Editor’s note: Feb. 12 is Charles Darwin’s birthday, and on that date the CVPost began a six-part series on the life of the British naturalist whose theory of evolution transformed scientific views of the natural world. The series is written by Wil Taylor, chair of the biology department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. As a paleontologist and educator, Taylor has a lifelong passion for the study of evolution. His study has taken him, among other places, to the Galapagos Islands and Darwin’s country estate at Downe, England.
By Wil Taylor
For the CVPost
Right after returning to England from his journey on the HMS Beagle in 1835, Charles Darwin enjoyed a bit of celebrity.
This period brought the publication of Darwin’s travel writings that chronicled his journey. These proved to be very popular and appeared under the title “Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle.”
Many of these writings first appeared as the third of a four-volume set of the technical account of the voyage that was published by the captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy. An interesting side note is that Darwin’s notes, containing accurate descriptions of geology and natural history, were initially excerpted and published without his permission or any compensation.
In these few exciting years between 1835 and 1838, Darwin lived in London, socializing widely and seeing to it that the brightest minds worked on his collections.
While Darwin often is mistakenly credited as being its originator, it is important to understand that evolution – the concept that living things change over time – was not a new idea. But in the 1830s it was still a rather fringe idea. At that time, the dominant explanation for the way living things came to be as they were was called the Doctrine of Special Creation.
Special Creation, which today is associated with fundamentalist Protestants who continually work through the courts to get religious education back into public schools, was considered a scientific principle in the early 19th century. In fact, it was the scientific principle at that time.
His own writings show that Darwin believed Special Creation when he boarded the Beagle, but he harbored slight doubts by the time he got off five years later. This is reflected in his journals as puzzlement at some of the things he saw during his journey.
Darwin noted that the tortoises between the closely spaced islands of the Galapagos archipelago were different, an observation that was confirmed by the local inhabitants of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, about 600 miles west of Ecuador.
Why, Darwin wondered, would a Creator make a different type of tortoise for each island?
He also noted slight differences between the mockingbirds on the various islands. Again, the same question arose.
Regarding the birds that now bear his name (Darwin’s finches), he placed them in widely different groups. He had to await the appraisal of John Gould, his bird expert at the Zoological Society of London, to discover that all those birds with their widely varying beak sizes on the different islands were finches, members of one closely related group.
At first this also was puzzling, until Darwin considered the possibility that if a single or a few ancestral birds from the South American mainland were to arrive on bird-free islands that only recently had emerged from the ocean, they might establish themselves. Then if their descendants gradually adapted to local circumstances over many generations, this would fit the pattern seen.
The conclusion Darwin was being led to by his observations was that species were not fixed. And he was in search of an explanation that did not involve the random tinkerings of a Creator that could explain the unusual distribution of organisms.
In Darwin’s own words, such a suggestion felt like “confessing to a murder.”
In 1839, Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood, and they set to doing what many Victorian couples did, raise a huge family – 10 children in all.
By the time of his marriage, however, Darwin’s health had started to fail. He suffered bouts of stomach ailments, vomiting, diarrhea, trembling, and severe boils. The possible causes of these symptoms have been speculated about endlessly – overwork, stress, perhaps Chagas disease, a tropical parasitical ailment – but whatever the true cause, it left him unable to work more than a few hours a day.
In 1842, he and Emma moved to a new home in Kent, near the village of Downe, east of London. There they established a daily pattern that circulated around their growing family. From a social perspective, Darwin’s new lifestyle could only be described as reclusive, but he maintained a voluminous level of correspondence, all of which can be viewed digitally at www.darwinproject.ac.uk.
Through all of this correspondence and the various projects he would take up, including selective breeding of both plants and animals (specifically pigeons), Darwin eventually became convinced that species are not fixed, but rather are related by common ancestry. What he lacked was a mechanism, an explanation for how this might have happened.
Inspired by a passage that was part of his voluminous reading, Darwin hit upon a natural process that might have allowed organisms to change without the intervention of a Creator. Once he had his mechanism, he wrote up his ideas, then proceeded to conduct, among other things, an 8-year study of barnacles – a study that even he confessed may not have been worth all the effort.
In short, Darwin would wait for 20 years to publish his theory.
What was his inspiration? And why did he wait so long to tell the world about his mechanism?
Next week.
Next Week: Part IV – “The Origin of Species” and its reception (1852-60)