Darwin's Struggle: The Evolution of the Origin of Species


Darwin's Struggle: The Evolution of the Origin of Species

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In the late summer of 1859, Charles Darwin finally completed the last

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paragraph of his greatest work on The Origin Of Species.

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But he wasn't drawing his inspiration from the exotic islands

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that he'd visited on his famous voyage on HMS Beagle.

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A chalk bank in Kent, near his house at Downe,

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provided his metaphor for the laws

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that explain the diversity of life on our planet.

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It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,

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with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about,

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and with worms crawling through the damp earth,

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and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,

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so different from each other,

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and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,

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have all been produced by laws acting around us.

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Darwin was unleashing a new vision of nature,

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where species evolved independently from the guiding hand of a creator.

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The established vision of a harmonious world, divinely ordained

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to serve God's noblest creation, mankind, would be shattered.

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He was very aware

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that what he was dealing with was effectively intellectual dynamite,

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and he kept most of his thoughts about what he was doing

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in terms of where man might come from,

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where new species might arise, effectively secret.

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It was a secret with which Darwin had wrestled for 20 years.

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20 years of unflinching support from his wife Emma, who feared that

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her beloved husband might be consigned to eternal damnation

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for challenging traditional beliefs.

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Together they would endure two decades of debilitating illness,

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self-doubt, and family tragedy.

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It was a life struggle that Darwin also saw

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among the animals and plants in the fields and tangled banks

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of the Kentish countryside.

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A struggle that is a founding principle of his theory of natural selection.

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And the last paragraph of the Origin Of Species really goes out with a perfect bang.

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The whole book has been about the struggle for existence

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and what Tennyson had called nature red in tooth and claw.

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The last paragraph gives, to me, a sense of hope.

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It sort of shows that this war of all against all,

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actually has a result and the result is the living world we see around us.

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The beauties of the tangled bank,

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the worms and the butterflies and the grass and the orchids,

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all of these beauties of nature emerge from Darwin's simple idea.

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There is grandeur in this view of life,

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with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms

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or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along

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according to the fixed laws of gravity,

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from so simple a beginning

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endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

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have been, and are being, evolved.

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Just as beauty and wonder emerge out of a war of nature,

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so too did Charles Darwin's great book evolve out of years

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of painstaking research and inner conflict.

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At the age of 33,

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Charles Robert Darwin was already an established gentleman naturalist.

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His substantial private income

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enabled him to pursue his particular interest,

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solving what had been called "the mystery of mysteries".

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How animals and plants might transmute or evolve.

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It was to find a quiet place to write

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that in 1842 he and his burgeoning family had moved to a house

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just outside London near the village of Downe, in Kent.

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After several fruitless searches in Surrey and elsewhere,

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we found this house and purchased it.

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I was pleased by the diversified appearance

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of the vegetation proper to a chalk district,

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and so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the Midland counties.

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And still more pleased with the extreme quietness

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and rusticity of the place.

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Darwin knew in the country there was space to expand his experiments,

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to walk, to observe nature.

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There was plenty of information there for him to draw on

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and then there was a very important factor for Darwin

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of getting into a space where he felt safe,

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with his secret theory of transmutation.

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In the early 1840s, transmutation or evolution was still a radical idea,

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associated with social revolution.

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It was a secret that he shared with his wife and first cousin

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Emma Wedgwood, whom he had married three years earlier.

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I marvel at my good fortune that Emma, so infinitely my superior

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in every single moral quality, should have consented to be my wife.

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Emma was the precondition for everything that he did.

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She...created a love-shaped space

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where he felt safe to work obsessively without fearing

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the loss of love and damaging their relationship.

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She was to nurse him through years of recurrent bouts of illness,

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the nature of which remains unclear to this day.

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Possibly damage caused by a South American parasite,

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inflamed by anxiety and nervous tension.

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25 years' extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence.

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Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying,

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dying sensations or half-faint and copious and very pallid urine.

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Air fatigues bring on head symptoms, nervousness when Emma leaves me.

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I think she was always concerned about his health.

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She was constantly trying to persuade him

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to have a day off here, go on a trip there,

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not because she wanted his company,

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but because she felt if he carried on working at the pace

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at which he was going, then he would become more ill.

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Emma was to provide Charles with ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.

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As a father, Charles Darwin did not conform

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to the standard Victorian stereotype

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of the distant and stern pater familias.

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Darwin was very much a family man.

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He writes rather wryly one year

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that his wife hadn't been doing very well last year

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because she hadn't had a baby,

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which is pretty rude for a Victorian, I have to say.

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But what's fascinating is that he used his children

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as experimental animals.

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He noted their expressions when they were crying, when they were angry

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and he saw how similar they were to the expression of a dog.

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He saw his family as part of the human family,

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the human family as part of the mammal family,

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the mammal family as at one with the primroses.

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And that really shows that he saw humankind

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as an intrinsic part of the living world and not apart from it.

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This was radically different from the established Christian view

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of the time, where mankind was God's special and separate creation.

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He kept his real opinions in a private notebook.

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Man in his arrogance thinks of himself as a great work,

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worthy of the interposition of a deity.

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More humble and I believe true,

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to think him created from animals.

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And Charles and Emma did what animals do,

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only they had a bed to do it in, upstairs.

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But then because Darwin believed strongly in analogy,

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it's not only animals that do what people do, but it's also plants

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that do what people do in strange and complicated ways.

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So from the marriage bed to the flower bed was only 100 yards

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and Darwin would go downstairs,

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out the back door, down to his flower beds

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where experiments were being performed and how these creatures,

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he even regarded some plants as simple animals,

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also reproduced themselves.

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Just over a year after he arrived at Downe,

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he felt bold enough to tentatively raise the issue of species change

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with his botanist friend Joseph Hooker.

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At last gleams of light have come

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and I'm almost convinced that species are not immutable.

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It is like confessing a murder.

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Hooker's response was noncommittal.

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Darwin retreated into his shell.

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If Hooker wouldn't buy it, then his old teachers at Cambridge certainly wouldn't.

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Even the most progressive members of the Anglican clergy still saw nature's beauty and abundance

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as divinely ordained for the benefit of the Lord's highest creation, man.

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The fundamental idea around nature for many people during the early part of the 19th century,

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particularly in Cambridge, but throughout Anglican Britain,

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was that of design.

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The world was made for man and probably the best way

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of explaining this is just to think about the 24 hour day.

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We think of that of course as just an outcome of astronomical chance,

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in the way that the planets work and so forth.

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For people who were sitting in Cambridge,

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the idea was basically the 24 hour day is...

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that's because humans need to sleep for eight hours.

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And everything around them is organised from that fact,

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from human need going outwards.

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To suggest that mankind was merely a product of nature risked attack

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from the black robed priests, the black beasts, as Darwin called them.

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But what he possibly feared even more was the loss of respect

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from the Cambridge dons who had taught and inspired him.

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Men such as the straight spoken Yorkshireman

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the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology,

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who saw God's design in nature.

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"Denying this..."

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"..Might brutalise it and sink the human race

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"into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen

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"since records tell us of its history."

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Sedgwick represents a union, an uneasy union of science and religion

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that had prevailed since the 17th century, in Britain particularly.

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A division of labour in which those who study nature

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offer to those who study God,

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evidence of God's greatness and goodness and wisdom

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in the world about us and those who study God's revelation in the Bible

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offer reasons for believing in God that he has revealed to us

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and how to go to heaven.

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Nature doesn't tell us how to go to heaven,

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but it tells us that there is a God in heaven,

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who has revealed himself and how to get there in the Bible.

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It was with these traditional views in mind that in early 1844,

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Darwin began to prepare a manuscript

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that he hoped would eventually show even men like Sedgwick

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that evolution was a reality,

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and that he had found the mechanism that made it happen.

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But as a punctilious and cautious man,

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he needed to marshal his evidence.

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What he does there at Downe

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is really create a living laboratory.

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You know, a laboratory to go along with his career, as it were.

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It's not just Darwin sitting alone, looking out the window.

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Darwin didn't just use his house and gardens to observe and learn from nature.

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He bred pigeons and orchids, raised 50 varieties of gooseberry,

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and to counter the creationists,

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he became a beekeeper

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in order to show that the near perfect hexagons in honeycombs

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were made by instinct rather than divine design.

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My habits are methodical,

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my love of natural science has been steady and ardent.

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I have the strongest desire

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to understand or explain whatever I have observed.

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To group all facts under some general laws.

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He would also create a place to think.

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A rough oval shaped path of gravel was laid down and trees planted

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to provide him with a half kilometre walking circuit.

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He called it the Sand Walk.

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Darwin called the Sand Walk his thinking path.

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He watched the trees grow and many of them are still there...

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..in the knowledge and hope that he would be able to pace

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around this plot and escape the pressure

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of sitting in one place

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and writing and squeezing one's ideas out the point of a pen.

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Darwin would lose himself in thought on the Sand Walk,

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so much so that the only way he could keep track of the time he spent there

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was to keep track of the laps and he kept track of the laps

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by a pile of flints,

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one of which he would kick to the side after a lap

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and when the whole pile had been moved across the path,

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he knew he had completed his exercise, that was your thinking time for the day.

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We, the subsequent generation, love the Sand Walk

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because we can imagine Darwin on it and think about

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what he can see from the sand... in the Sand Walk.

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He can see these climbing plants, the bryony

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in the hedge for example.

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He can see Great Puckland's field where he will, you know,

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formulate a concept of biodiversity.

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Secluded in his rural laboratory, Darwin's manuscript on what he was already calling natural selection

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developed into an essay, suitable for publication.

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Some of his text drew on the experiences he had on his round the world Beagle expedition.

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Out of the five years he spent on the voyage,

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he'd stayed just five weeks on the Galapagos Islands,

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collecting specimens of plants and different species of mockingbirds and finches.

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The significance of his Galapagos experience in the development of his theory has been overstated.

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Just as I think it's very common to imagine

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that great theories appear in a rush, through inspiration, all at once,

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as though every scientist is like Archimedes

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streaking along a street from his bath somewhere in Syracuse.

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So, we want the place where the inspiration hits

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to be glamorous and exotic and the Galapagos does that perfectly,

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but that's completely to get the origin of the origin entirely wrong.

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It was only back in London after his Galapagos visit that Darwin realised

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that the species of birds and plants he collected were subtly

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different from island to island,

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yet were closely similar to species on the South American continent.

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In the 1844 manuscript, he used this as evidence

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that new species had evolved

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as continental birds and plants adapted to the different island habitats.

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The Galapagos of course are a fantastic

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place to go and...there's a way

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in which they're inevitably going to be associated with Darwin.

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But I think their importance I think is easy to misunderstand.

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For one thing, his collections from it are really not that great.

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He mislabelled most of his specimens,

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he didn't identify which of the particular islands,

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his various finches and other organisms were actually from.

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The main thing about it is not so much about natural selection

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at that stage, it's the Galapagos are much more important

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in terms of helping Darwin be convinced

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that evolution might have been taking place.

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The Galapagos evidence was just part of Darwin's awakening.

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Only a way mark on the twisting path

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to his completed theory of evolution.

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Now at Downe, he was able to draw on nine years of intellectual struggle.

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He'd set down some of his most brilliant insights

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in what would become known as the transmutation notebooks.

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It was in these pocketbooks that he first drafted the idea

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that the vast range of living species

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must have all evolved from a shared common ancestry.

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Twigs and branches, stemming from one tree of life.

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He is brainstorming with total abandon, totally unorthodox,

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unacceptable to philosophers in his day.

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Maybe there were a few enlightenment rationalists in France

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who would do that, but no-one in Britain would countenance someone

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seriously trying to find out about the world by doing what Darwin did.

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And he wasn't just tapping physics and theology,

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he was going to economics,

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he was going to animal breeding, he was reaching out in every direction

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for evidence of intuitions

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to build up the world as he sensed it existed.

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Yet that vision of the world was changing all the while,

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he was testing what he thought might be the case,

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this is the brainstorming with what people were saying was the case.

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Darwin's 1844 manuscript was based on wide reading

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from Milton's Paradise Lost

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to the evolutionary speculations of his grandfather Erasmus

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and the radical French biologist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck.

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His great geologist mentor Charles Lyell taught him

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that the Earth's surface had been formed

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gradually over countless ages.

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But it was the political economist, Thomas Malthus who would stimulate

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the closest parallel to a eureka moment that Darwin would ever have.

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In October 1838, 15 months after I had begun my systematic inquiry,

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I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population.

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In terms of natural selection,

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there's a crucial moment in Darwin's discovery

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and that is I think when he reads Thomas Malthus's essay

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on the Principle Of Population.

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Now, this was an incredibly controversial book.

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It was controversial basically

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because it argued that there were limits to growth.

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A lot of philosophers in the 18th century had said,

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"Mankind can progress indefinitely, everything's gonna be great."

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Malthus says, "No, that's not the case.

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"In fact we've got limited food supply,

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"and effectively what happens is you're going to get this population exploding exponentially,

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"and it's going to be cut off by the need for food."

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What Darwin does is turn this into a creative principle in nature.

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Death becomes the way of explaining life.

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And so what happens is you get this incredible idea that all

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of these thousands of forms, all these slightly different species

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are competing for these tiny spaces on the Earth and in nature.

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Each one trying to live and only those that are most fit,

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only those that are really going to match in to that little spot,

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those are the ones that are going to survive and all the thousands,

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the millions, the billions, the rest are going to die.

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It at once struck me that under these circumstances,

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favourable variations would tend to be preserved

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and unfavourable ones destroyed.

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The result of this would be the formation of new species.

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Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.

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He says that this population growth

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is like 100,000 wedges pounding into the face of nature.

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You know, pushing in stronger ones and throwing out weaker ones.

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Therein capturing the essence of struggle for existence,

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of survival of the fittest.

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He had a moment, where he got very excited,

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you definitely can tell the excitement

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because it's very, very tight, very, very careful.

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It's controlled thrill I would say, very, very detailed writing,

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layer upon layer really, of a reaction to this thing.

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By 1844, Darwin had placed Malthus's ideas on population

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at the core of his theory of natural selection,

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as a mechanism by which evolution occurred.

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The war of nature destroyed the weaklings.

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Only the best adapted went on to reproduce,

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passing on their successful characteristics

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to succeeding generations.

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In having so many children, Charles and Emma were effectively conducting their own Malthusian experiment.

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By the time he had finished the manuscript,

0:23:250:23:27

one baby child had died and Emma was about to be pregnant with a fifth.

0:23:270:23:32

William and Annie, their first two were thriving.

0:23:320:23:36

Anne Elizabeth Darwin was born in March 1841.

0:23:360:23:42

She became indispensable to her mother by the time she was that wonderful age, eight or nine.

0:23:420:23:48

She showed her parents great tenderness.

0:23:480:23:51

And I think that that increased Emma and Charles's love for Annie.

0:23:510:23:55

She would pet them and stroke their hands and stroke their hair

0:23:550:23:59

and take her father's hair and plait it and fix it just so.

0:23:590:24:02

Then take his hand and walk around the Sand Walk and skipping ahead.

0:24:020:24:07

And she had her own little flower patch in the back, all these endearing things

0:24:070:24:11

as they watched their eldest daughter become a young woman.

0:24:110:24:14

Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance,

0:24:160:24:21

and rendered every movement elastic and full of life and vigour.

0:24:210:24:25

It was delightful and cheerful to behold her.

0:24:250:24:29

Her dear face now rises before me, as she used to sometimes come

0:24:290:24:33

running down the stairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me.

0:24:330:24:36

Her whole form radiant with pleasure of giving pleasure.

0:24:360:24:40

And as these children grew up, these were not only loved children,

0:24:420:24:48

but they were creatures, they were little developing organisms.

0:24:480:24:51

They were like the orang-utan in the London zoo and Darwin would compare

0:24:510:24:57

his son, William and Annie growing up, with the orang-utan in the zoo.

0:24:570:25:03

At Downe, Annie and her siblings provided an emotional relief

0:25:080:25:12

from the constant struggle with his new and contentious theory.

0:25:120:25:16

But there was another long-term source of unease.

0:25:160:25:20

Emma read his completed manuscript.

0:25:200:25:23

Darwin must have known that she would find it uncomfortable reading.

0:25:230:25:27

In a strong and loving relationship, his rejection of traditional

0:25:270:25:31

religious teachings made her anxious about his salvation.

0:25:310:25:35

Although the manuscript acknowledged the existence of a creator,

0:25:350:25:40

Emma felt it undermined the belief

0:25:400:25:43

that man was specially created by God.

0:25:430:25:46

If you put yourself in the mind of a 19th century reader,

0:25:460:25:50

the notion that species had evolved, that humans had evolved,

0:25:500:25:54

would be deeply upsetting because of this presumption

0:25:540:26:00

that humans are at the top of the ladder of the hierarchy,

0:26:000:26:05

perfect formed, noble, all of those things.

0:26:050:26:08

To suggest that we had evolved from apes and before that from primitive sea creatures,

0:26:080:26:14

must have seemed deeply heretical.

0:26:140:26:17

Darwin's very aware that he needs to tell his wife the general tenure

0:26:190:26:24

of the work that he's actually doing,

0:26:240:26:26

but he's also quite aware too that she's going to be upset.

0:26:260:26:30

I mean, Emma's quite liberal in her general outlook,

0:26:300:26:34

but she also is a practising Christian and a strong believer.

0:26:340:26:38

Emma feared that her husband's religious doubts would mean

0:26:380:26:42

that he might not be saved and join her in the afterlife.

0:26:420:26:45

When I am with you all melancholy thoughts keep out of my head,

0:26:450:26:50

but since you are gone some sad ones have forced themselves in,

0:26:500:26:53

of fear that our opinions on the most important subject

0:26:530:26:57

should differ widely. My reason tells me

0:26:570:27:00

that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin,

0:27:000:27:04

but I feel it would be a painful void between us.

0:27:040:27:07

The big question for Emma was were they going to spend eternity together?

0:27:070:27:11

Or when she died and then he died

0:27:110:27:14

was that something where they were going to be apart,

0:27:140:27:17

and I think that was a terrible kind of burden for her

0:27:170:27:20

and it remained a burden right up till the end of their lives.

0:27:200:27:23

I do not wish for any answers about all this.

0:27:250:27:28

It is a satisfaction for me to write it.

0:27:280:27:31

Don't think it's not my affair and does not signify much to me.

0:27:310:27:36

Everything that concerns you concerns me.

0:27:360:27:38

And I would be most unhappy if I thought that we would not belong to each other forever.

0:27:380:27:44

That became an item of unfinished business in their relationship.

0:27:480:27:53

It was buried perhaps many times,

0:27:530:27:55

but when a child was sick and dying or when Darwin, as so often the case,

0:27:550:28:01

fell ill and she had to care for him,

0:28:010:28:04

it was the spectre of being eternally without her beloved,

0:28:040:28:08

that haunted Emma and made her bring it up to him.

0:28:080:28:12

We don't know how many times in private.

0:28:120:28:14

We do know that the issue weighed heavily on Darwin from a note he later added to Emma's letter.

0:28:140:28:21

When I am dead, know how many times I have kissed and cried over this.

0:28:230:28:30

Whatever her personal misgivings,

0:28:320:28:34

Emma loyally read and commented on the essay.

0:28:340:28:37

Darwin was still not confident enough to have it published

0:28:370:28:41

and his anxieties about hostile attitudes to evolutionary ideas were soon to be confirmed.

0:28:410:28:49

He finishes this essay, and I think any decision that he had

0:28:490:28:54

that he was thinking about publishers

0:28:540:28:57

is certainly knocked on its head in October of 1844,

0:28:570:29:00

when he learns through an advertisement in the London Times

0:29:000:29:04

that a book has been published

0:29:040:29:06

called the Vestiges Of The Natural History Of Creation.

0:29:060:29:10

This is an anonymous book. Who its author was subject of great guessing and uncertainty

0:29:110:29:17

and it's a book which even the advertisements say,

0:29:170:29:21

deals with the whole range of natural phenomena and explains it

0:29:210:29:25

through a natural law of development.

0:29:250:29:27

In other words, there's some sort of evolution

0:29:270:29:30

that will explain how everything in the universe came in to being.

0:29:300:29:34

It becomes one of the great sensations of the 1840s.

0:29:340:29:37

Everybody reads it, from Queen Victoria to the poet Tennyson,

0:29:370:29:42

most of Darwin's friends.

0:29:420:29:43

It's discussed very extensively by a whole range of different people.

0:29:430:29:48

The whole train of animated beings,

0:29:480:29:50

from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent,

0:29:500:29:55

are then to be regarded as a series of advances

0:29:550:29:58

of the principle of development.

0:29:580:30:01

It has pleased providence to arrange

0:30:010:30:03

that one species should give birth to another

0:30:030:30:06

until the second highest gave birth to man.

0:30:060:30:09

The identity of the author, Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist,

0:30:110:30:15

was not revealed for another 40 years.

0:30:150:30:18

He had feared the inevitable backlash.

0:30:180:30:20

In the vanguard of the attack was Darwin's old Cambridge teacher,

0:30:200:30:25

the Reverend Adam Sedgwick.

0:30:250:30:27

He detected the "serpent coils of false philosophy"

0:30:270:30:30

in the book's vision of transmutation.

0:30:300:30:33

People came down on it very hard.

0:30:350:30:38

His professor Sedgwick here at Cambridge,

0:30:380:30:40

referred to it as a filthy abortion, whose head ought to be crushed.

0:30:400:30:45

Now of course that's consistent with seeing it as the offspring

0:30:450:30:49

of a frail, female mind, this book, this filthy abortion.

0:30:490:30:53

That's hard talk from the Reverend Adam Sedgwick,

0:30:530:30:56

Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

0:30:560:30:58

I cannot but think the work is from a woman's pen.

0:30:590:31:03

It's so well dressed and so graceful in its externals.

0:31:030:31:08

This mistake was woman's from the first.

0:31:080:31:11

She longed for the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

0:31:110:31:14

And she must pluck it, right or wrong.

0:31:140:31:17

And Sedgwick absolutely loathes Vestiges.

0:31:170:31:21

For him as for many evangelical Christians, Vestiges is, which was bound in red, is the scarlet harlot.

0:31:210:31:27

It's a book that has the beautiful attraction of a woman.

0:31:270:31:31

What you need to do, he says, is rip off the pretty clothes

0:31:310:31:34

and reveal underneath the foul mass of corruption within.

0:31:340:31:38

If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain.

0:31:390:31:44

Religion is a lie, human law is a mass of folly and a base injustice,

0:31:440:31:49

morality is moonshine.

0:31:490:31:51

Our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen,

0:31:510:31:56

and men and women are only better beasts.

0:31:560:31:59

And Darwin reads this, as he says, in fear and trembling.

0:31:590:32:03

It also, I think, serves a very useful role for Darwin though,

0:32:030:32:07

because when he reads the review,

0:32:070:32:09

when he looks at what Sedgwick has to say,

0:32:090:32:11

in many ways he's able to start ticking off the kinds of things

0:32:110:32:14

that he needs to look into,

0:32:140:32:16

the kinds of questions he needs to answer,

0:32:160:32:18

in order to make sure that his theory is safe,

0:32:180:32:20

it has the right kind of armour around it,

0:32:200:32:22

so that it can go forward in the world without having

0:32:220:32:25

the same kind of reaction against it that Vestiges has.

0:32:250:32:28

Still reeling from the savage response to Vestiges,

0:32:310:32:34

Darwin seems to have gone into a period of self doubt.

0:32:340:32:37

His fears of being regarded as a lightweight speculator were possibly

0:32:370:32:42

raised by some words of advice from his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker.

0:32:420:32:47

Hooker said to him that he thought that no-one had the right

0:32:470:32:51

to pronounce on species unless they had examined many.

0:32:510:32:55

A throwaway line in a letter from Hooker to his friend,

0:32:550:33:01

and yet, clearly a remark

0:33:010:33:04

that haunted Darwin, that he knew, absolutely that Hooker was right.

0:33:040:33:07

That if anyone was going to believe this enormous claim

0:33:070:33:11

that he was going to make,

0:33:110:33:12

then he really had to do the examining of many.

0:33:120:33:16

He had to really do the work with the microscope

0:33:160:33:19

and with the dissection tools, and once he'd done that,

0:33:190:33:22

and once people admired him for the detail of that work,

0:33:220:33:25

then he would have a better chance with the big ideal.

0:33:250:33:29

Darwin decided to embark on a comprehensive description

0:33:290:33:33

of an entire subclass of marine organisms, barnacles.

0:33:330:33:36

It was a project he anticipated would take a matter of months.

0:33:360:33:40

It was to take him eight years.

0:33:400:33:43

There are two types of barnacles, mainly. There's the coned barnacles.

0:33:430:33:48

They're little white volcanic, tiny cones that cover every rock.

0:33:480:33:54

Inside the cone there's a little creature,

0:33:540:33:58

which is cemented to the rock by its head and which fishes with its feet.

0:33:580:34:03

So, when the tide comes in, the feet come out through the little hole,

0:34:030:34:08

and there's this wonderful pulsing movement, like feathers almost,

0:34:080:34:12

as the feet fish for tiny plankton.

0:34:120:34:15

They also, barnacles, the coned barnacles, have the largest penises

0:34:190:34:23

proportionate to size in the entire animal kingdom,

0:34:230:34:27

so every now and again you can also see,

0:34:270:34:30

coming out of one of the tops of these cones, an enormous penis,

0:34:300:34:34

which will come out the top and then go in to the top of another valve,

0:34:340:34:41

maybe four or five barnacles away.

0:34:410:34:44

So he quite quickly comes to see and express this sense of wonder.

0:34:440:34:52

That here they were, seemingly ordinary, you know,

0:34:520:34:56

covering every shoreline of the temperate world,

0:34:560:35:01

and yet when you go in really, really close,

0:35:010:35:04

what seems like a simple organism becomes a very sophisticated one

0:35:040:35:08

and you see that pattern over and over again in Darwin's early work,

0:35:080:35:12

that sense of, we must stop talking

0:35:120:35:15

about higher animals and lower animals.

0:35:150:35:17

That actually the lower animals are often very sophisticated,

0:35:170:35:22

almost fantastic in the way that they've adapted to their conditions.

0:35:220:35:26

You can almost hear him gasp, you know, as he goes further and further in at the beauty of these things.

0:35:260:35:33

There was another pay-off.

0:35:330:35:35

Darwin's barnacle research relied on people sending him specimens from all over the world.

0:35:350:35:41

Downe House developed into the hub of a network of contacts

0:35:410:35:45

which would supply vital evidence for writing The Origin Of Species.

0:35:450:35:50

Darwin's communication networks are absolutely remarkable.

0:35:500:35:53

They're partly a tribute to the sophistication

0:35:530:35:58

of the Victorian postal service,

0:35:580:35:59

without which most 19th century science would have collapsed.

0:35:590:36:03

Pigeon breeders and orchid fanciers,

0:36:030:36:06

colonial physicians and Royal Naval officers were badgered

0:36:060:36:12

by Darwin from his study in Downe,

0:36:120:36:16

so that flowing on to that desk were piles and piles of paper.

0:36:160:36:22

It was while he was still laboriously dissecting his way

0:36:250:36:28

through hundreds of barnacle specimens

0:36:280:36:31

that one more of Darwin's own children was struck down

0:36:310:36:34

with what is now thought to have been tuberculosis.

0:36:340:36:38

When Annie was about nine years old, she began to have tummy troubles,

0:36:380:36:43

which isn't surprising in a house

0:36:430:36:45

where the father was periodically throwing up in his study

0:36:450:36:49

and doing all kinds of odd things to keep himself from becoming violently physically ill.

0:36:490:36:53

It was one of the ways one got attention at Downe House,

0:36:530:36:57

was to be sick, very sick preferably.

0:36:570:36:59

And finally her illness became so acute

0:36:590:37:02

that while Emma was seriously pregnant,

0:37:020:37:05

she was having her ninth child,

0:37:050:37:07

Charles put Annie under his own doctor

0:37:070:37:10

and the doctor immediately diagnosed

0:37:100:37:13

a grave situation that was bound to get worse

0:37:130:37:16

and finally over the Easter weekend, she died.

0:37:160:37:20

Her eyes sparkled brightly, she often smiled.

0:37:220:37:27

Her step was elastic and firm.

0:37:270:37:30

She held herself upright and often threw her head backwards

0:37:300:37:33

as if she defied the world in her joyousness.

0:37:330:37:36

A week after Annie died, this is what's most remarkable,

0:37:360:37:41

Charles sat down and in a single draft, you can tell by reading it,

0:37:410:37:48

wrote a magnificent threnody for this loved and sorely missed child,

0:37:480:37:54

in which he describes Annie's human nature in all of its physicality.

0:37:540:38:02

This is not just a struggle for existence

0:38:020:38:06

in which a vulnerable life is crushed,

0:38:060:38:10

this is a loved person who is their offspring.

0:38:100:38:14

We have lost the joy of the household

0:38:170:38:19

and the solace of our old age.

0:38:190:38:21

She must've know how we loved her.

0:38:210:38:24

Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still

0:38:240:38:29

and shall forever love her dear joyous face, blessings on her.

0:38:290:38:35

Annie's death came just three years after Darwin's father had died, an unbeliever.

0:38:350:38:40

With his own belief in a Christian God already shaken,

0:38:400:38:44

Darwin now severed his ties with traditional faith.

0:38:440:38:49

Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate,

0:38:490:38:52

but it was at last complete.

0:38:520:38:55

I indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity can be true,

0:38:550:38:58

for if so, the plain language seems to show that men who do not believe will be everlastingly punished.

0:38:580:39:08

And this is a damnable doctrine.

0:39:080:39:11

There it seems to me is the quintessence

0:39:110:39:15

of any anger that he felt at Annie's being torn away at Easter, focused into a single moral statement.

0:39:150:39:22

And it's the statement of a non believer.

0:39:240:39:28

A non Christian, but still a believer in God.

0:39:280:39:32

Just a god who will not punish ten year olds.

0:39:320:39:36

Death in the war in nature had been the driving force

0:39:400:39:43

of Darwin's theory of evolution from the time he read Malthus.

0:39:430:39:46

Eight years after her death,

0:39:480:39:50

Darwin would weave his daughter into that vision.

0:39:500:39:53

Annie is in chapter three of The Origin Of Species where Darwin talks about the struggle for existence.

0:39:550:40:02

And, in that chapter, Darwin,

0:40:020:40:05

he's now writing five, six years, seven years after Annie's death.

0:40:050:40:11

He describes for us nature as it appears

0:40:110:40:15

and then nature how it really is.

0:40:150:40:19

He refers to the smiling face of nature.

0:40:190:40:21

He refers to the nature that we look out upon

0:40:210:40:24

and is so celebrated, the green and pleasant land of England,

0:40:240:40:28

the insects flitting through the air, the birds sporting themselves.

0:40:280:40:31

We do not see, he says, beneath the surface.

0:40:310:40:35

It's a continual state of war.

0:40:350:40:38

Under this surface of nature,

0:40:380:40:40

the young are dying young

0:40:400:40:44

and the rest of the animal life struggles to survive.

0:40:460:40:49

And then he says that this struggle for existence is like,

0:40:530:40:58

and he uses the old notebook figure, wedges being driven into the face.

0:40:580:41:03

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.

0:41:060:41:10

Every single organic being around us may be seen to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers,

0:41:100:41:17

that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life,

0:41:170:41:20

that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old

0:41:200:41:25

during each generation or at recurrent intervals.

0:41:250:41:29

The face of nature may be compared to a yielding surface with 10,000 sharp wedges

0:41:290:41:35

packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows.

0:41:350:41:38

Sometimes one wedge being struck and then another with greater force.

0:41:380:41:43

And there's this nature with a smiling face

0:41:460:41:49

and then there are wedges being driven...

0:41:490:41:52

It's the most horridly anthropomorphic figure.

0:41:520:41:57

When I first read that, after studying Annie's death,

0:41:570:42:00

I thought, "Could it be her face?"

0:42:000:42:02

And, of course, when you read his account of her, a week after she died,

0:42:020:42:07

over and over again, it's her brilliance face,

0:42:070:42:10

her beaming face, her smiles that he remembers

0:42:100:42:13

with the picture of the daguerreotype sat next to him.

0:42:130:42:16

In writing this chapter in the struggle for existence in The Origin of Species

0:42:170:42:23

he's portraying Annie's fate in falling victim

0:42:230:42:27

to a remorseless struggle that gives rise to higher forms of life.

0:42:270:42:34

She suffered at Easter that others may live.

0:42:340:42:37

Darwin now lost himself in barnacles again, taking three more years to finish his huge study.

0:42:420:42:49

At last he now felt able to return to his big theory but, for some time,

0:42:490:42:54

something had been nagging him.

0:42:540:42:56

How did a group, like barnacles, evolve consisting as they did of

0:42:560:43:01

thousands of slightly different species, many living side by side?

0:43:010:43:06

Was his idea of natural selection enough by itself

0:43:060:43:09

to explain the extraordinary diversity of living things?

0:43:090:43:12

At that time, I overlooked one problem of great importance.

0:43:120:43:18

The problem is the tendency in organic beings

0:43:180:43:21

descended from the same stock to diverge in character

0:43:210:43:25

as they become modified.

0:43:250:43:27

There's a place in the autobiography where he talks about

0:43:270:43:32

the moment of discovery

0:43:320:43:33

of the principle of divergence.

0:43:330:43:36

You can see a...small piece of paper among many

0:43:360:43:40

that are dated the same date, November '54,

0:43:400:43:43

in which his handwriting is extremely jagged

0:43:430:43:47

in pencil.

0:43:470:43:49

And I can remember the very spot in the road,

0:43:490:43:52

whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.

0:43:520:43:57

The solution, as I do believe, is that the modified offspring

0:43:570:44:03

of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted

0:44:030:44:07

to the many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature.

0:44:070:44:12

What Darwin realised was that the more individuals differed from each other,

0:44:120:44:16

the better able they would be to take advantage of the particular environment in which they lived.

0:44:160:44:21

Just as importantly,

0:44:210:44:23

species would diverge even more as they adapted to each other.

0:44:230:44:28

This interdependence had a parallel

0:44:280:44:30

in what would eventually become the Victorian factory system.

0:44:300:44:34

He uses, I would call it more like the Adam Smith phase

0:44:340:44:38

of Darwin's encounter with the political economists,

0:44:380:44:41

because, you know, Adam Smith had this idea of the division of labour,

0:44:410:44:45

that you can produce more wealth if you have people who are specialists,

0:44:450:44:50

you know, instead of everybody being a farmer.

0:44:500:44:53

If some people become tailors and some people become leather workers,

0:44:530:44:58

you can produce more wealth.

0:44:580:45:00

Darwin uses the essentially the same idea

0:45:000:45:02

and applies it to these little plots of ground

0:45:020:45:06

and his view is that more life can be sustained

0:45:060:45:10

on a square plot if the organisms use different parts of the environment.

0:45:100:45:17

If you think about this in terms of this kind of lawn plot experiment.

0:45:170:45:22

You've got grasses and other plants growing and its roots might go down to a certain depth,

0:45:220:45:27

so it can take nutrients from that level,

0:45:270:45:30

but another might grow to a deeper depth,

0:45:300:45:32

You can sustain more life that way than if they are all growing to the same depth.

0:45:320:45:37

If they were all one kind.

0:45:370:45:39

And he's seeing that as a process of divergence.

0:45:390:45:43

Darwin set up innovative trials to test out his ideas.

0:45:450:45:49

Leaving a few square feet of his lawn unmown for three years,

0:45:490:45:52

he regularly noted the change in composition in the struggle for life

0:45:520:45:57

among 20 plant species, recording 11 winners and nine losers.

0:45:570:46:02

In Great Puckland's meadow

0:46:020:46:04

he counted 142 different species, the first ever survey of its kind.

0:46:040:46:10

The chalk fields and banks around Downe support

0:46:100:46:14

as many as 40 different species per square metre.

0:46:140:46:18

An abundance explained by natural selection and the principle of divergence.

0:46:180:46:25

And his applications of Adam Smith's ideas of capitalist manufacture

0:46:340:46:38

were not lost on the inventor of the idea of class struggle, Karl Marx.

0:46:380:46:43

Darwin discovers among the beasts and plants the society of England, with its division of labour,

0:46:430:46:51

competition, opening up of new markets, inventions

0:46:510:46:56

and the Malthusian struggle for existence.

0:46:560:47:00

And certainly Darwin, when he looks at those tangled banks,

0:47:000:47:04

where new varieties

0:47:040:47:07

and eventually new species are preferentially being produced

0:47:070:47:12

by competition and the physiological division of labour,

0:47:120:47:16

Darwin calls those "manufactories of species."

0:47:160:47:19

The very phrase "factory system" is about 30 years old

0:47:210:47:24

and it had first been applied to this new system of economy,

0:47:240:47:28

based on industrial production,

0:47:280:47:31

ferocious division of labour, automation and mechanisation.

0:47:310:47:35

Now Darwin was using those principles

0:47:350:47:39

to try and make sense of what was happening

0:47:390:47:43

when competition was particularly vigorous

0:47:430:47:46

and therefore adaptations peculiarly intensely favoured.

0:47:460:47:50

It was at this time that Darwin began to feel confident enough to come out in public with his theory.

0:47:520:47:58

He started to prepare a master work where every possible criticism could

0:47:580:48:02

be anticipated and every assertion backed up by evidence.

0:48:020:48:05

He wanted to win over his Victorian readers

0:48:050:48:09

with striking and familiar examples.

0:48:090:48:12

Understanding their fascination with domestic animals,

0:48:120:48:16

he chose a particularly popular species, the pigeon,

0:48:160:48:19

in order to make an analogy.

0:48:190:48:21

Fancy pigeon breeding by artificial selection

0:48:210:48:24

showed how natural selection worked in the wild.

0:48:240:48:27

He was especially concerned with just the sheer diversity of pigeons,

0:48:270:48:32

all the different forms, the amazing types of pigeons

0:48:320:48:36

and how those related then to a single ancestor.

0:48:360:48:39

On the one hand you had fantails,

0:48:390:48:41

really beautiful birds with beautiful feathers

0:48:410:48:45

down to the almond tumblers, very small birds with beaks so small

0:48:450:48:48

that they could hardly get out of their egg shells.

0:48:480:48:51

Carrier pigeons were very large, had these kind of big ugly beaks.

0:48:510:48:56

They showed this incredible diversity.

0:48:560:48:58

How could they all come from one ancestor?

0:48:580:49:02

Just as pigeon breeders bred different varieties,

0:49:020:49:05

so nature acted in the same way over longer periods of time,

0:49:050:49:09

naturally selecting different varieties,

0:49:090:49:11

each passing on their own inherited characteristics.

0:49:110:49:15

So in some sense what Darwin was saying was just as the pigeon fanciers had a fancy,

0:49:150:49:20

nature had a fancy and that fancy

0:49:200:49:22

was to produce these incredible varieties,

0:49:220:49:25

all these different kind of forms

0:49:250:49:27

and types of animals and plants that we see around us.

0:49:270:49:30

That diversity could actually be explained by looking at something as simple as pigeons.

0:49:300:49:37

Pigeons were to be one example amongst many

0:49:380:49:41

in a work that might have amounted to three heavy volumes,

0:49:410:49:45

had Darwin not been interrupted.

0:49:450:49:48

My plans were overthrown.

0:49:480:49:49

For early in the summer of 1858 Mr Wallace,

0:49:490:49:53

who was then in the Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay

0:49:530:49:56

on the Tendency Of Varieties To Depart Indefinitely From The Original Type,

0:49:560:50:02

and this essay contained exactly the same theory as mine.

0:50:020:50:06

Alfred Russel Wallace had been supplying Darwin, and other rich collectors

0:50:130:50:17

with animal and plant specimens from the Indonesian archipelago.

0:50:170:50:20

Now, Darwin, one has to say, was a toff, there's no question of it.

0:50:200:50:25

Wallace was exactly the opposite.

0:50:250:50:27

He had a few years of schooling, he was kicked out,

0:50:270:50:29

and he went to the university of life, that's all he could afford,

0:50:290:50:33

and he decided to set up shop as a collector of animals

0:50:330:50:35

and he had an extraordinarily adventurous life.

0:50:350:50:38

He went to Indonesia and had a tremendously challenging and difficult time.

0:50:380:50:43

I mean, he was living out in the jungle for year after year after year

0:50:430:50:46

and then suddenly one day, he had a good idea.

0:50:460:50:49

Like Darwin,

0:50:490:50:51

Wallace had been struck by Thomas Malthus's essay on population.

0:50:510:50:56

His theory came to him while he was lying incapacitated with malaria struggling for life.

0:50:560:51:01

So he wrote with a certain amount of trepidation to the grand

0:51:010:51:05

and already famous fellow of the Royal Society, Charles Darwin,

0:51:050:51:09

with this idea and, of course, it landed on Darwin's breakfast table,

0:51:090:51:13

here in Downe, with the force of an hand grenade.

0:51:130:51:16

So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.

0:51:190:51:23

Though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated

0:51:230:51:29

as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.

0:51:290:51:33

Darwin was distraught. Also his daughter, Henrietta, was sick

0:51:350:51:39

and his infant son, Charles, gravely ill.

0:51:390:51:42

He put his trust in his friends Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell,

0:51:420:51:46

to decide the fate of his theory.

0:51:460:51:49

With Wallace far away in Indonesia, they resolved to have papers

0:51:490:51:53

by both naturalists presented

0:51:530:51:55

at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London.

0:51:550:51:58

Remarkably, the joint presentation stirred up little interest.

0:51:580:52:03

Darwin too was absent from the event.

0:52:030:52:06

His infant son had died.

0:52:060:52:09

Once recovered, he resolved

0:52:090:52:11

to publish his book as soon as possible.

0:52:110:52:15

The great thing that Wallace did, I think in many ways, was to make

0:52:150:52:19

sure that Darwin basically finished his book and wrote it in such a way

0:52:190:52:23

that it was readable to a much wider audience than it would have otherwise been.

0:52:230:52:27

Darwin was basically writing a three volume treatise on natural selection,

0:52:270:52:32

with all the evidence, pigeons, bees, ants, everything, all put in.

0:52:320:52:37

There was going to be a chapter on man, it was everything.

0:52:370:52:40

What Wallace did would galvanise Darwin.

0:52:400:52:42

He recaptured much of the energy he had when he was working

0:52:420:52:45

in the Beagle voyage and he suddenly started writing with a real passion.

0:52:450:52:49

In September 1858, I set to work on the strong advice of Lyell and Hooker

0:52:510:52:57

to prepare a volume on the transmutation of species.

0:52:570:53:00

It cost me 13 months' and ten days' hard labour.

0:53:000:53:04

It was published under the title of

0:53:040:53:07

The Origin Of Species in November 1859.

0:53:070:53:11

Darwin was to describe his book of nearly 500 pages

0:53:120:53:16

as one long argument.

0:53:160:53:18

He gently and tentatively coaches his reader

0:53:180:53:21

through a developing series of observations and examples.

0:53:210:53:25

Throughout the same pattern is repeated

0:53:250:53:29

of moving from specific details to grand overarching conclusions.

0:53:290:53:35

I often think that the theory of evolution of natural selection

0:53:350:53:39

is a bit like the grammar of biology.

0:53:390:53:42

You can't learn a language without understanding at least something about its grammar,

0:53:420:53:47

and you couldn't be a biologist before 1859

0:53:470:53:49

because none of the facts seem to fit together.

0:53:490:53:52

You could be studying flowers, or earthworms,

0:53:520:53:55

you could be collecting birds on the Galapagos but they were sort of independent discoveries.

0:53:550:54:00

But suddenly The Origin Of Species made it all make sense.

0:54:000:54:04

It gave you a framework onto which you could bolt all these facts.

0:54:040:54:08

So it really was, and still is,

0:54:080:54:10

the central book of the science of biology.

0:54:100:54:13

The book appealed to a new breed of professional men of science who were prepared to accept

0:54:160:54:21

that all nature was governed by fixed laws, The Origin Of Species

0:54:210:54:25

as much as the motions of the planets.

0:54:250:54:28

But Darwin had invested so many years developing the book

0:54:280:54:31

because he also hoped to win over his old Anglican mentors.

0:54:310:54:35

On The Origin Of Species only twice refers to the origins of mankind

0:54:380:54:44

but for old naturalists,

0:54:440:54:47

such as his respected teacher Professor Adam Sedgwick,

0:54:470:54:52

the implications were obvious and odious.

0:54:520:54:55

Adam Sedgwick wrote him a letter.

0:54:560:54:59

This old man sat down and sorrowfully

0:54:590:55:03

told his geological student

0:55:030:55:07

how much he disapproved of this book, The Origin Of Species,

0:55:070:55:14

which in places Sedgwick said,

0:55:140:55:17

"attempts to break the link

0:55:170:55:20

"between the world of nature and the reality of God."

0:55:200:55:24

I have read your book with more pain than pleasure.

0:55:260:55:30

Parts of it I admired greatly,

0:55:300:55:33

parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore,

0:55:330:55:37

parts I read with absolute sorrow

0:55:370:55:40

because I think them utterly false and grievously mischievous.

0:55:400:55:45

Sedgwick hoped that they would see each other in heaven

0:55:470:55:51

and that said it all, didn't it?

0:55:510:55:53

Sedgwick realised perfectly well what was at stake

0:55:530:55:56

and what Darwin himself always knew was at stake.

0:55:560:55:59

Sedgwick saw the fabric tottering and falling.

0:55:590:56:04

That is the fabric of salvation and eternal life.

0:56:040:56:07

If you make a man out of a monkey that all comes down.

0:56:070:56:11

The family was really quite upset about this. I think it's probably

0:56:140:56:18

for Darwin the most upsetting letter he gets about The Origin Of Species

0:56:180:56:22

because it represents the kind of, on some level,

0:56:220:56:25

his failure in a certain way to be able to reach

0:56:250:56:27

the kind of person that Sedgwick actually was.

0:56:270:56:30

And it's particularly upsetting, I think also for Emma,

0:56:300:56:33

because Sedgwick is somebody that she particularly admired and whose views she respected quite heavily.

0:56:330:56:40

And so there's quite a lot of sense that there's upset in the household

0:56:400:56:45

as a result of Sedgwick's intervention in the debate.

0:56:450:56:48

Whatever the personal set-backs, Emma steadfastly supported Charles

0:56:500:56:54

throughout the years of controversy that followed

0:56:540:56:57

enabling him to write nine more books,

0:56:570:57:00

despite further breakdowns and mounting exhaustion.

0:57:000:57:03

But he was later to call The Origin Of Species

0:57:030:57:06

the chief work of his life.

0:57:060:57:08

The book has never been out of print.

0:57:080:57:11

In it he immortalised a chalk bank at Downe to illustrate

0:57:110:57:14

the extraordinary diversity and interdependence of living beings

0:57:140:57:19

that result from the process of natural selection.

0:57:190:57:22

It might also serve as a metaphor for his struggle to write the book.

0:57:220:57:26

And, of course, the entangled bank that he describes at the end is also a vision of his own life, you know,

0:57:280:57:34

the entangled bank that he sees, central to his vision of nature

0:57:340:57:38

is also the world that he's lived in.

0:57:380:57:40

There's a sense of worship in that,

0:57:400:57:43

a worship of nature as he sees it fully.

0:57:430:57:46

That he accepts the war, the destruction, the famine,

0:57:460:57:49

the pain, the suffering, the loss of children

0:57:490:57:53

but nonetheless you put all of that together,

0:57:530:57:56

the death and the suffering and the beauty and the miracle of it

0:57:560:58:01

and you end with wonder.

0:58:010:58:03

There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers

0:58:070:58:11

having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one,

0:58:110:58:15

and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along,

0:58:150:58:19

according to the fixed laws of gravity,

0:58:190:58:22

from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful

0:58:220:58:26

and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

0:58:260:58:30

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