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In the late summer of 1859, Charles Darwin finally completed the last | 0:00:03 | 0:00:08 | |
paragraph of his greatest work on The Origin Of Species. | 0:00:08 | 0:00:12 | |
But he wasn't drawing his inspiration from the exotic islands | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
that he'd visited on his famous voyage on HMS Beagle. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:19 | |
A chalk bank in Kent, near his house at Downe, | 0:00:19 | 0:00:22 | |
provided his metaphor for the laws | 0:00:22 | 0:00:25 | |
that explain the diversity of life on our planet. | 0:00:25 | 0:00:28 | |
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, | 0:00:30 | 0:00:36 | |
with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, | 0:00:36 | 0:00:40 | |
and with worms crawling through the damp earth, | 0:00:40 | 0:00:44 | |
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, | 0:00:44 | 0:00:47 | |
so different from each other, | 0:00:47 | 0:00:49 | |
and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
have all been produced by laws acting around us. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:57 | |
Darwin was unleashing a new vision of nature, | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
where species evolved independently from the guiding hand of a creator. | 0:01:01 | 0:01:06 | |
The established vision of a harmonious world, divinely ordained | 0:01:06 | 0:01:09 | |
to serve God's noblest creation, mankind, would be shattered. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:14 | |
He was very aware | 0:01:16 | 0:01:18 | |
that what he was dealing with was effectively intellectual dynamite, | 0:01:18 | 0:01:22 | |
and he kept most of his thoughts about what he was doing | 0:01:22 | 0:01:25 | |
in terms of where man might come from, | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
where new species might arise, effectively secret. | 0:01:27 | 0:01:30 | |
It was a secret with which Darwin had wrestled for 20 years. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:36 | |
20 years of unflinching support from his wife Emma, who feared that | 0:01:36 | 0:01:41 | |
her beloved husband might be consigned to eternal damnation | 0:01:41 | 0:01:44 | |
for challenging traditional beliefs. | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
Together they would endure two decades of debilitating illness, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:52 | |
self-doubt, and family tragedy. | 0:01:52 | 0:01:54 | |
It was a life struggle that Darwin also saw | 0:01:59 | 0:02:02 | |
among the animals and plants in the fields and tangled banks | 0:02:02 | 0:02:06 | |
of the Kentish countryside. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
A struggle that is a founding principle of his theory of natural selection. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:12 | |
And the last paragraph of the Origin Of Species really goes out with a perfect bang. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:18 | |
The whole book has been about the struggle for existence | 0:02:18 | 0:02:22 | |
and what Tennyson had called nature red in tooth and claw. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:25 | |
The last paragraph gives, to me, a sense of hope. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
It sort of shows that this war of all against all, | 0:02:28 | 0:02:31 | |
actually has a result and the result is the living world we see around us. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:36 | |
The beauties of the tangled bank, | 0:02:36 | 0:02:38 | |
the worms and the butterflies and the grass and the orchids, | 0:02:38 | 0:02:42 | |
all of these beauties of nature emerge from Darwin's simple idea. | 0:02:42 | 0:02:48 | |
There is grandeur in this view of life, | 0:02:48 | 0:02:51 | |
with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms | 0:02:51 | 0:02:55 | |
or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along | 0:02:55 | 0:02:59 | |
according to the fixed laws of gravity, | 0:02:59 | 0:03:01 | |
from so simple a beginning | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful | 0:03:04 | 0:03:10 | |
have been, and are being, evolved. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
Just as beauty and wonder emerge out of a war of nature, | 0:03:12 | 0:03:16 | |
so too did Charles Darwin's great book evolve out of years | 0:03:16 | 0:03:21 | |
of painstaking research and inner conflict. | 0:03:21 | 0:03:24 | |
At the age of 33, | 0:03:40 | 0:03:41 | |
Charles Robert Darwin was already an established gentleman naturalist. | 0:03:41 | 0:03:47 | |
His substantial private income | 0:03:47 | 0:03:49 | |
enabled him to pursue his particular interest, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:51 | |
solving what had been called "the mystery of mysteries". | 0:03:51 | 0:03:55 | |
How animals and plants might transmute or evolve. | 0:03:55 | 0:04:00 | |
It was to find a quiet place to write | 0:04:02 | 0:04:04 | |
that in 1842 he and his burgeoning family had moved to a house | 0:04:04 | 0:04:09 | |
just outside London near the village of Downe, in Kent. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:12 | |
After several fruitless searches in Surrey and elsewhere, | 0:04:14 | 0:04:18 | |
we found this house and purchased it. | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
I was pleased by the diversified appearance | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
of the vegetation proper to a chalk district, | 0:04:23 | 0:04:25 | |
and so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the Midland counties. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
And still more pleased with the extreme quietness | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
and rusticity of the place. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
Darwin knew in the country there was space to expand his experiments, | 0:04:39 | 0:04:45 | |
to walk, to observe nature. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:48 | |
There was plenty of information there for him to draw on | 0:04:48 | 0:04:52 | |
and then there was a very important factor for Darwin | 0:04:52 | 0:04:56 | |
of getting into a space where he felt safe, | 0:04:56 | 0:04:59 | |
with his secret theory of transmutation. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:04 | |
In the early 1840s, transmutation or evolution was still a radical idea, | 0:05:04 | 0:05:11 | |
associated with social revolution. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
It was a secret that he shared with his wife and first cousin | 0:05:14 | 0:05:17 | |
Emma Wedgwood, whom he had married three years earlier. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:21 | |
I marvel at my good fortune that Emma, so infinitely my superior | 0:05:21 | 0:05:26 | |
in every single moral quality, should have consented to be my wife. | 0:05:26 | 0:05:32 | |
Emma was the precondition for everything that he did. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:36 | |
She...created a love-shaped space | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
where he felt safe to work obsessively without fearing | 0:05:40 | 0:05:47 | |
the loss of love and damaging their relationship. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:50 | |
She was to nurse him through years of recurrent bouts of illness, | 0:05:52 | 0:05:56 | |
the nature of which remains unclear to this day. | 0:05:56 | 0:05:59 | |
Possibly damage caused by a South American parasite, | 0:05:59 | 0:06:03 | |
inflamed by anxiety and nervous tension. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
25 years' extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:12 | |
Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying, | 0:06:12 | 0:06:16 | |
dying sensations or half-faint and copious and very pallid urine. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:21 | |
Air fatigues bring on head symptoms, nervousness when Emma leaves me. | 0:06:21 | 0:06:27 | |
I think she was always concerned about his health. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:31 | |
She was constantly trying to persuade him | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
to have a day off here, go on a trip there, | 0:06:34 | 0:06:38 | |
not because she wanted his company, | 0:06:38 | 0:06:40 | |
but because she felt if he carried on working at the pace | 0:06:40 | 0:06:43 | |
at which he was going, then he would become more ill. | 0:06:43 | 0:06:45 | |
Emma was to provide Charles with ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:52 | |
As a father, Charles Darwin did not conform | 0:06:54 | 0:06:57 | |
to the standard Victorian stereotype | 0:06:57 | 0:06:59 | |
of the distant and stern pater familias. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:02 | |
Darwin was very much a family man. | 0:07:02 | 0:07:05 | |
He writes rather wryly one year | 0:07:05 | 0:07:07 | |
that his wife hadn't been doing very well last year | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
because she hadn't had a baby, | 0:07:10 | 0:07:11 | |
which is pretty rude for a Victorian, I have to say. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:14 | |
But what's fascinating is that he used his children | 0:07:14 | 0:07:18 | |
as experimental animals. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:20 | |
He noted their expressions when they were crying, when they were angry | 0:07:20 | 0:07:24 | |
and he saw how similar they were to the expression of a dog. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:27 | |
He saw his family as part of the human family, | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
the human family as part of the mammal family, | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
the mammal family as at one with the primroses. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
And that really shows that he saw humankind | 0:07:40 | 0:07:43 | |
as an intrinsic part of the living world and not apart from it. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:48 | |
This was radically different from the established Christian view | 0:07:48 | 0:07:52 | |
of the time, where mankind was God's special and separate creation. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:57 | |
He kept his real opinions in a private notebook. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:02 | |
Man in his arrogance thinks of himself as a great work, | 0:08:04 | 0:08:08 | |
worthy of the interposition of a deity. | 0:08:08 | 0:08:11 | |
More humble and I believe true, | 0:08:11 | 0:08:14 | |
to think him created from animals. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
And Charles and Emma did what animals do, | 0:08:20 | 0:08:24 | |
only they had a bed to do it in, upstairs. | 0:08:24 | 0:08:27 | |
But then because Darwin believed strongly in analogy, | 0:08:27 | 0:08:29 | |
it's not only animals that do what people do, but it's also plants | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
that do what people do in strange and complicated ways. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
So from the marriage bed to the flower bed was only 100 yards | 0:08:36 | 0:08:40 | |
and Darwin would go downstairs, | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 | |
out the back door, down to his flower beds | 0:08:43 | 0:08:45 | |
where experiments were being performed and how these creatures, | 0:08:45 | 0:08:50 | |
he even regarded some plants as simple animals, | 0:08:50 | 0:08:54 | |
also reproduced themselves. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:56 | |
Just over a year after he arrived at Downe, | 0:09:04 | 0:09:06 | |
he felt bold enough to tentatively raise the issue of species change | 0:09:06 | 0:09:10 | |
with his botanist friend Joseph Hooker. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
At last gleams of light have come | 0:09:14 | 0:09:17 | |
and I'm almost convinced that species are not immutable. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:22 | |
It is like confessing a murder. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:25 | |
Hooker's response was noncommittal. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:30 | |
Darwin retreated into his shell. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:32 | |
If Hooker wouldn't buy it, then his old teachers at Cambridge certainly wouldn't. | 0:09:32 | 0:09:37 | |
Even the most progressive members of the Anglican clergy still saw nature's beauty and abundance | 0:09:38 | 0:09:45 | |
as divinely ordained for the benefit of the Lord's highest creation, man. | 0:09:45 | 0:09:50 | |
The fundamental idea around nature for many people during the early part of the 19th century, | 0:09:50 | 0:09:55 | |
particularly in Cambridge, but throughout Anglican Britain, | 0:09:55 | 0:09:58 | |
was that of design. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:00 | |
The world was made for man and probably the best way | 0:10:00 | 0:10:03 | |
of explaining this is just to think about the 24 hour day. | 0:10:03 | 0:10:07 | |
We think of that of course as just an outcome of astronomical chance, | 0:10:07 | 0:10:11 | |
in the way that the planets work and so forth. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:13 | |
For people who were sitting in Cambridge, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:16 | |
the idea was basically the 24 hour day is... | 0:10:16 | 0:10:19 | |
that's because humans need to sleep for eight hours. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
And everything around them is organised from that fact, | 0:10:23 | 0:10:27 | |
from human need going outwards. | 0:10:27 | 0:10:29 | |
To suggest that mankind was merely a product of nature risked attack | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
from the black robed priests, the black beasts, as Darwin called them. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
But what he possibly feared even more was the loss of respect | 0:10:41 | 0:10:45 | |
from the Cambridge dons who had taught and inspired him. | 0:10:45 | 0:10:49 | |
Men such as the straight spoken Yorkshireman | 0:10:49 | 0:10:53 | |
the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology, | 0:10:53 | 0:10:57 | |
who saw God's design in nature. | 0:10:57 | 0:10:59 | |
"Denying this..." | 0:10:59 | 0:11:01 | |
"..Might brutalise it and sink the human race | 0:11:01 | 0:11:03 | |
"into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen | 0:11:03 | 0:11:08 | |
"since records tell us of its history." | 0:11:08 | 0:11:10 | |
Sedgwick represents a union, an uneasy union of science and religion | 0:11:15 | 0:11:20 | |
that had prevailed since the 17th century, in Britain particularly. | 0:11:20 | 0:11:26 | |
A division of labour in which those who study nature | 0:11:26 | 0:11:30 | |
offer to those who study God, | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
evidence of God's greatness and goodness and wisdom | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
in the world about us and those who study God's revelation in the Bible | 0:11:36 | 0:11:41 | |
offer reasons for believing in God that he has revealed to us | 0:11:41 | 0:11:46 | |
and how to go to heaven. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:48 | |
Nature doesn't tell us how to go to heaven, | 0:11:48 | 0:11:51 | |
but it tells us that there is a God in heaven, | 0:11:51 | 0:11:53 | |
who has revealed himself and how to get there in the Bible. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:57 | |
It was with these traditional views in mind that in early 1844, | 0:11:59 | 0:12:03 | |
Darwin began to prepare a manuscript | 0:12:03 | 0:12:05 | |
that he hoped would eventually show even men like Sedgwick | 0:12:05 | 0:12:09 | |
that evolution was a reality, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:11 | |
and that he had found the mechanism that made it happen. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
But as a punctilious and cautious man, | 0:12:16 | 0:12:19 | |
he needed to marshal his evidence. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:21 | |
What he does there at Downe | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
is really create a living laboratory. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:28 | |
You know, a laboratory to go along with his career, as it were. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:32 | |
It's not just Darwin sitting alone, looking out the window. | 0:12:32 | 0:12:35 | |
Darwin didn't just use his house and gardens to observe and learn from nature. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:42 | |
He bred pigeons and orchids, raised 50 varieties of gooseberry, | 0:12:42 | 0:12:46 | |
and to counter the creationists, | 0:12:46 | 0:12:48 | |
he became a beekeeper | 0:12:48 | 0:12:49 | |
in order to show that the near perfect hexagons in honeycombs | 0:12:49 | 0:12:54 | |
were made by instinct rather than divine design. | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
My habits are methodical, | 0:12:59 | 0:13:01 | |
my love of natural science has been steady and ardent. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:04 | |
I have the strongest desire | 0:13:04 | 0:13:06 | |
to understand or explain whatever I have observed. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:10 | |
To group all facts under some general laws. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:13 | |
He would also create a place to think. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:18 | |
A rough oval shaped path of gravel was laid down and trees planted | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
to provide him with a half kilometre walking circuit. | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
He called it the Sand Walk. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:26 | |
Darwin called the Sand Walk his thinking path. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:33 | |
He watched the trees grow and many of them are still there... | 0:13:33 | 0:13:37 | |
..in the knowledge and hope that he would be able to pace | 0:13:38 | 0:13:42 | |
around this plot and escape the pressure | 0:13:42 | 0:13:48 | |
of sitting in one place | 0:13:48 | 0:13:50 | |
and writing and squeezing one's ideas out the point of a pen. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:55 | |
Darwin would lose himself in thought on the Sand Walk, | 0:14:05 | 0:14:08 | |
so much so that the only way he could keep track of the time he spent there | 0:14:08 | 0:14:13 | |
was to keep track of the laps and he kept track of the laps | 0:14:13 | 0:14:18 | |
by a pile of flints, | 0:14:18 | 0:14:19 | |
one of which he would kick to the side after a lap | 0:14:19 | 0:14:24 | |
and when the whole pile had been moved across the path, | 0:14:24 | 0:14:27 | |
he knew he had completed his exercise, that was your thinking time for the day. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
We, the subsequent generation, love the Sand Walk | 0:14:32 | 0:14:38 | |
because we can imagine Darwin on it and think about | 0:14:38 | 0:14:41 | |
what he can see from the sand... in the Sand Walk. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
He can see these climbing plants, the bryony | 0:14:44 | 0:14:48 | |
in the hedge for example. | 0:14:48 | 0:14:50 | |
He can see Great Puckland's field where he will, you know, | 0:14:50 | 0:14:54 | |
formulate a concept of biodiversity. | 0:14:54 | 0:14:58 | |
Secluded in his rural laboratory, Darwin's manuscript on what he was already calling natural selection | 0:15:03 | 0:15:11 | |
developed into an essay, suitable for publication. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:15 | |
Some of his text drew on the experiences he had on his round the world Beagle expedition. | 0:15:15 | 0:15:21 | |
Out of the five years he spent on the voyage, | 0:15:21 | 0:15:24 | |
he'd stayed just five weeks on the Galapagos Islands, | 0:15:24 | 0:15:27 | |
collecting specimens of plants and different species of mockingbirds and finches. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:33 | |
The significance of his Galapagos experience in the development of his theory has been overstated. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:39 | |
Just as I think it's very common to imagine | 0:15:41 | 0:15:46 | |
that great theories appear in a rush, through inspiration, all at once, | 0:15:46 | 0:15:51 | |
as though every scientist is like Archimedes | 0:15:51 | 0:15:55 | |
streaking along a street from his bath somewhere in Syracuse. | 0:15:55 | 0:15:59 | |
So, we want the place where the inspiration hits | 0:15:59 | 0:16:03 | |
to be glamorous and exotic and the Galapagos does that perfectly, | 0:16:03 | 0:16:08 | |
but that's completely to get the origin of the origin entirely wrong. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:13 | |
It was only back in London after his Galapagos visit that Darwin realised | 0:16:13 | 0:16:19 | |
that the species of birds and plants he collected were subtly | 0:16:19 | 0:16:23 | |
different from island to island, | 0:16:23 | 0:16:26 | |
yet were closely similar to species on the South American continent. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:30 | |
In the 1844 manuscript, he used this as evidence | 0:16:30 | 0:16:33 | |
that new species had evolved | 0:16:33 | 0:16:35 | |
as continental birds and plants adapted to the different island habitats. | 0:16:35 | 0:16:40 | |
The Galapagos of course are a fantastic | 0:16:40 | 0:16:42 | |
place to go and...there's a way | 0:16:42 | 0:16:44 | |
in which they're inevitably going to be associated with Darwin. | 0:16:44 | 0:16:48 | |
But I think their importance I think is easy to misunderstand. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:51 | |
For one thing, his collections from it are really not that great. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:55 | |
He mislabelled most of his specimens, | 0:16:55 | 0:16:57 | |
he didn't identify which of the particular islands, | 0:16:57 | 0:17:00 | |
his various finches and other organisms were actually from. | 0:17:00 | 0:17:04 | |
The main thing about it is not so much about natural selection | 0:17:04 | 0:17:07 | |
at that stage, it's the Galapagos are much more important | 0:17:07 | 0:17:11 | |
in terms of helping Darwin be convinced | 0:17:11 | 0:17:13 | |
that evolution might have been taking place. | 0:17:13 | 0:17:16 | |
The Galapagos evidence was just part of Darwin's awakening. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:21 | |
Only a way mark on the twisting path | 0:17:21 | 0:17:24 | |
to his completed theory of evolution. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:26 | |
Now at Downe, he was able to draw on nine years of intellectual struggle. | 0:17:29 | 0:17:34 | |
He'd set down some of his most brilliant insights | 0:17:34 | 0:17:38 | |
in what would become known as the transmutation notebooks. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:42 | |
It was in these pocketbooks that he first drafted the idea | 0:17:43 | 0:17:47 | |
that the vast range of living species | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
must have all evolved from a shared common ancestry. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:53 | |
Twigs and branches, stemming from one tree of life. | 0:17:53 | 0:17:58 | |
He is brainstorming with total abandon, totally unorthodox, | 0:18:00 | 0:18:07 | |
unacceptable to philosophers in his day. | 0:18:07 | 0:18:11 | |
Maybe there were a few enlightenment rationalists in France | 0:18:11 | 0:18:15 | |
who would do that, but no-one in Britain would countenance someone | 0:18:15 | 0:18:20 | |
seriously trying to find out about the world by doing what Darwin did. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:24 | |
And he wasn't just tapping physics and theology, | 0:18:27 | 0:18:30 | |
he was going to economics, | 0:18:30 | 0:18:32 | |
he was going to animal breeding, he was reaching out in every direction | 0:18:32 | 0:18:37 | |
for evidence of intuitions | 0:18:37 | 0:18:40 | |
to build up the world as he sensed it existed. | 0:18:40 | 0:18:45 | |
Yet that vision of the world was changing all the while, | 0:18:45 | 0:18:49 | |
he was testing what he thought might be the case, | 0:18:49 | 0:18:51 | |
this is the brainstorming with what people were saying was the case. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
Darwin's 1844 manuscript was based on wide reading | 0:18:56 | 0:19:00 | |
from Milton's Paradise Lost | 0:19:00 | 0:19:02 | |
to the evolutionary speculations of his grandfather Erasmus | 0:19:02 | 0:19:07 | |
and the radical French biologist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck. | 0:19:07 | 0:19:11 | |
His great geologist mentor Charles Lyell taught him | 0:19:11 | 0:19:14 | |
that the Earth's surface had been formed | 0:19:14 | 0:19:17 | |
gradually over countless ages. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:19 | |
But it was the political economist, Thomas Malthus who would stimulate | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
the closest parallel to a eureka moment that Darwin would ever have. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:29 | |
In October 1838, 15 months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, | 0:19:30 | 0:19:36 | |
I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:41 | |
In terms of natural selection, | 0:19:41 | 0:19:43 | |
there's a crucial moment in Darwin's discovery | 0:19:43 | 0:19:45 | |
and that is I think when he reads Thomas Malthus's essay | 0:19:45 | 0:19:48 | |
on the Principle Of Population. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:50 | |
Now, this was an incredibly controversial book. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:53 | |
It was controversial basically | 0:19:53 | 0:19:55 | |
because it argued that there were limits to growth. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
A lot of philosophers in the 18th century had said, | 0:19:58 | 0:20:01 | |
"Mankind can progress indefinitely, everything's gonna be great." | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
Malthus says, "No, that's not the case. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:07 | |
"In fact we've got limited food supply, | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
"and effectively what happens is you're going to get this population exploding exponentially, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:16 | |
"and it's going to be cut off by the need for food." | 0:20:16 | 0:20:20 | |
What Darwin does is turn this into a creative principle in nature. | 0:20:22 | 0:20:26 | |
Death becomes the way of explaining life. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:29 | |
And so what happens is you get this incredible idea that all | 0:20:29 | 0:20:34 | |
of these thousands of forms, all these slightly different species | 0:20:34 | 0:20:38 | |
are competing for these tiny spaces on the Earth and in nature. | 0:20:38 | 0:20:42 | |
Each one trying to live and only those that are most fit, | 0:20:42 | 0:20:47 | |
only those that are really going to match in to that little spot, | 0:20:47 | 0:20:51 | |
those are the ones that are going to survive and all the thousands, | 0:20:51 | 0:20:55 | |
the millions, the billions, the rest are going to die. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:58 | |
It at once struck me that under these circumstances, | 0:21:11 | 0:21:14 | |
favourable variations would tend to be preserved | 0:21:14 | 0:21:17 | |
and unfavourable ones destroyed. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:20 | |
The result of this would be the formation of new species. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:24 | |
Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:29 | |
He says that this population growth | 0:21:30 | 0:21:34 | |
is like 100,000 wedges pounding into the face of nature. | 0:21:34 | 0:21:40 | |
You know, pushing in stronger ones and throwing out weaker ones. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:48 | |
Therein capturing the essence of struggle for existence, | 0:21:48 | 0:21:53 | |
of survival of the fittest. | 0:21:53 | 0:21:55 | |
He had a moment, where he got very excited, | 0:22:26 | 0:22:29 | |
you definitely can tell the excitement | 0:22:29 | 0:22:32 | |
because it's very, very tight, very, very careful. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
It's controlled thrill I would say, very, very detailed writing, | 0:22:35 | 0:22:41 | |
layer upon layer really, of a reaction to this thing. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:46 | |
By 1844, Darwin had placed Malthus's ideas on population | 0:22:50 | 0:22:55 | |
at the core of his theory of natural selection, | 0:22:55 | 0:22:58 | |
as a mechanism by which evolution occurred. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
The war of nature destroyed the weaklings. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:08 | |
Only the best adapted went on to reproduce, | 0:23:08 | 0:23:12 | |
passing on their successful characteristics | 0:23:12 | 0:23:16 | |
to succeeding generations. | 0:23:16 | 0:23:18 | |
In having so many children, Charles and Emma were effectively conducting their own Malthusian experiment. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:25 | |
By the time he had finished the manuscript, | 0:23:25 | 0:23:27 | |
one baby child had died and Emma was about to be pregnant with a fifth. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:32 | |
William and Annie, their first two were thriving. | 0:23:32 | 0:23:36 | |
Anne Elizabeth Darwin was born in March 1841. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:42 | |
She became indispensable to her mother by the time she was that wonderful age, eight or nine. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:48 | |
She showed her parents great tenderness. | 0:23:48 | 0:23:51 | |
And I think that that increased Emma and Charles's love for Annie. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:55 | |
She would pet them and stroke their hands and stroke their hair | 0:23:55 | 0:23:59 | |
and take her father's hair and plait it and fix it just so. | 0:23:59 | 0:24:02 | |
Then take his hand and walk around the Sand Walk and skipping ahead. | 0:24:02 | 0:24:07 | |
And she had her own little flower patch in the back, all these endearing things | 0:24:07 | 0:24:11 | |
as they watched their eldest daughter become a young woman. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance, | 0:24:16 | 0:24:21 | |
and rendered every movement elastic and full of life and vigour. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:25 | |
It was delightful and cheerful to behold her. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:29 | |
Her dear face now rises before me, as she used to sometimes come | 0:24:29 | 0:24:33 | |
running down the stairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me. | 0:24:33 | 0:24:36 | |
Her whole form radiant with pleasure of giving pleasure. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:40 | |
And as these children grew up, these were not only loved children, | 0:24:42 | 0:24:48 | |
but they were creatures, they were little developing organisms. | 0:24:48 | 0:24:51 | |
They were like the orang-utan in the London zoo and Darwin would compare | 0:24:51 | 0:24:57 | |
his son, William and Annie growing up, with the orang-utan in the zoo. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:03 | |
At Downe, Annie and her siblings provided an emotional relief | 0:25:08 | 0:25:12 | |
from the constant struggle with his new and contentious theory. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:16 | |
But there was another long-term source of unease. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:20 | |
Emma read his completed manuscript. | 0:25:20 | 0:25:23 | |
Darwin must have known that she would find it uncomfortable reading. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
In a strong and loving relationship, his rejection of traditional | 0:25:27 | 0:25:31 | |
religious teachings made her anxious about his salvation. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
Although the manuscript acknowledged the existence of a creator, | 0:25:35 | 0:25:40 | |
Emma felt it undermined the belief | 0:25:40 | 0:25:43 | |
that man was specially created by God. | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
If you put yourself in the mind of a 19th century reader, | 0:25:46 | 0:25:50 | |
the notion that species had evolved, that humans had evolved, | 0:25:50 | 0:25:54 | |
would be deeply upsetting because of this presumption | 0:25:54 | 0:26:00 | |
that humans are at the top of the ladder of the hierarchy, | 0:26:00 | 0:26:05 | |
perfect formed, noble, all of those things. | 0:26:05 | 0:26:08 | |
To suggest that we had evolved from apes and before that from primitive sea creatures, | 0:26:08 | 0:26:14 | |
must have seemed deeply heretical. | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
Darwin's very aware that he needs to tell his wife the general tenure | 0:26:19 | 0:26:24 | |
of the work that he's actually doing, | 0:26:24 | 0:26:26 | |
but he's also quite aware too that she's going to be upset. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:30 | |
I mean, Emma's quite liberal in her general outlook, | 0:26:30 | 0:26:34 | |
but she also is a practising Christian and a strong believer. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:38 | |
Emma feared that her husband's religious doubts would mean | 0:26:38 | 0:26:42 | |
that he might not be saved and join her in the afterlife. | 0:26:42 | 0:26:45 | |
When I am with you all melancholy thoughts keep out of my head, | 0:26:45 | 0:26:50 | |
but since you are gone some sad ones have forced themselves in, | 0:26:50 | 0:26:53 | |
of fear that our opinions on the most important subject | 0:26:53 | 0:26:57 | |
should differ widely. My reason tells me | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, | 0:27:00 | 0:27:04 | |
but I feel it would be a painful void between us. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:07 | |
The big question for Emma was were they going to spend eternity together? | 0:27:07 | 0:27:11 | |
Or when she died and then he died | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
was that something where they were going to be apart, | 0:27:14 | 0:27:17 | |
and I think that was a terrible kind of burden for her | 0:27:17 | 0:27:20 | |
and it remained a burden right up till the end of their lives. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:23 | |
I do not wish for any answers about all this. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:28 | |
It is a satisfaction for me to write it. | 0:27:28 | 0:27:31 | |
Don't think it's not my affair and does not signify much to me. | 0:27:31 | 0:27:36 | |
Everything that concerns you concerns me. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:38 | |
And I would be most unhappy if I thought that we would not belong to each other forever. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:44 | |
That became an item of unfinished business in their relationship. | 0:27:48 | 0:27:53 | |
It was buried perhaps many times, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
but when a child was sick and dying or when Darwin, as so often the case, | 0:27:55 | 0:28:01 | |
fell ill and she had to care for him, | 0:28:01 | 0:28:04 | |
it was the spectre of being eternally without her beloved, | 0:28:04 | 0:28:08 | |
that haunted Emma and made her bring it up to him. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:12 | |
We don't know how many times in private. | 0:28:12 | 0:28:14 | |
We do know that the issue weighed heavily on Darwin from a note he later added to Emma's letter. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:21 | |
When I am dead, know how many times I have kissed and cried over this. | 0:28:23 | 0:28:30 | |
Whatever her personal misgivings, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:34 | |
Emma loyally read and commented on the essay. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
Darwin was still not confident enough to have it published | 0:28:37 | 0:28:41 | |
and his anxieties about hostile attitudes to evolutionary ideas were soon to be confirmed. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:49 | |
He finishes this essay, and I think any decision that he had | 0:28:49 | 0:28:54 | |
that he was thinking about publishers | 0:28:54 | 0:28:57 | |
is certainly knocked on its head in October of 1844, | 0:28:57 | 0:29:00 | |
when he learns through an advertisement in the London Times | 0:29:00 | 0:29:04 | |
that a book has been published | 0:29:04 | 0:29:06 | |
called the Vestiges Of The Natural History Of Creation. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:10 | |
This is an anonymous book. Who its author was subject of great guessing and uncertainty | 0:29:11 | 0:29:17 | |
and it's a book which even the advertisements say, | 0:29:17 | 0:29:21 | |
deals with the whole range of natural phenomena and explains it | 0:29:21 | 0:29:25 | |
through a natural law of development. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:27 | |
In other words, there's some sort of evolution | 0:29:27 | 0:29:30 | |
that will explain how everything in the universe came in to being. | 0:29:30 | 0:29:34 | |
It becomes one of the great sensations of the 1840s. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:37 | |
Everybody reads it, from Queen Victoria to the poet Tennyson, | 0:29:37 | 0:29:42 | |
most of Darwin's friends. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:43 | |
It's discussed very extensively by a whole range of different people. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:48 | |
The whole train of animated beings, | 0:29:48 | 0:29:50 | |
from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, | 0:29:50 | 0:29:55 | |
are then to be regarded as a series of advances | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
of the principle of development. | 0:29:58 | 0:30:01 | |
It has pleased providence to arrange | 0:30:01 | 0:30:03 | |
that one species should give birth to another | 0:30:03 | 0:30:06 | |
until the second highest gave birth to man. | 0:30:06 | 0:30:09 | |
The identity of the author, Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist, | 0:30:11 | 0:30:15 | |
was not revealed for another 40 years. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:18 | |
He had feared the inevitable backlash. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:20 | |
In the vanguard of the attack was Darwin's old Cambridge teacher, | 0:30:20 | 0:30:25 | |
the Reverend Adam Sedgwick. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:27 | |
He detected the "serpent coils of false philosophy" | 0:30:27 | 0:30:30 | |
in the book's vision of transmutation. | 0:30:30 | 0:30:33 | |
People came down on it very hard. | 0:30:35 | 0:30:38 | |
His professor Sedgwick here at Cambridge, | 0:30:38 | 0:30:40 | |
referred to it as a filthy abortion, whose head ought to be crushed. | 0:30:40 | 0:30:45 | |
Now of course that's consistent with seeing it as the offspring | 0:30:45 | 0:30:49 | |
of a frail, female mind, this book, this filthy abortion. | 0:30:49 | 0:30:53 | |
That's hard talk from the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, | 0:30:53 | 0:30:56 | |
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. | 0:30:56 | 0:30:58 | |
I cannot but think the work is from a woman's pen. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:03 | |
It's so well dressed and so graceful in its externals. | 0:31:03 | 0:31:08 | |
This mistake was woman's from the first. | 0:31:08 | 0:31:11 | |
She longed for the fruit of the tree of knowledge. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:14 | |
And she must pluck it, right or wrong. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:17 | |
And Sedgwick absolutely loathes Vestiges. | 0:31:17 | 0:31:21 | |
For him as for many evangelical Christians, Vestiges is, which was bound in red, is the scarlet harlot. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:27 | |
It's a book that has the beautiful attraction of a woman. | 0:31:27 | 0:31:31 | |
What you need to do, he says, is rip off the pretty clothes | 0:31:31 | 0:31:34 | |
and reveal underneath the foul mass of corruption within. | 0:31:34 | 0:31:38 | |
If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:44 | |
Religion is a lie, human law is a mass of folly and a base injustice, | 0:31:44 | 0:31:49 | |
morality is moonshine. | 0:31:49 | 0:31:51 | |
Our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen, | 0:31:51 | 0:31:56 | |
and men and women are only better beasts. | 0:31:56 | 0:31:59 | |
And Darwin reads this, as he says, in fear and trembling. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:03 | |
It also, I think, serves a very useful role for Darwin though, | 0:32:03 | 0:32:07 | |
because when he reads the review, | 0:32:07 | 0:32:09 | |
when he looks at what Sedgwick has to say, | 0:32:09 | 0:32:11 | |
in many ways he's able to start ticking off the kinds of things | 0:32:11 | 0:32:14 | |
that he needs to look into, | 0:32:14 | 0:32:16 | |
the kinds of questions he needs to answer, | 0:32:16 | 0:32:18 | |
in order to make sure that his theory is safe, | 0:32:18 | 0:32:20 | |
it has the right kind of armour around it, | 0:32:20 | 0:32:22 | |
so that it can go forward in the world without having | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
the same kind of reaction against it that Vestiges has. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:28 | |
Still reeling from the savage response to Vestiges, | 0:32:31 | 0:32:34 | |
Darwin seems to have gone into a period of self doubt. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:37 | |
His fears of being regarded as a lightweight speculator were possibly | 0:32:37 | 0:32:42 | |
raised by some words of advice from his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker. | 0:32:42 | 0:32:47 | |
Hooker said to him that he thought that no-one had the right | 0:32:47 | 0:32:51 | |
to pronounce on species unless they had examined many. | 0:32:51 | 0:32:55 | |
A throwaway line in a letter from Hooker to his friend, | 0:32:55 | 0:33:01 | |
and yet, clearly a remark | 0:33:01 | 0:33:04 | |
that haunted Darwin, that he knew, absolutely that Hooker was right. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:07 | |
That if anyone was going to believe this enormous claim | 0:33:07 | 0:33:11 | |
that he was going to make, | 0:33:11 | 0:33:12 | |
then he really had to do the examining of many. | 0:33:12 | 0:33:16 | |
He had to really do the work with the microscope | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
and with the dissection tools, and once he'd done that, | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
and once people admired him for the detail of that work, | 0:33:22 | 0:33:25 | |
then he would have a better chance with the big ideal. | 0:33:25 | 0:33:29 | |
Darwin decided to embark on a comprehensive description | 0:33:29 | 0:33:33 | |
of an entire subclass of marine organisms, barnacles. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
It was a project he anticipated would take a matter of months. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
It was to take him eight years. | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
There are two types of barnacles, mainly. There's the coned barnacles. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:48 | |
They're little white volcanic, tiny cones that cover every rock. | 0:33:48 | 0:33:54 | |
Inside the cone there's a little creature, | 0:33:54 | 0:33:58 | |
which is cemented to the rock by its head and which fishes with its feet. | 0:33:58 | 0:34:03 | |
So, when the tide comes in, the feet come out through the little hole, | 0:34:03 | 0:34:08 | |
and there's this wonderful pulsing movement, like feathers almost, | 0:34:08 | 0:34:12 | |
as the feet fish for tiny plankton. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:15 | |
They also, barnacles, the coned barnacles, have the largest penises | 0:34:19 | 0:34:23 | |
proportionate to size in the entire animal kingdom, | 0:34:23 | 0:34:27 | |
so every now and again you can also see, | 0:34:27 | 0:34:30 | |
coming out of one of the tops of these cones, an enormous penis, | 0:34:30 | 0:34:34 | |
which will come out the top and then go in to the top of another valve, | 0:34:34 | 0:34:41 | |
maybe four or five barnacles away. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
So he quite quickly comes to see and express this sense of wonder. | 0:34:44 | 0:34:52 | |
That here they were, seemingly ordinary, you know, | 0:34:52 | 0:34:56 | |
covering every shoreline of the temperate world, | 0:34:56 | 0:35:01 | |
and yet when you go in really, really close, | 0:35:01 | 0:35:04 | |
what seems like a simple organism becomes a very sophisticated one | 0:35:04 | 0:35:08 | |
and you see that pattern over and over again in Darwin's early work, | 0:35:08 | 0:35:12 | |
that sense of, we must stop talking | 0:35:12 | 0:35:15 | |
about higher animals and lower animals. | 0:35:15 | 0:35:17 | |
That actually the lower animals are often very sophisticated, | 0:35:17 | 0:35:22 | |
almost fantastic in the way that they've adapted to their conditions. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:26 | |
You can almost hear him gasp, you know, as he goes further and further in at the beauty of these things. | 0:35:26 | 0:35:33 | |
There was another pay-off. | 0:35:33 | 0:35:35 | |
Darwin's barnacle research relied on people sending him specimens from all over the world. | 0:35:35 | 0:35:41 | |
Downe House developed into the hub of a network of contacts | 0:35:41 | 0:35:45 | |
which would supply vital evidence for writing The Origin Of Species. | 0:35:45 | 0:35:50 | |
Darwin's communication networks are absolutely remarkable. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:53 | |
They're partly a tribute to the sophistication | 0:35:53 | 0:35:58 | |
of the Victorian postal service, | 0:35:58 | 0:35:59 | |
without which most 19th century science would have collapsed. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:03 | |
Pigeon breeders and orchid fanciers, | 0:36:03 | 0:36:06 | |
colonial physicians and Royal Naval officers were badgered | 0:36:06 | 0:36:12 | |
by Darwin from his study in Downe, | 0:36:12 | 0:36:16 | |
so that flowing on to that desk were piles and piles of paper. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:22 | |
It was while he was still laboriously dissecting his way | 0:36:25 | 0:36:28 | |
through hundreds of barnacle specimens | 0:36:28 | 0:36:31 | |
that one more of Darwin's own children was struck down | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
with what is now thought to have been tuberculosis. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:38 | |
When Annie was about nine years old, she began to have tummy troubles, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:43 | |
which isn't surprising in a house | 0:36:43 | 0:36:45 | |
where the father was periodically throwing up in his study | 0:36:45 | 0:36:49 | |
and doing all kinds of odd things to keep himself from becoming violently physically ill. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:53 | |
It was one of the ways one got attention at Downe House, | 0:36:53 | 0:36:57 | |
was to be sick, very sick preferably. | 0:36:57 | 0:36:59 | |
And finally her illness became so acute | 0:36:59 | 0:37:02 | |
that while Emma was seriously pregnant, | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
she was having her ninth child, | 0:37:05 | 0:37:07 | |
Charles put Annie under his own doctor | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
and the doctor immediately diagnosed | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
a grave situation that was bound to get worse | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
and finally over the Easter weekend, she died. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:20 | |
Her eyes sparkled brightly, she often smiled. | 0:37:22 | 0:37:27 | |
Her step was elastic and firm. | 0:37:27 | 0:37:30 | |
She held herself upright and often threw her head backwards | 0:37:30 | 0:37:33 | |
as if she defied the world in her joyousness. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:36 | |
A week after Annie died, this is what's most remarkable, | 0:37:36 | 0:37:41 | |
Charles sat down and in a single draft, you can tell by reading it, | 0:37:41 | 0:37:48 | |
wrote a magnificent threnody for this loved and sorely missed child, | 0:37:48 | 0:37:54 | |
in which he describes Annie's human nature in all of its physicality. | 0:37:54 | 0:38:02 | |
This is not just a struggle for existence | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
in which a vulnerable life is crushed, | 0:38:06 | 0:38:10 | |
this is a loved person who is their offspring. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:14 | |
We have lost the joy of the household | 0:38:17 | 0:38:19 | |
and the solace of our old age. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:21 | |
She must've know how we loved her. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:24 | |
Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still | 0:38:24 | 0:38:29 | |
and shall forever love her dear joyous face, blessings on her. | 0:38:29 | 0:38:35 | |
Annie's death came just three years after Darwin's father had died, an unbeliever. | 0:38:35 | 0:38:40 | |
With his own belief in a Christian God already shaken, | 0:38:40 | 0:38:44 | |
Darwin now severed his ties with traditional faith. | 0:38:44 | 0:38:49 | |
Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, | 0:38:49 | 0:38:52 | |
but it was at last complete. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:55 | |
I indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity can be true, | 0:38:55 | 0:38:58 | |
for if so, the plain language seems to show that men who do not believe will be everlastingly punished. | 0:38:58 | 0:39:08 | |
And this is a damnable doctrine. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:11 | |
There it seems to me is the quintessence | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
of any anger that he felt at Annie's being torn away at Easter, focused into a single moral statement. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:22 | |
And it's the statement of a non believer. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:28 | |
A non Christian, but still a believer in God. | 0:39:28 | 0:39:32 | |
Just a god who will not punish ten year olds. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:36 | |
Death in the war in nature had been the driving force | 0:39:40 | 0:39:43 | |
of Darwin's theory of evolution from the time he read Malthus. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
Eight years after her death, | 0:39:48 | 0:39:50 | |
Darwin would weave his daughter into that vision. | 0:39:50 | 0:39:53 | |
Annie is in chapter three of The Origin Of Species where Darwin talks about the struggle for existence. | 0:39:55 | 0:40:02 | |
And, in that chapter, Darwin, | 0:40:02 | 0:40:05 | |
he's now writing five, six years, seven years after Annie's death. | 0:40:05 | 0:40:11 | |
He describes for us nature as it appears | 0:40:11 | 0:40:15 | |
and then nature how it really is. | 0:40:15 | 0:40:19 | |
He refers to the smiling face of nature. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:21 | |
He refers to the nature that we look out upon | 0:40:21 | 0:40:24 | |
and is so celebrated, the green and pleasant land of England, | 0:40:24 | 0:40:28 | |
the insects flitting through the air, the birds sporting themselves. | 0:40:28 | 0:40:31 | |
We do not see, he says, beneath the surface. | 0:40:31 | 0:40:35 | |
It's a continual state of war. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:38 | |
Under this surface of nature, | 0:40:38 | 0:40:40 | |
the young are dying young | 0:40:40 | 0:40:44 | |
and the rest of the animal life struggles to survive. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:49 | |
And then he says that this struggle for existence is like, | 0:40:53 | 0:40:58 | |
and he uses the old notebook figure, wedges being driven into the face. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:03 | |
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness. | 0:41:06 | 0:41:10 | |
Every single organic being around us may be seen to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers, | 0:41:10 | 0:41:17 | |
that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life, | 0:41:17 | 0:41:20 | |
that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old | 0:41:20 | 0:41:25 | |
during each generation or at recurrent intervals. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:29 | |
The face of nature may be compared to a yielding surface with 10,000 sharp wedges | 0:41:29 | 0:41:35 | |
packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows. | 0:41:35 | 0:41:38 | |
Sometimes one wedge being struck and then another with greater force. | 0:41:38 | 0:41:43 | |
And there's this nature with a smiling face | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
and then there are wedges being driven... | 0:41:49 | 0:41:52 | |
It's the most horridly anthropomorphic figure. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:57 | |
When I first read that, after studying Annie's death, | 0:41:57 | 0:42:00 | |
I thought, "Could it be her face?" | 0:42:00 | 0:42:02 | |
And, of course, when you read his account of her, a week after she died, | 0:42:02 | 0:42:07 | |
over and over again, it's her brilliance face, | 0:42:07 | 0:42:10 | |
her beaming face, her smiles that he remembers | 0:42:10 | 0:42:13 | |
with the picture of the daguerreotype sat next to him. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:16 | |
In writing this chapter in the struggle for existence in The Origin of Species | 0:42:17 | 0:42:23 | |
he's portraying Annie's fate in falling victim | 0:42:23 | 0:42:27 | |
to a remorseless struggle that gives rise to higher forms of life. | 0:42:27 | 0:42:34 | |
She suffered at Easter that others may live. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:37 | |
Darwin now lost himself in barnacles again, taking three more years to finish his huge study. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:49 | |
At last he now felt able to return to his big theory but, for some time, | 0:42:49 | 0:42:54 | |
something had been nagging him. | 0:42:54 | 0:42:56 | |
How did a group, like barnacles, evolve consisting as they did of | 0:42:56 | 0:43:01 | |
thousands of slightly different species, many living side by side? | 0:43:01 | 0:43:06 | |
Was his idea of natural selection enough by itself | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
to explain the extraordinary diversity of living things? | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
At that time, I overlooked one problem of great importance. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:18 | |
The problem is the tendency in organic beings | 0:43:18 | 0:43:21 | |
descended from the same stock to diverge in character | 0:43:21 | 0:43:25 | |
as they become modified. | 0:43:25 | 0:43:27 | |
There's a place in the autobiography where he talks about | 0:43:27 | 0:43:32 | |
the moment of discovery | 0:43:32 | 0:43:33 | |
of the principle of divergence. | 0:43:33 | 0:43:36 | |
You can see a...small piece of paper among many | 0:43:36 | 0:43:40 | |
that are dated the same date, November '54, | 0:43:40 | 0:43:43 | |
in which his handwriting is extremely jagged | 0:43:43 | 0:43:47 | |
in pencil. | 0:43:47 | 0:43:49 | |
And I can remember the very spot in the road, | 0:43:49 | 0:43:52 | |
whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me. | 0:43:52 | 0:43:57 | |
The solution, as I do believe, is that the modified offspring | 0:43:57 | 0:44:03 | |
of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted | 0:44:03 | 0:44:07 | |
to the many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature. | 0:44:07 | 0:44:12 | |
What Darwin realised was that the more individuals differed from each other, | 0:44:12 | 0:44:16 | |
the better able they would be to take advantage of the particular environment in which they lived. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:21 | |
Just as importantly, | 0:44:21 | 0:44:23 | |
species would diverge even more as they adapted to each other. | 0:44:23 | 0:44:28 | |
This interdependence had a parallel | 0:44:28 | 0:44:30 | |
in what would eventually become the Victorian factory system. | 0:44:30 | 0:44:34 | |
He uses, I would call it more like the Adam Smith phase | 0:44:34 | 0:44:38 | |
of Darwin's encounter with the political economists, | 0:44:38 | 0:44:41 | |
because, you know, Adam Smith had this idea of the division of labour, | 0:44:41 | 0:44:45 | |
that you can produce more wealth if you have people who are specialists, | 0:44:45 | 0:44:50 | |
you know, instead of everybody being a farmer. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:53 | |
If some people become tailors and some people become leather workers, | 0:44:53 | 0:44:58 | |
you can produce more wealth. | 0:44:58 | 0:45:00 | |
Darwin uses the essentially the same idea | 0:45:00 | 0:45:02 | |
and applies it to these little plots of ground | 0:45:02 | 0:45:06 | |
and his view is that more life can be sustained | 0:45:06 | 0:45:10 | |
on a square plot if the organisms use different parts of the environment. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:17 | |
If you think about this in terms of this kind of lawn plot experiment. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:22 | |
You've got grasses and other plants growing and its roots might go down to a certain depth, | 0:45:22 | 0:45:27 | |
so it can take nutrients from that level, | 0:45:27 | 0:45:30 | |
but another might grow to a deeper depth, | 0:45:30 | 0:45:32 | |
You can sustain more life that way than if they are all growing to the same depth. | 0:45:32 | 0:45:37 | |
If they were all one kind. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:39 | |
And he's seeing that as a process of divergence. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:43 | |
Darwin set up innovative trials to test out his ideas. | 0:45:45 | 0:45:49 | |
Leaving a few square feet of his lawn unmown for three years, | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
he regularly noted the change in composition in the struggle for life | 0:45:52 | 0:45:57 | |
among 20 plant species, recording 11 winners and nine losers. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:02 | |
In Great Puckland's meadow | 0:46:02 | 0:46:04 | |
he counted 142 different species, the first ever survey of its kind. | 0:46:04 | 0:46:10 | |
The chalk fields and banks around Downe support | 0:46:10 | 0:46:14 | |
as many as 40 different species per square metre. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:18 | |
An abundance explained by natural selection and the principle of divergence. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:25 | |
And his applications of Adam Smith's ideas of capitalist manufacture | 0:46:34 | 0:46:38 | |
were not lost on the inventor of the idea of class struggle, Karl Marx. | 0:46:38 | 0:46:43 | |
Darwin discovers among the beasts and plants the society of England, with its division of labour, | 0:46:43 | 0:46:51 | |
competition, opening up of new markets, inventions | 0:46:51 | 0:46:56 | |
and the Malthusian struggle for existence. | 0:46:56 | 0:47:00 | |
And certainly Darwin, when he looks at those tangled banks, | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
where new varieties | 0:47:04 | 0:47:07 | |
and eventually new species are preferentially being produced | 0:47:07 | 0:47:12 | |
by competition and the physiological division of labour, | 0:47:12 | 0:47:16 | |
Darwin calls those "manufactories of species." | 0:47:16 | 0:47:19 | |
The very phrase "factory system" is about 30 years old | 0:47:21 | 0:47:24 | |
and it had first been applied to this new system of economy, | 0:47:24 | 0:47:28 | |
based on industrial production, | 0:47:28 | 0:47:31 | |
ferocious division of labour, automation and mechanisation. | 0:47:31 | 0:47:35 | |
Now Darwin was using those principles | 0:47:35 | 0:47:39 | |
to try and make sense of what was happening | 0:47:39 | 0:47:43 | |
when competition was particularly vigorous | 0:47:43 | 0:47:46 | |
and therefore adaptations peculiarly intensely favoured. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:50 | |
It was at this time that Darwin began to feel confident enough to come out in public with his theory. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:58 | |
He started to prepare a master work where every possible criticism could | 0:47:58 | 0:48:02 | |
be anticipated and every assertion backed up by evidence. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:05 | |
He wanted to win over his Victorian readers | 0:48:05 | 0:48:09 | |
with striking and familiar examples. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:12 | |
Understanding their fascination with domestic animals, | 0:48:12 | 0:48:16 | |
he chose a particularly popular species, the pigeon, | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
in order to make an analogy. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:21 | |
Fancy pigeon breeding by artificial selection | 0:48:21 | 0:48:24 | |
showed how natural selection worked in the wild. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:27 | |
He was especially concerned with just the sheer diversity of pigeons, | 0:48:27 | 0:48:32 | |
all the different forms, the amazing types of pigeons | 0:48:32 | 0:48:36 | |
and how those related then to a single ancestor. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:39 | |
On the one hand you had fantails, | 0:48:39 | 0:48:41 | |
really beautiful birds with beautiful feathers | 0:48:41 | 0:48:45 | |
down to the almond tumblers, very small birds with beaks so small | 0:48:45 | 0:48:48 | |
that they could hardly get out of their egg shells. | 0:48:48 | 0:48:51 | |
Carrier pigeons were very large, had these kind of big ugly beaks. | 0:48:51 | 0:48:56 | |
They showed this incredible diversity. | 0:48:56 | 0:48:58 | |
How could they all come from one ancestor? | 0:48:58 | 0:49:02 | |
Just as pigeon breeders bred different varieties, | 0:49:02 | 0:49:05 | |
so nature acted in the same way over longer periods of time, | 0:49:05 | 0:49:09 | |
naturally selecting different varieties, | 0:49:09 | 0:49:11 | |
each passing on their own inherited characteristics. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:15 | |
So in some sense what Darwin was saying was just as the pigeon fanciers had a fancy, | 0:49:15 | 0:49:20 | |
nature had a fancy and that fancy | 0:49:20 | 0:49:22 | |
was to produce these incredible varieties, | 0:49:22 | 0:49:25 | |
all these different kind of forms | 0:49:25 | 0:49:27 | |
and types of animals and plants that we see around us. | 0:49:27 | 0:49:30 | |
That diversity could actually be explained by looking at something as simple as pigeons. | 0:49:30 | 0:49:37 | |
Pigeons were to be one example amongst many | 0:49:38 | 0:49:41 | |
in a work that might have amounted to three heavy volumes, | 0:49:41 | 0:49:45 | |
had Darwin not been interrupted. | 0:49:45 | 0:49:48 | |
My plans were overthrown. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:49 | |
For early in the summer of 1858 Mr Wallace, | 0:49:49 | 0:49:53 | |
who was then in the Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay | 0:49:53 | 0:49:56 | |
on the Tendency Of Varieties To Depart Indefinitely From The Original Type, | 0:49:56 | 0:50:02 | |
and this essay contained exactly the same theory as mine. | 0:50:02 | 0:50:06 | |
Alfred Russel Wallace had been supplying Darwin, and other rich collectors | 0:50:13 | 0:50:17 | |
with animal and plant specimens from the Indonesian archipelago. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:20 | |
Now, Darwin, one has to say, was a toff, there's no question of it. | 0:50:20 | 0:50:25 | |
Wallace was exactly the opposite. | 0:50:25 | 0:50:27 | |
He had a few years of schooling, he was kicked out, | 0:50:27 | 0:50:29 | |
and he went to the university of life, that's all he could afford, | 0:50:29 | 0:50:33 | |
and he decided to set up shop as a collector of animals | 0:50:33 | 0:50:35 | |
and he had an extraordinarily adventurous life. | 0:50:35 | 0:50:38 | |
He went to Indonesia and had a tremendously challenging and difficult time. | 0:50:38 | 0:50:43 | |
I mean, he was living out in the jungle for year after year after year | 0:50:43 | 0:50:46 | |
and then suddenly one day, he had a good idea. | 0:50:46 | 0:50:49 | |
Like Darwin, | 0:50:49 | 0:50:51 | |
Wallace had been struck by Thomas Malthus's essay on population. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:56 | |
His theory came to him while he was lying incapacitated with malaria struggling for life. | 0:50:56 | 0:51:01 | |
So he wrote with a certain amount of trepidation to the grand | 0:51:01 | 0:51:05 | |
and already famous fellow of the Royal Society, Charles Darwin, | 0:51:05 | 0:51:09 | |
with this idea and, of course, it landed on Darwin's breakfast table, | 0:51:09 | 0:51:13 | |
here in Downe, with the force of an hand grenade. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. | 0:51:19 | 0:51:23 | |
Though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated | 0:51:23 | 0:51:29 | |
as all the labour consists in the application of the theory. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:33 | |
Darwin was distraught. Also his daughter, Henrietta, was sick | 0:51:35 | 0:51:39 | |
and his infant son, Charles, gravely ill. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
He put his trust in his friends Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell, | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
to decide the fate of his theory. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:49 | |
With Wallace far away in Indonesia, they resolved to have papers | 0:51:49 | 0:51:53 | |
by both naturalists presented | 0:51:53 | 0:51:55 | |
at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. | 0:51:55 | 0:51:58 | |
Remarkably, the joint presentation stirred up little interest. | 0:51:58 | 0:52:03 | |
Darwin too was absent from the event. | 0:52:03 | 0:52:06 | |
His infant son had died. | 0:52:06 | 0:52:09 | |
Once recovered, he resolved | 0:52:09 | 0:52:11 | |
to publish his book as soon as possible. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:15 | |
The great thing that Wallace did, I think in many ways, was to make | 0:52:15 | 0:52:19 | |
sure that Darwin basically finished his book and wrote it in such a way | 0:52:19 | 0:52:23 | |
that it was readable to a much wider audience than it would have otherwise been. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:27 | |
Darwin was basically writing a three volume treatise on natural selection, | 0:52:27 | 0:52:32 | |
with all the evidence, pigeons, bees, ants, everything, all put in. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:37 | |
There was going to be a chapter on man, it was everything. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:40 | |
What Wallace did would galvanise Darwin. | 0:52:40 | 0:52:42 | |
He recaptured much of the energy he had when he was working | 0:52:42 | 0:52:45 | |
in the Beagle voyage and he suddenly started writing with a real passion. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:49 | |
In September 1858, I set to work on the strong advice of Lyell and Hooker | 0:52:51 | 0:52:57 | |
to prepare a volume on the transmutation of species. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
It cost me 13 months' and ten days' hard labour. | 0:53:00 | 0:53:04 | |
It was published under the title of | 0:53:04 | 0:53:07 | |
The Origin Of Species in November 1859. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:11 | |
Darwin was to describe his book of nearly 500 pages | 0:53:12 | 0:53:16 | |
as one long argument. | 0:53:16 | 0:53:18 | |
He gently and tentatively coaches his reader | 0:53:18 | 0:53:21 | |
through a developing series of observations and examples. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:25 | |
Throughout the same pattern is repeated | 0:53:25 | 0:53:29 | |
of moving from specific details to grand overarching conclusions. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:35 | |
I often think that the theory of evolution of natural selection | 0:53:35 | 0:53:39 | |
is a bit like the grammar of biology. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:42 | |
You can't learn a language without understanding at least something about its grammar, | 0:53:42 | 0:53:47 | |
and you couldn't be a biologist before 1859 | 0:53:47 | 0:53:49 | |
because none of the facts seem to fit together. | 0:53:49 | 0:53:52 | |
You could be studying flowers, or earthworms, | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
you could be collecting birds on the Galapagos but they were sort of independent discoveries. | 0:53:55 | 0:54:00 | |
But suddenly The Origin Of Species made it all make sense. | 0:54:00 | 0:54:04 | |
It gave you a framework onto which you could bolt all these facts. | 0:54:04 | 0:54:08 | |
So it really was, and still is, | 0:54:08 | 0:54:10 | |
the central book of the science of biology. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:13 | |
The book appealed to a new breed of professional men of science who were prepared to accept | 0:54:16 | 0:54:21 | |
that all nature was governed by fixed laws, The Origin Of Species | 0:54:21 | 0:54:25 | |
as much as the motions of the planets. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:28 | |
But Darwin had invested so many years developing the book | 0:54:28 | 0:54:31 | |
because he also hoped to win over his old Anglican mentors. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:35 | |
On The Origin Of Species only twice refers to the origins of mankind | 0:54:38 | 0:54:44 | |
but for old naturalists, | 0:54:44 | 0:54:47 | |
such as his respected teacher Professor Adam Sedgwick, | 0:54:47 | 0:54:52 | |
the implications were obvious and odious. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:55 | |
Adam Sedgwick wrote him a letter. | 0:54:56 | 0:54:59 | |
This old man sat down and sorrowfully | 0:54:59 | 0:55:03 | |
told his geological student | 0:55:03 | 0:55:07 | |
how much he disapproved of this book, The Origin Of Species, | 0:55:07 | 0:55:14 | |
which in places Sedgwick said, | 0:55:14 | 0:55:17 | |
"attempts to break the link | 0:55:17 | 0:55:20 | |
"between the world of nature and the reality of God." | 0:55:20 | 0:55:24 | |
I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:30 | |
Parts of it I admired greatly, | 0:55:30 | 0:55:33 | |
parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore, | 0:55:33 | 0:55:37 | |
parts I read with absolute sorrow | 0:55:37 | 0:55:40 | |
because I think them utterly false and grievously mischievous. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:45 | |
Sedgwick hoped that they would see each other in heaven | 0:55:47 | 0:55:51 | |
and that said it all, didn't it? | 0:55:51 | 0:55:53 | |
Sedgwick realised perfectly well what was at stake | 0:55:53 | 0:55:56 | |
and what Darwin himself always knew was at stake. | 0:55:56 | 0:55:59 | |
Sedgwick saw the fabric tottering and falling. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:04 | |
That is the fabric of salvation and eternal life. | 0:56:04 | 0:56:07 | |
If you make a man out of a monkey that all comes down. | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
The family was really quite upset about this. I think it's probably | 0:56:14 | 0:56:18 | |
for Darwin the most upsetting letter he gets about The Origin Of Species | 0:56:18 | 0:56:22 | |
because it represents the kind of, on some level, | 0:56:22 | 0:56:25 | |
his failure in a certain way to be able to reach | 0:56:25 | 0:56:27 | |
the kind of person that Sedgwick actually was. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
And it's particularly upsetting, I think also for Emma, | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
because Sedgwick is somebody that she particularly admired and whose views she respected quite heavily. | 0:56:33 | 0:56:40 | |
And so there's quite a lot of sense that there's upset in the household | 0:56:40 | 0:56:45 | |
as a result of Sedgwick's intervention in the debate. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:48 | |
Whatever the personal set-backs, Emma steadfastly supported Charles | 0:56:50 | 0:56:54 | |
throughout the years of controversy that followed | 0:56:54 | 0:56:57 | |
enabling him to write nine more books, | 0:56:57 | 0:57:00 | |
despite further breakdowns and mounting exhaustion. | 0:57:00 | 0:57:03 | |
But he was later to call The Origin Of Species | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
the chief work of his life. | 0:57:06 | 0:57:08 | |
The book has never been out of print. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:11 | |
In it he immortalised a chalk bank at Downe to illustrate | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
the extraordinary diversity and interdependence of living beings | 0:57:14 | 0:57:19 | |
that result from the process of natural selection. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:22 | |
It might also serve as a metaphor for his struggle to write the book. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:26 | |
And, of course, the entangled bank that he describes at the end is also a vision of his own life, you know, | 0:57:28 | 0:57:34 | |
the entangled bank that he sees, central to his vision of nature | 0:57:34 | 0:57:38 | |
is also the world that he's lived in. | 0:57:38 | 0:57:40 | |
There's a sense of worship in that, | 0:57:40 | 0:57:43 | |
a worship of nature as he sees it fully. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:46 | |
That he accepts the war, the destruction, the famine, | 0:57:46 | 0:57:49 | |
the pain, the suffering, the loss of children | 0:57:49 | 0:57:53 | |
but nonetheless you put all of that together, | 0:57:53 | 0:57:56 | |
the death and the suffering and the beauty and the miracle of it | 0:57:56 | 0:58:01 | |
and you end with wonder. | 0:58:01 | 0:58:03 | |
There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers | 0:58:07 | 0:58:11 | |
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one, | 0:58:11 | 0:58:15 | |
and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along, | 0:58:15 | 0:58:19 | |
according to the fixed laws of gravity, | 0:58:19 | 0:58:22 | |
from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful | 0:58:22 | 0:58:26 | |
and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. | 0:58:26 | 0:58:30 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:52 | 0:58:56 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:56 | 0:59:00 |