Webster Charles Darwin

The Origin of Evolutionary Biology
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5756-4
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

When Charles Darwin announced his theory of evolution by natural selection, he did more than transform biology. Before his great work, humans were comfortably different from other life: a special creation. By showing how life on Earth evolved, Darwin told us that humans too are part of nature. His decisive experience - a five-year round-the-world voyage on the Beagle - set him thinking about the diversity of life: ideas that would challenge the scientific establishment and Victorian society. Darwin for years built his evidence for evolution, even as he realised that such ideas were leading him straight into controversy and dispute. This updated, concise yet informative account of Darwin's life and work makes vividly clear the personal influences of the man and his work - and why his discoveries continue to influence us all.

STEPHEN WEBSTER is Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London, where he leads the Good Science Project. From 2008 to 2013 he was director of the Science Communication Unit, where he taught philosophy of science and ethics on the masters' programme. His first degree was in zoology, followed by postgraduate work in the philosophy of evolutionary theory. His PhD thesis was an investigation of art-science collaborations, especially in relation to research practice. In his career as a science writer he wrote several radio plays for BBC Radio, scripted an opera about Darwin, and was a Guardian newspaper weather columnist. Stephen is the author of Thinking About Biology (Cambridge University Press 2003) and co-editor of Silences of Science (Routledge 2017). At Imperial College London, as leader of the Good Science Project, he co-ordinates work designed to explore and enhance contemporary research culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Webster, Stephen

Leseproben

2

Early Years

I have heard my father and elder sisters say that I had, as a very young boy, a strong taste for long solitary walks, but what I thought about I know not … I was very fond of collecting eggs, but I never took more than a single egg out of a bird’s nest.

Charles Darwin3

Darwin was born into a thriving family. Around him were lively siblings, a father with a good income and a mother whose own family, the Wedgwoods, were busily growing their pottery industry in the north Midlands of England. Charles’ paternal grandfather Erasmus was a physician and a famous poet, one smitten by the progressive aspects of technology. Evolutionary theory clearly ran in the family, for the great poet had believed that species transformed over time. He had described a theory of evolution in his Zoonomia, published in 1794.4

It was Erasmus Darwin who had first forged the family link with the Wedgwoods, joining them in their campaigns to get London politicians to work harder for the industrial north – ‘England’s powerhouse’. The Wedgwoods were wealth creators, suspicious of the parliamentary powers of the English aristocracy, but their political interests were wide. They were convinced of the wrongness of slavery and were restless believers in the power of science and technology to improve the wealth of the nation and the happiness of its citizens. The shared Darwin–Wedgwood passion for technology and politics became a bloodline when the Wedgwood daughter, Susannah, married the Darwin son, Robert. It perhaps isn’t a surprise, then, that their fourth child, Charles, always maintained a keen interest in the currents of political thought.

Darwin grew up in an atmosphere of progressive politics and optimism about the value of technology. A key part of this influence was the Wedgwood allegiance to the Unitarian Church. As Nonconformist Christians worshipping outside the Church of England, they were by definition dissident thinkers, convinced of the promise of science and reason, and inclined to question the powers of the political and religious establishment. A link between scientific work and religious belief had been established by the founder of modern Unitarianism, the eighteenth-century chemist Joseph Priestley, who worked with the Wedgwoods and was a friend of Erasmus Darwin. A pragmatic collaboration between religion and science formed the background to Darwin’s upbringing and it meant that when he started thinking about the evolution of species, he was in tune with a free-thinking tradition already existing in his family.

Among the Unitarian doctrines Darwin absorbed as a child was a belief in the essential unity of all people. He lived in a household that saw humankind as indivisible and slavery a horror that must be campaigned against. Even if he was not directly involved in those campaigns, his mother had been. The Wedgwoods’ tough-minded idealism must be a factor not only in Darwin’s lifelong abhorrence of slavery, but also in his willingness to fight for his beliefs, however fierce the opposition.

The family house was a large mansion on the edge of Shrewsbury, close to meadows that Darwin was soon exploring. Built by Robert to mark his success as a doctor and family man, the Mount, as it was called, was his ‘seat’, and he was its undoubted patriarch. When Charles once described his father as ‘the largest man I ever knew’,5 he meant it literally as well as metaphorically, for Robert was indeed vast, weighing in at some 24 stone (336 pounds). But he was a big character, too, a respected physician who was attentive to his patients and good at his job.

The remarkable doctor had other professional interests. At a time when commerce and industry were expanding fast across rural England, he formed a kind of personal bank, loaning to individuals as they tried to grow their land or their businesses. It was something he was good at and wanted to do, for he respected these energetic innovators. He knew his clients well enough to intuit when to lend and when to decline. According to Darwin, his father’s ‘chief mental characteristics were his power of observation and his sympathy, neither of which have I ever seen exceeded or even equalled’.6 By the time Darwin was a teenager, the doctor was managing two successful practices, one in medicine, the other in banking. Both skills secured his importance and reputation across the county – and made the family rich.

Darwin kept his father in mind always. There is a story of Charles visiting the Mount as an old man, and being shown round by the new tenant, regretting all the while that the visit was so closely supervised: ‘If I could have been left alone in that green house for five minutes, I know I should have been able to see my father in his wheel-chair as vividly as if he had been there before me.’7 When the time came for Darwin’s own children to describe their memories of a notable father, they remembered how he was forever reminding them of their excellent grandfather – ‘the wisest man I ever knew’.8

Darwin’s appreciation of his father is understandable. For beyond the helpful matter of Robert’s financial success, it seems his undisputed power in all family matters was combined with some sensitivity to Darwin’s ambling development. Robert was a shrewd man who acted decisively and presciently at critical moments in his son’s student years. Darwin’s false starts and waywardness never produced a family panic, and he became in due course a young man of determination and courage, well able to stand up for himself and with a firm sense of his true vocation.

Darwin had four sisters and one brother. Ras (full name Erasmus) was four years his senior, but the gap didn’t seem to matter. They were fellow conspirators as teenagers and college companions later. They stayed fond of each other throughout their lives and it is significant that Ras is buried in the village churchyard at Downe, where Darwin settled and spent most of his adulthood. Ras never married – his sisters described him as too lazy for that – but he was a genial conversationalist, dryly humorous and much too worried about his health.

Darwin was the youngest boy, but not the youngest child. Chivvying from behind was Catherine, just fourteen months his junior. Catherine also was a friend. An attractive engraving exists of these two smallest additions to the family. Catherine and Darwin gaze out of the frame; they look good natured and happy, as though poised for a life made easier by privilege and doting siblings. Their mother, Susannah Wedgwood, and three older sisters formed the sturdy domestic backbone of the family.

Tragically, that backbone weakened over time. When Charles was 8 years old his mother died, hit by an infection that raced rapidly and painfully through her system. The doctor could do nothing. Aunts and sisters attended what fast became a deathbed. Charles was kept away. His Aunt Kitty reported back to the Wedgwoods: ‘After a wretched night my poor sister yet lives, but the mortification is far advanced and must very soon be fatal.’9 Susannah endured this catastrophic illness – probably pleurisy – for three days before dying. It was an exhausting and pitiable end, and Charles was to see her only when she was relaxed once more in death. This shocking and disastrous event left him with only the faintest of memories, and years later he made this sad comment about her: ‘My mother died in July 1817 when I was a little over eight years old, and it is odd that I can remember hardly anything about her except her deathbed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work-table.’10 The elder sisters, who from the beginning had doted on their little brother, were now in charge of the household and of their young siblings. Marianne, Caroline and Susan were 19, 17 and 14 respectively. They knew what to do.

Meanwhile, young Darwin developed a liking for collecting, albeit with no great focus: stones, insects and stamps would all equally catch his eye. It was a fresh-air childhood, and there were aspects of it that he never relinquished. The greater part of his life was spent away from any city, and the childhood passion for collecting grew as he did, pushing aside more formal education and leading in time to his systematic study of great swathes of the natural world. The greatness of Darwin has much to do his with his ability, when young, to maintain a polite interest in his studies, while at the same time allowing his true interests to flourish.

However much Darwin enjoyed his freedom in the countryside, there was no avoiding the schoolmaster and the textbook. Soon after Susannah’s death the family decided it was time to get a grip on the boy’s schooling. The family was familiar with Shrewsbury School, a famous boarding establishment close by. Ras was already there. It was natural that his younger brother would follow, and a year after his mother’s death the 9-year-old Darwin was uprooted from the Mount. Always modest about his formal academic abilities, Darwin looked back at his time at Shrewsbury School with disappointment: ‘Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr Butler’s school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught, except a little ancient geography and history. The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.’11

Yet there were warm memories too. He found a good spot – a deep window in some old wall – where he spent hours reading: Shakespeare for his stories, Euclid for his geometrical clarity. These authors, too, were windows into nature. Nor does it sound as though he was sullen or lonely at Shrewsbury:...