Darwin's Island (2 page)

The Descent of Man
,
and Selection in Relation to Sex
, to give its full title, stands rather apart from the rest. The book appeared in 1871 and was both the first real treatment of human evolution and an introduction to the importance of sexual conflict in evolution. It sets out the entire Darwinian argument with reference to a single group of creatures: man and his relatives.
Descent
, like
The Origin of Species
, is in the main a compilation of the results of others. Even so, it fits well into what might be called the Down House School and I use it here as an introduction to the world of modern evolutionary biology as illustrated by ourselves and our primate relatives. The study of our past has been transformed. If the author of
The Origin
were to rewrite that famous work today he would turn for many of his examples not to pigeons and tortoises, nor to worms and barnacles, but to his fellow citizens.
The Origin
’s sole mention of
Homo sapiens
, the tentative claim that ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’, has been wonderfully upheld. It shows how the truths glimpsed by Darwin now unite the whole science of life.

Here I attempt to update all those topics for today. I append an
envoi
with a look at the biological world of the twenty-first century compared with its state in 1859. In the tradition of the great naturalist himself, who was dubious about the many infantile attempts to apply his ideas to society (as in a newspaper’s claim that his work proved that ‘might is right & therefore that Napoleon is right & every cheating tradesman is also right’), I avoid as far as possible any discussion of the relevance of Darwinism to the human predicament. I also steer clear of the empty arguments about its interactions with religion. The struggle to separate science from theology still fascinates a few, but most scientists have no interest in it (although there are exceptions, for the Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley felt that ‘Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes besides that of Hercules’). Today’s biology in its success emphasises how little relevance it has to the issues so often, and so tediously, discussed by non-biologists. As Darwin put it in
The Descent of Man
: ‘We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it.’ Science can do that, and no more.

My eminent predecessor at University College London, the Nobel Prize-winner Peter Medawar, in an acerbic comment on the relative merits of students of science and the arts, said of Watson and Crick (of double helix fame) that ‘Not only were they clever, they had something to be clever about.’ Not only did Charles Darwin travel, he had something to travel for. The joy of the
Beagle
voyage was that it had a point. For a real adventurer, to travel hopefully is not enough: some end must be in view. As he wrote in the last pages of his account of the journey: ‘If a person asked my advice before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced.’

Darwin’s odysseys, from the Galapagos to West Wales, play an important part in all his books, as they did in the author’s life. The
Beagle
crossed nearly fifty thousand kilometres of ocean but his British journeys covered almost as much country. His work was always tied to where he found himself, whether in a rain forest or a suburb. Many of his compositions emerge from a kind of Grand Tour of the British Isles. His very first memory, as recounted in his autobiography, was of a visit to Abergele for the sea-bathing at the age of four. Six years later he was back on the Welsh coast at Towyn, where he noted some ‘curious insects’ (black and red Burnet Moths) not seen around Shrewsbury. Unlike the many naturalists of those times who filled cabinets with butterflies or shells to make a biological stamp-collection, he wondered, even as a child, quite why they were found in one place and not another.

As he grew older, natural history became an all-embracing passion. His early enjoyment of literature, art and music disappeared and he wrote that ‘I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.’ His preferred reading consisted of romantic novels (the sillier the story, the better, said his children) and he sold off his family heirlooms of Wedgwood pottery and Flaxman reliefs. He could make out ‘absolutely nothing’ of what merit there was in a collection of Turner watercolours. ‘My mind’, he wrote, ‘seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive’ (although he did send the
Expression of the Emotions
book to art journals for review, where it was criticised for its insensitivity to the nature of Art).

That obsession with science allowed Charles Darwin’s juvenile interest in the insects of England and Wales to grow into a lifelong exploration of the biology and geology of his native island. He published his first scientific paper, on the eggs of an animal found in the Firth of Forth, in the twelve grey months he spent in Edinburgh. After a brief visit to Dublin, the young enthusiast then moved to Cambridge, where he spent many days knee-deep in bogs and fens in the search for specimens. Just before the departure of the
Beagle
, he travelled for three weeks across North Wales from Shrewsbury to Conwy and Barmouth with the geologist Adam Sedgwick, who taught him the elements of mapping so useful on the voyage. On his return he set off again to Scotland, where, in his first major scientific paper, he made a frightful error in his evaluation of a series of parallel shelves or ‘roads’ in Glen Roy as wave-cut beaches rather than the shores of drained glacial lakes (as he wrote many years later, ‘I am ashamed of it’). Later in life he criss-crossed Britain to pursue his researches or to take his family on holiday, or to escape the epidemics of infection that now and again swept through Downe (and killed two of his own children). They went to Wales, to the Isle of Wight (where he met Alfred, Lord Tennyson), to Torquay, to the Lake District (an audience there with Ruskin), to Stonehenge, to the heathlands of England and to a variety of grand mansions across the kingdom. Often, his experimental subjects - pots of orchids or of insect-eating plants - travelled with the family, at considerable inconvenience. He had plenty of time to explore the British Isles for in his forty years at Down House Charles Darwin spent two thousand nights away from home - the equivalent of a day a week. A few of his trips lasted a month and more.

Some of his travels were in search of science, but many were a quest for health. He became chronically ill very soon after his return from the
Beagle
trip and his heavy use of snuff and tobacco did nothing to improve his well-being. Darwin visited spas in Great Malvern, in Guildford and in Ilkley (where he received the first copy of
The Origin
). His later years were marked by a series of bizarre attempts to remedy his feeble state (even if he did write that illness, ‘though it has annihilated several years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement’). The main symptom was vomiting, often brought on by stress, with the rushed last chapter of
The Origin
sparking off a severe episode that caused great prostration of mind and body. So severe were the attacks that he declined some invitations to stay in friends’ houses on the grounds that ‘my retching is apt to be extremely loud’.

He tried Condy’s Ozonised Fluid, ‘enormous quantities of chalk, magnesia & carb of ammonia’, and rubber bags filled with ice and worn next to the spine. Nothing worked (although he learned to play billiards at one of the establishments and became a devotee of the pastime, which helped him to relax and, as he said, ‘drives the horrid species out of my head’). The author of
The Origin
was a victim of the Victorian ‘Demon of Dyspepsia’ and was joined in that unhappy throng by Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale and the evolutionists T. H. Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace and Herbert Spencer, together with his own brother Erasmus. Their troubles funded several pharmaceutical fortunes (including that of Henry Wellcome, which later helped pay for that Darwinian triumph, the sequence of human DNA). What his condition might have been is not known: a supposed conflict between Christian belief and rationalism, or a parasite picked up in Brazil or even, some say, the obsessive swallowing of air. He was diagnosed as having ‘waterbrash’ - heartburn, in modern parlance, the reflux of acid from the stomach - which can result from an ulcer. Dyspepsia’s nausea, depression and lassitude are, we know today, caused by a bacterium. The bug that swept through Victoria’s intellectuals might now be cured with a simple pill.

Later in life, in part because of his health, the paterfamilias of Down House spent longer and longer periods without leaving home. He fed his household with fifty-three distinct varieties of gooseberries and three of cabbage. In his garden he carried out many experiments, helped by William Brooke, his ‘gloomy gardener’ (who was seen to laugh just once, when a boomerang broke a cucumber frame). The naturalist’s tale ends, in the tradition of the classics, with the hero’s death and his desire to join his beloved earthworms in the ‘sweetest place on Earth’, the village churchyard at Downe - a wish frustrated by fame, the establishment and the Abbey.

Darwin’s Island
retraces some of Darwin’s steps and moves his discoveries forward by a century and more. It will, I hope, help bring his less well-known work into the third millennium. Several people have helped in the preparation of this book. David Leibel, Michael Morgan, Kay Taylor and Anna Trench made helpful comments on parts of it. I thank them for their help.

Three of my earlier volumes - on coral reefs, on the nature of maleness and on the theory of evolution itself - pay homage to the founder of the science of life, and each is an attempt to update his ideas for the modern age. There could be no better way to honour the most famous of all biologists at this time of concentrated attention on his history than to give his less celebrated works the exposure they deserve. For Charles Darwin, the five
Beagle
years that became part of Britain’s intellectual legacy led to four decades of intense labour within the confines of his native land. In that modest group of islands he underwent a second great voyage: not of the body but of the mind. This book traces that journey from its beginning to its end.

CHAPTER I

THE QUEEN’S ORANG-UTAN

In 1842 Queen Victoria went to London Zoo. She was less than amused: ‘The Orang Outang is too wonderful . . . he is frightfully, and painfully, and disagreeably human.’ The animal was not a male but a female called Jenny and Charles Darwin had, some years earlier, visited its mother. He too spotted the resemblance between the apes on either side of the bars. The young biologist scribbled in his notebook that ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.’ Seventeen years after Victoria’s visit, in 1859, he published the theory that proved the Queen’s kinship, and his own, to Jenny, to every inmate of the Zoological Gardens and to all the inhabitants of the Earth.

The Origin of Species
caused uproar among the Empress of India’s subjects. Her Chancellor, Benjamin Disraeli, asked famously: ‘Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new fangled theories.’ Many of his fellow citizens agreed. Even so, the notion at once entered public discourse (and
Punch
devoted its 1861 Christmas annual to gorilla-like humans and their opposites). In time, and with some reluctance, the notion that every Briton, high or low, shared descent with the rest of the world was accepted. A quarter of a century on, W. S. Gilbert penned the deathless line that ‘Darwinian man, though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved’ and the idea of
Homo sapiens
as a depilated ape became part of popular culture, where it belongs. Victoria herself congratulated one of her daughters, the crown princess of Prussia, for turning to
The Origin
: ‘How many interesting, difficult books you read. It would and will please beloved Papa.’

As the Queen had noticed, the physical similarity of men to apes is clear. In 1859, Charles Darwin came up with the reason why. A certain caution was needed to promote the idea that what had made animals had also produced men and women, and he waited for twelve years before he expanded on the subject.
The Descent of Man
describes how - and why -
Homo sapiens
shares its nature with other primates. The book uses our own species as an exemplar of evolution.

To the founder of modern biology, man obeyed the same evolutionary rules as all his kin and shared much of his physical being with them; as the book says, in its final paragraph, he still bears ‘the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’. In moral terms
Homo sapiens
was something more: ‘. . . of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense . . . is summed up in that short but imperious word “ought,” so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment’s hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature.’ No ape understands the meaning of ‘ought’, a word pregnant with notions quite alien to every species apart from one. Even so, despite that essential and uniquely human attribute, every ape - and we are among them - is, like every other creature, the product of a common biological mechanism.