Erik Visits a Non-American Grave, Part 2,022

This is the grave of Charles Darwin.

Born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, Darwin grew up wealthy. His father was a well-known doctor and both grandfathers were involved in the abolitionist movement, which was usually a good indicator of wealth as well. He’s also rich enough that we have a portrait of him at age 7 and that is the single best sign of wealth in that era of English history.

Darwin was sent to school to be a doctor, attending the University of Edinburgh. He was a lot more interested in the natural world and wasn’t a great student. He began to work with Robert Edmond Grant, an early scientist working on invertebrates. He decided that something like this needed to be his career. A political radical, Grant influenced Darwin to rethink everything, including ideas of the natural world. This wasn’t such a stretch for Darwin–his family were Unitarians anyway, but he had grown up in boarding school and came to college thinking the Bible as literal truth. Anyway, Darwin moved to Christ’s College at Cambridge to study natural history in 1828 and was there until 1831. He real interest at this was religious natural philosophy. He still basically believed that God was pulling the strings in a very Christian manner.

Darwin read a ton, including Alexander von Humboldt’s travel books and the 1831 book by John Herschel,  Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which pushed the idea of personal observation as the way to study nature. Darwin really believed in this and so that year, he signed up to be the naturalist for a long trip on the HMS Beagle, a British war ship led by Captain Robert Fitzroy, who was an officer but also a committed naturalist. The goal here was to map the west coast of South America and, of course, to promote British power. All of this was always about promoting British imperialist aims.

Well, what Darwin observed over the next five years would change the world. He was ready to see a lot of the new scientific findings and he did, including the fossils of many extinct species. Then he went to the Galapagos and saw all the unique animals of that place and so many other places made him seriously consider that the old ways of understanding the natural world and the entire creation of species were completely disconnected from what actually happened. As soon as he returned from the Beagle in 1836, Darwin went to meet Charles Lyell to discuss what he had seen and what it meant for science. With Lyell’s encouragement, Darwin began to present his ideas. They became more refined through his interactions with the rest of the British scientific community, many of whom were greater experts on the classifications of animals than he.

By the late 1830s, Darwin had started to articulate his theory of evolution, discussing things such as natural selection. He published The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs in 1842, writing up his research on barnacles. Darwin was a slow and careful researcher. He was not going to publish the full impact of his thoughts until he had it all really worked out. Moreover, he was hardly the only person working in the natural sciences and changing the ways people thought about the world, so there was always new ideas and research to incorporate.

Finally, Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Along with Marx and Freud, Darwin became the 19th century thinkers completely reestablishing people’s relationship to the people and world around them in that era. The theory of evolution was almost irrefutable. I hardly need to discuss its impact here. Two points though. First, Darwin’s ideas were revolutionary, but there were lots of other ideas out there at the time. It took a long time for a lot of Darwin’s arguments to win out, long after he was dead. After his death, his ideas took something of a nosedive. People by the 1880s widely agreed that evolution was the right way to think about the Earth’s biological history, but they did not agree that natural selection, as Darwin described it, was why. Some of this was the continued belief that God was the real driver and it was so hard for some people to let that go. For others, it was neo-Lamarckism and the idea of social characteristics that mattered, which isn’t surprising in an era where these largely rich white Europeans and Euro-Americans were trying to also understand why they were so obviously superior to Africans and the Chinese and the like. So when those kinds of questions start your scientific inquiry, you are going to get racist answers and of course Darwin’s ideas became part of this as well. Again, while “pure science” may exist, a racist society will always produce racist science, as we see in the modern world as well. Anyway, it wasn’t until the 1930s that natural selection really became the unanimous opinion among scientists.

Second, the idea that the theory of evolution was inherently oppositional to God and religion was not borne out at the time. Sure, a lot of people had trouble letting God go here, but even many of these people argued that it was God revealing more of His ways to us now that we have advanced beyond needing silly stories in the Bible to explain the world to us. At least in the United States, it wasn’t until the rise of early 20th century evangelicalism as a response to modernism generally that these negative connotations to Darwin’s work became a mainstream respsonse.

The thing about Darwin though is that his health wasn’t really very good and hadn’t been since shortly after he returned from his adventures in the 1830s. A combination of that and overwork meant he did what he could to keep writing and he did, but it was sporadic and he never again published something as groundbreaking as On the Origin of Species with one huge exception in 1871’s The Descent of Man, Darwin’s attempt to apply his ideas of human society. Now, Darwin was a man of his time and he was as impacted by the racist scientific questions of the time as anyone, but it’s also important to note that he never in fact advocated eugenics, though his cousin was one of the idea’s progenitors and Darwin himself was at least interested in the arguments shortly before he died. I don’t think it would have taken Darwin too long to get to eugenics though, had he lived another few years.

It seems Darwin had a bad heart. It finally killed him in 1882. He was 73 years old.

There is much, much more to say here. But this post is long enough so let’s leave it to commenters to take from here.

Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

If you would like this series to visit famous American scientists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Carl Sagan is in Ithaca, New York and John Bardeen is in Madison, Wisconsin. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.