Vol 25, no 3, October - The Linnean Society of London

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THE LINNEAN 2009 VOLUME 25(3)
this time there was no professional career structure in the Natural Sciences, as we
would understand it. Only those peripheral to medicine offered any sort of opportunity,
a fact that was to have important repercussions. Lord Goring was, however, wrong in
seeing the Church and Botany as being mutually exclusive alternatives. Many country
clergymen were also botanists vide Darwin’s Cambridge mentor. Rev. John Stevens
Henslow, who held the University Chair in the subject. Darwin, as we know, inherited
sufficient wealth and, by his own financial acumen acquired more, so as to obviate
any need for him to earn a living at all. If it had been otherwise I would not be writing
this! Indeed, if Wedgwood had had to call in the administrators 200 years before they
did (Times 7 Jan. 2009) or if Darwin had taken a fancy to medicine and followed his
grandfather, father and elder brother into that professsion, if Capt. Pringle Stokes had
not shot himself and/or Lieutenant Skyring had been ratified as the Beagle’s captain,
or, even, if the Beagle had been able to explore the southern shores of Gondwanaland,
who knows where we would be? The ‘ifs’ of history are frowned upon by historians
but sometimes attempts to reconstruct these virtual scenarios enable us to focus on the
reasons as to why certain things didn’t happen. One of the best of the crop of anniversary
books this year is Nick Spencer’s Darwin and God. This work, by tracing in detail the
reasons for the gradual erosion of Darwin’s faith, such as it ever was, prompts us to
question how things would have worked out had Darwin not been disillusioned by
Christianity. However, the unexpurgated version (Nora Barlow, 1958) of the
Autobiography makes it quite clear that he was so disillusioned and the rest is history.
Darwin himself was not averse to framing historical ‘if’ questions and certainly
one of these, occasioned by his visit to Chile in March 1835, was to initiate a train of
thought the fruits of which we are still reaping. While near the town of Concepcion he
witnessed an earthquake that devastated the area. This prompted Darwin to speculate
on what sort of mayhem such a catastrophe would produce if it were to hit the British
Isles. It would, he says, result in the destruction of private property, public buildings
along with their records and, in short, destroy the whole, apparently stable, perfect
and internal infrastructure of society within a few minutes and ‘...violence and rapine
would remain uncontrolled. In every large town famine would go forth, pestilence
and death following in its train’. He was deeply moved by what he saw and it ‘...cast
shadows over the stable, ordered vision of nature that supposedly pointed directly to
the deity that Darwin imbibed at Cambridge’ (Spencer p.27).
The ‘Darwin Industry’ has provided us with an overwhelmingly massive literature
on Darwin’s ‘Sea Change’. However, in summary, albeit an over simplistic one, by
the time he docked at Falmouth on October 2 nd 1836 he had begun to ask how it was
that clear evidence pointed to the fact that Nature was not perfectly harmonious,
anthropocentric, and stable, presided over by a benevolent Deity as depicted in the
popular painting, by Edward Hicks. ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ (1820). Nature was, in
fact. dynamic, capricious and, above all, indifferent to human life. In fact, the very
opposite to what his Anglican upbringing had led him to believe and which, up to that
point, he had indeed believed. Charles Darwin had begun to frame some very difficult
questions many of which we are still attempting to answer.
It was the received wisdom surrounding the intertwined ideas of stability, perfection
and purpose about which Darwin came to have doubts. Furthermore, he came to be