A Brief History of Creation (18 page)

By the early nineteenth century, theories of evolution, then generally known as transmutation or transformationism, had grown among the fringes of accepted science. Darwin was no stranger to the basic concept. His grandfather Erasmus held that organisms were slowly but constantly changing, until they became entirely new species. Yet years of relentless religious criticism had left Erasmus Darwin largely silent on the subject by the time his grandson Charles entered the picture. Most of Charles Darwin's introduction to transmutational theory had come at university in Scotland, at the hands of a freethinking biologist named Robert Grant.

Before Cambridge, Darwin had studied at the University of Edinburgh, where both he and his brother had worked toward degrees at the university's medical school, which then had a reputation as the finest in the country. There, Grant took Darwin under his wing. The University of Edinburgh also had a reputation for radicalism, and Grant—Francophile, self-proclaimed enemy of the church and tradition, and, some said, a homosexual—was one of its most radical professors.

Darwin's first impression of Grant was of a man stiff and aloof, though he soon found the professor to be quite the opposite. Warm, friendly, infectiously enthusiastic, Grant could work himself into a frenzy when discussing his scientific passions, microscopy in particular. Grant took his young charge on frequent strolls along the shore near a home he owned on the North Sea. As they gathered sea slugs and sea mats and dark-green seaweed that they called “dead man's fingers,” Grant's passion for nature started to rub off on Darwin.

The outspoken Grant had by then become one of the loudest English proponents of the evolutionary concept. Among trained physicians like Grant or Darwin's grandfather, such notions were slightly more acceptable than in other branches of science. These were men who spent years studying bones and vital organs, and bones and vital organs tell a story. Each species, so different on the surface, often shares the same internal
body plan. The bones of a rat's hand are remarkably similar to the bones of a human being's hand; just as a bird's wing is similar to a dolphin's flipper. When the skeletal remains of different species are laid out side by side, their relationships can be seen, each species differing only slightly from those nearest to it in the evolutionary chain. Those same similarities could be found in the vital organs. The heart of a bear, for example, differs only slightly from the heart of a cow. These were clues of long, incremental change, beginning with the smallest and simplest organisms and ending with the largest and most complex.

Grant's intellectual hero was the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. A soldier-turned-botanist, Lamarck had devised the first truly comprehensive theory of evolution. Others had vaguely articulated the concept in one form or another. Even several of the classical Greek natural philosophers had guessed at the core tenets of evolutionary theory. But Lamarck laid out a mechanism to explain the process: the theory of acquired characteristics. He held that living things could pass on to their offspring the traits they developed during their lifetimes. Increasing one's speed by running would lead to faster children; the lifting of heavy objects would lead to stronger ones. This natural process of change could be traced all the way back to the spontaneous generation of the simplest building blocks of life, particles that Lamarck called “monads.” Spontaneous generation, Lamarck supposed, was happening constantly, providing new evolutionary lines to replace those that had become extinct. While Darwin would one day envision a tree of life, Lamarck saw each species as the product of its own distinct line. Lines that became extinct were replaced by new lines that began by the constantly occurring process of spontaneous generation. Thus, he believed that the most complex organisms—like humans—were also the oldest; the simplest organisms, like protozoa, the youngest.

Darwin's stay in Edinburgh and his molding at the hands of Grant were cut short prematurely. Stories had started to appear in the press of the growing subversiveness at the university. One lecturer generated a furor by suggesting that consciousness was but a function of the natural processes in the brain, that there was no such thing as a soul. Alarmed by what he was hearing about Edinburgh, Darwin's father began to chart a different
life for his youngest son. Charles, he decided, would be a parson. And he would prepare for his new life at the more conservative Cambridge, where the professors had more staid notions about the nature of life than did Robert Grant.

Cambridge was hardly a bastion of conservatism when it came to modern science. But compared to Edinburgh, it must have seemed like one. As part of his core curriculum, Darwin was expected to read and digest the work of Archdeacon William Paley, who argued that living beings were so supremely fitted to their environments that this alone could prove the existence of God. God was not quite an active agent, constantly intervening with miracles, but rather a great cosmic designer. Paley liked to use an analogy similar to the one Voltaire was so fond of. “The watch must have had a maker,” he wrote. “There must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.” Paley's views were held by most respectable scientists of the time, and taught by men like Darwin's Cambridge professors Sedgwick and Henslow. When Darwin read Paley's book
Natural Theology
, he wrote that he found himself “charmed and convinced.”

By the time of his graduation, his father's idea of a country parsonage had begun to appeal to Darwin. He envisioned a life spent leisurely tending a Unitarian flock, leaving him plenty of time to pursue naturalism and writing. But while journeying around the world in the
Beagle
and beginning to confront uncomfortable truths about the natural world, the idea of a parsonage had steadily lost its appeal. His sisters had guessed as much from his letters home. In a letter that greeted him at his first stop in Falmouth, his sister Fanny wrote, “I fear there are but small hopes of your still going into the Church.”

Darwin did indeed return from the voyage of the
Beagle
a changed man. Yet he still sought the approbation of the respectable scientific establishment. He now had little time for the rabble-rousing, irreligious Grant. Back in England, Darwin spurned Grant's overtures in favor of Henslow's and Sedgwick's. Darwin wanted to build a stable life and a stable reputation. In 1839, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, whom he had
known since childhood. They eventually took a house in the village of Downe, in Kent. He found that the quiet life of an English village appealed to him. It was like the country parsonage he had once imagined himself heading, but without the flock to tend to.

Religion always remained a delicate subject in Charles and Emma's relationship. Although her Unitarianism wasn't based on literal readings of the Bible, Emma was nonetheless a woman of deep and sincere religious conviction. Charles was already beginning to feel the sway of doubt by the time they decided to marry. Before proposing, he had confessed his growing belief in transmutation. She was, in fact, the first person to whom he confided his increasingly unorthodox views. She wrote to him afterward, saying she was concerned about the doubts raised by his scientific explorations and worried that religion would be a “painful void between us.” She accepted his proposal nonetheless. Their marriage was mostly a happy one.

As the years passed and Darwin was increasingly forced to confront the implications of his scientific work, his doubts grew stronger, and stronger still as three of their ten children perished at young ages. By the end of his life, the idea of a divine creator would begin to ring hollow to him. Life did not follow a plan. It did not make sense. He never called himself an atheist, nor did he feel a kinship with the radical atheists who were the quickest to rally to his evolutionary theory. Eventually, though, he did start to call himself agnostic. His beliefs were an obstacle that he and Emma were able to overcome. In public, he would touch on the subject of religion only reluctantly.

Married and settled at Downe, Darwin set about explaining a new theory of evolution, one in which the engine of change was his own concept of natural selection, not the acquired characteristics proposed by Lamarck. He gathered his thoughts into an essay that laid out the basic points of his theory. For years, he showed it to no one. He kept the manuscript in a sealed envelope that he entrusted to his wife. He told her to have it published in the event of his death.

In 1844, Robert Chambers's
Vestiges
was published. The book both
excited and alarmed Darwin. To his mind, it was filled with hasty generalizations. Yet it was an articulation of an evolutionary history of species not unlike what he himself was contemplating. And its success proved that the public was thirsty for new ideas about the natural world, even when those ideas flouted convention and religious sensibilities.

Darwin had by then confided his growing belief in evolution to a few close friends, including Lyell and Owen. Both slowly started coming around to his position. Another of his confidants was a young botanist by the name of Joseph Hooker, to whom he showed a draft of his essay, which had grown to 230 pages. Over the coming years, Hooker would become Darwin's closest friend, and a trusted sounding board for his ideas.

Darwin began laying plans for his magnum opus on the subject. He intended to call it
Natural Selection
. The massive sales of Chambers's book showed Darwin just how popular his own book could be. But he was wary of the virulent criticism of
Vestiges
, with some of the harshest attacks having come from his former professor, Sedgwick. Already, Sedgwick seemed to sense the change in Darwin and was becoming distant and aloof. This worried Darwin because Sedgwick was just the type of man he hoped to cultivate and, in time, convert. Darwin wasn't interested in science on the fringes, preaching to radical scientists like Grant. Darwin became even more determined to arm himself with research that was exhaustive and, as much as humanly possible, unassailable.

The work was painstakingly slow. For more than a decade, he gathered material, while working on subjects that would help him build a case. He wrote an intensive study of barnacles and began breeding pigeons in the hopes of finding more clues to and evidence of evolution.

As Darwin forged ahead, there was one aspect of his burgeoning evolutionary theory that Hooker, in particular, had started to fret over: the source of the first living being on Earth, what Hooker called “the vital spark.” In the wake of
Vestiges
, the subject of the origin of life was increasingly being raised in the newspapers. In scientific circles, men like Robert Grant continued to fulminate against biblical creationism. For Hooker, it was the ultimate question. Had it been an act of miraculous creation or a
natural process like all the other elements of evolution? Lyell was similarly tormented. If Darwin was right, humankind would lose what Lyell called its “high estate.”

Darwin shrugged off the need to challenge such entrenched beliefs. There was too little evidence. Any attempt to address the ultimate origin of life would threaten the airtight case he was building for natural selection. He was already tormented by the religious implications posed simply by embracing the transformationist unorthodoxy. He dreaded coming to be seen as a “Devil's Chaplain,” the nickname of the evangelist reverend-turned-atheist Robert Taylor, who used to haunt the streets around Cambridge giving fiery speeches. Darwin was wary of anything that would cloud his message or make it harder to accept.

T
HE STRESS OF WORKING
on what he knew would be such a controversial—and important—book took a toll on Darwin. He once compared the admission of his evolutionary beliefs to “confessing a murder.” His health deteriorated, probably because of the mental strain. He started to worry about an early death, increasingly experiencing heart palpitations and chest pains that he had first felt on the
Beagle
expedition. He developed a chronic stomach condition he diagnosed as “nervous dyspepsia.” Doctors usually advised him against working too hard. He grew ever more retiring. In his autobiography, he wrote, “We went a little into society . . . but my health almost always suffered from the excitement, violent shivering and vomiting attacks being thus brought on.”

Darwin continued his work, but at a snail's pace. Then, in June of 1858, he received a jolt in the form of a package delivered from the island of Ternate, in the Dutch East Indies. It contained a handwritten essay by a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. Shockingly, it looked almost identical to the essay on natural selection that Darwin had written in secret more than ten years before.

Alfred Russel Wallace was a self-made man in almost every respect. He had worked as a carpenter, surveyor, and teacher, educating himself in public libraries, before boldly setting out to follow in the footsteps of
his heroes, naturalist explorers like Alexander von Humboldt and Darwin. That Wallace managed to travel the world independently was a feat in itself. Inspired by a popular travel memoir by the New Yorker William Henry Edwards,
A Voyage up the River Amazon
, Wallace first set out for Brazil. He supported himself by sending specimens back to wealthy collectors and museums in England. On his return journey, he narrowly escaped a fire on the ship he was sailing on, surviving for ten days in a lifeboat on the open sea. His next trip took him to Indonesia, where he collected specimens for Darwin, among others.

Wallace was first exposed to evolutionary thinking by
Vestiges
, which had a profound effect on him. Later, in the Amazon, he observed, firsthand, morphological differences in butterflies, much like those that Darwin noticed in the finches of the Galápagos. Also like Darwin, Wallace had read Malthus's influential book on population growth and managed to connect these Malthusian ideas to the struggle for survival that he saw in the wild. Now, Wallace was sending a draft of those ideas to the man he thought could understand his theory and whose approbation he most desired.