The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (18 page)

It was toward the end of this phase — a few months before natural selection dawned on him — that Darwin decided to marry. Not necessarily anyone in particular; it isn't clear that he had Emma Wedgwood even remotely in mind, and one common view is that she wasn't at the center of his thinking on the subject. In a remarkable deliberative memorandum, apparently composed around July of 1838, he decided the matter of marriage in the abstract.

The document has two columns, one labeled Marry, one labeled Not Marry, and above them, circled, are the words "This is the Question." On the pro-marriage side of the equation were "Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with."
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After reflection of unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with "better than a dog anyhow." He continued: "Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chitchat — These things good for one's health. — but terrible loss of time." Without warning, Darwin had, from the pro-marriage column, swerved uncontrollably into a major anti-marriage factor, so major that he underlined it. This issue — the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time — was addressed at greater length in the appropriate, Not Marry column. Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve "Freedom to go where one like — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle — to have the expense & anxiety of children — Perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one's bread."

Yet the pro-marriage forces carried the day, with this train of thought at the end of the Marry column: "My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won't do. — Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps." After recording these images he wrote: "Marry-Mary[sic]-Marry Q.E.D."

Darwin's decision had to survive one more wave of doubt. The backlash began innocently enough, as Darwin wrote, "It being proved necessary to Marry, When? Soon or Late." But this question incited that final spasm of panic with which many grooms are familiar. Brides are familiar with it too, of course, but their doubt seems more often to be whether their choice of a lifelong mate is the right one. For men, as Darwin's memo attests, the panic isn't essentially related to any particular prospective mate; it is the concept of a lifelong mate that is at some level frightening. For — in a monogamous society, at least — it dampens the prospects for intimacy with all those other women that a man's genes urge him to find and get to know (however briefly).

This isn't to say that the premarital panic fixes itself coarsely on
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images of would-be sex partners; the subconscious can be more subtle than that. Still, there is, somewhat reliably among men who are about to pledge themselves to one woman for life, a dread of impending entrapment, a sense that the days of adventure are over. "Eheu!!" Darwin wrote, with one final shudder in the face of lifelong commitment. "I never should know French, — or see the Continent — or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales — poor slave — you will be worse than a negro." But then, fatefully, he mustered the necessary resolve. "Never mind my boy — Cheer up — One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in ones face, already beginning to wrinkle. — Never mind, trust to chance — keep a sharp look out — There is many a happy slave — " End of document.
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Darwin had written an earlier deliberative memorandum, probably in April, in which he rambled on about career paths — teach at Cambridge? in geology? in zoology? or "Work at transmission of Species"? — and pondered the marriage question inconclusively.
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There is no way of knowing what drove him to reopen the question and this time settle it. But it's intriguing that, of the six entries made between April and July in his sporadically kept personal journal, two say he was feeling "unwell." Unwellness was to become a way of life for Darwin, a fact he may already have suspected. It is ironic that hints of mortality can draw a man into marriage, for often it is these same hints, much later, that drive him out, to seek fresh proof of his virility. But the irony dissolves when reduced to ultimate cause: both the impulses to profess lifelong love to a woman and to wander lie within a man by virtue of how often, in his ancestors, they led to progeny. In that sense, both are an apt antidote to mortality, though in the end futile (except from the genes' point of view), and, in the latter case — wandering — often destructive as well.

Anyway, on a less philosophical plane: Darwin may have sensed that he would before long need a devoted helpmate and nurse. And perhaps he even had a glimmer of spending many years working, in patient and needy solitude, on a big book about evolution. As Darwin's health had gotten worse, his grasp of that subject had gotten
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better. He opened his first notebook on "transmutation of Species" in June or July of 1837, and his second in early 1838.
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By the time he was rigorously mulling marriage, he had gone some of the way toward natural selection. He believed that one key to evolution lay in initially slight hereditary difference; that when a species is divided into two populations by, say, a body of water, what are at first merely two variants of the species grow apart until they qualify as new and distinct species.
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All that remained — the hard part — was to figure out what guided that divergence. In July of 1838, he finished his second species notebook and opened his third, the one that would bring him the answer. And he may, as he penned his fateful marriage memorandum that same month, have had a sense of impending success.

In late September, the solution came. Darwin had just read Thomas Malthus's famous essay on population, which noted that a human population's natural rate of growth will tend to outstrip the food supply unless checked. Darwin recalled in his autobiography: "[BJeing well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work."
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Under the heading of September 28, Darwin jotted in his notebook some lines about Mai thus and then, without explicitly describing natural selection, surveyed its effects: "One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of Nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones. The final cause of all this wedgings, must be to sort out proper structure & adapt it to change."
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The direction of Darwin's professional life was set, and now he fixed the course of his personal life. Six weeks after writing this passage, on Sunday, November 11 ("The Day of Days!" he wrote in his personal journal), he proposed to Emma Wedgwood.

Viewed in the simplest Darwinian terms, Darwin's attraction to Emma seems strange. He was now a high-status and well-to-do man
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in his late twenties. Presumably he could have had a young and beautiful wife. Emma was a year older than he and, though not unattractive (at least in the eyes of her portrait painter), was not thought beautiful. Why would Darwin do anything so maladaptive as to marry a plain woman who had already exhausted more than a decade of her reproductive potential?

First of all, this simple equation — rich, high-status male equals young, beautiful wife — is a bit crude. There are many factors that make for a genetically auspicious mate, including intelligence, trustworthiness, and various sorts of compatibility.
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Moreover, the selection of a spouse is also the selection of a parent for one's offspring. Emma's sturdiness of character foreshadowed the attentiveness she would bring to her children. One of her daughters recalled: "Her sympathy, and the serenity of her temper, made her children feel absolutely at their ease with her, and sure of comfort in every trouble great or small, whilst her unselfishness made them know that she would never find anything a burden, and that they could go to her with all the many little needs of a child for help or explanation."
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Besides, if the issue is how "valuable" a wife Darwin should be expected to seek, the question isn't, strictly speaking, how marketable a mate he was, but how marketable he had been given the impression he was. By adolescence, if not earlier, people are getting feedback about their market value, feedback that shapes their self-esteem and thus affects how high they aim their sights. Darwin doesn't seem to have emerged from adolescence feeling like an alpha male. Though large, he was meek, not much of a fighter. And, as one of his daughters noted, he considered his face "repellently plain."
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Of course, all of this was rendered less relevant by later achievement. Darwin may not have had high status as a teenager, but he got it later, and status per se can compensate, in the eyes of women, for mediocre looks and a lack of brute strength. Yet his insecurity seems to have persisted — as, indeed, insecurities formed in adolescence often do. The question is why.

Maybe the developmental mechanism that fine-tuned Darwin's insecurity was a vestige of evolution, an adaptation that would have tended to raise fitness in the ancestral environment but no longer does. In many hunter-gatherer societies, the male dominance
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hierarchy is fairly firm by early adulthood; submissive, low-status men don't go to college, assiduously climb career ladders, and then wow ladies with their newly reached station. So in the ancestral environment, a self-esteem that began to harden shortly after adolescence may have been a reliable guide to one's enduring value on the marriage market; maybe it has become a faulty indicator only in a more modern environment.

Then again, maybe a stubbornly low opinion of oneself can be adaptive in almost any environment. Wives do cheat on husbands, after all. And folk wisdom, at least, has them often cheating with handsome, athletic men. Thus Darwin's low opinion of his animal magnetism may have kept him from marrying the kind of stunning woman who would draw overtures from world-class philanderers whom she would then find sexier than him.

Emma accepted Darwin's proposal, leaving him with feelings of "hearty gratitude to her for accepting such a one as myself." She was pleased, she later reported, to find that he had been unsure of her answer.
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It is everyone's desire not to be taken for granted by a mate, and naturally so, since this would bode ill for future devotion.

Emma shows no signs of having equivocated. She clearly admired Darwin's intelligence and, in explaining her assent, she also stressed his honesty, his affection toward his family, and his "sweet tempered" nature.
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(Translation: he probably has some good genes and he seems likely to be a generous and considerate parental investor.) And it could not have escaped her attention that he came from a wealthy family and was of high and rising professional stature (that he would have plenty of resources, material and social, to invest).

To be sure, Emma came from a wealthier family. Her grandfather was an innovative and immensely successful potter whose name lives on in the form of Wedgwood china. She could have married a pauper without fear that her children would grow up deprived. But, as we've seen, attraction to mates who command social and material resources may have been so consistently conducive to the fitness of women during evolution that it has become a fairly rigid part of their minds.

Even if Emma Wedgwood could have bought her way into London's high society — through philanthropy, say — Darwin's social status probably would have wowed her. At any rate, it did. During her engagement to Charles, the couple was entertained by the Cambridge University geologist Adam Sedgwick. "What an honour for the great Sedgwick to invite me to his house," marveled Emma. "Me only think of it! I feel a greater person already for it & how my head will stand it when I am really Mrs. D ... I can't tell."
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Men, of course, are hardly oblivious to the status and wealth of a mate. But if the importance of these things was indeed sexually asymmetrical during most of evolution, the male attraction to a moneyed or socially prominent woman may be less a matter of raw appeal and more a matter of conscious calculation. In the July marriage memorandum, when Darwin was fretting about the twin evils of marriage — the "loss of time every day" and the "horrid poverty" that could result, he slyly followed each of those phrases with a parenthetic qualifier: "without one's wife was an angel, & made one keep industrious," he added after the first worry. And after the second: "without one's wife was better than an angel & had money."

Regardless of how much Darwin did or didn't know about his future health and career, he had just given a composite sketch of the ideal wife for a chronically ill man who, while not affiliated with any university, is trying to write the most important scientific book of the century. And, regardless of whether he then had some inkling of who his wife would be, he had just given a roughly accurate portrait of Emma Wedgwood.
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Between her father's wealth, Darwin's father's wealth, Darwin's book royalties, and his knack for sound investment, there would be ample money in the Darwin household.
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And although Emma may not have "made" Darwin stay industrious, she certainly encouraged him to, nursing him faithfully and shielding him from distraction. Darwin, in characteristically oblique fashion, made this assignment clear from the beginning. Three weeks into the engagement, he wrote to her about the reaction of an acquaintance to the news: "She says 'so Mr. Darwin is going to be married; I suppose he will be buried in the country and lost to geology'. She little knows, what a good strict wife, I am going to be married to,
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who will send me to my lessons, and make me better, I trust, in every respect... ,"
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