Archive for the ‘Who Darwin Was’ Category

Charles Darwin struggled with significant health problems. Just less than two weeks before publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin described his condition to his cousin Fox in a letter, stating, “I have had a series of calamities; first a sprained ankle, and then badly swollen whole leg and face; much rash and a frightful succession of Boils—4 or 5 at once. I have felt quite ill—and have little faith in this ‘unique crisis’ as the Doctor calls it, doing me much good. I cannot now walk a step from bad boil on knee.”

Things that Darwin once found pleasurable as a young man turned on him. By 1865, at the age of fifty-six, Darwin summed up his problems in writing to a new medical adviser by writing that for twenty-five years he had experienced extreme flatulence, preceded by ringing ears and visual black dots, and vomiting preceded by shivering and crying.

In 1871, one year before the publication of the sixth and final edition of The Origin of Species, in a letter to his natural selection collegue, Alfred Wallace, Darwin confided: “present I feel sick of everything, and if I could occupy time and forget my daily discomforts, or rather miseries, I would never publish another word.”

Time and health took a toll on Darwin’s mind: “I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in historical plays. But now after many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for pictures or music.”

What caused Darwin’s life-long health problems? To explain why Darwin experienced such poor health, scientists have pointed to a one night event east of the Andes near Mendoza in March 1835—Darwin wrote: “At night I experienced an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Vinchuca, a species of Reduvius, the great black bug of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body.” Darwin is thought to have been bitten by an insect called the “Great Black Bug of the Pampas” carrying the infectious parasite Trypanosoma cruzi.

For over a period of forty years, Darwin suffered intermittently from various combinations of symptoms such as malaise, vertigo, dizziness, muscle spasms and tremors, vomiting, cramps and colics, bloating and nocturnal intestinal gas, headaches, alterations of vision, severe tiredness, nervous exhaustion, dyspnea, skin problems such as blisters all over the scalp and eczema, crying, anxiety, sensation of impending death and loss of consciousness, fainting, tachycardia, insomnia, tinnitus, and depression. However, since attempts to test Darwin’s remains at the Westminster Abbey by using modern PCR techniques have been refused by the Abbey’s curator, the real cause of Darwin’s health problems remains only speculative.

Charles Darwin recorded in his autobiography that The Origin of Species “is no doubt the chief work of my life. It was from the first highly successful. The first small edition of 1,250 copies was sold on the day of publication, and a second edition of 3,000 copies soon afterwards. Sixteen thousand copies have now (1876) been sold in England and considering how stiff a book it is, this is a large sale.”

While it is unknown how the 1,250 copies could have been sold on “the day of publication” without Amazon.com, what is known is that Darwin was famous long before the publication of the first edition of The Origin of Species in 1859.

Charles Darwin was following in the tradition of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin—author of the infamous Zoönomia. King George III even asked Erasmus to be his doctor, but he refused the appointment—too busy.

Erasmus was building a vast network of associates that became known as the leading social and philosophical lights. With contacts like Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, and James Watt, Erasmus established the Lunar Society that became the main intellectual powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution in England.

By the time Charles Darwin entered Edinburgh University, Zoönomia (meaning “the law of life” in Latin) had become a popular poetry and science textbook. At Edinburgh University, Charles Darwin learned that his professor, Robert Edmund Grant, quoted from Zoönomia for his doctoral thesis. 

Just months after returning from the voyage on the HMS Beagle in February 1837, and before starting working on what is now known as The Origin of Species, Darwin was elected to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society, later accepting Darwin accepted the position of Secretary of the Society in March 1838. Darwin was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in January 1839. The Geographic and Royal Society institutions were reserved for the intellectual elite—only.

The Darwin’s in the eighteenth century has been likened to the Kennedy’s of the nineteenth century. Darwin’s notoriety can even be seen at play during the voyage of the HMS Beagle. By British custom, the ship’s surgeon traditionally took the position of the official “naturalist.” Darwin’s role was to be a “gentleman’s naturalist” and assist the ship’s surgeon, Robert McKormick, and Captain FitzRoy. 

On shore in Brazil, however, it was the 22-year old Charles Darwin, not Doctor McKormick, who began receiving all the notoriety and the invitations from dignitaries on shore. Reasonably, McKormick felt upstaged by Darwin. Being sufficiently disgruntled, McKormick left the Beagle at Rio de Janeiro. McKormick’s status was “invalided out” back to Britain.

In 1859, not only was the topic of evolution was “in the air”, Darwin’s word was like E.F. Hutton speaking. The timing was perfect. Darwin’s pre-Origin notoriety preceded the successful launch of one the most influential and contentious books ever in the history of science.

The publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859 continued the Darwin legacy. Erasmus Darwin, Darwin’s grandfather,  had published the book entitled Zoönomia, or The Laws of Organic Life earlier in 1794. In Zoönomia, Erasmus entertains the basic tenets of evolution and asks the question: 

“Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality… possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?”

 As a physician in Lichfield from 1756 to 1781, Erasmus acquired a reputation for being a great healer. He was so successful that King George III asked him to be his doctor, but Erasmus Darwin refused the appointment. Becoming a noted naturalist, writer, poet, and inventor during his own time, Erasmus’ intellectual curiosity eventually led him to be one of the founding members of the Lunar Society. Members of this society were of influence, largely becoming the engine-driving force of the British Industrial Revolution.

 Darwin’s passion to study of nature came into sharper focus during the second year at Edinburgh University. On campus, Darwin became acquainted with Professor Robert Edmund Grant, a proponent of evolution and student of Erasmus Darwin.

 In his doctoral thesis, Grant quoted from Zoönomia. Evolution even at that time was strongly rooted in academic circles. Grant espoused the Lamarckian theory: evolution through acquired characteristics. In his autobiography, Darwin recalls an early conversion with Grant:

 “He one day, when we were walking together he burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution. I listened without any effect on my mind. Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my Origin of Species.”

 In time, Darwin became one of Grant’s keenest students and assisted him with collecting specimens. Grant introduced Darwin to the academic elite of the day, connections that were to become invaluable for his future.

Shrewsbury Scholl

At the age of eight, Darwin’s mother died. For a year, Darwin along with his younger sister, Emily Catherine continued to be homeschooled at home by their older sister Caroline until 1818 when their father enrolled them in Doctor Butler’s boarding school in Shrewsbury, one mile from home. Nature, not school was on Darwin’s mind. Collecting insects was his greatest interest, “By the time I went to this day-school my taste for natural history was well developed.”

Collecting was soon to become a passion that Darwin would eventually weave into the history of western civilization. As a young boy, Darwin was engaging with a measure of mischievousness: “I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father’s trees and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit.”

As a boy, Darwin was a runner and racer, and often successful. In explaining the reason for success, Darwin wrote, “When in doubt I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to my prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how generally I was aided.”

Darwin was not alone. Founded five years after the publication of the Origin of Species, X Club was founded by Thomas Huxley to market Darwinism. X Club members were the secular elite of the day and included George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Huxley, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, William Spottiswoode, and John Tyndall. The members of the X Club were joined in a fight to unite “devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas”—an organized atheist movement.

 Club members wielded much influence over scientific thought. Between the inception in 1864 and its termination in 1893, the X Club and its members gained prominence within the scientific community ruling order. Between 1870 and 1878, Hooker, Spottiswoode, and Huxley held office in the Royal Society simultaneously, and between 1873 and 1885, they consecutively held the presidency of the Royal Society.

X Club member sphere of influence extended beyond the halls of the Royal Society. Five X Club members eventually held the presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science between 1868 and 1881. Hirst was elected president of the London Mathematical Society between 1872 and 1874 while Busk served as Examiner and eventually President of the Royal College of Surgeons. Frankland also served as President of the Chemical Society between 1871 and 1873. Just the dynamics, influence, and public relations of the X Club alone ensured a place for Darwin in history in the halls of academia and far beyond.

Not only were the X Club members Darwin’s PR agents, members gained rule over the emerging institutional academic sciences. Darwin was not alone.

Cambridge University

Without question, Darwin had a distain for Christianity. Darwin wrote, “I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlasting punishment. This is a damnable doctrine.” This is a remarkable statement for someone formally educated to be a clergyman in the Church of England.

Perhaps Darwin’s angst against Christianity stemmed from his father’s insistence that he attend Christ’s College at Cambridge University. Or perhaps, Darwin’s angst stemmed from speculating based the perspective of uniformitarianism that championed by Charles Lyell. While on the Beagle Darwin read Lyell’s book, entitled Principles of Geology. Lyell’s theory contradicts any concept of a global flood. 

Yet, like Lyell, once the scientific method had been abandoned, Darwin was free to explore concepts beyond the evidence. Two years before the publication of the Origin of Species, in an 1857 letter to Asa Gray, Darwin wrote, “I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science.”

Ironically, even Darwin’s “bulldog,” Ernst Mayr, by the end of the twentieth century came to the same conclusion that “biology, even though it has all the other legitimate properties of a science, still is not a science like the physical sciences.”

Darwin had evidence, but the analysis was not bassed on the scientific method. Now 150 years later, the irresolvable issues could have been avoided had Darwin’s not reached “beyond the bounds of true science.” The convening of the Altenberg Summit in Austria this last summer highlights our entrance into the postmodern evolution era.

Darwin

February 12, 1809, on the same day that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin, Darwin was born into aristocracy at the Mount. Since Darwin’s mother died when he was only eight years old, his father sent him to Butler’s boarding school. By his own admission, Darwin considered himself a “below average” student.

 Then at the age of sixteen, Darwin started college at Edinburgh University to become a physician, because that is what his father wanted him to do. But Darwin was repulsed but what he saw. Transferring to Christ’s College at University of Cambridge to become a minister, Darwin developed life-long associations with Professors Henslow and Sedgwick.

 After receiving an offer of a lifetime after graduation following Henslow’s recommendation, Darwain joined the HMS Beagle as a volunteer naturalist. Leaving Plymouth, England in December 1831, the Canary Islands were the first to be explored and while nearly “utterly homesick,” the thirty-five days on Galápagos Islands cumlinated the voyage. While it was Captain FitzRoy Legacy gave Darwin the opportunity of a lifetime, he later deeply regreted the decision, eventually committing suicide.

 Impressions from the voyage eventually paved the way for the publication of The Origin of Species, more than 20 years later. In 1882, in the area of Westminster Abbey known as Scientists’ Corner, Darwin was laid a few feet from the burial place of Sir Isaac Newton and next to that of the astronomer Sir John Herschel.