life.” He studied a little about Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions, and he saw Christianity as on a par with but not superior to other beliefs. He thought that the concept of God was beyond the mind of man, and also that religion was a very private matter.