Andy Barclayreviews Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of EnglandBy Steve Jones Little Brown. 307 pp, £20 and The Young Charles DarwinBy Keith Thomson Yale University Press. 265 pp, £18.99. Bill McSweeneyreviews Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human OriginsBy Adrian Desmond and James Moore Allen Lane, 485pp, 25
Darwin beyond the Beagle
WOW! GOODNESS ME! Fancy that! Well I never! This is what you will be saying at every other page of Steve Jones’s brilliant, remarkable, profound and deeply unsettling book. Your reactions otherwise will be of shock and awe: shock at how far down the road to hell humankind has pushed its handcart, and awe at the light way Jones wears his formidable learning. If there is one book to be read at this bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of his The Origin of Species, then this must be it.
Jones’s starting point is very simple: “Many people believe that Darwin, racked by guilt at replacing the doctrines of the Church with a joyless vision of Man as a shaved primate in an amoral universe, then retired into obscurity. He repented his blasphemy on his deathbed and was buried as an almost forgotten savant whose work – like that of so many famous scientists – had been completed while he was still a young man.
Nothing could be less true. In the four decades that remained to him after he came home from the wilds in 1836 [the five-year voyage of The Beagle], Darwin worked even harder than he had as a young man and published a dozen books. To remember only The Originis as foolish as to celebrate Shakespeare just as the author of Hamlet. Great Britain was the last of the 40 islands he visited and he studied its natural history in more detail than that of anywhere else."
And more painstakingly, too: when he and his family set off on one of his many journeys, his experimental subjects – pots of orchids or of insect-eating plants and the like – travelled with them.
But those five years of unremitting seasickness on the tiny Beaglemust have taken their toll, for Darwin never left British shores again. Darwin's Island is about his years of work on the plants, animals and people of the land of his birth. His "domestic works" were Barnacles, Orchids and Insects, Variation Under Domestication, The Descent of Man, Expression of the Emotions, Insectivorous Plants, Climbing Plants, Cross- and Self-Fertilisation, Forms of Flowers, Movement in Plantsand Formation of Vegetable Mould by Earthworms.
Darwin set out his work in good, plain Victorian prose. He wrote to Thomas Henry Huxley in 1865 that “I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work”. Jones follows in this great tradition: after a first chapter outlining the present state of research in biology and studies in natural selection and DNA, he takes each of Darwin’s domestic works in turn, plays variations on Darwin’s themes, and updates those themes for our own age.
Darwin’s central thesis was the unity of life – that of Man with the primates as much as anything else. In 1842 Queen Victoria went to London Zoo and was less than amused: “The Orang Outang is . . . frightfully, and painfully, and disagreeably human.”
Darwin saw the resemblance between the apes on both sides of the bars, and wrote in one of the notebooks that carried ruminations on his observations for all his working life: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.”
When The Originwas published in 1859, Disraeli famously asked: "Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories."
Jones reminds us of the close kinship between Man and the chimpanzee, with their DNA codes 99 per cent the same: “Although that figure underrates the real divergence of the two species, with various changes in the number and position of inserted, repeated or deleted segments of DNA marking both lines . . . Only one chromosome has gone further. Women have two large X chromosomes, men an X matched with a smaller Y. The human and the chimp X have diverged by just half a per cent in single letters of the DNA alphabet while the Y has shifted three times more, as proof that women, with two Xs, are closer to chimpanzees than are men.”
Now there's a topic that will keep Joe Duffy's chat show going for weeks. As fuel to the fire we can add the remarks of Charles Kingsley, Victorian author of The Water Babies, who wrote to his wife about an Irish visit that "I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw . . . to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much."
Darwin was anxious about his 10 children. He and his wife Emma were cousins, and after much research with plants in the greenhouse, he found that close inbreeding can impose a real burden. “When we hear it said that a man carries in his constitution the seeds of inherited disease there is much literal truth in the expression,” Darwin wrote.
And to a friend, he said: “We are a wretched family.” His daughter Annie died at the age of 10, throwing her parents into despair. Tuberculosis was the cause of her death, but Darwin feared that her plight may have in part been due to her parents’ marital history: seven of their children died before their time or lived on but stayed childless. As Jones says: “Close mating may be more harmful to a family’s prospects than was once supposed.”
Jones develops his theme with the results of worldwide research into the dangers of inbreeding. For instance, "in Bradford, the Pakistani community is among the most inbred in the world", he writes. But perhaps that is of little concern to our Muslim brethren: last month Damian Thompson, editor-in-chief of the Catholic Heraldwrote that "about 95 per cent of Muslims worldwide explicitly reject the science of evolution, and the proportion is growing".
JONES CAN BE very funny. In discussing evolution in response to a common challenge, he writes that “the complicated chemical used as a sexual scent by certain species of butterfly also does the same job for elephants (which is riskier for one partner in the relationship than for the other)”.
Again, in his research for his 1872 volume on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Other Animals, Darwin was in correspondence with workers in some very far-flung parts of the British empire. "Mr BF Hartshorne . . . states in the most positive manner that the Weddas of Ceylon never laugh. Every conceivable incitive to laughter was used in vain. When asked whether they ever laughed, they replied: 'No. What is there to laugh at?'"
And he plays a variation on a grand Wodehousian theme: “George W Bush’s countenance was more or less blank whatever message he tried to put across, but his Department of Homeland Security has spent millions on machines that claim to detect when a terrorist is about to attack by the look on his countenance. Nobody denies that the expression of a Scotsman with a grievance is easy to distinguish from a ray of sunshine, but such claims go too far.”
Jones has a splendid knack for unearthing the telling remark. When in 1875 Darwin published Insectivorous Plants, he found that many of their adaptations are also present in the other major kingdom of life. His wife Emma wrote in her diary when he was at work on a certain insectivore that: "I suppose he hopes to end by proving it an animal." Darwin was so astonished by such parallels that he wrote to a friend: "I am frightened and astounded at my results."
But the aesthete John Ruskin said, in precious contrast, that “with these obscene processes and prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing whatever to do. I am amazed and saddened, more than I can care to say, by finding how much that is abominable may be discovered by an ill-taught curiosity.”
Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, can also tantalise: “A hundred and fifty fungi that snack on flesh are known, and there is a whole world of hunting mushrooms ready to be discovered.”
His final chapter ends with an apocalyptic analysis of Earth: "Whatever the future holds, the bicentennial of Darwin's birth marks a new era in the biology of our planet. The changes are not limited to the rain forest, or the coral reefs, or the teeming tropics, but are hard at work on Darwin's own island and on the people who live there. From Shrewsbury [Darwin's childhood hometown] to the Galapagos and from worms to barnacles to human beings, there has been a triumph of the average. The Earth is, as a result, a far less interesting place than is was when HMS Beagleset sail. Whether it becomes even less so – and whether it survives at all – depends on the talents of the only creature ever to step beyond the limits of Darwinian evolution."
The Young Charles Darwinis a worthy and wordy plod through Darwin's early life, and the ranges of influences on him, particularly in the universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. The dead hand of American fact-checkers and over-zealous editors is everywhere present, and there are some laugh-out-loud moments when the ponderous style trips up: "Darwin had never experienced a really big city, although he had once taken a short trip to Liverpool." If Neptunist versus Vulcanist geology is your thing, this is the book for you.
But you have to get Jones.
Andy Barclay is an author and journalist.
Abolishing Slavery with Sceince
IT WAS ONCE thought that you could spot a criminal by the bumps on his cranium and distinguish between Jew and Gentile, Arab and Caucasian by their facial characteristics. There was once a common belief in Northern Ireland that you could pick out the Catholics from a crowd on the other side of the street and you could spot a Protestant a mile away. The prejudice was father to the conviction. All it needed was a body of scientists to authorise it.
By the turn of the last century, Darwinism had been embraced by progressive thinkers throughout Europe, and its offshoot, Social Darwinism, had made its mark among progressive thinkers as the explanation of racial difference and hierarchy. “The survival of the fittest” is forever linked with Darwin as the expression of his thesis that nature discards the weak and advances the cause of the race or nation best adapted to its environment.
From this it was a short step for Darwin’s cousin, the scientist Francis Galton, to invent the science of eugenics to promote social policies that would discourage procreation among the biologically inferior sections of society and reward inbreeding among their superiors. The Nazi enthusiasm for sterilising Jews was the worst, but not the only example of the practice of eugenics in the 20th century, from the US to the Scandinavian countries.
While it was the social philosopher Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, who coined and popularised the term “survival of the fittest”, Darwin was not immune to the ethnic stereotyping of the Victorian era. The authors refer to “that Middle England dislike of the Irish Catholic working classes” which Darwin shared and which allowed him to write of the “careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman” from a race which “multiplies like rabbits”.
Not a great model of humanity for Desmond and Moore to rescue from the vilification of later generations, you would have thought. And Darwin has indeed been vilified.
His most famous publication in 1859, The Origin of Species, told us little about the evolution of humans. Darwin shared a belief that was rock solid in the Cambridge of his day that Adam was the father of all mankind. No race or nation was excluded from this common descent. “All men therefore needed to be saved”, the authors conclude. “That was why the church existed.” If all races were not of one species, some would have escaped original sin and the church’s missionary activity would be redundant. “One would no more need to convert those races or free their slaves than one would convert or free domestic animals.”
The planters and slave traders needed to deny this religious view of common descent from Adam in order to support the claim that blacks were sub-human, “more ape-like and fitted for subservience”. In the anti-abolitionist air that Darwin breathed since childhood and shared with his academic peers, common descent from Adam and Eve was not a problem.
BUT DARWIN KNEW that one day he might have to address the awful implication of his work on the origin of species. It was one thing to antagonise the supporters of slavery by defending the unity and common origin of humans, black and white. It was quite another to extend that idea to animals and plants.
In 1871, 12 years after publication of the work that made him rich and famous, Darwin published his thesis on the evolution of life, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. This shocked the religious establishment and incurred the wrath of creationists who recognised rightly the incompatibility of his views with their literal interpretation of the story of creation in the Book of Genesis. It made him the progenitor of eugenics and the unwitting champion of a cause he never embraced: atheism.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore collaborated in writing an acclaimed biography of Darwin in 1991 and come together again with this intriguing angle on the great Victorian scientist, who is still causing tremors in religious circles throughout the world. (Polls consistently show that most Americans look to the Bible, not to Darwin, to answer the factual question of the origin of life.)
In the conventional view, Darwin applied his genius for collecting things, measuring them and organising them according to some scheme of classification, to all forms and traces of life and came up with the meaning of life. He was a geek with the mind of a computer.
That was not how it was, according to Desmond and Moore. Delving into a vast labyrinth of letters and official sources, they trace the motive for his lifelong research to the sacred cause to which he remained committed throughout his life: the abolition of slavery. They argue that the science that Darwin practiced was not the detached pursuit of truth but his way of contributing to the greatest moral movement of the age: the abolition of slavery.
The book begins with a lengthy account of the racist ideas and theories that flourished in the early 1900s. This was the beginning of the science of phrenology, which looked to the shape and bumps and size of the cranium as an indicator of character and mental ability. Darwin’s years as a medical student in Edinburgh coincided with the rapid spread of “bumpology”, as it was sarcastically termed. Given the preoccupation of the time with measuring, ranking, and grading, it was inevitable, the authors tell us, that the new science would serve the cause of racial distinction and denigration.
Darwin’s ancestral passion for the abolition of slavery, and his religiously-inspired antipathy towards the idea of a sub-human species that made no demands on the conscience of white slave-traders, was the driving force in the work that would begin with the unity of humans and end with the shocking story of the unity of life.
The authors could have made their argument in a book half its size. And they exaggerate unnecessarily the causal link between Darwin’s moral views and the scientific progress of his ideas. But it is a fascinating read, rich in detail, novel in its construction of how one of the world’s greatest scientists applied his religious abhorrence of slavery to the discovery of the material stuff of life.
Bill McSweeney is research fellow in international peace studies at the School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin