The natural
The 25 well-bred naturalists of London’s Linnean Society had no reason to expect anything unusual when they gathered on a Thursday evening in 1858 for their regular July meeting. Nor is there any indication that, when the night was done, they understood that God had been deposed and the world turned upside-down. These amateur scientists, however, had witnessed arguably the most important moment in the history of science and modern thought. It was to them that Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was first presented -- an idea that would revolutionize biology and, ultimately, Victorian society itself by showing that a struggle for survival, not a divine will, shaped life on Earth.
For Darwin, it was a turning point. He had mailed the research manuscript a day after his infant son died of scarlet fever. His brainchild now faced its own mortal test. His claim to be father of this theory also was at risk: Working independently, a naturalist named Alfred Wallace had deduced some of the same insights into evolution and sought Darwin’s help in making them public.
Typically, Darwin did not attend that meeting, for no one was more agitated about the ramifications of his scientific ideas than Darwin himself, or more uncomfortable with debating them in public. So unseemly did Darwin consider his convictions about natural selection that he kept them secret for 20 years. To discuss them publicly at long last was “like confessing a murder,” Darwin confided to a friend. So on this important evening, Darwin left it for two influential colleagues -- botanist Joseph Hooker and geologist Charles Lyell -- to debut his heretical views in public, making sure his work was presented in conjunction with Wallace’s first paper. On Darwin’s behalf, they ignited a controversy that burns no less fiercely today than 144 years ago, even though science has confirmed virtually every aspect of its postulates.
English science historian Janet Browne opens the concluding second volume of her brilliant, landmark biography, “Charles Darwin: The Power of Place,” with this agonizing and yet liberating moment of public disclosure. Freed for the first time from self-doubt, Darwin finished his most influential work, “The Origin of Species,” in less than a year. The second half of Darwin’s life was dominated by its publication in 1859 and his surprisingly ruthless efforts to promote the ideas it articulated.
In “The Power of Place,” Browne has chronicled the public birthing of an idea, long incubated in the womb of Darwin’s mind. The paradox of Darwin’s personality is the crux of the story. Darwin was both a recluse and the most influential public intellect of his century; jealous and generous; an ocean voyager who hated to travel; a scientist prone to quackery; an unfettered thinker who chained himself to rigid domestic routine; the privileged son of the well-to-do elite, trained for the clergy, whose ideas struck at the heart of Anglican doctrine, the secularist whose life’s work sapped the power of the established church and yet who was buried with honor in the nave of Westminster Abbey. What emerges from Browne’s book is the most insightful portrait in a generation of this puzzling and provocative mind.
In Browne’s view, this shy yet well-connected squire’s son conducted his most important work not as a globe-trotting field biologist aboard the HMS Beagle but in self-imposed exile in the rural backwater of Downe, a village of barely 500 people in Kent. There he worked secluded from the distractions of London by country custom and forbidding parish hedgerows. “These home-based researches were the hidden triumph of his theory of evolution,” Browne writes. “His family setting, his house, his garden, the surrounding Kent countryside, and his own sense of himself ... and the property he owned provided the finely crafted examples of adaptation in action that lifted his work far out of the ordinary.”
In the service of his science, Darwin submitted himself totally to the discipline of his curiosity, obsessively analyzing the intricate mechanisms of natural selection and ruthlessly arranging his domestic routine to accommodate his work. In this vein, Browne demonstrates how completely Darwin was schooled by his exhaustive investigation of living things in the fields and gardens of Kent, where little escaped his sustained attention. He bred pigeons, observed the local bees, tracked the wriggles of local worms, counted blades of grass, even monitored the leafy flutter of the twisting creepers that festooned his garden walls.
What elevates Browne’s account of Darwin’s life is her insight into the liberating power of domesticity for a contemplative mind. She also well understands how, as an invalid, Darwin used his migraines and digestive disorders to control those around him. She is on equally intimate terms with Darwin’s inner family circle and the imperial scientific world in which he flourished.
Darwin shrewdly capitalized on the rising fortunes of modern publishing, the beginnings of mass media and the appetite for ideas among the burgeoning Victorian middle class. His theory of evolution was, in a sense, made possible by the British postal system. Spending more on stamps and stationery in a month than the average workman made in a year, Darwin orchestrated acceptance of his ideas by mail, wheedling, cajoling and rallying adherents on two continents from the seclusion of his study. He deftly deployed dozens of surrogates, who controlled much of the scientific media of the day, across the chessboard of public opinion.
In all, Darwin left behind 14,000 letters, perhaps half of his lifetime correspondence, and kept meticulous journals that documented the daily misgivings and eureka moments of his researches. More is known about the moment-to-moment development of Darwin’s theory of evolution than any other scientific idea in history. Browne brings to life this vast archive to show how this radical theory became conventional wisdom and how, in the process, science supplanted established religion as the final authority on the origins of life and the natural order.
Darwin’s gift to biology was to give evolution its animating principle -- the adaptive struggle for survival -- and deduce the mechanism that drives it -- natural selection. He buttressed this theory with closely observed evidence published in a series of volumes that consumed his mature years. As no one before him, Darwin saw in the minutiae of ordinary living things -- orchids, finches, tortoises, seeds, barnacles, sundews, vines, insect-eating plants -- the grand sweep of natural selection.
All nature is at war with itself, Darwin declared. God’s harmony was an illusion. There was no hidden hand of divine grace or intelligent design at work, no progressive ascent to perfection, only a momentary advantage in an endless struggle to survive and reproduce. Species were fluid. Organisms shifted randomly.
In contrast to the elaborate peer review of modern scientific publishing, Darwin presented his theory as simply as possible to the general reading public. “The Origin of Species” was published in straightforward prose as a 502-page volume, priced at 12 shillings a copy. Anyone could absorb its thesis, and tens of thousands of attentive readers did. Most of the weaknesses in his arguments -- that contemporary creationists marshal today to contest evolution -- were addressed by Darwin, who didn’t hesitate to confront them in print. He clearly understood that there was no avoiding the religious and social conflicts arising from his work. If the Bible could not be trusted in matters of geology and biology, how could it serve as the authority on morality and salvation?
“I cannot persuade myself,” Darwin wrote to his friend Asa Gray, then America’s leading botanist and a man who hoped for evidence of a deity’s guiding influence in nature, “that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details
But the Victorian view of biology mirrored that of an established social order, each individual and species in its fixed place, as ordained by a divine creation. Social barriers were just as rigid. Evolution, as espoused by Darwin, was immediately attacked by creationist clerics of the day as immoral and indecent. Darwin and his opponents were “perceived as fighting over the right to explain origins -- a dispute over the boundary between science and the church that seemed as physically real to the participants and to the audience as any territorial or geographical warfare,” Browne writes.
Convinced of his rectitude, he was the most celebrated thinker of his day, yet a reluctant celebrity who sought to evade the claims on his time that honors demanded. He pursued ingenious home-based experiments secure in his domestic circle of Downe.
Darwin remains so compelling today, in part, because his work embodies science in its primal essence. His was the uncompromising effort of a disciplined intelligence in a time before research harnessed itself so completely to the technology of tools. He needed no electron microscopes or gene sequencers, no cyclotrons, satellite sensors or supercomputers to understand life. On occasion, Darwin borrowed a flower pot to cultivate for his observation the worms that plowed his garden. Browne’s biography deftly captures his extraordinary accomplishment, explaining why no one, as the Times of London announced upon Darwin’s death at 73 on April 19, 1882, “wielded a power over men and their intelligence more complete than that which for the last 23 years has emanated from a simple country house in Kent.”
