The stone is still there in the garden. That’s what gets me. It’s not the house itself – houses decay slowly and can be preserved pretty easily, especially in Britain where even an eighteenth-century country house is not “old.” It’s not even the tree behind the house, alive when Charles Darwin still lived in his Down House, now propped up by guywires against inevitable collapse as a kind of totem of the great naturalist’s existence. If you leave the rear exit, the one that takes you to Darwin’s preserved greenhouse and the stunning flora on a pretty path lined in that particular English way of making the perfectly manicured seem somehow “natural,” you might glance to the left and see behind a small iron fence a one-foot-wide stone. A round mill stone or pottery wheel, it was, or appears to have been. And through the stone’s center hole protrude two short metal bars, patinaed teal with age. Given its supposed duration in this location, it’s easy to imagine the stone disappearing under the turf. That was, indeed, the intended trajectory of the original stone when it was laid there in the 1870s, not long before Darwin’s death in 1882. This one is a replacement, which is carefully lifted and leveled every so often. The always green lawn is cropped short around it, since that stone is absolutely meant to be seen.
It was a kind of investigation, originally. An earthworm experiment conceived of by Francis Darwin, the recently widowed third son of Charles, fifth child overall. It’s maintained there as a monument to Charles Darwin, a man who more than any other stands for the life sciences. Ironically, both father and son Darwin believed it would have been covered up by now, part of the inevitable process of bioturbation – worms (other creatures, too, but they were writing a book about earthworms, Darwin’s last book) excavating soil, turning it over, bringing it to the surface, and things like large flat stones gradually being subsumed into the earth.
Here’s the thing, though: in an era when compound microscope technology developed rapidly, when cell theory swept through the multinational life sciences community, when “germs” were gradually replacing explanations of humors and miasmas for health and disease, when chromosomes had been witnessed, when investigators of the patterns of heredity published scores of books – and in an era when peer-reviewed scientific journals published by scientific societies shared all of these new knowledges between a growing cadre of professional biologists who increasingly had to beg for money from wealthy benefactors and governments to continue their work – Charles Darwin did few laboratory experiments.
Sure, he fiddled. He floated seeds in salty water. He bred pigeons and skinned them, comparing skeletons. He let vines twirl in the sun and measured that. He fertilized lots of orchids and fed insectivorous plants. And given the way natural history was done in that age, all those things were good enough. But looking forward just a few decades to the days of randomized trials and arrays of test tubes, what he did looks, well, primitive. He couldn’t set up controls, didn’t have a microtome, never made microscopy slides, had no idea how to use chemical dyes, did not write grant applications, and could not compute statistics – all standard stuff in a late-nineteenth-century biology laboratory. What Darwin did in his back garden was observe. Plants, mostly. And let’s not downplay this: he was the consummate gentleman naturalist observer.
That might be fine, except that he considered himself a geologist for a good part of his career – paradoxical since he’s the only biologist with an internationally recognized day in his honor. Darwin Day is 12 February, his birthday. That day is used to promote the life sciences, anthropology, really anything that has to do with the study of evolution in any discipline. And that’s curious. There is no equivalent day for, say, Curie in chemistry, Faraday in electricity, Herschel in astronomy, Lyell in geology, and so on. In Anglo-American culture, we usually reserve named days for political or military figures or heroes with such tremendous courage and sociocultural importance that a “day” seems barely adequate – people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., say, or Mahatma Gandhi.
It’s not just Darwin Day, either. In the United Kingdom, his hoary visage appeared on the £10 note for years; in the United States, he has an anti-award named after him for accidental death via exceedingly stupid behavior. There are Darwin figurines and bobble-heads, Darwin coloring books and cookbooks, and, of course, there’s a whole school of thought known as “Social Darwinism,” once publicly advocated by the wealthiest man on the planet, Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at least according to legend. (There’s no Rockefeller Day, either.)
Let’s face it: Charles Darwin, a man who actively avoided the public eye, who felt more comfortable staring at barnacles in his home office than at any scientific society meeting, has become a kind of secular saint – a bearded, wizardly face of the life sciences in general and of evolutionary biology particularly. For that reason, we preserve his library, his study, his house, a tree behind that house, and a rock set up in his garden to measure the dirt moved by earthworms. People like me travel a good distance to look at his desk, his makeshift lavatory, his snuff box, and walk the “sandwalk” circuit that he traversed daily through the woods behind his garden. Or we board a ship to the Galápagos Archipelago west of South America and imagine him scrambling up the barren volcanic shores among thousands of crabs and iguanas. Both pilgrimages are buoyed by hopes that we will catch the faintest hint of the man and his great ideas. How that transformation occurred – from homebody stooping over barnacles and pollenating orchids in his back garden to secular saint worthy of statues, museum displays, and brief biographies in every undergraduate biology textbook – is itself an interesting story that I will briefly touch on in the final chapter.
What I want to explore in the rest of the book is a different sort of mystery. How could someone so well known, a scientific icon, really, be so often misunderstood? The resolution to this mystery, it turns out, has a lot to do with what Darwin represents rather than what he actually said. In this book (Chapters 1, 3, and parts of 4 and 6), I unpack small parts of his biography to address five widely repeated misunderstandings, not only of the man Darwin in particular, but of what he intended to convey in his publications and what has been made of them since. Chapter 2 addresses the misconception that Darwin discovered evolution on the Galápagos Islands; in Chapter 4, that Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at the same evolutionary theory as Charles Darwin. A third misconception, that Darwin’s Big Idea was merely the process of natural selection, is addressed in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, I tackle the thorny issue of Darwin’s religious beliefs and the misconception that he advocated atheism; finally, in Chapter 7, the misconception that Darwin’s theories pointed directly to the death camps of the twentieth century. Tying it together, I finish with an exploration of the “Darwin Industry” that created, and attempts to tear down, the legends accreting around this one man.
With someone attached to such a voluminous body of scholarly biography and popular legendarium, I could hardly attempt to say anything completely new. My goal, instead, is to tug on the old man’s beard a bit, to scratch at his ideas, to peck at his words, and see if we could get a smidgen clearer about his own message to the world as he wrote it in a large number of books and hundreds of letters from the 1830s through the end of his life in 1882 at the not-that-old age of 73. That means I’ll need to go beyond the mortal Darwin just a bit to address the construction and use of Darwin-ism in the twentieth century.
With any luck, this book will wipe away some of the dust accumulating over the old man’s image. And just maybe I can convince you that the real story of Darwin is really a story about so many other people who were not Darwin.
