Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – March 26, 2006.

The Darwin Exhibition #4. Darwin’s Youth, Continued...
and his Earliest Exposure to Evolutionary Ideas.

Readers of my past few blogs will recall that I recently spent two intense weeks in Cambridge, England, reading through Charles Darwin’s scientific notebooks and diaries—much of which remains as yet untranscribed and thus unavailable except to scholars able to take the trek to Cambridge University Library. Our goal in this work is to reconstruct as accurately as possible the path that led Darwin to reject his earlier, culturally inculcated acceptance of creationist views and accept instead the notion that all species are related, descended from a single common ancestor: in other words, the very idea of evolution.

Darwin’s main teachers as he took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge were the Reverend John Stevens Henslow—a geologist, mineralogist and (most famously) a botanist; and the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, a very important early geologist who, among other things, named the “Cambrian”—the earliest division of geological time in the Paleozoic Era. Both men, as their titles would imply, were religious; both firmly believed that species, though they may vary, are essentially fixed—and not connected to other species in a process of ancestry and descent. These were Darwin’s mentors, and as far as anyone knows for sure, Darwin took his understanding of the natural world primarily from them; in other words, Darwin also thought that species are fixed entities, independently created—when he departed in late 1831 on the epochal voyage on HMS Beagle. (I’ll have more to say on Henslow and Sedgwick and what they taught Darwin in other blogs).

But what is less well appreciated is that Darwin had two brief but intense exposures to evolutionary ideas as a young man before he even got to Cambridge. The first came through reading his very own grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s large book Zoonomia. Erasmus Darwin was a physician and a well-known intellectual (see previous blog); Zoonomia explores medical and biological themes—including Erasmus Darwin’s own take on the concept of evolution. (See Darwin Blog # 10—neither Charles Darwin nor his grandfather were the first to entertain evolutionary ideas). Charles read Zoonomia as a youth—perhaps in one of his favorite reading spots, reputedly lying on the carpet under the dining room table.

But that’s not all; Darwin’s father, Robert Waring Darwin (himself also a successful physician) sent Charles to medical school in Edinburgh when Charles was only 16. In his Autobiography, written later in life, Darwin recalls his father saying to him at one point: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat catching, and you shall be a disgrace to yourself and to all your family.” Charles was to join his brother Erasmus (“Ras”)—the two of them slated to follow the family tradition by becoming doctors.

‘Twas not to be. Charles hated the sight of blood and the screams of surgery patients in those pre-anesthesia days. His love of the outdoors continued unabated, though—he still went hunting, still ran with dogs (don’t know about the “rat-catching”) and still collected his beetles—escaping the boring lectures as often as he dared.

And he met the young naturalist Robert Grant. It was Grant who took him along the shores of the Firth of Forth, collecting intertidal invertebrates. And it was Grant who forcefully threw a heavy dose of evolution in the young Darwin’s face.

Grant was a fan of Jean Baptiste, Chevalier de Lamarck—who published his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809—ironically, the same year as Darwin’s birth. As mentioned two blogs back, Lamarck probably had the most completely developed ideas on evolution of any of Darwin’s predecessors. He saw the great spectrum of simple, primitive forms of life up through the most complex as an interconnected great “Chain of Being.” To Lamarck, it was clear that all organisms—plants and animals—are interconnected by a process of ancestry and descent.

Grant (who was also a fan of Charles’ grandfather’s writings on evolution), must have been especially happy to try to mold the young man’s mind along evolutionary lines. He and Darwin paid particular attention to the simple marine colonial invertebrates that they thought might show the connections between the plant and animal worlds. Darwin’s first research was on the colonial marine bryozoan Flustra. “Bryozoa” means “moss animals.” The very name says it: simple marine animals that look a lot like moss—which of course are plants. Darwin retained his fascination for such “corallines” throughout his entire voyage of the Beagle.

One day, as Darwin tells us in his Autobiography, Grant “burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution.” What effect did this have on Darwin? Let’s let him tell us in his own words—written later in life, but nonetheless very important: “I listened in silent astonishment, and as far as I can judge without any effect on my mind. I had previously read the Zoonomia of my grandfather, in which similar views are maintained, but without producing any effect on me.”

No effect whatsoever? Hard to imagine—but hard to dispute, either. Perhaps reflecting on this, Darwin goes on judiciously to say “Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my Origin of Species.”

May have done so indeed. Yet, unsurprisingly, what may have been lurking subconsciously in the young Darwin’s brain is impossible to demonstrate. But at least we know that Darwin was aware that an alternative explanation for the appearance of biological nature was already available—and already held in esteem by some, like his very own grandfather, whose opinion he respected.

Niles Eldredge

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