Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – September 26, 2006.

The Darwin Exhibition: Darwin at Down House, Part 1—and Another eMail from "CD"

Good to be back—with an opportunity today to return to my description of the exhibition Darwin—the immensely popular show that closed at the American Museum of Natural History in NY this past August 20th—and which is scheduled to go on view at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in the first week of October. The Unknown Hacker—a presumed anti-evolution zealot—had rudely interrupted these proceedings. I had left off well over a month ago, after describing Darwin's intense six years in London, after he arrived home in October 1836 (170 years ago!): intense interactions with scientific colleagues (Darwin was surprised to find how well he was already known before he arrived home—thanks in no small part to the publication of some of his Beagle correspondence with J.S. Henslow), marriage and fatherhood, and the opening of his private notebooks in which he jotted down his first coherent, extended thoughts on "transmutation."

London in the late 1830s was a dirty, noisy and even dangerous place. The Darwins had been living at Macaw cottage on Upper Gower Street—an increasingly tight fit for the growing family of two children, the servant staff, and of course Emma and Charles. Charles' stomach maladies that were to plague him for the rest of life had already begun (many years later Darwin's son Francis said that he had never known his father to enjoy a single day of normal health such as is usual for most people). Charles and Emma decided that a retreat to the countryside—emulating the life both had experienced as children—would be the best thing to do. Though Charles was already a fixture in the scientific life of London, his aversion to social life was growing—and life in the countryside would offer him the peace and privacy to continue his work—so long as their new home was not too far from the action in London.

They decided on a home in Down (later renamed "Downe") Village—which today, while nearly as rustic a community as it was in 1842, remains a part of greater London. The newly established train line, located a carriage ride of a few miles away, offered easy travel to central London. Charles' father Robert generously provided the capital, and the Darwins moved to Down House in September of 1842. The Downe region has recently been nominated as a World Heritage Site—in recognition of one of the greatest ideas in cultural history, and one that so effectively links the natural world with human existence.

Sometime during the summer, before the move, Darwin wrote his first real essay on transmutation—his "Pencil Sketch" of 1842. There is a disconcerting gap in Darwin's surviving notes and manuscripts between his last entries in the "Transmutation Notebooks" that appear to have been written sometime late in 1839—and this "Pencil Sketch" of 1842. Darwin had been deeply engaged in almost constant writing in the notebooks from mid-1837 onwards—stopping only after he had nailed down the principle of natural selection (though he does not actually call it that in the notebooks).

Then, nothing—at least nothing that anyone has so far found. Years after Darwin had died in 1882, son Francis discovered the 1842 Pencil Sketch (along with the much longer 1844 Essay) thrown in with heaps of papers in the closet under the main staircase in Down House. Darwin was a paper miser (the Exhibition has an original manuscript sheet of the Origin of Species with a boyhood drawing by none other than the same young Francis on its back—graphic testimony to Darwin's commitment to frugal recycling!). Francis published these two manuscripts, along with key items of his father's correspondence, in his book Foundations of the Origin of Species in 1909—to coincide with his father's 100th birthday and the 59th anniversary of the publication of the Origin. I consider Francis' book to be the first, and still highly valuable, contribution to Darwinian historiography.

And I find Darwin's 1842 Pencil Sketch to be hands down the most riveting of all of Darwin's writings on evolution—and that includes his various personal and scientific diaries from the Beagle; his correspondence throughout his entire life; his often cryptic, but also often thrilling, terse notes recorded in his Red, Transmutation and Metaphysical Notebooks of the 1830s; his 1844 Essay; his never-finished Big Species book (to have been entitled Natural Selection had he ever published it); the Origin of Species and all of his other books—estimable and incredibly important as they were—and still are today.

For the Pencil Sketch of 1842 reads as if it were written by a man who was still searching for the best way to articulate his ideas. Writing does that to you: you may think you understand something well enough to put it down in words on paper—but you often find that the job is not all that easy. You may indeed grasp the essence of the major points of your thesis—but still find that the logical flow of ideas and information is not in place until you try to write it all down. Darwin's 1842 Pencil Sketch consists of only 35 manuscript pages. Some parts flow well (though his writing naturally gained polish through practice over the subsequent 40 years of his life). But parts of it consist of open notes to himself—as if he knew this was a dry run, a practice essay, as if he wanted to get the gist of his ideas on evolution through natural selection (yes—he uses the term "natural selection" apparently for the first time in this manuscript) down in some sort of summary form before pulling up stakes and moving the household to Down House.

Thus this first essay of Darwin's on evolution is very fresh; you can feel his explorations even as he commits his ideas to paper in their first extended exposition. And the structure of this little essay is also deeply important—for Darwin begins with a discussion of variation and selection—and then, in Part II, talks about fossils, homology, classification—patterns that either first brought him to evolution, or which occurred to him to be patterns you might expect—predict—if evolution happened—a mode of thought begun in his Transformation notebooks shortly after he arrived home from the Beagle journey (and as we have seen in earlier blogs).

So 1842 is a departure, as well as a beginning: Darwin begins with the end of his ruminations in his notebooks: his discovery of natural selection. He then turns the tables and examines his patterns to see how they fare as predicted outcomes of the action of natural selection. He keeps this structure in all of his three later, more extended manuscripts and books that deal directly and solely with evolution through natural selection: the 1844 Essay, the mid-1850s unfinished Natural Selection—and, of course, his epochal "abstract" of his ideas: On the Origin of Species.

And then, nothing again—at least insofar as Darwin's evolutionary thinking is concerned. Two years are to go by before we see Darwin again approaching the subject. Our showcase outlining the events in Darwin's life in 1844—his famous letter to Joseph Hooker “confessing a murder,” his own expanded Essay of 1844, and his reaction to the anonymously published pro-evolutionary, best-seller Vestiges of Creation, is probably my favorite in the entire Darwin Exhibition—discussed in detail in my next blog.

Meanwhile…those of you who read the previous blog will remember that strange email I received from someone claiming to be the restless shade of Charles Darwin himself. Preposterous—as I said then, and as I of course still say: I don't believe in ghosts. But I did admit that I would absolutely LOVE to ask Charles Darwin all sorts of questions—not only about his own life and times, but also about what he makes of ours—especially the lasting impact he still has on modern life—especially life in the USA, a place he never actually visited during his lifetime. He makes many Americans at least as uneasy as his own shade purports to be—and, at the same time, he is perhaps THE standing icon, at least among 19th century historical figures, of rationalism. He probably did more to secularize the western world than any other single person—current events to the contrary notwithstanding.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained—so I posed a test to this digital visitor to my website. I asked him to "tell us something that happened to you while on the Beagle that, as far as you know, neither you nor anyone else spoke about after your return—a fact or two that never figured into any of your later writings about evolution, or anything else. But a fact that can be independently ascertained based on historical records."

This is his reply:

September 19th, 2006

My dear Eldredge:

I hope you do not mind this further intrusion on your website. Even though you have written in your previous blog that you would wish to converse with me were it at all possible, I do of course acknowledge your ill-ease at my appearance—not least because a rational person quite rightly rejects the Supernatural.

I myself was quite appalled at my colleague and friend Alfred Russel Wallace's infatuation with séances and the after-life. As you may know, I quickly came to the conclusion that if all the rest of life has descended from an ancestral species living in the remote geological past, then certainly this proposition could not stop literally at our feet: Man himself must also have evolved, I believed, as I made clear as early as the late 1830s in my Transmutation and Metaphysical Notebooks. And that supposition, I assure you, was early meant to embrace the totality of human existence—not excepting the so-called human "soul." Later in life especially, Wallace thought otherwise—and our differences grew from that point on.

Believe me when I say that I was at peace from the moment I died at age 73 and was (surprisingly and against my own expectations) interred at Westminster Abbey beside Sir John Herschel. (The irony of it all! Not only to be castigated, as I knew and feared I would be, especially by the older Church Establishment—but then to be laid to rest at Westminster AND beside Herschel—whose words about solving the "mystery of species" –i.e. the appearance of new species through Natural Law or Secondary Causes—I had found so heartening as a young man, flushed and nervous as I then was over my transmutational theory; but who, later on, peremptorily dismissed my most important discovery—Natural Selection—as the "Law of Higgledy Piggledy. (I have agonized over this latter event, and have concluded that the physicists of the time—and perhaps even now—require a statement to be of the simple form "If A, then B" to be a "law." The notion that "If A, then B; but if C, then D; and if more of the same A, no further change at all" –which is what natural selection boils down to—is evidently too complicated a logical structure for their minds).

But nonetheless I was at peace. I had embraced, if not entirely welcomed, death (so much more work to be done!). Death is a part of life—the price of admission, if you will, to the arena of life in the first place. When gone, I lay still, and was no more. This was true until just recently, when my spirit came to haunt especially American cultural life, that something like my own personal cognition awakened.

I am no corporeal ghost that comes in the night; rather, I am a Sentience that has become so pervasive as to be nearly palpable—a spirit so incessantly called upon by supporters and detractors alike that my mind can be read. The Digital Revolution facilitates such a strange state of affairs—as I can, it seems, read the bytes of the digital ether—but no longer the familiar jottings of letters or the printed words in books. Upon reflection, I now see that emails must be the bane of the historian: I am back as a Sentience (I hope not for long!) at least in part because I wrote so many letters, manuscripts and books—an appalling number of them surviving and (I gather) published. Even my most intimate letters have been scrupulously published by the Cambridge University Darwin Correspondence Project. Many of these are now available on the so-called World Wide Web (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin/ ). Had I been living in the age of email, none of this correspondence and unpublished manuscripts would likely have survived—and perhaps I might not be so restless as I now find myself.

Be all that as it may, here I unhappily am. You ask, not unreasonably, for some sign, some tangible evidence, that I am who I purport to be. Very well. When I was early out on the Beagle voyage, late summer and early autumn of 1832, we were in Bahia Blanca in what is now the country of Argentina. As I made clear in the very first sentence of my Origin of Species, the relation of certain fossils (I believe I wrote “past inhabitants”) of South America to their living counterparts was one of the important points that led me to the acceptance of transmutation in the first place. And the early discoveries of many species of indigenous, albeit extinct, mammals at two locales in Bahia Blanca were not only my first, but all told most important, such fossil discoveries of the entire voyage.

But I found other things whilst there; in particular I refer to a certain specimen of Snake of a most peculiar character. It was several feet long, and I knew it (even at the time) to be quite venomous. It's head was strikingly triangular in profile from above—hence the French term for it: "trigonocephale"—the genus being itself Trigonocephalus as later confirmed when the specimen (I believe now ensconced in the Cambridge University Zoology collections—if indeed it survives) was studied by an expert back in London.

I believe I made an entry in my Diary about this snake; I also recall having written Professor Henslow about all my collecting adventures at Bahia Blanca—the fossils, most certainly; but I added as well some news concerning some of the birds and other living species I chanced upon whilst there. This latter I was able to verify, for although (for some mysterious reason) the first volume of my Correspondence has not yet been put "on-line," Prof. van Wyhe has published excerpts of some of my letters on his website (http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin2/texts.html )—including an Abstract of this particular letter written to Henslow. Surely enough, reference is made to this snake there as well.

When reading this passage (and the corresponding passage in the Diary, if indeed it is there), one is struck ex post facto at how "evolutionary" my passage on the trigonocephale seems to be. Yet I was not then a transmutationist!!! For, as I wrote to Henslow, the snake seems to be intermediate between a Viperus (true viper) and a Crotalus (a rattlesnake)—in having a hard terminus to the tail which it shakes in the manner of a rattlesnake even though the structure is a most imperfect version of the rattlesnake's rattle. It seems in our world of ca. 1831, we were accustomed to such imagery in comparing similar species—whether we were transmutationists (like Lamarck, my Grandfather Erasmus Darwin, and Robert Grant) or creationists (like Henslow and virtually everyone else in England—including, of course, myself).

Enough. Please see if you can verify these remarks on the curious trigonocephale. They were an interesting forerunner to my true transmutational thoughts—which came later. Interesting, though, that they were expressed at the very time that I was so engrossed with comparing fossil and modern mammifers unique to the South American continent.

With apologies, once again, for my intrusion, my dear Eldredge

Yours Most Truly

C. Darwin

I had remembered something, dimly, about Darwin's encounter with this snake—as I had paid a lot of attention to his experiences with fossil mammals at Bahia Blanca in the course of preparation of the Darwin Exhibition and my accompanying book. Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow first published Darwin's personal Diary in 1934, and a much later version (1988), with valuable scholarly annotations, has been published by great-grandson Richard Darwin Keynes (showing again the importance of the Darwin family in presenting Darwin's unpublished writings to the world).

Sure enough, it is there—both in the Diary, and again (as Darwin himself—if such the letter writer be—was able to verify; see portions of the letter from Darwin to Henslow of November 1832 at http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin3/henslow_letters.html ). The corresponding passage (dated October 8, 1832) in the Diary reads:

I also caught a large snake, which at the time I knew to be venomous; but now I find it equals in its poisonous qualities the Rattle snake. In its structure it is very curious, and marks the passage between the common venomous and the rattlesnakes. Its tail is terminated by a hard oval point, & which, I observe, it vibrates as those possessed with a more perfect organ are known to do so.

And of course I agree that the language is striking—so much so that modern evolutionary biologists do not think twice in pronouncing these words those of a true evolutionist. Yet the evidence is pretty clear that Darwin himself was no evolutionist when he wrote these words—as the writer of this letter maintains.

And, as far I know, Darwin himself never went back to his snake—whether in his notes, manuscripts, books or correspondence, when discussing the origin of, or evidence for, his transmutational views. Nor has any scholar pointed expressly to these passages. The snake appears to have been a specimen of the local species of what is now called Bothrops—one of many New World species of fer-de-lance.

But, even though I am the one who posed the challenge and set the test, I remain unconvinced. Time now to ask a tough question of my own—one that I am reasonably certain no one alive has any chance whatever of being able to answer—save myself and David Kohn, my Virgil who has guided me to the inmost sanctums of Darwiniana. The evidence has never been published, and though a few scholars have undoubtedly chanced upon this document, they are unlikely to be able to remember it well enough to answer the question—without returning to the rare book collection at Cambridge University.

So, here it is, "Mr. Darwin," my question to you: At some point not long after your arrival home from the Beagle voyage, you met a man and asked a favor of him: to produce on the spot a list of the living species of a group of mammals that you had encountered in South America. Who was that man, what were the mammals, how did he comply—and, for good measure, when and where did this take place?

Once again, “Mr. Darwin," I look forward to your reply.

Niles Eldredge

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