charles_darwin

32
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
passed before Darwin turned his full concentration to his work on
species.
Some of Darwin’s biographers have drawn attention to Darwin’s
concern about publishing his theory about the origin of species.
These biographers suggest that Darwin realized that his theory was
so heretical (in the Christian sense of the word), so opposite to the
prevailing view about the origins of life that he deliberately delayed
publishing his ideas publicly. This suggestion has some merit. His
‘‘confession’’ to Hooker is proof that Darwin was worried. And it did
take more than twenty years before Darwin’s first musings about
transmutation became the book The Origin of Species.
Darwin did worry about the furor that his theory might cause,
but it is inaccurate to blame only this concern for the ‘‘delay’’ in publication.
Darwin disliked controversy: ‘‘I rejoice that I have avoided
controversies,’’ he wrote in 1881, ‘‘and this I owe to Lyell, who many
years ago ... strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy,
as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time
and temper.’’ 45 Furthermore, a controversy had already erupted in
1844 over the origin of species. The book Vestiges of the Natural History
of Creation was published that year. The author was unknown:
only posthumously was Robert Chambers (1802–1871), a Scottish
publisher and amateur geologist, revealed as the author. The book’s
support for transformism—the idea that the evolution of species was
proof that society could progress to become more egalitarian, for
example—did cause a furor, particularly as the scientific evidence
Chambers gave for evolution was not convincing. 46 Equally important,
Darwin was concerned about his wife Emma. He did not want
to upset her by publishing a theory that seemed to oppose or undermine
the Christian explanation of the origin of species. Emma, like
Darwin’s sisters, was very religious.
But it is too easy to focus on these concerns because they fit so
well into a story of the outbreak of the ‘‘Ôwar’’ between science and
religion. Without doubt, the delay in the completion of The Origin of
Species was mainly due to the character of the man. Darwin was a
cautious person. He was certainly of a very different temperament
from Alfred Wallace who could work out a theory of natural selection
during three days of torrid thinking and write down his conclusions
in an essay immediately. Darwin’s method of work was slow
and methodical. He preferred to accumulate facts over a long period
of time, think about the ways these facts related to each other, and
then fit them together into a large synthesis. This approach was not
the kind that would produce an academic paper or a book in a week,
a month, or even a year. ‘‘I gained much by my delay in publishing