Charles and Emma (22 page)

 

Using birds as an example, Charles showed that in nature, if every egg hatched and every fledgling survived, populations would grow too big: “Suppose in a certain spot there are eight pairs of birds, and that only four pairs of them annually (including double hatches) rear only four young, and that these go on rearing their young at the same rate, then at the end of seven years (a short life, excluding violent deaths, for any bird) there will be 2048 birds, instead of the original sixteen.” But bird populations do not explode. What happens, instead, is a struggle for existence, with slight variations in the birds giving some advantages over others.

On the same day that baby Charles was being put into the ground, the members of the Linnaean Society heard his father's words:

 

Now, can it be doubted, from the struggle each individual has to obtain subsistence, that any minute variation in structure, habits, or instincts, adapting that individual better to the new conditions, would tell upon its vigour and health? In the struggle it would have a better chance of surviving; and those of its offspring which inherited the variation, be it ever so slight, would also have a better chance. Yearly more are bred than can survive; the smallest grain in the balance, in the long run, must tell on which death shall fall, and which shall survive.

 

Charles had figured out, looking at the finches and mocking birds from the Galapagos all those years ago, that certain variations helped the birds survive. The small variations that caused individual birds to survive would be passed down to their offspring, creating—eventually—new, separate species. The same thing happened with dogs and foxes, with ferns and flowers, with all living things.

The survival of a species also depended upon how successful males and females were in reproducing their lines. Three of Charles's children had not survived. But seven had; some of them, he hoped, would reproduce.

Since survival in nature depended on reproduction, courtship was crucial. Charles wrote about “the struggle of the males for the females. These struggles are generally decided by the law of battle, but in the case of birds, apparently, by the charms of their song, by their beauty or their power of courtship, as in the dancing rock-thrush of Guiana. The most vigorous and healthy males, implying perfect adaptation, must generally gain the victory in their contests.” He had some vigorous and healthy males left in his five sons.

In this paper, he didn't come right out and say that God had nothing to do with the process, but he knew that the people listening would hear that between the lines: “An organic being, like the woodpecker or mistletoe, may thus come to be adapted to a score of contingences—natural selection accumulating those slight variations in all parts of its structure, which are in any way useful to it during any part of its life.” In other words, species were constantly adapting. This was the moment he had been scared of for so many years—his theory made public. He wasn't there in the great meeting room to see the reaction of his peers. He was home with his family.

And in the Linnaean Society meeting room, Charles's and Wallace's papers were met with—no reaction. There were, if not literal, then theoretical yawns. No one seemed to understand the import of what the two men were saying.

 

At home the next day, Charles focused on getting all the children who were well enough—that is, all but Etty—out of Down and away from the scarlet fever. He had to protect his
offspring. He and Emma arranged for her sister Elizabeth to take them into her house in Hartfield, Sussex, south of Down (Elizabeth lived in a house next to their other sister, Charlotte). Etty was too ill to move, so until she was stronger Charles and Emma stayed with her.

When Charles received word of the reaction at the meeting, he was relieved. He would edit and polish his paper, making it ready for publication. And then maybe he would write his book, finally.

Once Etty was well enough to be moved, Charles and Emma took the whole family for a holiday on the Isle of Wight. While there, Charles got his paper ready for the Linnaean Society's publication of the proceedings; both his and Wallace's papers would be published at the same time. Meanwhile, Hooker wrote to Wallace and told him what they had done. Charles was seriously worried about Wallace's reaction. He was worried about the reaction when the papers were printed, as well. But neither reaction was earth-shattering. Wallace was very generous and understanding; he gave Darwin priority. He even later wrote a book about the theory, which he called “Darwinism.”

As to the reaction of the members of the Linnaean Society—only a few who read the papers had any idea what impact the theory would make. The firestorm Charles had long feared had not come to pass.

So by the time he got back home in August, Charles was well into the writing of his book. He would call it not
Natural Selection
as he once planned, but
On the Origin of Species.
He was committed, but he was still scared. And sick. He wrote to Hooker how ill writing the book was making him: “My God how I long for my stomach's sake to wash my hands of it—for at least one long spell.” But he kept working on the book, veering
away from it sometimes to help Frank with his beetles. Frank recently had started collecting them, and Charles's old interest was renewed. He wrote to Fox that his son had “caught the other day
Brachinus crepitans…
My Blood boiled with old ardour when he caught a
Licinus
—a prize unknown to me.”

The biggest and most difficult task he had with the book was to make it short enough to be readable. He called the book his “Abstract,” for it was only a fraction of what he had written over the years. He knew that it is often harder to write short than to write long. (Across the ocean, the essayist Henry David Thoreau had written to a friend just the year before, “Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”)

Charles worked harder than he ever had. He sat not at a desk, but in his armchair, which had been raised high to accommodate his long legs, with a board across his knees to write on. He was surrounded by his years of notes and research. The children ran in and out, as usual, and he took breaks for reading the mail, striding around the Sandwalk, listening to Emma read, playing backgammon, and writing letters. But he made great progress quickly. After all the hesitation, all the delay, he finished the book he had been sitting on for more than fifteen years in just thirteen months and ten days.

 

Chapter 26

Dependent on Each Other in So Complex a Manner

 

Then how should I manage all my business if I were
obliged to go every day walking with my wife?

—C
HARLES
, 1838,
CONTEMPLATING WHETHER TO MARRY

 

I
n 1859, when Charles finished the manuscript for his book, he gave it to Emma. He also sent it to some of his scientific friends, but he was in many ways most interested in Emma's reaction. She was a representative of the religious world he was up against—he was sleeping with the enemy! And she told things as she saw them.

He respected Emma's mind and trusted her implicitly. She was brilliant, had been an avid reader her whole life, and she was a terrific literary critic, editor, and proofreader. Emma helped him with all his papers and books, and this one was the most important. Charles wanted
The Origin of Species
to be simple enough for a nonscientist to read and understand, as well as accurate and cogently argued enough to convince a scientist. His scientific friends would speak to the latter
question. But Emma was his first and most important nonscientific reader.

In fact, Emma was not all that interested in science. She was only interested in Charles's science because it was his. Once, as they sat together listening to a lecture at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he turned to her and said, “I am afraid this is very wearisome to you.”

“No more than all the rest,” she answered him quietly.

Charles often told this story; he thought it was funny. He had never wanted a scientific partner. He wanted a constant companion, which he got. He also got a devoted nurse who would not leave him alone for a night because it made him anxious. He got a woman who was, according to an aunt of Emma's, “an exception to every wife” in her devotion.

But he also got a good—and tough—reader.

Now, sitting in the drawing room, Emma read page after page of
The Origin of Species.
In the book, Charles was trying to make a strong, coherent, cogent argument for creation by natural selection. It was, in many ways, a response to the argument put forth by William Paley in
Natural Theology.
Charles modeled his own book after Paley's, because he wanted
The Origin
to have the same effect on others that Paley's had had on him when he first read it at Cambridge. And Charles's book was, after all, an argument against the concept of God as creator that Paley had espoused.

Emma and most of Charles's religious friends and family did not ascribe to the miracle-creating, vengeance-meting, wrathful-king God of the Hebrew scriptures. They believed in the prevailing concept of God: God as benevolent Father who created every single species as it existed now, unchanged. This God created a world that ran like clockwork, with every plant, animal, and creature a cog in the great machine. This
God created a world with people at the top, near the angels, and all the other animals down below, unrelated to human beings. This God had revealed himself through his son, with a promise of everlasting life.

In
The Origin,
Charles wasn't trying to murder Emma's God; he was trying to show how he believed creation really occurred.

He knew he was right; he just had to make his argument clear enough so as to be, as much as was possible, irrefutable. And he wanted to be polite about it. Charles wrote the way he spoke, as an English gentleman. At Down, when he wanted a servant to do something, he did not order him in an imperious way. Instead he said, “Would you be so good” as to light the fire, empty the chamber pot, fix my dinner? There was no doubt that Charles was the master, but he was kind and respectful. Now in his book he was saying, Would you be so good as to listen to what I have to say—and agree with me?

In what was to become one of the most famous passages in the book, he wrote:

 

It may metaphorically be said, that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, through the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working,
whenever and wherever opportunity offers,
at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

 

“It may metaphorically be said” was a bit of British reserve, but it was clear what Charles was arguing. It may be said that new species are forming all the time. It may be said that God did not create all the species at once, as you have been told to
believe. Old species die out; new species are created. It may be said that this is actually beautiful. For Charles this process
was
beautiful. For Emma death was bearable because there was an afterlife. In Charles's view of the world, death looked very different, but he found meaning and grandeur in that view.

As Emma read the pages, there were parts that made her cringe; passages that she worried would move people farther away from God. But she only criticized the argument to help Charles spell it out more clearly. Emma rewrote awkward sentences, and if she didn't understand what he was trying to say, they talked it through so that he could write it in a more lucid fashion. She also helped him with his grammar and his atrocious spelling. She teased him about his misuse of commas—and fixed them for him.

In a brilliantly persuasive move, Charles included a chapter called “Difficulties of the Theory.” He had thought long and hard about what people would object to, and he had worked hard to answer their objections as best he could. “Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work,” he said in chapter VI, “a crowd of difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree staggered; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to the theory.”

In this chapter, he addressed difficulties such as Emma's concern about the development of the eye. He wrote, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” But he went on to compare the reader's doubt to
another long-held assumption that was known now to be wrong: “When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of
Vox populi, vox Dei,
as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.”
Vox populi, vox Dei:
“The voice of the people is the voice of God.” Not true, Charles was saying. Just because everyone thinks so doesn't mean it is right.

He argued to Emma and to all his readers:

 

Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive to the theory.