Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

while embracing evolutionary science. By the end of his life
Charles Darwin was an agnostic. Historians have considered
that the death of Darwin’s beloved daughter Annie at age 10
may have been the precipitating factor in making him abandon
belief in, at least, a providential God. All this time, Darwin
was in great pain that his loss of faith was distressing to
Emma, which indeed it was. When they wrote notes to one
another about it, she remained his loyal partner even though
she feared he was losing his soul, and he responded, “You do
not know how many times I have wept over this.” Darwin’s
religious agnosticism, therefore, was not easy or arrogant but
came at the expense of the pain that he caused to his dearest
friend.
Charles and Emma bought a country house in Down,
just far enough from London to be able to visit it but not
be bothered by it. As it turned out, it would not have mattered
how far away from London he lived, because Darwin
became ill at this time and remained so for the rest of his life
and hardly ever traveled. He suffered recurring symptoms of
headaches, heart flutters, indigestion, boils, muscle spasms,
and eczema, on which he kept scientific notes but for which
neither he nor any physician had a solution. Several possibilities
have been proposed for the cause of Darwin’s illness.
Some scholars have suggested that he had contracted Chagas’
disease, caused by a parasite from a bug bite, while in South
America. This is unlikely, because Darwin was developing
some of his symptoms shortly before the voyage began. Other
scholars have suggested that his illness was genetic in origin,
resulting from the inbreeding of the Darwin and Wedgwood
families. Emma’s brother Josiah and his wife, who were also
first cousins, lost a sickly baby. It has also been suggested
that recessive mutations from inbreeding caused the death of
Darwin’s daughter Annie.
Emma was the perfect companion and nurse. Her care
and friendship enabled Darwin to continue his research
and writing despite his illness, and despite the criticisms he
received throughout his life. She would play the piano for
him, and they would read together in the evenings. The conclusion
seems inescapable that Charles Darwin could not
have accomplished what he did had it not been for Emma.
Darwin’s illness kept him home, and his wealth meant
that he did not have to work. He was, accordingly, able to
devote full time to the study of science—that is, the few hours
of the day in which he was not suffering the symptoms of his
malady. He read every scientific book and article he could
find and corresponded widely with fellow scientists all over
the world. The solitude, especially during his strolls on the
Sandwalk around his property, allowed him to think. He put
the time to good use, not only proposing the modern theory
of evolution but also almost single-handedly inventing the sciences
of ecology, pollination biology, and plant physiology.
Right to the very end of his life, he noticed things that hurried
and shallow people did not: His last book was about the
slow but cumulative effects of earthworms on transforming
the landscape and creating the soil.
It was not long after the Darwins moved to Down House
that Charles had to deal with a crisis of thought. By 1837 he
Darwin, Charles
had worked out the theory of natural selection. He thought
of natural selection, first, because he was very familiar with
individual differences within populations, whether of pigeons
or of people; second, because he realized that populations
could grow rapidly. He got this latter idea from reading
Malthus’s Essay on Populations (see Malthus, Thomas).
Malthus was a clergyman who used his essay to argue against
the doctrine of Divine Providence: Because populations
grow by doubling but resources increase, if at all, only in a
linear fashion, then people were condemned into an eternal
cycle of overpopulation and famine. Darwin, his Christian
faith already slipping, undoubtedly agreed; but he also realized
that the whole world of plants and animals was similarly
condemned to eternal overpopulation. Out of this crisis
came an insight that changed the world. Darwin realized that
overpopulation could be a creative force as well as a destructive
one, as the superior individuals in a population would
be the ones to survive, and this would cause the population
to evolve. One of the consequences of Malthus’s doctrine
was the political opinion that any attempts to help the poor,
through public works and welfare, would only cause their
populations to grow larger and to increase the total sum of
their misery. Throughout Darwin’s adult life, there were riots
and political movements in which the poor and their populist
leaders threatened the entrenched power of lords, priests, and
the leaders of industry. A new set of Poor Laws in England
specifically invoked Malthus as the justification for forcing
the poor to leave England, work for lower wages, or to be
content with poverty. The political theory of the Malthusians
was that ruthless competition among companies guaranteed
the progress of England and of humankind. It was exactly the
political viewpoint that philosopher Herbert Spencer would
later defend, inventing the phrase “survival of the fittest” (see
Spencer, Herbert). Darwin feared that by incorporating
Malthus into his theory of natural selection, he might be seen
to side with those who oppressed the poor, an association
he did not desire. Even today, Darwinian natural selection
is often associated with ruthless competition. Novelist Kurt
Vonnegut, for example, said that Darwin “taught that those
who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements.”
During the 20th century, evolutionary scientists proposed
ways in which natural selection could lead to cooperation
rather than just to competition (see altruism).
Darwin began to keep a notebook on the subject of natural
selection, but told almost nobody about it for many years.
The book Vestiges of Creation had demonstrated what would
happen if someone came up with a half-baked theory of evolution
and rushed it into print, and Darwin did not want
his theory to suffer such deserved ridicule. He was afraid to
admit that he accepted evolution (called at that time transmutation)
partly because it was the reigning doctrine of political
revolutionaries. He told his friend, the botanist Sir Joseph
Hooker, that admitting that he believed in transmutation was
“like confessing a murder.” Darwin wanted to make sure
that he had all of the scientific facts in order, to certify every
aspect of his theory, before he published it. This was a tall
order. Darwin had to demonstrate that populations of plants