Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – August 15, 2006.

The Darwin Exhibition #8. Back Home in England: London, 1836-1842. Part 1.

The Beagle voyage was supposed to last two years; instead, it went on for nearly five. Darwin, along with everyone else in the crew, was surely glad to get home when the Beagle finally pulled into port in October, 1836. Yet it wasn’t long after all the joyous reunions had taken place that Darwin turned his attention to the serious matter of getting the remainder of the specimens he had collected into the hands of competent naturalists. He had his patterns of species replacements in time and space—and on separate islands in archipelagoes—all worked out. Now he was anxious to see whether the rest of his birds, mammals, plants—and fossils—confirmed what he knew to be true of the Galapagos mockingbirds, the South American rheas and edentate mammal fossils he had collected.

The remainder of his birds went to the ornithologist John Gould—who would soon tell him that the mélange of little nondescript black or greenish birds from the Galapagos formed a closely related group of some 13 species of finches. It wasn’t until 1845, in the second edition of his famed Journal of Researches (much better known as The Voyage of the Beagle), though, that Darwin published a quartet of Gould’s drawings of the profiles of the heads of these species—hinting strongly about evolution by remarking that it is almost as if the different species were derived from a common ancestral species to fit into different places in the Galapagos economy of nature.

The exhibition contains a selection of these famous “Darwin’s finches,” in a case alongside the huge skull of a fossil mammal named Toxodon by the anatomist Richard Owen. Darwin had supposed that Toxodon was a giant form of rodent (after all, the largest living species of rodent in the world is the South American capybara). Owen confirmed this diagnosis—adding fuel to Darwin’s evolutionary speculations; only later did it turn out that Toxodon is a member of an extinct group of mammals native to South America.

Darwin had bought this Toxodon skull from a farmer in Patagonia; he had found it leaning up against a fence on a hacienda, and bought it for next to nothing. Kids had thrown rocks at it, knocking out some of its teeth. In the early 1840s, Owen was on the staff of the Royal College of Surgeons; he later became Director of the Natural History Museum. The skull is on loan to the exhibition from the Natural History Museum, London—but was still the property of the Royal College of Surgeons during World War II, when the College was bombed severely. The Toxodon skull survived the bombing because it had been stored unceremoniously in a stairwell. Quite a long and hazardous journey for this single specimen!

Owen described all of Darwin’s fossil mammals in a monograph that was a part of a series of publications that Darwin edited on the scientific study of the specimens he brought back. Owen’s monograph was published in 1842; George Waterhouse’s monograph on the living species of mammals, appeared earlier—in 1839. Darwin wrote introductions to both these publications.

But by far the most famous of all these publications stemming from Darwin’s sojourn on the Beagle was Darwin’s first book: the first edition of the Journal of Researches, aka The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839. One of Darwin’s very first tasks was to sit down and start the time-consuming task of integrating his Beagle notes and begin writing what turned out to be a prodigious manuscript. It was a popular success—though it never earned Darwin a penny (Darwin learned from this mistake—apparently becoming one of the first book authors to demand—and receive—and advance on royalties for his most famous book of all: On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection—published 20 years later in 1859).

A wall near the entrance to the London section of the exhibition is covered with a stunning array of “herbarium sheets” of many of the plants that Darwin had collected in the Galapagos. Botanists attach their dried specimens to large sheets of paper, and add collection numbers, notes and often drawings of parts of the plants—before the sheets are carefully shelved away. (We were fortunate to obtain these sheets from the Cambridge University Herbarium; the incredible three-dimensionality of these sheets masks the fact that they are actually high-density digital scans!).

Darwin had sent his plants originally to Henslow, in the hope and expectation that Henslow would study them thoroughly. He never did—and it wasn’t until Darwin was able to enlist the aid of young Joseph Hooker in the early 1840s that Darwin found out that the pattern of differentiation of plant species on the Galapagos Islands is even more impressive than the mockingbirds, tortoises—and even the belatedly famous Galapagos finches.

Darwin arrived home to find himself already well-known in scientific circles: Henslow had circulated some of Darwin’s scientific findings that he written Henslow about—and his fossil mammals were already the talk of the town. He delivered a paper on the step-wise gradual uplift of the Andes Mountains through the action of earthquakes to the Geological Society of London—and agreed to become Secretary of that Society. He joined the Zoological and other scientific societies as well—mingling with the scientists of his day, seeing them as sources of further information and help in analyzing the specimens he had brought back home with him.

In 1839, he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood; we have on display the famous list of reasons for and against marriage that Darwin, an inveterate lister, compiled to help him decide whether or not he really should get married. He saw a wife as a good friend and companion (“at least better than a dog” he wrote), and looked forward to having children (they ended up having 10!)—but was concerned that he would lose time from his work. In the end, the positive side triumphed—and he wrote at the bottom “Marry, Marry, Marry—QED.”

The young married couple lived in “Macaw Cottage” (so-named because its previous occupants had painted some of the rooms in bright colors) on Upper Gower Street. Emma became his helpmate in more than just the domestic side of Darwin’s life—taking an active interest in Darwin’s career, and as the years went by, reading his manuscripts and helping him with his writing. But when she first heard of Darwin’s ideas (Darwin’s father had advised Charles not to speak of his evolutionary ideas to Emma—on the grounds that one should never discuss religion with a woman!), Emma was distressed. In those pre-antibiotic days, life expectancy was much shorter than it is today in the western world; Emma was concerned that her husband’s views would keep them from spending eternity together in heaven. She communicated her fears in a letter that Darwin took to heart; he wrote on the back of it “Note, after I am gone, how many times I have kissed and cried over this.” This letter is one of the more poignant elements of the exhibition—one which raises the issue, ever present in Darwin’s mind, of the religious implications that his evolutionary ideas raised for everyone—from himself potentially right through all elements of British society—the main reason why he kept his ideas strictly to himself, with the exception of Emma, and some close friends and relatives.

As we’ll see in the next blog, the MAIN thing Darwin did in these first six years back in England was to open a series of notebooks in which he developed the core of his evolutionary ideas. This on top of everything else! He saw that if evolution had occurred, if all species are descended from a single common ancestor in the remote geological past, then we humans must have evolved too, right along with everything else. This he knew was perhaps the most radical and shocking implication of his evolutionary ideas.

But he wouldn’t allow himself to back down from the idea of human evolution. When the Regent Park Zoo acquired its first orangutan—a young female named Jenny—Darwin, as a member of the Zoological Society, was allowed to visit her in her cage. There he performed a series of simple “experiments”—seeing whether Jenny could recognize (or otherwise take an interest in) her own image in a mirror. He also tested her reactions to smells and sounds—and then promptly went home and did the same tests on his two young children, William and Anne! That would of course have shocked the British public—for the implication was clear that Darwin saw a close relationships between humans and the great apes.

And so did the Queen—though she was disgusted by it. Young Queen Victoria visited the second “Jenny” at the zoo in the early 1840s—pronouncing her “disagreeably human.” The Queen rejected what Darwin embraced—and what in a general way was obvious to all: the close resemblance between apes and humans—right on down to the details of their behavior.

As I write these words, I have just learned the people of the United States rank second lowest of the 32 otherwise-European countries surveyed in terms of the proportion of people who believe that we humans have evolved.

It is, unfortunately, not news that a majority of the United States adult population does not agree that humans have evolved from earlier species. But seeing our abysmally low ranking within western-world nations on this issue is especially galling to me. What is the matter with us? Why are we so afraid of the findings of modern science?

Niles Eldredge

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