Knowing Darwin

Over the past 150 years Darwin has become many people and many opinions. On the Origin of Species has been used to justify ideologies quite at odds with each other, including socialism and fascism; he has been claimed as an atheist, yet also represented as an empiricist hardly aware of the implications of his own theory. His determined silence in the Origin on the effects of his ideas for humankind may have been intended a s he said to be diplomatic, but instead shook the foundations of human pride in our separate status.

His reluctance to apply evolutionary principles directly to social reform, as his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace did, has led some to view him as unconcerned with social justice. Darwin takes it for granted that we are part of the animal kingdom. And he takes that understanding further: we are kin to all organic life forms, extant and extinct.

In the telling of Darwins story, emphasis is often put on his presence as a family man, the devoted husband and father of 10 children who had the free run of the house and even his study. Darwin certainly lived in the midst of his own family and among those of his immediate kin, present and for several generations back. But in the Origin Darwin also expanded the idea of family, away from the human only, away from what he called the exclusiveness of pedigrees and armorial bearings, to embrace all the past and present inhabitants of the world. Instead of being special creations, all organic beings are, as an outcome of his theory, lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch. We are all the offspring of common parents, and for Darwin this inclusiveness is the grand fact he has uncovered.

In the conclusion to the Origin, Darwin seeks to hearten and reassure the reader: When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendents of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. We are part of the grandest of all families, he suggests, because we are part of the oldest family (that criterion by which the grandeur of aristocratic families is judged). His theory challenges apartheid in all its forms, including that between the living and the dead.

Two important new books consider Darwins achievement and the radical changes brought about by his thinking. In Darwins Island, Steve Jones places his work in a continuum that reaches into the present of scientific research, as well as emphasising its extraordinary prescience; in Darwins Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore investigate the social and personal forces that formed his thinking. Jones looks forward, and laterally across all the areas to which Darwins work contributed; Desmond and Moore plumb the past and seek a central explanation for Darwins drive.

Both books enhance our understanding of Darwins significance. They are exhilarating in the freedom and precision with which they track ideas. Though both treat Darwin as a great man, they are not at the mercy of the great-man view of history. They recognise that the powerful individual is shaped and conditioned by the times in which he or she lives. There is a difference between them, though: Jones has no truck with the idea that Darwins theories are inherently social, though their effects are colossally so. Desmond and Moore emphasise the inspiration that political ideas provided, and see them as intrinsic to Darwins theories.

Both books draw on Darwins insistence that all organisms are kin and from common stock. They set out to rescue him from some false assumptions and to demonstrate the range and impassioned foresight of his work, as well as its relation to his own life experience. And both engage with the whole corpus of his writing, not just the Origin.

That in itself is a great gain: Darwin was an indefatigable writer as well as a scrupulous observer throughout his adult life, from the 1830s to the early 1880s. In that time, he published a continuous stream of books, many of them founding documents of a range of different disciplines. The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Animal Kingdom (1876), for example, was about hermaphrodite plants and was, Jones argues, a first step in the scientific study of sex.

As Jones demonstrates, Darwins concern with sexed and unsexed species and with their inventive means of exchanging genes had its bearing on his anxieties about first-cousin marriages such as his own. But the outcome of his investigation was not controlled by these concerns. Jones also goes on to show where later research has reinforced or corrected Darwins views: He denied the importance of selfing in animals and was again mistaken I myself once worked on hermaphrodite slugs, who manage quite well with sex within their own skins.

Jones shows how Darwin, living a family life in the English countryside, was able to attain radical insights and experimental results from the materials of his garden and greenhouses and from the fields that surrounded his house. These insights and results, he argues, are as vital to evolutionary theory and its future as those Darwin gleaned from his visit to the Galapagos Islands. He shows, too, that despite the illness that hampered much of his adult life, Darwin travelled quite widely within Britain (often accompanied by subjects of study such as pots of orchids or of insect-eating plants . . . at considerable inconvenience).

The delight in reading Jones book is the zest with which he explores facts and sets them together to yield more than anyone could have expected, in true Darwinian style. Although he insists on the crucial experimental presence of the British Isles in Darwins researches, he does not confine himself to these shores. Jones demonstrates the coherence of Darwins output, showing how much of his thinking radiates out from his studies of barnacles and climbing plants, insects and worms. The finches and the tortoises of the Galapagos are part of the throng of life-forms, not the sole topic of his investigations.

Darwin himself had geology as his founding imagination and, writing to his friend and cousin William Darwin Fox, just before he arrived at the Galapagos, he was excited mostly at the prospect of finding rock strata there. To Darwin, nothing was trivial, since his entire theory depended on transmission of slight variations which, over time, produce huge consequences. On the contrary, as Jones makes clear, he saw how things small and large in scale relate intimately to each other and how organisms remote in time and place share processes with others close at hand.

Jones relishes Darwins own puzzlement, even occasional exasperation, at the sheer inventiveness of forms in nature. Of orchids, Darwin writes: Hardly any fact has struck me so much as the endless diversities of structure, the prodigality of resources, for gaining the very same end, namely, the fertilisation of one flower by the pollen from another plant.

Jones comments that he glimpsed but a small part of the game played by all plants as they fulfil their sexual identity and goes on to ruminate on cheats, stupidity, reproductive dishonesty and identity fraud in plants, with some side-glances at human parallels. (He notes with some glee Darwins assumption that females are monogamous, which led him to refuse the idea of reproductive fraud in mammals.)

Jones is still startled by the investigations he records and by the potentialities of science. He demurs at anything that too closely identifies the scientist with the science, yet he emphasises the magic of connection: There is something magical in the way that scientific rationalism connects raindrops with heartbeats, and battered trees with depressed infants.

Occasionally, I found his insistence on the language of competition and struggle misleading: the biological war between flower and insect might be seen as biological collaboration. He insists that the whole of evolution involves an endless set of tactics, but no strategy. That is, Darwinian theory is not predictive. The intricacy of connections and deviations certainly makes it impossible to foresee the future. Nor, Jones asserts, does natural selection have any inbuilt tendency to improve matters. Here he differs from Darwin who, frequently links the idea of selection with that of improvement.

That difference cannot be glossed over. Jones seems to assume Darwins assent, but in the Origin we read: old forms will be supplanted by new and improved forms; the later and more improved forms have conquered the older and less improved organic beings in the struggle for life. And in his autobiography Darwin writes of his dismay at the distant fate of Earths organic life as the planet cools: Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he is now, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. Natural selection does not produce perfection (indeed, imperfection, as of the eye, is evidence of natural selection in process), but Darwin does draw the idea of improvement tightly into his understanding of its outcome.

Looking back, we may see this insistence as tinctured with the Victorian belief in progress and the hierarchical views of race-theorists, which colour Darwins efforts even as he tries to think himself free of those assumptions. Thats not to his discredit, but it is important to acknowledge the degree to which he both worked within and struggled against the assumptions of his time, especially when they are not our assumptions.

Desmond and Moore concentrate on the human implications of Darwins argument that all life-forms are kin. Their theme is the appalling practice of slavery and the history of the anti-slavery movement. They explore the Darwin familys place in that movement and show the ways in which scientific debate was fundamental to the struggle between those who tolerated or supported slavery and those, such as Darwin, who had both a visceral and an intellectual loathing of it. They go further, to suggest that the initial drive behind Darwins investigation of species formation was his personal loathing of slavery. To this end, they marshal an admirable and exciting mass of research into Darwin family history and Darwins early life, bringing out the importance of his mothers Unitarianism and his Wedgwood relatives activism. Their account of Darwins rather unhappy year at Edinburgh University, struggling to study as a doctor, is illuminating.

This episode is usually written off as a fruitless period in Darwins young life and intellectual formation. The authors explain his reaction in terms of him being a polished young gentleman, one who had a particular horror of bleeding. But given that one of these operations was on a child, its not hard to share his horror at pain.

His capacity for empathy was a quality that was to stand him in good stead in his scientific practice later, so that their vague summary sentence is disappointing: It was clearly the aura as much as the anatomy that he hated. But much else in these early chapters is revelatory, in part because Desmond and Moore bring so many strands together though their characterisation of Walter Scotts novels as emphasising continuity and medievalism misses a trick. In fact, novels such as Waverley and Old Mortality confronted what was then quite recent upheaval, resistance and change: the forces of discontinuity and of struggle for territory.

Desmond and Moore explore the opinions and histories of Darwins teachers and fellow-students, their relations to phrenology, philanthropy, taxonomy and taxidermy. The last proved especially fruitful for Darwin: one winter he bought 40 hours of instruction in stuffing birds from a black freedman, John, and late in life recalled that I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man. Desmond and Moores point is that Darwin, from quite early on, had learned to appreciate the capacities of people who elsewhere would be subject to slavery. Moreover, since John had travelled with his master, Waterton, through jungle country, Darwin would have had access to a different view of the communities they had explored from that to be found in travel books. In Edinburgh, when Darwin was studying there, issues of environmental versus anatomical determinism, and a self-animated versus a creatively animated nature, were being thrashed out all around him.

Already the shadow of slavery as a dark corollary was emerging, Desmond and Moore write, never stated, but looming larger as explanations of subjugation came to the fore. Slavery features everywhere in their account: from Darwins immediate family circle, to his later testy relations with his early mentor, the great geologist Charles Lyell, who failed fully to acknowledge the evils of slavery.

Although there are times where Desmond and Moores assiduity in finding side-references to slavery becomes somewhat oppressive, the authors do succeed in demonstrating the degree to which current events merged into Victorian scientific inquiry and inflected its findings. Moreover, they highlight Darwins ability to treat equally people of many backgrounds, including the impressive Richard Hill naturalist and anti-slavery activist and the first gentleman of colour in the Jamaican magistracy, assigned to adjudicate between former slave-holders and slaves. Such ties were personal but also always in the service of experimental investigation and scientific theory.

The authors set out to establish not only the centrality of race relations, and specifically slavery, in Darwins investigations, but to demonstrate that he formed the concept of sexual selection much earlier than is often thought and that it owes much to these racial controversies. The Descent of Man thus becomes all about sexual selection rather than this idea being loosely added at the end.

There may be more unevenness in Darwins attitudes than this book can quite tolerate, particularly in relation to hierarchy among human races. And absences, like that of humankind from the Origin, can be filled with many meanings: perhaps Darwin was not as preoccupied with the human as are his commentators. But in the main they are justified in their claims: Darwin never forgot the cries he heard from an anonymous house while on a land journey from the Beagle, and this haunting first-hand experience of liberal impotence in the face of cruel and degrading suffering fuelled his thinking.