About Darwin and Me
Todays post is long, and probably won’t cover all the ground it should. Expect to see more about Darwin and his effect on scientific thought and on my own thoughts in the future.
I didn’t actually ‘get around’ to reading “The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man” until 10-15 years ago. When I finally did, it was in a single volume, a tome, really, from my father’s library of antique books. By that point, of course, I was familiar with Evolutionary theory, but I decided that it was time to read the original work. When I had finished “Origin” (but not descent) I told my father that I had been surprised at the amount of religion Darwin put into the book - God was referred to constantly. My father expressed the opinion that Darwin ‘had’ to put it in in order to make it palatable to his readers.
I recall being shocked by Darwins ‘conclusion’ to “Descent”. At the time, it seemed to me to be a rant about the future evolution of mankind, as the ’superior’ members of the race were having fewer children due to the deferral of childbirth, while the ‘inferior’ would out reproduce them. I’ll get back to this later, but I have to point out that, if I recall it correctly, he had associated inferior with uneducated, and it just didn’t make sense to me that he would write it. It didn’t make sense as a scientific viewpoint, and it didn’t make sense coming from a writer who wanted to make his theory ‘palatable to his readers’. It was distasteful enough that I put the book down and didn’t come back to it for years. I hope and believe I returned the tome to my father. I should go through his library some time and look for it.
Years later I heard someone else opine that Darwin had lost his religion while he wrote “The Descent of Man”, while researching the life forms of parasitic wasps. That the idea of God creating such things, not as a punishment of man, but to inflict pain and suffering on other creatures (free of ‘original sin’) was not something he could conscience. I know enough people who are be quite religious without being hung up on the literalness of the creation myth that this made sense to me, so I thought it was probably true.
Recently, I read a biography of Darwin, curious to see how he had lost his faith, if he ever had it in the first place. So I read “Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution”.
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Author Randal Keynes;
Publication date 05 November, 2002
Randal Keynes is Charles Darwin’s great-great grandson. I thought that if anyone had access to information which could shed light on Darwin, his faith or lack thereof, and his views on the future evolution of humanity, Keynes would be the one.
It turned out I was right.
Darwin was too squeamish to finish his medical degree. You have to remember that this was in the early 19th century, well before germ theory was established, and before anesthetics. Allopathic medicine was an extremely risky and unpleasant thing, which sometimes (as in Darwins own case) boiled down to dosing a patient with heavy metals and hoping for the best.
His next choice was to become a naturalist, which involved studying to become a clergyman. There’s nothing in his writings to lead one to believe he was at all devout at this point. His family were Unitarians, and there was a strong atheistic current in his upbringing. Darwin, himself, in later writings, describes losing his religion in his early 30’s, as a gradual and painless process. Keynes, for the most part, agreed with my father about the frequent mentions of God being a nod to the convention of the time, but he also says that God was part of Darwins every day conversation, and that he called upon God (at least, in writing) during times of personal need, throughout his life. He also wrote about wanting to believe, and may have been thinking more and more about God as he got older. Not in terms of fear of damnation, but more in having a deep, personal desire to believe in a positive force behind it all, even though he didn’t see actual evidence for it.
Darwin was socially progressive. He came from an upper class family, and had family money (and investments) which saw him through his life. He contributed to charities which cared for the poor and uneducated. He founded a social club for local villagers, where they pooled their monies and set up retirement funds. He did not sound like the class conscious reactionary who felt the poor were constitutionally inferior who wrote the closing I recall.
According to Keynes, rewrote the conclusion of the book Herbert Spencer’s “Social Darwinism” - the idea that the weak and poor were evolutionarily inferior, and therefore it was scientifically unethical to help them…
I’m not going to devote a future post to Social Darwinism, so I’ll digress and tackle it here, briefly, and in very little detail.
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It’s poor science. Darwin’s recalled conclusions that the poor and uneducated would out reproduce the rich, although it presumes there’s some link between social condition and genetic condition, is better thought out. The fact is that the ‘undesirables’, regardless of state of health, were increasing in the population. Therefore, evolutionarily, they were ‘winning’, and ‘helping’ evolution would mean killing off the upper classes.
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The Theory of Evolution, like all scientific theories, simply describes a process. It doesn’t tell us what we ’should’ do or justify any action. It might help us predict the consequences of a planned course of action, but it doesn’t excuse us from morality, or tell us what our moral choices should be.
The conclusion in the Project Gutenberg Version is clearly the ‘kinder, gentler’ version which Keynes refers to. I suppose it is possible that my father actually had a first edition, or it’s possible I completely misremembered what I had read. The latter is very possible, because reading the biography brought to mind other ways in which my memory just didn’t fit Darwin’s life.
Charles and Emma Darwin, although they did ‘delay childbirth’ to the point where, even now, they would have been older first time parents, managed to have ten children, seven of whom lived to adulthood. I don’t think his peers were being out-competed in the gene poool. I also don’t have a clear recollection of his complaint (on page 398) that “When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not consanguineousmarriages are injurious to man”. Of course, it wouldn’t have much sense to me until I learned that Darwin had married his first cousin, and then one of his children (the daughter of Keynes title) contracted a fever (probably typhus) and died. He tried to enlist the government in a study to determine whether such marriages really did produce children who were more susceptible to disease, and was rebuffed.
There are a great number of things I only dimly recall from reading the Darwin Tome. I forgive myself for these lapses, because expecting myself to retain everything would be ridiculous. I generally remember enough that, every time I read a report of a new finding in sociobiology or other aspects of evolutionary theory I get annoyed. Darwin really did discuss most of this first (I think biological altruism is the exception, but that’s another post).
One thing I did not recall, or only recalled vaguely, was the section on barnacles. This is unfortunate, because it really illustrates both Darwins brilliance and his determination. According to Keynes, Darwin was, in part, inspired to classify every known species of barnacle, in part, because his friend Sir Joseph Hooker felt he didn’t have enough evidence to publish his theory. The idea was that a ‘family tree’ of species within a genus could be built (and make sense) if the theory of evolution was right, and that it couldn’t be made to make sense if God simply created all species. Phylogenetic trees are now extremely common, and the basis of modern taxonomy. Every single one of them represents a separate experiment which confirms the Theory of Evolution, but they are so familiar they are rarely thought of in those terms. (Simply a note for those who dispute that evolutionary theory is predictive).
Other tangents from the biography. Darwin published “Origin” a bit earlier than he would have liked, because Alfred Russell Wallace wrote to him before presenting his own version of the Theory. The two of them corresponded a little, and, although they didn’t actually collaborate on the Theory, presented the concept together before the Anthropological Society. Darwin held off on publishing “Descent”, because he didn’t want to stir up that particular controversy. He finally went ahead and finished it after Wallace discovered spiritualism and turned all woo on him.
Both Wallace and Lyell (the geologist who sparked Darwin’s imagination in the first place) came up with a criticism of ‘Survival of the Fittest’ which disturbed Darwin. They felt that the evolution of humanity must have involved a sudden jump or discontinuity… I’m sure they weren’t thinking along these lines, but reading about it put me in mind of punctate evolution, which I’ll go into in later posts.
Finally, I feel compelled to restate that allopathic medicine at the time was a pretty dangerous affair. Mercury was, apparently, a pretty common ingredient in medications. Darwin came down with an illness on the Beagle, and had relapses for the rest of his life. Conventional medical treatments failed (disastrously) and he eventually tried a pretty loopy ‘water cure’, which was similar in intent to moderning ‘cleansing’. The doctor who came up with this cure also practiced homeopathy, and believed in spiritualism. Darwin tried it anyway, and it worked well for him, far better than the available allopathic alternatives. Years later, after conventional medicine failed his ten year old daughter he again turned to the ‘water cure’, which failed to cure her of (probably) typhus. I refuse to fault Darwin for trying, remember, the germ theory was not well known, and there were no antibiotics.
I think that’s everything I need to cover in an introductory Darwin post. We’ll come back to him later, probably many times.
