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Darwin and evolution

Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth - and considering his work: Darwin and evolution.

Why is Charles Darwin commonly held up as the father of the theory of evolution? Ben Valsler spoke to Darwin biographer Jim Moore, and he began by asking him what drove Darwin to formulate the concept of evolution in the face of what was, initially, profound religious and political hostility to his ideas.

Jim Moore: Darwin was driven by different things at different times, just like all of us. He was complex; he changed; he became more conservative generally speaking as he got older, but if you mean what drove Darwin to become an evolutionist, one has to say it has to be something as powerful as the forces that were ranged against evolutionists.

When Darwin is less than 30 years old, he comes back from travelling around the world – most of it was on land, not at sea – but he gets home, and within weeks, probably a few months, he’s become an evolutionist. Why does he do that? It’s a bad career move, and in our new book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and I say that that powerful drive that overcame the social stigma of being an evolutionist was Darwin’s radical belief in the unity of all life.

That common descent unites every species, the human race as well as all races of animals and plants, and that leads him to a powerful image that was part of the ideological foundations of the anti-slavery movement. The notion of a family tree of humanity for traditional Christians rooted in Adam and Eve as the father and mother of humankind. Darwin takes it a step further and unites everyone and says that it’s our arrogance to believe that we’re not related to animals; it’s the arrogance of the slaveholder lording over his slaves whom he likes to regard as another species.

Charles Darwin. Image: Jupiterimages Corporation.

Ben Valsler: This may well have been the driving force but still, it was a long time before he published. It was a long time before these ideas actually made it out there. Was there a tempering force as well that made him look for all the right evidence and made him make sure he could prove this before he would publish?

Jim: Darwin kept his thoughts to himself to begin with. He was in the process of becoming involved in the Royal Society as secretary of the Geological Society of London. He was welcomed to the inner sanctum of elite natural history. His sponsors were Cambridge clergymen, professors; he had a grant from the Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, a huge amount of money to publish his Beagle research. He was a young man on the make. He was pushing all the right buttons, he was going all the right places, and yet he carried this terrible secret in his private notebooks. He needed a theory, and he began calling his speculations ‘my theory.’

That was his project, ‘my theory,’ and towards the end of 1838 he works out what we now call natural selection. By 1839, when he’s getting married and having children, he’s developed that, and he knows within three years – he leaves London, he takes shelter in the countryside – he knows he’s onto something really big. It’s going to change the course of the history of science if he can convince people.

Now, at that stage you don’t go public. You take every precaution that’s necessary to convince people beforehand that what you carry with you is true. It’s not disreputable; it’s the answer to the mystery of the diversity of life on earth.

So, he commits himself for the next 17 years, that’s sort of 20 years in all since he devises natural selection, to answering in advance every conceivable objection that the heavyweights of science in his day could bring against what he’s doing, and that leads him into huge research projects. And finally he gets around to putting pen to paper and he plans a huge book, maybe a half million words in three volumes which no one would read, and in the middle of all of that, you know, he gets outed by this guy named Wallace, everyone knows this story, Darwin has to condense his work into something which he entitles On the Origin of Species.

Ben: Do you think the pressure of having these other younger researchers formulating very, very similar theories based on very similar principles, Wallace was looking at series of islands much like Darwin had, do you think this forced him to make some concessions in his work?

Jim: Darwin was not aware that Wallace was working on a theory, until the paper arrived in June 1858. Darwin felt safe in his non-competitive ecological niche as a theoriser of evolution. He knew that all the other theorisers were discredited or spoke ill of. He wasn’t like them. He wasn’t telling anybody what he was like. He still believed he had an inside track on natural selection.

Now, what did he do with that theory once he knew that Wallace was onto the same thing? He believed Wallace was onto the same thing. Darwin read the paper in haste; we can all see now that they are not talking about the same thing in the same way – Wallace rejects the selection analogy for example. Absolutely basic analogy with domestic animal breeding, Wallace absolutely rejects it, always rejects it. So there’s a fundamental difference between Darwin and Wallace to begin with.

I can’t see that Darwin gives up anything. I’d have to think about it for a while before I gave you a technical answer, but it seems to be that what Wallace says and does over the next 10 to 15 years makes Darwin more attached to what he always thought. Wallace did push him hard, and Darwin said once, “It terrifies me to disagree with you,” and that was public hyperbolae, but this unprepossessing sort of guy, who left school when he was 13, he didn’t go to Cambridge. I mean he would have, Wallace would have joined The Open University and he’d have got a fine PhD, had there been an Open University in 1840.

This was an incredibly bright and underused talent, you know, and Darwin knew that. You know, they were socially chalk and cheese, and yet this guy was dorking him, and Darwin took preventative measures, hedging about his theories to make sure, obvious example is sexual selection, Darwin is so goaded by Wallace, because Wallace doesn’t believe that male competition and female choice causes sexual dimorphism in nature.

Darwin expands his work on sexual selection so two thirds of his book, on ‘The Descent of Man’, and Selection in Relation to Sex is the rest of the title, two thirds of that book is about birds and bees and pigeons and furry mammals before he ever gets to humans. Typical Darwin, he has to do the whole panoply of nature to prove that sexual selection is right and (brackets) Wallace is wrong.

Ben: And finally, what was it about Darwin that means that he stands out now? There were other people researching similar things that may not have hit exactly the same theory, but Darwin really was the man that stands out as being the father of evolution.

Jim: Evolution needs a father, as Steve Jones would say. Newton is pictured by Blake’s geometer outside the British library on Euston Road - unfairly perhaps. You think of Einstein. You think of Einstein as a brain, you know. You might think of Freud as being something really slippery. But Darwin’s a grandpa! He has a beard. He has a big family. He’s wealthy. He lives in the country. He’s contented. He cut the image of what it was like to be a gentleman of science in his day, and he still does.

Darwin is cuddly. Apart from the fact that this old man is not reliable with children because he teaches them falsehoods, some people say, this old gent is like anybody’s grandpa. You could really warm to the guy.

Now I’ve studied Darwin for many, many, many years, and I’m not particularly enamoured of him. The more I’ve got to know him, I suppose the more I’ve got to know anybody, the less I’ve been enamoured of him.

Listen to the whole programme, originally broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live, March 2009.

Find out more

Explore the reality behind the man and his theories: Darwin

Watch Jim Moore talking about his discovery of Darwin’s motivation

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am interested in the value of architecture and public art to the historian, but I also have a special place reserved in my imagination for that curious outcrop of eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture – the folly. Conforming to no especial architectural style, these were often buildings that had no discernible use and were erected either for curiosity value, to display their creator’s wealth, or merely as Georgian eye candy. Many have been lost over the years, but a goodly number still remain, mostly crumbling away in the estates of country houses and paying tribute to the strength of the ‘polite’ style in Hanoverian Britain. If a chance ever presents itself to visit a folly, it is rare for me to pass it up.

So, when it transpired that a generally forgotten (and determinedly locked-up) nineteenth century example – Tarner Folly – was being opened up for the Brighton Festival, I had to take a look. Not only that, but it was also to house an innovative piece of public art called ‘Path of the Echo’, which endeavoured to exploit the unique acoustics of the folly’s inside chamber.

Tarner Folly is a small, flint-studded tower, half concealed by foliage, that sits in the corner of a children’s play area, sandwiched between Kemptown and Hanover on the east side of Brighton. It has not been opened for quite some years, which is a shame because such things get forgotten all too easily. There is a question as to whether it can genuinely be described as a folly, since it appears to have been built as a lookout tower and local myths abound that it concealed the entrance to a tunnel that led to the shore (perhaps suggestive of a smuggling operation). Frankly, I’d say that its correct categorisation is really more a matter for the folly anorak, if such people exist.

Tarner Folly.

However, an enterprising artist had managed to persuade the city’s council to open up the folly for the festival in order to house an experiment that could well be described as an attempt to forge a symbiotic relationship between public art and architectural history. Inside, I discovered, sat a rather ingenious art installation. The artist, Mark Mitchell (no relation), demonstrated that by pulling various ropes and cranks, the apparatus would play a variety of string and percussive sounds, which would echo around the chamber. The installation was almost entirely constructed from ‘found material’ – a admirable recycling effort – although I was told that, in fact, Mark had liberated his flat-mate’s wok for part of the mechanism!

The 'Path of the Echo' installation.

As an exercise attempting to draw in two distinct audiences – the historical community and the artistic one – I thought that the installation worked marvellously well. The trouble with such experiments, though, is that they can be somewhat short-lived if funds of some description are not forthcoming. Thankfully, Mark and the Friends of Tarner (a local historical society) have come together in an attempt to keep the tower open. The idea is to curate the folly as a space for other exhibits, which might be generated by other artists through workshops with local community groups and schools. To bring the tower up to standards of public safety, however, requires funds in the region of £30,000, for which a bid to the lottery heritage fund is being prepared. I can only hope that these efforts to rehabilitate the folly as a valuable piece of history and a unique art-space are successful, since even in straitened times society needs its circuses as well as its bread. Besides, there seems something curiously apt about melding together public art and social history in this fashion. The folly builders of the Georgian age had a far more limited audience in mind, but they too were often inspired to construct their idiosyncratic monuments by a desire to create a dramatic talking-point, an aspiration that seems wholly reflected in contemporary public art.

Taking it further

If the above blog has caught your imagination, you may also find the following resources from The Open University interesting:

High Street History

Explore the hidden corners of your high street and see how history is buried in the everyday environment with our interactive high street history feature.

Learning Space: Brighton Pavilion

On the other hand, if you’re interested in the history of Brighton, then the OU offers you this free Open Learn resource on the Brighton Pavilion – which perhaps could even be called a folly itself!

Related courses from The Open University:

Heritage, whose heritage?

Who decides what should be preserved from the past as our heritage? Who is this heritage for and how should it be presented and explained? How can I engage actively with my heritage and have an impact on it? This course endeavours to answer these questions and to engage with current debates on the preservation of the past.

Art of the twentieth century

If you are drawn to art history more generally, this wide-ranging course discusses developments in the recent past and includes study of all the major twentieth century artistic movements.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

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I have periodically been harping on about the great benefits of studying history in these blogs – and I stick by all of them. Perhaps, though, I haven’t been quite so clear about the disadvantages that sometimes accompany being an historian.

In the past few years, for example, I have been experiencing a certain level of minor social embarrassment when watching plays at the theatre. Not always – I stress – and not caused either by any repellent physiological problem. It occurs solely when I am watching a play written at some time before the last decade or so, and it generally becomes more acute the further back in time the piece was composed.

And the simple fact is that I laugh (or, on one occasion, gasped) when practically nobody else in the audience is laughing (or gasping). This is, I assure you, no inexplicable nervous tic, but rather is entirely down to my profession. Because the thing is that I’m able to contextualize the writing within the period in which it was composed, as I suppose relatively few of the audience can. At The Importance of Being Earnest, this exchange (amongst others) between Jack Worthing and Lady Bracknell struck me – and no-one else – as splendidly ticklish:

Lady B: What are your politics?
Jack: Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

"Hahaha," I laughed, amid the silence. Thinking: "That would have been very funny in 1895." Later, however, I was mortified to imagine my fellow audience members wondering of each other who the bloke with the inappropriate cackle was.

This was not a one-off, however, as I have also descended into solo guffaws at The Revenger’s Tragedy, HMS Pinafore, and The Cherry Orchard. And whilst it helps that all of the above (yes, even the Chekhov) have comic moments, that advantage is largely cancelled out if one laughs at the "unfunny’"bits.

Man laughing.
[image by Thomas Hawk, some rights reserved]

At a Shakespeare play this is not quite such a trial. An unaccompanied chuckle at Shakespeare is more like boasting to the audience. As if to say, "I understand the complex language here, that you – poor sap – do not." When the language is much simpler, much more akin to how we speak in the twenty-first century, the solo giggler is immediately marked out as an idiot.

All the same, I wouldn’t be without the understanding that underpins my social faux pas. It has enriched my enjoyment of all art forms hugely. This is not merely a matter of being the jovial twit at the theatre: I could say the same of various poems, songs, paintings, films, or novels. The essential point is that it is history that has opened up such things for me. It is just regrettable that it can cause social side effects of such a laughable kind. 

Taking it further

• The arts past and present
• Film and television history
• Shakespeare: text and performance 
• Repetition and Deviation
  
  
   

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent seventeen years teaching history in higher education - the last fifteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he is working on the new history MA, and tutors on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university's academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Subscribe to Stuart Mitchell's posts