Happy Birthday to Charles the Person

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the very same day, February 12, 1809, a fateful day for the world.  That their births mean so much to so many 200 years later reflects far more than their amazing life accomplishments.  With its love of Great Men, history has turned each into a symbol of a major inflection point in the development of Western Civilization, marking the emergence of the Modern in our world.  Lincoln symbolizes the final collapse of slavery as an acceptable practice of Christian people.  Darwin symbolizes the final collapse of the traditional Christian explanation of how the world works.  These historic changes in worldviews originated centuries before their birthday.  Neither Lincoln nor Darwin was a major agent of the change.  But each was fated to drive the final nail.  Neither Lincoln’s presidency nor Darwin’s writings completed the change, but each turned the tide, making it forever impossible to slip permanently backward.

 

It is ironic that Lincoln symbolizes vindication of the Christian concept of the dignity of the individual person, with God-given rights, whereas Darwin symbolizes the Modern concept of a remote God uncaring about the lives of individual persons.  The triumph of Divinely justified abolition was concurrent with the legitimizing of belief that God, even if God exists, is irrelevant to life as we know it.  

 

Darwin Fish vs. Jesus Fish

 

Several years ago, I was driving home from work, a bit too lost in my thoughts.  I had to brake violently to avoid rear-ending a car stopped at an intersection in my California town.  As I recovered my wits and studied the rear-end of the car I nearly smashed, I saw for the first time the Darwin fish – the “Jesus fish” with Darwin’s name instead and little feet underneath, like the familiar figure of a fish sprouting feet to become an amphibian.  I laughed!  And I continued to laugh as I saw more of these Darwin fish on the rear ends of cars around town.  It is a university town, where you expect such clever, irreverent humor.  Over time, I saw the growing bumper battle between the Darwin fish and the Jesus fish, with ever more clever designs, culminating in the Darwin fish opening wide to eat the Jesus fish!  I became concerned.  Too many people are taking this battle seriously, seeing Darwin as displacing Jesus. 

 

This was not the reaction of an offended Christian or shock at such public display of intolerance.  I was reacting to the name Darwin coming to symbolize so much other than the man or even his work.  The Darwin fish proposes an equivalence between Darwin and Jesus.  Darwin the prophet of modernity, Darwin the symbol of Ultimate Truth, Darwin an object of “religious” reverence.  This struck me as profound misrepresentation of who was Charles Darwin and what he himself stood for.  This was not science versus religion or science versus Christianity but Science as a religion competing with Christianity as a religion.  I knew Charles the person would have been appalled. 

 

A Visit to Down House

 

Two years ago, I spent a March day at Down House, Charles’s home for forty years.  No other single house is more closely associated with the work of a great man.  It was a weekday, so I nearly had the place to myself.  Charles Darwin and his wife Emma and his children and his servants and his experiments and his village came alive in my mind. 

 

I prowled the family rooms, furnished almost as they were 150 years ago, imagining I could hear Emma playing the piano in the parlor.  I stood for an hour in his study, just watching Charles in my mind as he worked with total concentration yet smiled when his children came noisily rushing in to find scissors for their project.  I returned a few minutes later to imagine Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker sitting with Charles in rapt conversation.  I stood by the dining table to watch Charles holding court as local magistrate to settle disputes among his fellow villagers.  Then I saw him alone at the table carefully reconciling the accounts of the Friendly Club he helped start so that local laborers could save for their future needs.  I had tea at the kitchen table, where Charles once played a hand of whist for the cook while she tended the stove.  I walked the Sandwalk round and round five times as a snow squall swept through the stand of old trees Charles had planted then changed abruptly to pale Kentish sunshine over the fields that once belonged to the neighbor, Sir John Lubbock. On the Sandwalk, I thought for the first time in years about that near-accident in my own town and then about the meaning of the “Darwin fish.”   

 

In Defense of Charles the Person

 

I am a friend of Charles the person and therefore feel obliged to defend his good name.  Not that I knew him in person!  My great, great grandfather was born in England the same year as Charles.  But I know Charles a great deal better than I know my own ancestor.  His voyage on the Beagle inspired me to travel the world, too.  His evolutionary theory structured my worldview in university and to this day.  To me, however, Charles is more than a voyage and a theory.  Charles is a life-long friend – not a mentor or a teacher or a hero or an icon – a personal friend – like the fantasy friend of a child, I suppose – with passions and aversions, strengths and weaknesses, to which I relate my own.  He is a person with whom I can sympathize but also criticize.  He puzzles yet inspires me.  He makes me smile, and he is exasperating.  We agree, and we disagree.  We walk together in silence.  He speaks, I listen.  He is a personal friend, no less than my deceased father, who is gone, yet with me.  It is a person-to-person connection.  In short, I like Charles Darwin a great deal.  I know him too well to sit by while the modern world enthrones him as its demi-god.  Nor can I idly allow him to be branded the Anti-Christ. 

 

To Understand Charles the Person

 

The Darwin name will be taken in vain regardless of how hard we try to set the record straight, but those of us who honor intellectual honesty and historical accuracy should have ready access to the real man and what were most likely his true views on the issues that are now so controversial.  Surely this better understanding only improves the debate.  We also owe this much to such a remarkable, decent and likeable man. 

 

You might ask what more there is to know about Charles Darwin.  Surely his life and work are among the best chronicled of any historic figure.  What can be added to the numerous biographies based on volumes of personal letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and of course, his many books? 

 

Nonetheless, lots more is being written now, because today is February 12, 2009, the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth.  The world is celebrating as it would for no other scientist, because Darwin has become the patron saint of the secular worldview that needs no god for explanation of past, present and future.  The commemoration will be the occasion for new assaults in the ongoing culture war between evolution and creationism, more generally between secular and religious worldviews.  There will be lectures and symposia, sermons and articles, popular books and television specials revisiting and interpreting the life, times and writings of this iconic figure of the modern (and post-modern) world.

 

Whether the authors are triumphant or defiant in their attitude toward Charles Darwin, the naturalist of H.M.S. Beagle and author of On the Origin of Species will overshadow Charles Darwin the remarkably likeable countryman of Shropshire and Kent, the loyal friend of leading intellectuals around the world, the loving, playful father of accomplished children, and especially the devoted husband of Emma Wedgwood.  The influence of Emma on the career and thinking of Charles goes well beyond her famous roles as hostess and lady of Down House, guardian of his health and spirits, and worrier for his eternal soul as his worldview evolved toward its irretrievable break from Anglican orthodoxy.  She was a devout believer, but as a thoughtful Unitarian, not a rote Anglican.  She was the sophisticated daughter and granddaughter of great industrialists.  She had done the Grand Tour and learned the languages and music of the Continent (in contrast, Charles visited Europe only once, a brief visit to Paris, before his famous voyage, after which he never left England again).  She was keenly interested in the politics and current events of the day.  And she was Charles’s best friend.

 

An Online Book Project

 

As I stood in the parlor of Down House, it occurred to me that Emma and Charles were a couple worthy of a Jane Austen novel.  As I did my five turns around the Sandwalk, I started an ambition to achieve a novelist’s level of sympathy with this historic couple, if only to better understand Charles. 

 

What Charles and Emma wrote about their own personal views gives only partial insight.  Each had personal biases welling up from assumptions, of which even they were mostly unaware.  As we all are, Charles and Emma were children of their time and all that led up to that time.  Therefore, to properly interpret what they were thinking and feeling, we have to explore the history and philosophy and culture and society that influenced their thinking and feeling.  A daunting task indeed!

 

In July of last year (2008), I launched DarwinWatch on which I am posting a series of essays and book reviews I am writing as I read and think on this task.  Someday I plan to meld these into a book, which I may title Walking Fish: Charles and Emma Darwin on the Question of God.  There is no way to know how successful this project might be, but you may find my effort interesting to monitor on occasion.  I welcome your comments. 

 

Copyright 2009 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

 

The Voyage of the Beagle – Antecedents

 

In 1831, Charles Darwin was earning a lack-luster degree from Cambridge University and setting his sights on becoming a clergyman of the Church of England.  He was not enthused by the prospect, but he stood a good chance of getting a rural parish.  This would allow him to indulge his passion for natural history on the side, as had many rural clergymen for whom a career with the Church was more means than end.  Not that Charles was in the least insincere.  His father, Dr. Robert Darwin, having concluded that medicine was not for Charles, allowed him to leave Edinburgh University without a degree (as had his older brother, Erasmus) and enroll at Cambridge University to study the classics in preparation for a profession in the Church.  This had long been a fall back position for gentlemen in need of a respectable profession.  Before accepting his father’s offer, Charles considered carefully his ability to pledge himself to uphold the finer points of Church doctrine.  After much reading and thinking on the question, Charles decided that he could do it:  “… as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.” (from his Recollections).  And so he went up to Cambridge. 

 

Charles at Cambridge

 

His brother had preceded Charles to Cambridge and had told him about Professor John Stevens Henslow as a man who knew every branch of science.  His cousin and close friend, William Darwin Fox, a fellow beetle enthusiast, also went to Cambridge and soon got Charles an invitation to the regular Friday evening gatherings of students and faculty at Professor Henslow’s home to explore common interests in the natural world.  Something about Charles made him stand out enough for Henslow to take him under his academic and personal wing.  More than mentor and student, Henslow and Charles became field trip companions and soon very good friends.  In early 1831, after Charles had effectively completed his course work but still had to reside on campus for another two terms to fulfill degree requirements, Henslow encouraged Charles to take up geology under the tutelage of the revered Professor Adam Sedgwick.  Again the relationship became close.  Sedgwick invited Charles to accompany him during the summer on a geological transect of North Wales.  He taught Charles the intimate details of how geologizing was then done.  Charles loved the vigorous hiking across the landscape, observing and collecting samples with his new geological hammer, and putting the pieces of evidence together in a coherent map and understanding of the geology of the area.  Still, he was anxious to get back home in time for the start of the fall partridge hunting.  The start of his career with the Church could wait another few months.

 

FitzRoy Plans the Beagle’s Return to South America

 

Also in 1831, Robert FitzRoy was planning a second voyage in command of HMS Beagle to map the coasts of the “southern cone” of South America.  FitzRoy was in his early twenties but already an accomplished naval officer when he joined the earlier expedition at its midpoint.  The Beagle had sailed with HMS Adventure under the overall command of Phillip Parker King.  The expedition returned to England in 1830 with much work left to be done.  A second expedition was needed, but King decided to retire and live in Australia, so command of the second voyage fell to young FitzRoy with only the Beagle sailing this time. 

 

Their coastal mapping mission was motivated by the opening in the 1820s of the newly independent South American colonies for commercial relations with countries other than Spain and Portugal.  To facilitate trade by commercial shipping, and its ability to protect this trade, the Royal Navy needed more consistently accurate and detailed charts of the South American coasts and adjacent waters.  The expedition also was of vital strategic importance to learn more about these countries in general, especially their people and natural resources as producers of commodities to feed the growing demand of Britain’s industrial revolution.  Scientific exploration served national interests, and military careers in the poorly known regions of the early nineteenth century world not only permitted but even encouraged interest in natural history, from which knowledge of natural resources was likely to come.

 

In Need of “Some Well-Educated and Scientific Person” 

 

FitzRoy was given command of the Beagle quite suddenly on location in South American waters when her captain, Pringle Stokes, committed suicide.  The incident and his own experience of command heightened FitzRoy’s concern about the pressures and loneliness of command at sea, especially given his particular vulnerability to bouts of despair. This time he wanted a gentleman companion to share his cabin and meals, to dispel the loneliness and distract him from the relentless pace of work he was inclined to set for himself.  He asked a friend, who declined.  FitzRoy therefore asked Captain Francis Beaufort, Hydrographer to the British Admiralty (and inventor of the Beaufort Scale for describing wind force) to help him find a suitable gentleman.  It was appropriate that he ask Beaufort, as he was the technical supervisor of the expedition and was engaged in writing FitzRoy’s “terms of reference” (as we today would call his memorandum describing in detail the mapping and other assignments for the second voyage).  In FitzRoy’s own words, he “proposed to the Hydrographer that some well-educated and scientific person should be sought for who would willingly share such accommodations as I had to offer, in order to profit by the opportunity of visiting distant countries yet little known.”

 

When FitzRoy requested a “gentleman,” he was not asking for just any well-mannered sort of fellow but a person of particular social status and outlook compatible with his own – a man of his own class with whom he could deign to associate as an equal.  Actually, FitzRoy was an aristocrat descended from Charles II, but he would find a “gentleman” of some wealth, education, and refinement quite acceptable.  Beaufort contacted Professor Peacock of Cambridge University, and the old school network was activated.  Peacock contacted his friend, Professor Henslow, who was sorely tempted to take the position himself, except for the forlorn expressions of his wife and young children.  Henslow extended the invitation to Charles Darwin, as a very capable, if “unfinished” naturalist. After some famous hesitation, Charles accepted to go to London immediately to meet FitzRoy, to see if both could stand the idea of spending years together in the intimate quarters of a ship at sea.  After some equally famous hesitation by FitzRoy regarding the shape of Charles’s nose (phrenology, or study of the shape of face and head, was seriously considered by many educated people of that time), the two decided they liked each other and sealed the bargain, with the understanding that Charles (rather, his father) would pay all his own costs and would be designated the Captain’s personal guest, with liberty to leave the voyage at any port of call, to return by another ship to England.  FitzRoy was concerned from the start about the staying power of any companion he invited along.

 

Bonds of Friendship, Adventure and Ambition

 

During preparation of the Beagle in the autumn of 1831, these two young men, Robert FitzRoy, 26, and Charles Darwin, 22, quickly became friends, united by the excitement of high adventure to come.   Just imagine the anticipation of Charles as FitzRoy and his crew figuratively and literally showed him the ropes, helping him buy the right equipment and stow his gear in the tight spaces of the tiny cabin, even demonstrating how to hang his sleeping hammock and get into it without being thrown to the deck!  Charles was not the only landlubber guest of FitzRoy who must have amused the Beagle crew.  In addition to the complement of 65 crew, FitzRoy brought along nine “supernumaries,” counting Charles.  The others included a “draughtsman,” Augustus Earle, to record the voyage in paintings as well as, I presume, to make good-looking maps from the charts created by FitzRoy and his officers.  And an “instrument maker,” George Stebbing, to tend the 22 finest chronometers ever carried around the world, for FitzRoy to measure “meridian distances” that would greatly improve accuracy of locating major geographic features of the earth by longitude, still a relatively new method (this task was the primary motive for circumnavigating the globe once the work of surveying the South American coasts was completed).  And Richard Matthews, a missionary, and three Fuegians FitzRoy had brought back to England from the first expedition and educated at his own expense; Matthews and the Fuegians were to establish a mission at the bottom of the world, the vanguard of Christianity in Tierra del Fuego.  Plus FitzRoy had his own steward, and Charles had his own servant, especially to assist in his collecting and preserving of specimens. 

 

Excepting Charles and his servant, all these supernumaries and more were at FitzRoy’s personal expense.  To our modern ears, it seems quite remarkable that a military expedition would include the personal projects of its leader and mix public and personal funding of the diverse endeavors.  But this was typical for the time.  Such expeditions were usually led by wealthy, upper-class men who often had ambitious agendas of their own, compatibly mixed with service to the Crown. 

 

Adding to the bond forged between adventure travelers, FitzRoy and Charles shared a common ambition to use the opportunity of the voyage to establish themselves as experts in their respective professional fields and thereby launch their careers and secure their positions in English society.  An expedition to unknown lands, discovery of new knowledge, and the subsequent reports of the findings had established the reputations and positions of many young Englishmen prior to the second expedition of the Beagle.  Therefore, both FitzRoy and Charles could clearly see the future rewards of literally staying the course, of persisting through the long years of privation, hardship, danger, homesickness, hard work, and boring weeks at sea.  The burden was relieved, no doubt, by their sharing the resolve to see it through.  FitzRoy had the added incentive of being under Admiralty orders.  For Charles, completing the voyage was optional; on the other hand, he was motivated by intense desire to prove himself in some important way – especially to his family, it seems.  Plus, he was passionately committed to the work, and he knew how FitzRoy and Henslow and Sedgwick and many others in scientific English society thought it so exciting and important.  He had a respectable profession, at last.

 

.  .  .

 

I have based the foregoing on three books.  Charles’s Recollections, introduced in my previous posting, devotes only eight pages to the period of the voyage, mainly adding some personal information about his relationship with FitzRoy and events leading up to the sailing of the Beagle on December 27, 1831.  Charles’s public account of the voyage, drawn from his daily journal, was first published with FitzRoy’s account in 1839, and later in the same year as a stand-alone book entitled Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N. from 1832 to 1836.  This book of travels was a surprising publication success; several editions were published with variations of the title and translations into several languages.  It continues to be widely read today.  Charles admitted in his Recollections that “The success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books.”

 

The version I have read carefully is the Penguin Classics book, Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1989 – this is the first (1839) edition of Journal of Researches edited and abridged by Janet Browne and Michael Neve.  “Abridged” means that Browne and Neve reduced the length of the original first edition by removing whole sections they deemed of less interest, without touching the remaining sections, shortening the whole by about one third.  I admit to being grateful for the abridgment.  Charles wrote well, often with vivid imagery and lively spirit, but his was still an early 19^th century literary style.  I love Jane Austen, but Charles was not that good, and often it is a slog to follow his prose.  Moreover, I find his rather long geological digressions on the landscapes he traveled through quite tedious, and I am just not interested in his minute invertebrates (there is one memorable passage (p. 191) about zoophytes in the seas around the Falkland Islands which left me totaled puzzled after several readings).  The scientific expedition narratives of the time served the dual purpose of entertaining the generalist readers as well as informing the experts looking for information new to their specialty, creating in an uneven reading experience. 

 

I preferred reading the first edition, rather than the 1845 second edition, for which Charles “took much pains in correcting” the first edition, possibly obscuring what he was thinking or not thinking during or shortly after the voyage.  For example, I understand (and plan to verify) that he made more of the Galapagos observations in the second edition than in the first, overlaying his later interpretations on the raw observations and initial reactions during his visit to the archipelago in Sept-Oct 1835.

 

Browne and Neve do the reader a very great favor in their 26 pages of introduction.  Seldom have I found an introduction more enlightening and useful.  I am indebted to them for most of what I have written above about the historical context of the Beagle expedition and the background on Robert FitzRoy.  I highly recommend this introduction as an important document in itself. 

 

Browne and Neve very usefully attach two appendices:  “Admiralty Instructions for the Beagle Voyage” which includes Beaufort’s memorandum of detailed assignments for FitzRoy, and “Remarks with Reference to the Deluge” written by Robert FitzRoy himself as a counter to Darwin’s geological interpretations of what the two men saw together in distant lands.  Both of these pieces first were published in the second volume of FitzRoy’s Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle (1839).  Charles’s Journal of Researches first appeared as the third volume of FitzRoy’s Narrative.  I drew insights from the “Admiralty Instructions” in writing this post and the next.  FitzRoy was given a daunting set of surveying and other tasks, and his faithfulness to the instructions accounts for the length of the voyage extending from the original (and unrealistic) projection of two years to almost five years.

 

The third book is the Darwin and the Beagle by Alan Moorehead, published by Harper & Row in 1969.  This is the first book I read about Darwin himself (rather than his theory and its impacts).  I was a young graduate ecology student at the time.  Moorehead’s book tells the story of Charles and the Beagle experience so well, and so beautifully illustrated with contemporary paintings and sketches of the places, people and creatures, that it awakened in me a longing to travel the world, seeing it as an ecologist, especially the tropics.  I was the same age as Charles when he boarded the Beagle, and I identified with his youthful desire to see what he had only read about in books and his ambition to contribute something new to science.  I hoped that I, too, would gain wonderful insights from experiencing new natural worlds.  I highly recommend Moorehead’s book even today as an easy and compelling way to travel vicariously with Charles on his famous voyage.

 

However, in re-reading this book recently, I was reminded of the ever-so-subtle way an author, whether Moorehead or any other (including me), can create impressions that distort historical facts, without conscious intention to deceive or obscure.  Moorehead highlights a bit too much the intellectual conflict between Darwin and FitzRoy, during the voyage itself, regarding interpretation of geological observations.  He creates an impression of confrontation between the enlightened scientist just looking at the facts and the fundamentalist Christian clinging doggedly to the literal truth of the Biblical account.  As in most books about Darwin and evolution, Moorehead approaches his task with unspoken celebration of the triumph of the modern mind, as science defeats religion, as reason overcomes ignorant tradition, as light dispels the darkness.  Browne and Neve, in their introduction, paint a more complex and interesting portrait of the relationship between Charles and FitzRoy during the voyage.  No doubt they engaged in running debate as they tried together to make sense of what they encountered along the way (reflected by FitzRoy’s “Remarks”), but it seems to have been a friendly exchange between mutually respectful and relatively open minds that only later fully settled on diametrically opposing interpretations of fact.  During the voyage, they had some famous arguments, such as about the benefits of slavery in Brazil, reflecting their different political upbringings.  But it is doubtful that either grew furious with the other over their interpretations of the history of South American landscapes, much less the origin of species. 

 

In this posting, I have dwelled mostly on antecedents to the voyage of the Beagle.  In my next posting, I will summarize what I have learned about the events of the voyage itself.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography of Charles Darwin: A Book Review and Reflection on the Personality

What better way to get started toward understanding Charles the Person than with his own words about himself.  In 1876, at age 67, seven years before his death, Charles wrote Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character for the benefit of his wife, Emma, and his seven living children.  He begins with a passage that shows his humility and his intent:

 

A German Editor having written to me for an account of the development of my mind and character with some sketch of my autobiography, I have thought that the attempt would amuse me, and might possibly interest my children or their children.  I know that it would have interested me greatly to have read ever so short and dull a sketch of the mind of my grandfather, written by himself, and what he thought and did, and how he worked.  I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.  Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me.  I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

 

Unlike his Victorian peers, his style of writing is easy, direct, approachable – and revealing.  I enjoyed these 79 pages more than any other by Charles Darwin.  Of course, it would not be important to read these recollections without his other more important books.   By 1876, Charles was aware of his global fame and therefore the public fascination with himself.  Were it not for the controversy he fueled in British society, he would have been knighted by Queen Victoria, as were some of his close friends (and, later, even some of his own sons).  Yet British society showed its enormous respect by interring the unknighted Darwin almost beside Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. 

 

Charles’s Testament to His Heirs

 

He was pleased by the success of his books and his theory but distressed by the way his writing so distressed others.  A determinedly private man, Charles refused to engage publically with the socio-scientific-religious dust storm he had kicked up.  He fully expected a quiet burial in the Downe church cemetery, but this was not a man whose contribution to science and society lay undiscovered until after his death.  He had a profound effect on his peers, and he knew it.  Yet, in acceding to requests for his autobiography, he wrote as father and husband, aware that like his own curiosity to really know his nearly-as-famous grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, his children and grandchildren would want to know how he thought, worked and lived.  This was his testament to his heirs.

 

Can We Trust Charles’s Account of Himself?

 

Charles was aware of his success in achieving the scientific stature he clearly craved yet remarkably frank about his own shortcomings.  Did he engage in false humility?  Only a little, if at all.  Can we really trust what this man has written about himself?  Yes, I think we can.  Charles observed his own life with the same dispassionate acumen he applied to the natural world, but surely nothing is more difficult to observe with dispassion than one’s own life.  The best we can hope to get directly from Charles is an honest portrait of his self-image, an accurate rendition of what his memory chose to hold on to over the decades.  I suspect we do indeed get the best in this sense.  Emma Wedgwood, his wife and first cousin, knew Charles literally all his life and found him the most open man of her acquaintance (we would say “transparent” these days), a major reason she gave for falling in love with him.  His openness of mind and demeanor, and even writing style, made Charles stand out as exceptional in a generation given to artifice and ceremony.  By his nature, he seems worthy of our careful trust in what he has to say about himself.

 

A Passion for Collecting

 

Charles remembered that by the age of eight, “my taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting, was well developed.  I collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals.”  This passion for collecting extended in his teenage and university years to insects, especially beetles.  “But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles.”  His mind kept “indelible impressions of many beetles” he encountered, as one might remember time, place, and circumstances of meeting a fascinating person.  Just by the subtle shift in his writing of these lines, an increased intensity and detail, I can sense his passion.  Today, Charles would certainly have become an avid birder, like me, keeping detailed lists of species seen, lists which evoke vivid, colorful, detailed memories of the birds themselves and the circumstances of finding them.  We share this odd collector’s mentality. 

 

A Passion for Shooting (and Keeping Records)

 

Unlike me, Charles also had a passion for shooting (we would call it “hunting” these days), which was how one studied birds in those days (the double-barreled shotgun was the predecessor of the double-barreled binocular).  His “zeal for shooting in autumn” extended to keeping “an exact record of every bird shot through the whole season” which made him the butt of jokes by his “wicked friends.”  “I must have been half-consciously ashamed of my zeal.  I tried to persuade myself that shooting was almost an intellectual employment.”

 

Youthful Shortcomings

 

I can see in this admission a reflection of Charles’s self-consciousness about his youthful shortcomings.  Respect for the intellectual life was instilled in him, no doubt, by his intellectually distinguished father and grandfather.  Respect for the industrious life was instilled, too, by his father, a well-regarded physician, and his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, who made Wedgwood china the dinnerware of royalty.  As a boy and even as a young man, Charles was neither intellectual nor industrious in usual sense.  He was never a good student.  To him a classical grade school education was a waste, most university lectures a tedious bore, “maths” was repugnant, and his medical education at Edinburgh was distressing, even haunting.  “During my whole life I have been singularly incapable of mastering any language.”  He was hilarious among friends for his tin ear and inability to remember even simple musical tunes.  He thought his school masters and his father considered him “a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.”  His father even once made the stinging remark that “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”  Charles excused this as an uncharacteristic outburst by “… the kindest man I ever knew, and whose memory I love with all my heart …” Nonetheless, the threat of disapproval by his beloved but remote father lingered long into Charles’s adult life.

 

Intelligently Curious and Socially at Ease

 

In contrast, Charles clearly possessed deep native intelligence and curiosity, as well as a confident and pleasing social character.  Reflecting more positively on his school life, he wrote “I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.”  He loved reading books, and regretted that later in life he lost all pleasure from poetry of any kind.  He often took long, solitary walks and loved to ride (horses, of course) across beautiful landscapes.  But Charles was hardly a loner.  He made many friends at school and considered his disposition to be very affectionate.  He was at ease in society and adept at making friends with those who shared his general interests in collecting, riding, and shooting – and later in science. 

 

A Companion of Distinguished Men of Science

 

Most important for an unaccomplished youth, Charles’s personal qualities of openness, enthusiasm, curiosity, drive to understand, passion for nature, personal charm, and gentleman’s manners enabled him to become the companion of several distinguished men of science, when science was still known as “natural philosophy” and not quite yet an acceptable university major.  These men, especially Cambridge University Professor Henslow, the pioneering botanist, saw more in Charles than he could see in himself.  As Charles put it, “Looking back, I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical position, would never have allowed me to associate with them.”

 

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

 

What they saw recommended him for the opportunity of a lifetime, to travel as Captain FitzRoy’s gentleman companion and unofficial ship’s naturalist on the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle to map the coasts of southern South America and to circumnavigate the globe to take chronometric measurements.  Charles’s personal qualities prepared him well for integration with the socially diverse crew of the Beagle for five long years, 1831-1836, and his many arduous collecting expeditions from various ports of call.  In these Recollections, Charles treats the voyage briefly, referring the reader to his first published  book on the topic, but he sums up simply, “The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career …”  He felt he owed to the voyage his first real education.  “I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were always fairly developed.”

 

Imagine such a gift of opportunity to a young man!  It was almost a fluke, and he would have passed it up, except for the intervention of his Uncle Jos(iah Wedgwood II) with his skeptical father.  Unpromising as Charles was for a standard career in English society, his mentors recognized exceptional qualities that might be nurtured by an exceptional experience.  The voyage of the Beagle was one of many expeditions of exploration, especially following in the wake of Captain Cook’s voyages.  And many ship’s naturalists and medical officers collected specimens of all sorts and reported their findings to a society eager to learn about the world beyond Britain and Europe – in fact, Charles was able to draw on their work to put his own observations in global perspective.  To his generation, these voyages of discovery were equivalent in fascination to our exploration of space.  Even as late as the 1830s, it was still almost easy to discover something new and interesting for science and society simply by traveling the world.  If he could capture his observations and experiences in good English prose, his reports would have a guaranteed, eager audience.  However, there was nothing so unusual about Charles or the voyage of the Beagle that a scientific breakthrough would inevitably result.  His personal qualities, the mentors he gathered, and pure chance delivered him to this fabulous opportunity.  It was then solely up to Charles to make something very special of it.

 

Perspective Gained from Knowing the Young Man

 

Charles continued in his Recollections to briefly recount the people, places and events of his life from the departure of the Beagle from Portsmouth in December 1831 to his writing them down during May-August 1876.  I won’t summarize these recollections here, as the facts are recorded in other letters and books by and about Darwin.  I will review and reflect on many of these in later blog postings.  What is particularly important about his Recollections is that we have little else to tell us the story of Charles’s life and its influences during the formative years before his momentous voyage.  I believe that understanding the basic personality and the experiences that formed it into a young man is fundamental for putting his later life and work in proper perspective.  I will return to this theme repeatedly. 

 

I found Charles’s Recollections in a small volume reprinted from the Life of Charles Darwin, edited by his son, Sir Francis Darwin.  The volume was published as a small hardcover book, No. 7 in The Thinker’s Library, published by Watts & Co. (London) in 1929.  It is titled Autobiograhy of Charles Darwin with Two Appendices, comprising a Chapter of Reminiscences and a Statement of Charles Darwin’s Religious Views, by his Son, Sir Francis Darwin (Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge).  I will review the chapter and statement by Charles’s son in upcoming postings.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

Charles Darwin’s life, work and words and their meaning for the Science-Religion Debate: a personal exploration committed to intellectual honesty and historical perspective

Darwin Watch is a double entendre.  You, the visitor, can watch the life, work and words of Charles Darwin unfold in a series of essays and book reviews, starting in 2008.  You can also watch an author build a new book, Walking Fish – Charles and Emma Darwin on the Question of God (to be published by Novalis, if it crosses the finish line).  Along the way, you are invited to help – comment, advise, correct.  Actually, it is a triple entendre, because of the watch-as-timepiece metaphor used to illustrate intelligent design or refute it, from Paley to Dawkins.  But here ”watch” means to watch a life or a book unfold.            

I am the author, Chris Dunford.  What are my qualifications for this audacious project?  Perhaps no more than yours.  I am starting this Web site in my 60^th year.  I have a PhD in evolutionary biology and have contributed to the research literature, but for three decades I have made a living in the world of international development and non-profit management.  This career, and my wife and son, have allowed me to observe many faces of the human condition as well as of the natural world, around the world.  I don’t hope to explain what I’ve seen so much as to understand, in some intuitive way, and share this understanding with you, perhaps saving you considerable effort of your own.  If your curiosity insists, you may know me more deeply by reading another book I’ve authored, Life List – A Birder’s Spiritual Awakening.  This is a very personal exploration of nature (based on a visit to sub-arctic Canada ten years ago) and why it means so much to me, especially at the level of the spirit.  In writing my book, I discovered the conflict and interdependence of science and religion.  Yes, it’s about birding, too, but I promise you won’t have to read much about birds at Darwin Watch. 

Darwin Fish vs. Jesus Fish

 

What you read here is about Charles Darwin, the person.  It is the Charles the person who holds my attention, ever since I had to brake violently to avoid rear-ending a car in my California town.  As I recovered my wits and studied the bumper of the car I nearly smashed, I saw for the first time the Darwin fish – the “Jesus fish” with Darwin’s name instead and little feet underneath, like the familiar figure of a fish sprouting feet to become an amphibian.  I laughed!  And I continued to laugh as I saw more of these Darwin fish on the rear ends of cars around town.  It is a university town, where you expect such irreverent humor.  Over time, I saw the growing bumper battle between the Darwin fish and the Jesus fish, with ever more clever designs, culminating in the Darwin fish opening wide to eat the Jesus fish!  I became concerned.  Too many people are taking this battle seriously, seeing Darwin as displacing Jesus.

 

This was not the reaction of an offended Christian or shock at such public display of intolerance.  I was reacting to the name Darwin coming to symbolize so much other than the man or even his work. The Darwin fish proposes an equivalence between Darwin and Jesus.  Darwin the prophet of modernity, Darwin the symbol of Ultimate Truth, Darwin an object of “religious” reverence.  This struck me as profound misrepresentation of who was Charles Darwin and what he himself stood for.  This was not science versus religion or science versus Christianity but Science as a religion competing with Christianity as a religion.  I knew Charles the person would have been appalled. 

 

In Defense of Charles the Person

 

I am a friend of Charles the person and therefore feel obliged to defend his good name.  Not that that I knew him in person!  My great, great grandfather was born in England the same year as Charles – 1809.  But I know Charles a great deal better than I know my own ancestor.  His voyage on the Beagle inspired me to travel the world, too.  His evolutionary theory structured my worldview in university and to this day.  To me, however, Charles is more than a voyage and a theory.  Charles is a life-long friend — not a mentor or a teacher or a hero or an icon – a personal friend – like the fantasy friend of a child, I suppose – with passions and aversions, strengths and weaknesses, to which I relate my own.  He is a person with whom I can sympathize but also criticize.  He puzzles yet inspires me.  He makes me smile, and he is exasperating.  We agree, and we disagree.  We walk together in silence.  He speaks, I listen.  He is a personal friend, no less than my deceased father, who is gone, yet with me.  It is a person-to-person connection.  In short, I like Charles Darwin a great deal, but I know him too well to sit by while the modern world enthrones him as its demi-god.  Nor can I idly allow him to be branded the Anti-Christ. 

 

My “friendship” with Charles Darwin does not authorize me to tell you what motivated him or what he believed without my going back to the written record, his own books, journals and letters and the writings of his peers, family and biographers.  What a daunting task that is!  I am not a trained historian or biographer, and I still have a day job and a family to care for.  For the most part, I have to depend on others who have done the tedious work of extracting and summarizing what Charles and others actually revealed about the man.  It is a voluminous record, yet very sketchy regarding his religious and philosophical positions.  It requires a good deal of interpolation and interpretation, always subject to personal bias. 

 

A Child of His Time

 

Even what Charles wrote is not the complete key to his train of thought.  He had his own biases welling up from assumptions, of which even he was mostly unaware.  As we all are, Charles was a child of his time and all that led up to that time.  Therefore, to properly interpret what Charles was thinking and feeling, we have to explore the history and philosophy and culture and society that influenced his thinking and feeling.  A daunting task indeed!

 

Charles was born five years before Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.  Charles’s parents’ generation was traumatized by the French Revolution and the following surge of Napoleon’s armies across the Continent.  The society in which he was an impressionable teenager, as all teenagers are, was the society of Jane Austen’s novels.  English culture was absorbing and adjusting to Enlightenment philosophy, its countercurrents, and its conflicts with orthodox Christianity, which overlay the disruption of the traditional social order by the emerging Industrial Revolution and its new classes of beneficiaries and victims.  Just think of the profound influence of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam and Watergate on the assumptions of my generation.  Charles could not have made full sense of our writings on any philosophical issue without knowing these great influences on our worldviews.  Likewise, we cannot interpret Charles without knowing the context of his life.

 

Charles the Family Man

 

And there was Charles’s family.  His enormous physician father, Robert, and physician-philosopher-poet grandfather, Erasmus, who was an early and well-known proponent of evolutionary thought.   And the Wedgwood family of his mother, founders of the famous Wedgwood line of fine china and old-style Unitarians (among the many Dissenter sects of Christianity, tolerated just barely by the Church of England and the Crown).  And there was his brother, Erasmus (Ras to the family) who kept a bachelor’s salon for London intellectuals, including notably Thomas Carlyle and his wife, whom Charles knew fairly well.  And his close friends, Charles Lyell the famous geologist, Joseph Hooker the famous botanist, and Thomas Huxley, the famous anatomist and firebrand advocate of Charles’s theory (up to a point).  And, of course, there was his wife and first cousin and closest friend, Emma Wedgwood, who was well-educated and worldly, having done the Grand Tour of Europe’s cultural treasures while Charles visited Europe only once, a brief trip to Paris a few years before his voyage on the Beagle, after which he never again left England.  To understand Charles, we have to understand Emma, too.  She was religious in a way Charles was not, but she was hardly orthodox.  In the Anglican church of Downe, the Darwin family’s home village for decades, Emma is reported to have regularly required their eight children to turn their backs with her to the altar as the Confession of the Faith was chanted, all the while glaring at the rest of the congregation!  Perhaps this embarrassing scene explains why Charles preferred to stroll the village while the family attended Sunday service.

 

Understanding the Object of Rejection

 

I think understanding the context of a person’s life is particularly important, because as I have repeatedly discovered in my own career, it is often impossible to understand why a person so passionately promotes an idea without understanding what the person is thereby rejecting.  Yet people seldom cite this object of rejection in building the rationale for the idea.  Indeed, the person may not even be fully aware of what is being rejected or perhaps is reluctant to admit it.  Guarding against the strong temptation to psychoanalyze, we can use the context of the person’s life to surmise what the person is likely reacting against and thereby come closer to understanding fully.

 

Learning from Analogy with Ourselves

 

Even if all these pieces of evidence and context can be assembled, there will have to be interpretation – educated guesses – of what was going on in Charles’s mind.  Aside from assembling the pieces, I hope to contribute my own understanding from my “friendship” with Charles.  We learn very often by analogy.  When we cannot directly know the nature of what we are trying to understand, we find an analogy to something we know already and say “if it is truly like this, we can imagine how it would react to that.”  Charles was a well-educated, well-traveled, perceptive and sensitive man, not unlike you and me, perhaps.  If we can establish how he was similar and how he was different from us, we can use ourselves as a useful analogy to make good guesses about how he thought and felt about things about which you and I think and feel.  This must be done very cautiously, guarding diligently against wishful thinking and unconscious bias.  It cannot be fully successful. But it can move us much closer than we were before to understanding the man.

 

Why is this important? 

 

Charles Darwin has become a touchstone for our modern world.  The “bumper battle” of the fish symbols leaves no doubt of this.  Commentators in the Science-Religion Debate, with all its political implications and consequences, often use Darwin as their point of reference, either to support or refute assertions about matters at hand.  The Darwin name will be taken in vain regardless of how hard we try to set the record straight, but those of us who honor intellectual honesty and historical accuracy should have ready access to the real man and what were mostly likely his true views on the issues that are now so controversial.  Surely this better understanding only improves the debate.  We also owe this consideration to such a remarkable, decent and likeable man.  Providing ready access to Charles, the real person, is the ultimate purpose of Darwin Watch. 

  

I am reading a series of books and articles and compilations of letters and will provide you “book reviews” and short essays commenting on what I’ve read.  You may expect to see something new from me at least once a month.  In the process, you will see the “book” take shape.  Your comments, advice, and corrections will help the process along.  Post a comment with your thoughts.  This daunting task cannot be done by one person alone.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)