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The Scientists: Charles Darwin.
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Charles Darwin
(1809-82)
Darwin is the first of the evolutionary biologists, the originator of the
concept of natural selection. His principal works, The Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) marked
a new epoch. His works
were violently attacked and energetically
defended, then; and, it seems, yet today.
Charles Robert Darwin was born at Shrewsbury. His father was a doctor
and his mother was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin first
studied medicine at Edinburgh. Will as they might, it soon became clear to
the family, and particularly to young Charles, that he was not cut out for a
medical career; he was transferred to Cambridge (Christ's Church, 1828),
there to train for the ministry. While at Cambridge, Darwin befriended a
biology professor (John Stevens Henslow, 1796-1861) and his interest in zoology and geography grew.
Eventually, Darwin came under the eye of a geology professor, Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873). Just after a
field trip to Wales with Sedgwick -- during which Darwin was to learn much from "Sedgewick's on-the-spot
tutorials" and was to develop "intellectual muscle as he burnt off the flab"1 -- he was to learn, that, through
the efforts of Professor Henslow, that he had secured an invitation to go aboard the Beagle, which,
apparently, was being outfitted by the admiralty for an extended voyage to the south seas. In a letter,
Henslow was to advise that "you are the very man they are in search of." Desmond and Moore were to
write:
"The admirals were scouting out someone to accompany Capt. Robert FitzRoy on his two-year
survey of coastal South America. FitzRoy, only twenty-six himself, wanted a young companion, a
well-bred 'gentlemen' who could relieve the isolation of command, someone to share the captain's
table. Better still if he were a naturalist, for there would be unprecedented opportunities. The
ship was equipped for 'scientific purposes' and a 'man of zeal & spirit' could do wonders,
Henslow enthused. Charles might not be a 'finished naturalist,' but 'taking plenty of Books'
would help, and he was the obvious choice."2
Needless to say, though there was some anxious moments, Darwin was accepted by those responsible for the
voyage. The plans for the cruise of the Beagle were extended, in that it was to take place over the best part of
five years (1831-36) and was to take in the southern islands, the South American coast and Australia. While
aboard the vessel, Darwin served as a geologist, botanist, zoologist, and general man of science. It was rare to
have aboard a sailing vessel of the early 19th century a person who could read and write, let alone one, such
as Darwin, who could appreciate the necessity of applying scientific principles to the business of gathering
data and carrying out research on it. I am sure that the telling of Darwin's travels and observations, while
aboard the Beagle, would be an interesting topic in itself, but for my purposes here, I need only say, that
Darwin gained an experience which would prove to be a substantial foundation for his life's work; the
almost immediate result was the publication of his findings in 1840, Zoology of the Beagle.
"When on board H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the
distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the
present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters
of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin of species- that mystery of mysteries, as
it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred to me, in
1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and
reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work
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The Scientists: Charles Darwin.
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I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in
1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the
present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on
these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a
decision." (Darwin's opening paragraph to The Origin of Species, 1859.)
It was likely Darwin's reading of Adam Smith which led Darwin to his decisive breakthrough.3 ("Adam
Smith was the last of the moralists and the first of the economists, so Darwin was the last of the economists
and the first of the biologists.") Darwin read not only about those "laws" that govern the accumulation of
wealth, but also those "laws" which lead to being poor. In regards to these poor "laws," Darwin read
Malthus' Essay on Population:
"In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to
read for amusement Malthus' Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for
existence [a phrase used by Malthus] which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation
of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations
would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be a
new species. Here then I had at last got hold of a theory by which to work."4
Personally speaking, Darwin, directly on account of his early adventures (with his evidence and his
conclusions: zoological, botanical, geological and paleontological), could no longer subscribe to the teachings
of Genesis, viz., that every species had been created whole and have come through the ages unchanged.5 All
the evidence supports (and none exists that disproves) the proposition that life on earth has evolved; life
started out slow and small, and our current state of existence is as a result of some process working upon
natural materials throughout a period that consists of millions and millions of years. The question for
Darwin is what is this process, a question which, for twenty years, Darwin worked on. He considered his own
personal experiences which were considerable and the data that he had gathered. He read and read widely;
he abstracted the learned journals; he talked to breeders of domesticated animals. And only after years of
work did Darwin feel himself ready to express himself. More years were to pass, during which he gathered
more and more evidence, when, in 1859, Darwin came out with his scholarly presentation, The Origin of
Species.6
In 1859, Darwin's shattering work, The Origin of Species, came out ("a sell out in one day"); it is now
recognized as a leading work in natural philosophy and in the history of mankind. Simply stated, Darwin's
theory is that things, and, in particular, life, evolves by a process which Darwin called "natural selection."
"Currently we accept the general idea that biological development can be explained by
mutations in combination with natural selection. In its essential parts, therefore, Darwin's theory
of development has been accepted. In Darwin's time mutations were not known about; their
discovery has led to extensive modifications of his theory, but it has also eliminated the most
important objections to it. ...
We are beginning to see that the awesome wonder of the evolution from amoeba to man - for it is
without a doubt an awesome wonder - was not the result of a mighty word from a creator, but of
a combination of small, apparently insignificant processes. The structural change occurring in a
molecule within a chromosome, the result of a struggle over food between two animals, the
reproduction and feeding of young - such are the simple elements that together, in the course of
millions of years, created the great wonder. This is nothing separate from ordinary life. The
wonder is in our everyday world, if only we have the ability to see it."7 (Alfvén's Atom, Man, and
the Universe.)
Darwin's "evolutionary and comprehensive vision" is a monistic one, it shows that our universe is a "unitary
and continuous process," there does not exist a "dualistic split," and that all phenomena are natural.
Darwin's idea, it is written,
"is the most powerful and the most comprehensive idea that has ever arisen on earth. It helps us
understand our origins ... We are part of a total process, made of the same matter and operating
by the same energy as the rest of the cosmos, maintaining and reproducing by the same type of
mechanism as the rest of life ..."8 (Sir Julian Huxley.)
The theory of evolution is no longer just a theory; an overwhelming amount evidence has accumulated since
Darwin. Darwin's theory has never been successfully refuted. Darwin discovered a law just as surely as
Copernicus, Galileo and Newton discovered laws: natural laws. Just as the earth is in orbit and has come to
be and is depended on the force of gravity, a natural law; so life has come into being and exists and is
depended on the force of natural selection. One need not necessarily understand the why or the how of it, but
a natural law such as gravitation or selection nonetheless exists, whether a particular puny human being, or
group of them believe it or not.
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The theory as presented in Darwin's The Origin of Species, I should say, was not new to the world and it
cannot be attributed to Darwin. The theory, contrary to popular belief has been around since Aristotle and
Lucretius. Darwin's contribution is that he gathered indisputable evidence, and he set forth a theory on how
evolution works, the theory of natural selection. Darwin: "It may be said that natural selection is daily and
hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad,
preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever
opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic
conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the
long lapses of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the
forms of life are now different from what they formerly were."9
We will let Julian Huxley sum up Darwin's place in the history of science:
"Darwin's work ... put the world of life into the domain of natural law. It was no longer
necessary or possible to imagine that every kind of animal or plant had been specially created,
nor that the beautiful and ingenious devices by which they get their food or escape their enemies
have been thought out by some supernatural power, or that there is any conscious purpose
behind the evolutionary process. If the idea of natural selection holds good, then animals and
plants and man himself have become what they are by natural causes, as blind and automatic as
those which go to mould the shape of a mountain, or make the earth and the other planets move
in ellipses round the sun. The blind struggle for existence, the blind process of heredity,
automatically result in the selection of the best adapted types, and a steady evolution of the stock
in the direction of progress...
Darwin's work has enabled us to see the position of man and of our present civilization in a truer
light. Man is not a finished product incapable of further progress. He has a long history behind
him, and it is a history not of a fall, but of an ascent. And he has the possibility of further
progressive evolution before him. Further, in the light of evolution we learn to be more patient.
The few thousand years of recorded history are nothing compared to the million years during
which man has been on earth, and the thousand million years of life's progress. And we can
afford to be patient when the astronomers assure us of at least another thousand million years
ahead of us in which to carry evolution onwards to new heights."
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NOTES:
1
The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist: Darwin (New York: Warner, 1991) p. 96. Incidently, it's interesting to
note that Sedgwick, who was a very accomplished and well recognized scientist (wrote British Palæozoic
Fossils, 1854) "strongly opposed" Darwin's theories as expressed in The Origin of Species. (Chambers.)
2
The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist: Darwin, op. cit., p. 101.
3
This proposition, that it was his reading of Adam Smith which led to Darwin's theories in evolutionary
biology, has provoked more than one of my readers to write and question me. First, one has to understand
the theories of Smith; they are evolutionary. (That Darwin read Adam Smith, there can be little doubt.)
"The study of spontaneous orders has long been the peculiar task of economic theory, although, of course,
biology has from its beginning been concerned with that special kind of spontaneous order which we call an
organism. Only recently [1973] has there arisen within the physical sciences under the name of cybernetics a
special discipline which is also concerned with what are called self-organizing or self-generating
systems." [Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 36-7. Hayek (a Nobel
Prize winner) cites, in a footnote, work done by H. von Foerster & Zopf and more particularly, in regards to
the anticipation of the main conceptions of cybernetics by Adam Smith.] Further, at p. 23, ibid., Hayek
wrote: "It was in the discussion of such social formations as language and morals, law and money, that in the
eighteenth century the twin conceptions of evolution and the spontaneous formation of an order were at last
clearly formulated, and provided the intellectual tools which Darwin and his eighteenth-century moral
philosophers and the historical schools of law and language might well be described, as some of the theorists
of language of the nineteenth century indeed described themselves, as Darwinians before Darwin." In
support, Hayek cites, in his footnote, numerous studies, and interestingly, for me as a lawyer, the eminent
jurist, Sir Frederick Pollock who in turn makes reference to Edmund Burke and Montesquieu as being
'Darwinians before Darwin'."
4
There is no question that Darwin relied very much on Malthus' theories. In Darwin's introduction to The
Origin of Species he refers to Malthus, "This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and
vegetable kingdoms." And again in Chapter 3, "It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to
the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms."
5
Of course, Darwin's theory, at first blush, is at odds with the whole notion that there exists a Supreme
Being which brought into existence all things. As to the Primary Cause and more generally the existence of a
God: "I [Darwin] cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the
beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."
6
It was entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races
in the Struggle for Life. For a variety of diverse reasons, even in 1859, Darwin felt little ready to express his
theory; but he was spurred on by a fellow scientist, Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913). Darwin received a
letter from Wallace in the early 1840s, which contained, to Darwin's amazement, the theory of evolution by
natural selection. Wallace's theory came about as a result of the same inspiration which Darwin had, a
reading of Malthus. Wallace, however, had little evidence for his theory: Darwin did. Darwin and Wallace
jointly presented their theories to a learned society in London on July 1st, 1858 and both papers were
published by the society shortly thereafter. Towards the end of 1859, Darwin came out with his book (he
considered it a mere abstract). The publisher was John Murray in London and the first run of 1,200 copies
were sold out in the first day.
7
Hannes Alfvén is a professor of Plasma Physics at the University of Stockhol (San Francisco: Freeman,
1969).
8
This quote of Julian Huxley's comes from his work, Evolutionary Humanism (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus,
1992.) Julian Huxley was the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895). Thomas H. Huxley was an English
biologist, teacher, and a defender of Darwin. Darwin was not a conversationalist and he only very rarely
appeared in public to defend his theories himself; he was fully represented by Thomas H. Huxley, "Darwin's
Bulldog." It is interesting to note what Thomas H. Huxley said about his topic when confronted with the
opposition in the form of Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford. Both Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce were on the
same stage when during a conference which had as its theme, Darwinism. The Bishop, in a sarcastic manner
called out: "I would like to ask Professor Huxley whether it was on his grandfather's or his grandmother's
side that the ape ancestry comes in." Darwin after whispering to his dinner companion, "The lord hath
delivered him into my hands," took the podium:
"A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I
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should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with
success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real
acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the
point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."
9
Chapter 4 - "Natural Selection." Darwin, incidently, wrote an autobiography.
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