( Note to the reader: I published part one of this essay a couple of weeks ago. Both these parts can be read independently. However, there is an underlying continuity to both essays, and I hope to conclude this series in the next installment)
We would like to think – perhaps, romanticize is a better word – that all great scientific and creative endeavors are eureka moments, moments that arrive as sudden flashes of insight out of nowhere. Legendary stories of Archimedes’s proverbial bath-tub moment, Newton’s apple moment, Einstein’s thought experiment about travel at the speed of light, or Mozart composing his first piece when he was three years old, are not merely untrue and apocryphal; but what really is wrong about such stories is that it belittles, and dilutes the significance, the doubts, the stumbles, the criticisms, the cunningness, and of course years of hard work and effort that go into all pivotal discoveries and creativity. Nothing illustrates the power that such high-octane stories have on the public imagination more than Darwin’s discovery of the principle of evolution. Pick up any standard textbook, or read any popular story on evolution, and it is almost certain you will read that Darwin discovered evolution during his journey between the years 1832 – 1837 to South America onboard the ship Beagle. When we read such statements in awe, we conclude that Darwin must be a genius, a supremely talented scientist, and that is why he, among so many others who routinely made such trips during those days, was bequeathed this insight into the principle of life. The truth cannot be any further than this understanding. While it is true that Darwin was intrigued by the variety of life he saw on the Galapagos island and did make copious jottings in his notebooks on what he observed, he was nowhere close to identifying an underlying principle for such variety. His initial thoughts remained locked in his desk for twenty two years, during which time Darwin slowly and persistently wrestled with the idea, collaborated, and worked at it with great effort and even greater self-doubt, before he was literally forced by circumstances ( and a little anxiety to be the first one to publish the idea) to synthesize his ideas into a book in 1859 hastily. Even then, he was uncertain and careful not to overstate his case in the book “The origins of species”. In hindsight, The origins was one of the most revolutionary books ever written, but the man who wrote it did not come by the idea in a flash of insight. It was laborious, prodding, systematic, mechanical, and sometimes distasteful work that led Darwin toward his goal. If there is something about Darwin we can learn from, it is grit and the discipline to follow a train of thought to its conclusion without sacrificing one’s intellectual integrity.
There are many books that can give the reader a detailed account of Darwin’s life, but let us focus on a few aspects that are usually lost or do not come out clearly in such accounts. Darwin was never cut out to be a medical man. He detested blood. His father, a wealthy country doctor, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, and Darwin, obeying his father’s wishes joined the medical college at Edinburgh. He couldn’t survive for more than a year. He convinced his father that he wanted to study to be a priest and enrolled himself at Cambridge, escaping a career in medicine. His father grudgingly obliged. By a strange tryst of destiny, he found himself on the Beagle, as a companion to Captain Robert Fitzgerald on his voyage to survey South America. It was unplanned. What really prompted Charles to accept the commission as the unofficial naturalist on the voyage, is not clear. Still, it was a decision facilitated for him by his professor who saw in the young man a distinct capacity for diligent observation and a fluent conversationalist. For Darwin, the voyage was an opportunity to think about what he wanted to do with his life. He carried onboard three books: the first volume of Charles Lyell’s treatise “The principles of geology”, a radical revision of the geological timescales based on the layers of rock formations; the second book was Thomas Malthus “ essay on population”, in which the pastor turned economist mathematically established that there would always be an imbalance between birth rates and the food supply available, and Nature will strive to achieve a delicate balance between the two factors; and the third book, was Milton’s “Paradise lost”, an epic poem which extolled creationism, an idea which Darwin’s work would later refute.
In Darwin’s own words in the first paragraph of Origins, he states clearly that he did not discover the principles of natural selection or evolution during his Beagle voyage. The journey only triggered an interest, a curiosity in the anatomical patterns of animals and birds he observed on those isolated islands. Two finches belonging to the same species had differently shaped beaks. Darwin wondered how and why? When he returned to England after his five-year journey, he carried the questions with him, read extensively the prevailing literature, and educated himself in areas that could clarify his questions. By 1838, he more or less had a theory, but only a theory, on how different species descended from existing forms with modifications made possible through natural selection. Darwin was personally not comfortable with his own theory because of his upbringing and religious values, but to his credit, he held onto his theory despite his doubts and apprehensions, because it explained facts. This was Darwin’s singular greatness – his ability to let facts dictate the theory and not otherwise. By 1842, he had written a complete sketch of the theory in more or less scholarly form, and interestingly, the sequence of topics in that essay is almost identical to what would appear in Origins seventeen years later. In 1844, he further expanded the theory into a full-length dissertation; but, after that, he did something very curious; he set aside the book under lock and key with specific instructions to his devoted wife Annie that she should find someone to edit and publish the manuscript in case of his death. The manuscript languished for fifteen years because Darwin wasn’t fully convinced that his theory was universal enough to be evangelized as a fact. He wanted to be sure that he had enough evidence to make a convincing case for evolution. Otherwise, his work will be ridiculed and his own reputation irrevocably damaged. He understood the radical pulse of his discovery, and how radical it was to the prevailing theories. The general belief was that God created the world, and man was his supreme creation. But if Darwin’s theory is true, then it would collapse the entire edifice of Christian faith and force a radical revision of the anthropocentric narrative about the origins of species. Darwin, in 1844, was not yet ready to do that. He needed to see and learn more before the theory could become public.
From 1844 to 1858, Darwin worked on a variety of projects, the most important being the study of a single species of a particular class of cirripedes or commonly called Barnacles, a small sea animal that burrowed its way into sea shells. For eight years, Darwin collected barnacle samples from all over the world. He dissected them at his country home to understand the different variations in their anatomy. Some classes of Barnacles were hermaphrodites, and some changed between male and female sex in a single lifetime. The sheer range of the Barnacle anatomy and the variations among the species across regions fascinated Darwin. An intense and disciplined study of these small sea creatures provided Darwin with invaluable insights that clarified the principles of differentiation of species and also threw up incontrovertible evidence that species were not created by any divine ordinance but acquired their form and characteristics based on environment and adaptation. No God will have the time to create so many minute variations as a matter of design. The only way to understand the profusion of Barnacle types was to consider modification by descent based on natural selection. During this fertile period of research and insights, Darwin confided only in a few close friends: the Botanist Joseph Hooker, the geologist Lyell and his American botanist friend Asa gray.
By 1856, Darwin was ready to write his big book, complete with all the evidence he had collected thus far. After all, the only reason he had waited so long was to gather enough conviction and proof to support his theory. Now he had enough proof and the time had come to compose his magnum opus. But destiny had other plans. In the month of June 1858, one morning Darwin found a packet waiting for him at his doorstep from Alfred Russell Wallace, one of the many scientific correspondents Darwin regularly communicated with. Wallace was fourteen years Darwin’s junior and was studying natural history in the Malay archipelago just as Darwin had done during his voyage twenty years ago. When Darwin opened the package, he found a short scientific paper that sketched out briefly the principle of evolution, natural selection, and adaptation, almost identical to what Darwin had been exploring for nearly two decades. A cover letter from Wallace requested Darwin to assess the merit of the paper and to publish it if he thought it fit to do so. Darwin was shell-shocked. He couldn’t believe that someone else had worked out the same ideas and insights he had had and felt a pang of jealousy at the thought that a young colleague, during a period of convalescence after a bout of malaria, had so causally arrived and sketched out the very same principles of life that Darwin himself had so elaborately and painstaking worked out. It was a hard fact to digest, but Darwin was a magnanimous man with a lot of integrity in his actions and thoughts. He could have ignored, dismissed, and severely criticized Wallace’s paper and hidden it forever, but he did not do so; instead, he did something else, something noble and honorable.
Darwin consulted his two confidants Lyell and Hooker for their opinions on how to proceed with the matter. Darwin openly acknowledged to them that Wallace’s paper contained the same train of thought and insights on the origins of species as his, he would have to give due credit. Though Darwin had his pangs of regret that he wouldn’t be the first one to announce his scientifically-backed discovery, he definitely did not wish to leave Wallace out. Lyell and Hooker proposed the simultaneous publication of both papers and suggested a joint presentation at the meeting of the Linnaean Society, a premier scientific body in the UK. Both Darwin and Wallace agreed. Wallace was still in the Malay archipelago and Darwin couldn’t attend the Linnaean society presentation during to a personal medical emergency. But the paper was read and acknowledged in their absence. After this disclosure, Darwin couldn’t afford to wait much longer before he could publish his full-length book, he had to publish his findings, his evidence, much quicker than he would have liked. He abandoned the magnum opus, and instead dusted the 1844 manuscript, revised it, added new sections and evidence, and essentially published the “abstract”, he had written fifteen years ago under the new title “ On the Origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life”. The book was released on November 24th, 1859. It sold out immediately. A second edition with revisions came out six weeks later on January 7th, 1860, and by 1872 four more editions were published, each one carefully revised and additional evidence attached to specific topics. But none of the five editions that followed the first changed the essence of the narrative or the language in which the principles were framed. The subsequent editions grew bulkier and terse, but in terms of clarity, elegance, and masterful composition, the first edition is unmatched.
After 1872, in the remaining two decades of his life, Darwin’s output did not diminish. He kept publishing monographs and books at regular intervals on a variety of subjects. He was a famous man. The “Origins” had created a stir in the scientific community and among the reading public, no doubt, but did not have much of an impact because the Origins still did not quite account for or explain how changes were transmitted across generations of species. The fundamental unity of heredity wasn’t yet discovered. It would take another forty years, and an obscure Bavarian monk working alone in a pea garden to discover the rudiments of what is now called a gene.
In the third installment of this essay, we will turn to Origins as a scientific book, as a revolutionary work of ideas, and as a profound work of literature.