CHARLES DARWIN

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin devoted a sixth of his intellectual life to barnacles.

His study of plant genetics was fuelled in parts about concerns for his ten children since he and his wife were cousins.

Biographical Sketch of An Infant was based largely on his observations of his son William.

Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin wrote about social evolution rather than biological evolution.

Precedents

Robert Chambers The Vestiges of Natural History of Creation (1844). An early version of evolutionary history. A breakthrough book that Darwin was contemptuous of. Published anonymously.

Darwin adored The Gardener s Chronicle. He was upset that there was a dispute published in which Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) claimed to have produced the ideas of evolution by natural selection in the appendix of his book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture (1831).

In the first edition Darwin did not point the people who preceded him. This was pointed out to him.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith s economic argument that no one works for the common good and that our actions are determined by selfishness influenced Darwin.

The Finches' Beak

In the Gal pagos Darwin had not been particularly struck by twelve birds that he had collected. He took them to be local varieties blackbird, finch, warbler, and wren. Following his return to London, the taxidermist John Gould (1804-1881) assisted him with the bird volume of Zoology of The Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. It was Gould, who an autodidact, who pointed out to the naturalist that the birds were all varieties of a single family of finch despite their being different sizes and having a wide variety of beaks.

Alfred Russell Wallace

Lamarck and other French naturalists were aware of the kinship of different types of animal. They speculated about evolution having some impact upon animals physical characteristic. However, they did not furnish a mechanism. This is what Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace provided.

Wallace left school at the age of fourteen. He spent a dozen years working as a land surveyor. Subsequently, it was to inform his tendency to make maps.

In 1845 Wallace read Robert Chambers s anonymously published Vestiges of The Natural History of Creation. It proposed that life on Earth had evolved from earlier forms. The book sold in large numbers. It did not furnish a mechanism. Wallace became a supporter of evolution. He decided to become a collector of naturalist history items.

While on the Indonesian island of Halmahera Wallace suffered a bout of malaria. While he was recovering from it he devised his theory of natural selection.

Lyell was willing to apply change to geology but not to natural history. Wallace knew that Lyell was interested in his work. The letter that Wallace sent to Darwin was meant primarily to be forwarded to Lyell.

Alfred Wallace remained an admirer of Darwin. He was a champion of his work. He coined the word Darwinism . Wallace encouraged Darwin to use Herbert Spencer s phrase Survival of the fittest . Darwin did so in the fifth edition (1869) of Origin. However, the pair disagreed strongly over the involvement of humanity in evolution; Darwin regarded mankind as an animal, Wallace regarded people as being apart.

In part, the emerging professionalised scientific establishment was wary of Wallace because his open-mindedness rendered him open to the possibility that phenomena such as mesmerism and spiritualism might contain elements of merit. Despite William Hooker s advice, Darwin secured a state pension for Wallace.

Wallace s The Malay Archipelago (1869) is said to have been Joseph Conrad s favourite book.

For many years the Natural History Museum kept a portrait of Wallace that it owned in storage. In 2013, to mark the centenary of naturalist s death, the institution placed the painting in its main hall next to a statue of Darwin.

Location: The Natural History Museeum, Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD (blue, red)

Website: www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-was-alfred-russel-wallacel www.wallacefund.myspecies.info

Books

The Descent of Man

In The Origin of Species Darwin set out a mechanism for evolution to occur. In The Descent of Man Darwin introduced a second mechanism - sexual selection.

In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin made use of numerous quotations Galton s Hereditary Genius (1869), which came to be regarded as the founding work of eugenics. Darwin respected his cousin s thinking about inheritance, which he had been unable to construct a rigorous model, but disliked his ethno-nationalism.

Expression

The Expression of Emotions In Man and Animals (1872) argued for humanity s common emotions. In the book he argued that emotions were connected to the body as well as the mind, which was itself s function of the body.

Anti-Eugenics, anti-materialism

Origins

Religiously sincere people did not necessarily view Origin of Species with any hostility.

Many intellectually sophisticated Anglicans, the likes of Charles Kingsley, regarded the book as deepening their appreciation of the natural world rather than challenging their beliefs.

John Henry Newman found his appreciation of the divine underscored.

In 2012 the Natural History Museum held 487 editions of Origins that had been published in 38 languages.

Origins

In 1838 Darwin s breakthrough occurred while reading a copy of Malthus s book An Essay The Principle On Population (1798). The economist argued that reproduction leads to over overproduction which leads to competition. Darwin s prepared took this struggle for existence and adapted it natural selection.

Darwin estimated that it would have taken 300m years of the Weald of Kent to have been created by geological process. At the time, the role of nuclear energy in the Sun was completely unknown. A couple of years after Origin s publication William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) claimed that the Sun shined because it was collapsing inwards under the weight of its gravity and that therefore it could have only been shining for a few million years. Darwin learned of this and removed the reference to the creation of the Weald from the third edition of The Origin of The Species.

Oranges & Peaches

The Origins of Species is referred by some as Oranges & Peaches.

Origins: Birds

Darwin was stimulated to examine speculate upon evolution because a British resident of the Galapagos Islands remarked that he could tell which island giant tortoises came from because of the shape of their shells. However, Darwin failed to note which island his giant tortoises came from and so had to use the mocking birds that his assistant Symes Covington (1816-1861) had labelled with their place of origin.

Origins

There is an argument that The Origin of The Species was a major stimulus to a desire to establish the historicity of The Bible and then ultimately of archaeology, the desire to use Troy to establish the history of Greeks and thus the Europeans.

Sexual Selection

Darwin was happy to write about the sex life of plants, however, being a gentleman of his time, he was coy about writing about the sex life of vertebrates. His daughter aided with the proofs of Sexual Selection. In it, he wrote about the sexual swellings of primates in Latin because she could understand the language.

Joseph Hooker

The botanist Joseph Hooker was the first scientist to publicly support Darwin s idea.

Despite Hooker s advice, Darwin secured a state pension for Wallace.

Thomas Huxley

Thomas Huxley was about to go home and had to be persuaded to remain and attend the debate.

1 July 1860 Wilberforce debate. The result was probably a stand-off rather than a victory for either man. The person who came the best out of the matter was Joseph Hooker. He intervened and pointed out that Wilberforce had been attacking the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck s transmutation theory and not Darwin s one of evolution.

The monkey reference appears to have derived from a paper that Richard Owen had given that had compared the brains of an ape and a man. Owen had tried to stress the differences. Huxley had pointed out that there were great similarities. A row had been triggered. During it Huxley had stated that he was not ashamed to be descended from apes.

At the time Huxley was a poor public speaker; the experience was to make him determined to become one, which enabled him to act as Darwin s bulldog . In his risposte to Wilberforce he stated that he would rather be descended from an ape than associated with a man who used his great gifts to distort the truth.

Sir David Brewster s wife, Lady Brewster, fainted.

Mendel

Darwin did not know about genetics. The closest he came to it was particulate inheritance . Mendel wrote to Darwin, however, Darwin never opened the envelope.

Misc

Darwin was given to write marginalia in books that interested him. However, if sections did not, he often pulled out the relevant pages.

Richard Owen

Richard Owen s ideas were taught at the Mechanics Institute off the Tottenham Court Road. The future naturalist attended it for a period, having been taken there by his brother who was a carpenter. He became a religious sceptic as a result of his exposure to ideas that were being communicated there.

Misc

Leichhardt was interested principally interested in botany and geology. He stumbled into the arena of megafauna. Knew Lyall s work

Owen classified some fossil bones as being members of the pachyderm family. Ludwig Leichhardt challenged this interpretation. He stated that they were marsupials. Owen responded by declaring a general law that with extinct animals as with living particular forms were assigned to particular provinces and that the same forms were restricted to the same provinces at a previous geological period as they are at the present day. Without the law Darwin s theory of evolution would not have made sense.

Lyall had his doubts about Darwin s ideas. In a letter that Darwin wrote in 1859 he sought to persuade Lyall of their merit by declaring that natural selection was operation on mankind (the apologists were to try to distance these remarks when trying to dissociate Darwinianism from Social Darwiniamism). Darwin regarded social inequality between classes and nations as natural.

Data gathering revealed the poor were outbreeding the middle classes. The idea of control was added by the Social Darwinians to their outlook (would have been from.

Augustus Pitt Rivers

Augustus Lane-Fox was a younger son of a younger son of a minor aristocratic family. His education is obscure. He became a career army officer. He collected numerous items. When he married his wife, he was regarded as marrying above his station. His wife s family, the Stanleys of Alderley had numerous intellectual connections. Through them he met Thomas Huxley and Sir John Lubbock. The latter was Darwin s next-door neighbour.

He lent his collected to the South Kensington Museum, which housed the items in its Bethnal Greene Annexe.

He gave about half of his collection to establish the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.

Lane-Fox arranged his items in progressions. Applied Darwinianism to material objects in a way that the naturalist had not intended. Started to see himself as a scientist with a duty to promote. There is no evidence that he ever met Darwin.

Scientists appreciated his organisational talents. He was a practical person.

Pitt-Rivers separated technology from an immediate relationship to evolution but gave it a connection to evolutionary principles. Regarded it as a slow progression rather than jumps.

Under his influence the material in the Pitt-Rivers is arranged according to typology rather than region or time.

Geology developed during his lifetime. It came to be appreciated that it could be used to data artefacts according to the strata from which they were recovered. From Scandinavia the concepts of Stone Age, Iron Age etc. emerged. The recording of excavations grew more methodical.

Victorian excavations had tended to focus on burial mounds. Lane-Fox opted for settlements, which were more likely to yield everyday items that he was interested in collecting. Regarded the information about an object as being as important as the object itself.

At the age of 50 or so Lane-Fox unexpectedly inherited the Pitt-Rivers Cranbourne Chase estate and changed his surname.

As became a landowner his politics became less progressive. This was paralleled by the outlook of Herbert Spencer, whom he met through his wife s family.

By the time that he came to the inheritance Darwinianism was widely accepted. It was appreciated that the theory could not be applied directly to material culture (Darwin himself had never approved of the attempted application). As a result, Pitt-Rivers efforts tended to be devoted towards practical matters rather than theoretical ones.

At the start of 21^stC his legacy was regarded as lying in archaeology rather than anthropology. In large part, this derived from his having been misapprehended by Mortimer Wheeler, who was also a former military man.

Sir John Lubbock

Lubbock was a populariser rather than a profound thinker. He wished to link archaeological items with contemporary primitive societies. (He married one of Pitt-Rivers s daughters. The two men did not get on with one another.) His formal education had ended when he had been fourteen and had had to enter the family bank.

Lubbock represented the Darwin interest in Parliament. Responsible for the creation of a body to protect ancient monuments. Had Pitt-Rivers appointed to be its first director.

Location: 48 Grosvenor Street, W1K 3HW. Sir John s home. (purple, blue)

Charles Kingsley

Kingsley embraced biological Darwinism but did not take to Social Darwinism. He wrote Water Babies in defence of Origin of The Species. Within the politics of the Church of England, the book was an attack on Bishop Wilberforce. The cleric intended there to be an analogy between Faith and water babies. He believed that morality and imagination made people separate from the apes. The book indicated that it was incumbent upon the middle classes to pity the socially unfortunate and aid them; to the modern reader this viewpoint comes across as being condescending and to an extent racialist.

Kingsley had a belief in there being a connection between the body and the soul; if the body could be clean then so would the soul. He felt a need to be clean. He was unable to write if he felt that he was not clean. In the 1830s Lord Ashley had sponsored an Act that had made illegal for chimney sweeps to send children up chimneys. However, the implement of the measurement had been left to the discretion of local authorities. The book inspired a further measure that ended the practice.

In c.1878, following Kingsley s death, the Disraeli passed a consolidating Factory Act. This made the previous legislation. This marked a distinct advancement of the state into the everyday relationship between employers and their workers. By that time universal education was being furnished for children.

Kingsley was a chain smoker. He was one of the first people who was known to have died from the habit.

Kingsley was deeply concerned about the lot of the poor even before he F.D. Maurice and became a Christian Socialist.

Kingsley was appointed to the living of Eversley in Hampshire. He was horrified by the rural squalor that he encountered there. He became active in the Chartist Movement. He wrote the novels Yeast: A Problem (1848) and Alton Locke (1850) to advance a political agenda amongst the middle class reading public.

Kingsley became a favourite of Queen Victoria. At the time of his death he was a canon of Westminster Abbey.

Walter D. Crick

Towards the close of his life Darwin received a letter from Walter D. Crick, a shoe salesman. It was about a clam that was attached to a beetle. Touched on the issue of the dispersal of species.

Charles Darwin s correspondents included the Northamptonshire shoemaker and amateur naturalist W.D. Crick. He was the grandfather of Francis Crick one of the elucidators of the structure of D.N.A..

St George Jackson Mivart

St George Jackson Mivart had aspired to study at university but alienated his parents by converting from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. He studied law. He became an acolyte of Huxley and became an excellent comparative anatomist. However, with time he drifted away from Darwinism and wrote A Genesis of Species, which contained a powerful critique of Darwinism by displaying how Darwin s exposition of a theory of gradual evolution was not realistic. Darwin took notice and by the sixth edition of Origins had developed a more rigorous approach that accommodated many of Mivart s criticisms.

Coral

Darwin worked out how coral form atolls.

In Das Kapital (1867-83) Marx sought to making an analogy to the effectiveness of human co-operation and that of coral.

Kropotkin believed that coral was an example of mutual supporter. 21st biologists tend to view the two elements as being selfish inclined. The green alga symbionts will leave if they find conditions events or bad weather to be too bad. This is called coral bleaching.

Stephen J. Gould

Stephen J. Gould drew on his paleontological knowledge to argue that against Darwinianism. John Maynard Smith was renowned his pleasant nature. The one exception to this was his hostility to the views that Gould was espousing before the public.

The Charles Darwin Trust

The Charles Darwin Trust was founded in 1999 by Stephen Keynes (1927-2017), a great-grandson of the naturalist. When the Royal College of Surgeons indicated that it was going to sell down House, he persuaded the Wellcome Trust and English Heritage to buy it.

Website: www.charlesdarwintrust.org

David Backhouse 2024