reading the articles and fill out the form one by one

MR. DARWIN'S ABOMINABLE VOLUME A N E S S A Y

D a v i d Q u a m m e n

E V O L U T I O N A N D I N T E L L I G E N T D E S I G N

harles Darwin holds a peculiar position in the history of science and society. His name is a household word but his ideas—with a single

exception—aren't household ideas. He's central, he's iconic, but that's not to say that he's widely and well understood. Everyone knows something about who Darwin was, what he did, what he said, and the thing that most people think they know is: He concocted "the theory of evolution." This isn't quite wrong, just confused and imprecise, but it misses tbose points about Darwin's work that are most profoundly original, and dangerous, and thrilling.

One measure of his supposed familiarity is the careless use, within com- mon discourse, of the terms "Darwinism" and "Darwinian," which presume at reducing to trademark simplicity a diverse body of work that can't be so easily reduced. Forget about Darwinism, it doesn't exist. Charles Darwin didn't found a movement or a religion. He never assembled a creed of sci- entific axioms and chiseled them onto a stone tablet beneath his own name. He was a reclusive biologist who wrote books. Sometimes he made mistakes. Sometimes be changed his mind. Sometimes he worked on little subjects and sometimes on big ones. Most of bis published writings share a single under- lying theme—the unity of all life, reflecting the processes of evolution. He particularized tbat theme in a variety of concepts, some of which interlock nicely and remain valuable to biology, some of whicb don't. The most daring

Portrait of Darwin, circa 1860 (PAU^VICTORIUS EvoiuTioNCOLLECTfON. UNIVERSITY OF VIKGINIA).

The Beagle beached t o undergo repairs (DEPARrMENiOF LIBRARY SERVICES. AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NSIURAL HISTQRVJ

and original of those concepts, natural selection, is also the most enduringly significant, still central to a scientific understanding of life in its many forms on this planet.

Contrary to common impression, Darwin became an evolutionist slowly, during the period just after his famous voyage as naturalist aboard the survey ship Beagle. That voyage lasted from 1831 until 1836. Darwin was in his mid- twenties, tbe right age for maximum exertion in difficult circumstances and maximum absorption of new facts and impressions. While the Beagle's captain and crew did their work, young Mr. Darwin collected marine specimens with a plankton net dragged bebind the ship and made long excursions ashore for further collecting and observing. Inexperienced at tbe start, he gradually be- came a methodical and keenly percipient scientist. He visited Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Cbile, Peru, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and a number of small oceanic islands, including Cape Verde, tbe Azores, Tahiti, Mauritius, St. Helena, and the Galapagos. Once home from the voyage, be began to de- velop bis ideas about how species originate.

Many people, even among those wbo would say they accept Darwin's theory of evolution (whatever they take it to be), decline to absorb the full implications of what be would work out in tbe coming years. His biggest idea, bigger than mere evolution, was just too big, too harsh and threatening. That idea was natural selection, which he identified as tbe primary mechanism of evolutionary change. According to Darwin's view (since reaffirmed by a century and a half of further biological evidence), natural selection is a pur- poseless process but an efficacious one. Impersonal, blind to the future, it has no goals, only results. Its sole standards of valuation are survival and repro- ductive success. From scattershot variations, culled and accreted, it produces pragmatic forms of order. Its driving factors are hyperfecundity and mortal competition; its products and by products are adaptation, complexity, and di- versity. It embodies a deep cbanciness that is contradictory to the notion that Earth's living creatures, their capacities (including human capacities), tbeir histories, their indigenousness to particular locales, and their interrelations all reflect some sort of divinely preordained plan. It was a profoundly radical idea, offered to the world by a very cautious man.

Landing at Falmouth in southwestern England on October 2, 1836, Charles Darwin would never leave Creat Britain again. His days of gallivant- ing field biology were over. He was home and dry, and quite happy to remain so. Otber biologists of his era might spend a decade or more at punishing fieldwork in remote and exotic places; but for Darwin, five years was a belly- ful. Most of his scientific labor for the next two decades would entail researeb

Two original watercolors by Conrad Martens, the artist aboard the Beagle (VICTORIUS tvoLur

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reading, correspondence, experimentation, dissection, observation in the meadows and woodlands not far from home, and thinking. He was fastidious and deliberate. He plodded. As events would unfold, he spent twenty years preparing himself—that is, gathering data, shaping his arguments, mustering his nerve—to articulate publicly the idea of evolution (or as he initially called it, "transmutation") by natural selection. It was almost too long.

Among other distractions, Darwin threw himself into a ambitious taxo- nomic study of barnacles. During that period, a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace embarked on his own series of travels in search of an answer to the question of how species arise. Unlike Darwin, Wallace came from a humble family, with no educational opportunities or social connections. He spent four years in the Amazon basin, paying his way by the sale of decora- tive specimens, and then traveled eastward to Singapore. So far as Darwin was concerned, Wallace was just another callow adventurer and commercial collector. So far as Wallace was concerned, Darwin was merely the author of Journal of Researches from the Beagle voyage, a robust but conventional book of natural history and exploration. Wallace had no reason to suspect that Dar- win was a transmutationist, Uke himself, and he wasn't interested in Darwin's recent work on barnacle taxonomy. Having made his own lengthy expedition into remote areas of tropical wilderness, under circumstances more difficult than anything Darwin had endured, he may have lost his sense of awe toward the man he had once put in a class with Alexander von Humboldt.

Darwin's seemingly endless work on barnacles finally did end, in early au- tumn of 1854, about the time Wallace decided to leave Singapore for Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. Darwin noted in his diary, with a groan of frustration, that the project had cost him nearly eight years. The last of his four Cirripedia volumes wouldn't be published until weeks later, but on September 9 he fin- ished packing up his specimens. He'd had enough of the squinty dissecting, the laborious sketching, the microscopic penises and fluttery legs. He was eager to move on. That very day, according to another diary note, he "began sorting notes for Species Theory."

It was back at the center of his desk. He'd had sixteen years to think about the transmutation of species, to reRne his idea of natural selection, to mine the biological literature for relevant facts, to ponder his own data on variation and adaptation in the wild, to hone the arguments he had outlined. Meantime he had also fathered nine children, buried two of them, and sent his oldest son off to boarding school. He had published eight books (not counting some edited volumes of Beagle zoology), seven of them technical and one a popular travel narrative. He had made himself an expert on the classification of a dif- ficult group of animals, and his expertise had been certified by a major award. No one had a right, he had once worried, "to examine the question of species

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who hasn't minutely described many" and now he had earned that right. So was it time to publish his theory? No, not yet. He still wasn't ready.

Instead he launched a further program of empirical research to fill some of the gaps in his trove of evidence. He hecame an experimentalist, clutter- ing his house and grounds with simple but astute science projects that often smelled bad but supplied useful data. He worked his network of far-flung con- tacts for answers to obscure questions. He started keeping pigeons. Through- out the next two years he concerned himself largely with plant hybridization, plant fertilization, patterns of species diversity reflected in plant classification, the capacity of plants for transoceanic travel, and the anatomy and develop- ment of domestic animals.

Late in 1855 he drafted a form letter, a generalized request he intended sending to overseas contacts and acquaintances. It was phrased like a classi- fied ad under the WANTED heading. "Skins," it began: "Any domestic breed or race, of Poultry, Pigeons, Rabbits, Cats, & even dogs, if not too large, which has been bred for many generations in any little visited region, would be of great value." He was asking a sizable favor: Please ship me specimens. In ad- dition to the skin with its feathers or fur, he wanted a humerus and a femur and as much as possible of the cranium, preferably all still connected by sinew. The part about "many generations" in a "little visited region" was important for his studies of how individuals within a given population vary. Darwin now recognized that this crucial phenomenon, variation, occurs constantly in wild species as well as in domestic stock—but what causes it? Huge question. He didn't know. One possibility, he thought, was differences in external circum- stance. So he hoped to see how domestic breeds might vary when raised in exotic locales such as Persia, Jamaica, or Tunisia. He would happily reimburse the costs of skinning and shipping.

He made a list of the men to whom this request went. Halfway down ap- peared an inconspicuous name, "R. Wallace." Darwin evidently had a mailing address of some sort for Alfred Russel Wallace—possibly the one in Sarawak, Wallace's temporary base—but at this point he couldn't have guessed exactly where, within the vast Malay Archipelago, Mr. Wallace might actually be. And they barely knew each other. Darwin was just tossing a penny into a well.

In September 1855, the Annals and Magazine of Natural History published a paper that Wallace had sent from Sarawak. Titled "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species," it noted a suggestive pattern: that

"closely allied species" tend to occur in adjacent areas geographically and also (as reflected in the fossil record) adjacent in time. This paper created no sen- sation, but it did generate some murmurs. Wallace's agent, Samuel Stevens,

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 9

Charles Darwin (left) and Charles Lyell as they appeared in 1849, when engraved by Thomas H. MaguJre

N, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA) AKred Russel Wallace (opposite page} as a young man( V I C T O R I U 5 E V O I U T I 0 N

[DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY SERVICES. AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTOftV)

told him about several London naturalists who had groused that he should stop theorizing and stick to collecting facts. The eminent geologist Charles Lyell, on the other hand, found the paper intriguing. Out in Calcutta, a mu- seum curator named Edward Blyth got his copy of the Annah and reacted sim- ilarly. In a letter to Darwin, near the end of the year, Blyth asked: "What think you of Wallace's paper in the Ann. M. N. H.?" His own answer: "Good! Upon the whole!" Darwin's opinion was different. He read the paper around that time and made some notes for his own memory, as he routinely did with his eclectic research reading. That was Darwin's way, methodical and thorough; he chewed through huge amounts of material, swallowed the good bits, spit out the rotten stuff and the husks. Wallace's paper tasted like husk.

It discussed geographical distribution, Darwin recorded, but offered "nothing very new." It used the simile of a branching tree ("my simile," in Darwin's jealous view) to represent affinities and diversity in nature. It men- tioned rudimentary organs, though to what point? And the Galapagos com-

T H E V I R G I N I A Q U A R T E R L Y R E V I E W

ment—about how those peculiar creatures and curious patterns had never

received "even a conjectural explanation"—didn't pass unnoticed. Darwin

may even have winced, knowing it was true. He badn't risked any explana-

tion in the journal, b u t . . . give a man time. Well, all right, he'd had time. Still,

not enough. And what did Mr. Wallace know of the complex considerations?

Rather than arguing the point in his mind, or rising to this small provoca-

tion as a challenge, Darwin dismissed Wallace's whole effort. He saw no real

explanatory value to the "law" of juxtapositions and he heard nothing in the

vague language except a rehash of old fashioned natural theology. Now if Wal-

lace had scratched the word "creation" and spoken instead about "generation"

of new species, Darwin told himself, he could agree with the paper. So far as it

went. But Wallace hadn't used any such word. "It seems all creation with him,"

Darwin judged and went back to his pigeons.

DAVID Q U A M M E N 11

After a year in Sarawak, Alfred Wallace shifted onward in the Malay Archipel- ago to find new hunting grounds, beyond the range of previous British travel- ers and collectors. He caught a Chinese-owned schooner that stopped briefly at Bali and then deposited him on Lombok, a small island just thirty miles further east. Wallace stayed on Lombok for two months, shooting birds and observing the local culture while waiting for another boat that would take him to Macassar, a port on the bigger island of Celebes. Lombok is where he first encountered the sulfur-crested cockatoo, a gorgeous but noisy bird not found on Bali or any of the other islands westward. He also noticed the rainbow bee- eater, another pretty species common in Australia. Wallace would eventually realize from these signals and others tbat, just in bouncing from Bali to Lom- bok, across a narrow but deep strait, he had moved from one biogeograpbical zone into another. He was now in the realm of Australian fauna. That seemed odd. Why should there be such well demarcated zones?

From Lombok, he sent off a crate of specimens, to Stevens in London by way of Singapore, containing more than three hundred bird skins. Most of those, including as many cockatoos as he'd been able to kill, were intended for sale. The crate also contained something so ordinary that, coming from a commercial collector of biological exotica, it must have seemed peculiar: a local variant of the barnyard duck. Wallace's note to the agent explained: "The domestic duck var. is for Mr. Darwin." Please forward.

It's hard to say whether that duck ever reached Darwin. If so, he was pre- sumably grateful but not surprised. He had come to expect a high degree of generous cooperation from the people (especially those below him in social status) be called on for research assistance. Around the same time, Wallace wrote to him directly. Sent from Celebes, traveling the slow mail routes of the day, this letter took six months to reach Darwin's home in the little village of Downe, southeast of London. Like Darwin's first note to Wallace, it hasn't been preserved in the huge archive of Darwin correspondence; its existence and contents can only be inferred from the reply it evoked. "By your letter, & even still more by your paper in Annals," Darwin wrote Wallace on May l, 1857, "I can plainly see that we have thought much alike." Choosing his phrases with some delicacy, he added that "to a certain extent" they had reached "simi- lar conclusions." Furthermore, Darwin said, he endorsed "almost every word" of Wallace's paper and considered it rare for two theorists to agree so closely. Given Darwin's cold dismissal of the "law" paper in his reading notes—"noth- ing very new"—this was spreading the butter a bit thickly.

But something had changed. Wallace's lost letter may have contained a declaration of transmutationist views, and maybe also a boast that his paper was just tbe first step toward an explanatory theory. Such news would have put Darwin on guard. In any case Darwin knew that Wallace, consciously or

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not, was noodling along the edges of transmutationism. How consciously, how

fruitfully? Those were separate questions, which Darwin doesn't seem to have

asked. Seeing the younger man as a diligent but unsophisticated field natural-

ist and a possible but unlikely competitor, he was happy to share facts and

vague musings, and careful to get more than he gave. Several other factors, in

the meantime, had affected Darwin's state of mind.

First, he had grown more impatient to reveal his big secret. He confessed

to his old chum W. D. Fox, a nonscientist, that his present work involved the

question whether species are immutable or not. (He knew his own answer to

that but pretended to be uncertain.) He hoped to produce a book on the sub-

ject within a few years, he told Fox. Witb several scientific colleagues he went

further, admitting his conviction that species do transmutate and outlining his

theory. The botanist Joseph Hooker (a close friend of Darwin's) was already

in the know, having by now read an unpublished essay outlining the theory,

which Darwin had written in 1844. Early in 1856 Darwin revealed his thinking

to Charles Lyell and two or three others, including T. H. Huxley, the brilliant

anatomist and popular lecturer who taught natural history in London. Huxley

and Hooker and their wives, along with one other scientist, paid the Darwins

a weekend visit in Downe, during which the host spilled his beans about natu-

ral selection. Skeptical of religion, argumentative by nature, Huxley greeted

Darwin's wild idea with wild enthusiasm but managed to keep the secret when

he went back to London. Lyell and his wife also visited the Darwins for a few

days that month, and on the morning of April i6 the two men had a quiet talk.

Darwin laid out his heretical, ingenious theory. He must have gulped hard first,

given that Lyell had lambasted Lamarckian transmutationism in his influential

Principles of Geology. Lyell's reaction was strong but complicated, reflecting both

his intellectual courage and his attunement to the imperatives of a scientific

career. He didn't accept Darwin's notion, not yet. He did recognize its power

and importance. In a private journal of his own, devoted to the species question,

Lyell faithfully summarized that day's discussion. Remembering what Wallace

called the "law" of closely allied species appearing adjacent in space and time,

Lyell acknowledged that Darwin's theory of natural selection seemed to explain

it. He sensed that these two hounds were running the same hare.

The second new factor in Darwins mental mix was that Lyell gave him

some pointed advice: Publish. Enough delay, enough caution, enough perfec-

tionism. Go to press. "I wish you would publish some small fragment of your

data," Sir Charles wrote shortly after the visit; "pigeons if you please & so out

with the theory & let it take date—& be cited—& understood." He was still a

creationist himself, but also a loyal friend. Vicariously, on Darwin's behalf, he

felt the urgency to announce this great discovery—or anyway, this dramatic

idea—and claim credit.

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 1 3

Darwin promised to consider Lyell's suggestion. But he was reluctant and, as he admitted, confused. To come "out with the theory"—that was easier said than done. How could he do justice, in a hasty synopsis, to such a provocative and complicated set of facts, inferences, and concepts? How could he make the theory persuasive witbout presenting all his evidence? How could he an- swer preemptively all tbe objections he expected? And what was the rush? He felt strung between scientific ideals and scientific ambition. "I rather hate the idea of writing for priority," he told Lyell, "yet I certainly shd. be vexed if any one were to publish my doctrines before me."

He did begin drafting a short version—call it another essay, an article, whatever—but he soon grew frustrated at the effort to select and reduce so severely. By late summer of 1856 he had changed his approach, writing chap- ter by chapter on a scale tbat would eventually yield several fat, exhaustive tomes commensurate with Lyell's own three-volume Principles of Geology. He failed to appreciate (or decided subliminally to ignore tbe warning signs) that young Wallace was following the same intellectual route at a pace not braked by caution.

Toward the end of the year, Darwin wrote again to Lyell: "I am working very steadily at my big Book;—I have found it quite impossible to publish any preliminary essay or sketch; but am doing my work as complete as my present materials allow, without waiting to perfect them. And this much acceleration I owe to you." It wasn't acceleration enough.

Darwin and Wallace were now tenuously in touch but communicating at cross purposes through the international mails. Did tbe duck sent from Lombok ever make it to Darwin's dissecting bench? My guess is no, because the bird goes unmentioned after Wallace's cover note. Maybe the whole shipment of specimens went astray. Maybe it reached Samuel Stevens in a state of unpre- sentable rot. Anyway, no trace of a thank-you appears in Darwin's otberwise unctuous letter of May 1, 1857, in which he conveyed his compliments on Wallace's "law" paper.

There's another odd comment in that letter, showing Darwin's sensitivity about how long he had delayed. After noting tbe similarity of their views, and the rarity of such concord between two theorizing naturalists, he stroked a dash on the page, as though clearing his throat. Then be wrote: "This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, on the ques- tion how & in what way do species & varieties differ from each other." At last, Darwin intimated, he had found the answer. Anyway he'd found an answer, a distinct and tangible idea. Others would judge whether it was right or wrong. He couldn't possibly explain this idea in a mere letter, he told Wallace, too

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Darwin, about the time he began work on his "big Book" [DEPAHTMENTOF LIBRflKY SERViCES, A M t f i l C A N MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORV)

complicated. "I am now preparing my work for publication, but I find the sub- ject so very large, that though I have written many chapters, I do not suppose I shall go to press for two years." He was wheedling for time and consideration.

On or about June 18, 1858, another maiUng from Wallace arrived at Darwin's front door. It came, like the others, from somewhere in the Malay Archipelago. It had been four months in transit on a series of boats. This envelope was bulkier than usual, containing a manuscript as well as a letter. Darwin opened it. Scanning the letter, reading the enclosure, he felt a nauseating surge of emotions that began with surprise and swelled quickly toward despair. His big book at this point was still a work in progress, two-thirds written and growing more unwieldy every day. Meanwhile his young pen pal, Wallace, had inde- pendently conceived the idea of evolution by natural selection.

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 15

Wallaces manuscript was titled "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." It comprised about twenty pages of lucid, easy prose, written out in the author's hand. Its cardinal point, signaled in the title, was that the difference between species (as a category) and variety (as a category) is merely a difference of degree. That is, the amount of variation seen between varieties within a species is not inherently limited; rather, those increments can accumulate boundlessly until a variety splits away, becom- ing a distinct species unto itself. The manuscript posited "a general principle in nature" causing many varieties to do exactly that. And they don't just split from the parent species, Wallace asserted; they compete against it, sometimes outlive it, and eventually give rise to still other varieties differing more and more from the original type. Wallace, unlike Darwin, had coined no name for this "general principle." But his manuscript built a case for it with logic very similar to Darwin's own.

"The life of wild animals," Darwin read, "is a struggle for existence" in which "the weakest & least perfectly organized must always succumb." That struggle is driven by the pressure of inherent population growth rates, yield- ing many more newborn individuals than can be supported hy available food and habitat. Without mentioning Thomas Malthus by name, the manuscript gave a deft summary of Malthusian arithmetic as presented in An Essay on the Principle of Population (the same book that had inspired Darwin to his crucial insight, twenty years earlier). It noted that "variations from the typical form of a species" occur commonly among wild animals (as Wallace, the commercial collector, had often seen), and that most such variations "would affect, either favourably or adversely, the powers of prolonging existence." For instance: "An antelope with shorter or weaker legs must necessarily suffer more from the attacks of the feline carnivora." Lions would eat the slow ones. A passenger pigeon with less powerful wings would have trouble traveling widely to find food. Starvation and competition would eliminate the poor flyers. On the positive side, a giraffe with an especially long neck would have access to high leaves that the others couldn't reach. During a famine it might sustain itself with that extra resource, while short-necked giraffes died away. Those creatures "best adapted" as a result of such small differences would eat better and defend themselves better, survive better and reproduce more abundantly, establishing sizable populations while less fortunate creatures lost the struggle and disap- peared. The result would be "continued divergence" over long stretches of time, with "successive variations departing further and further from the original type." Wallace's manuscript ended with a flourish, suggesting that "all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction & succession in past ages, & all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they ex- hibit" are accountable to that nameless "general principle in nature."

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A big claim. The cover letter was more modest. Here's a hypothesis I've hit upon to explain the origin of species, Wallace said. He hoped it might seem as new to Mr. Darwin as it had to him when the notion first struck.

It didn't.

The manuscript was datelined: "Ternate, February 1858." Wallace had mailed it from a tiny volcanic island in the northern Moluccas. As the story goes, he got his inspiration during an attack of malarial fever, while forced to lie bedridden suffering alternate cold and hot fits and unable to do anything but think. One thing he thought about, as he'd been doing for years, was how spe- cies come into existence. Having seen such a spectrum of variation in the wild, having charted the suspicious distribution of closely allied species, Wallace had become ever more persuaded of the reality of transmutation. But what was the causal mechanism? During his bout of fever, he happened to remem- ber Malthus, whom he'd read more than a dozen years earlier. He recalled the geometric rates of population increase, the slower increases in available food, the consequent "checks" to human population growth. Suddenly it occurred to Wallace, just as it had to Darwin, that such checks also regulate animal pop- ulations in the wild. Pondering all that adversity and mortality, Wallace asked himself why some individuals survive while so many others die. "And the an- swer" as he recollected long afterward, was that "on the whole the best fitted live." Accidental variation plus the imperatives of struggle result in differential survival; differential survival leads to adaptation; divergent adaptation over vast stretches of time leads to fleet antelopes, strong-winged pigeons, and tall giraffes. Bingo. "The more I thought over it the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the prob- lem of the origin of species."

When the fever broke, Wallace got up and scribbled some notes. Within a few days he had written his manuscript and sent it to Darwin by the mail steamer that stopped at Ternate.

Why had he chosen Charles Darwin, ofall people, to receive an outpour- ing of his febrile idea? It wasn't because Wallace recognized Darwin as a fel- low transmutationist. The older man, in his published writings and their few exchanged letters, had been too coy to give that much away. As far as Wallace knew, Mr. Darwin was merely a conscientious naturalist of the traditional sort, whose interests ran to biogeography, barnacles, and variation in poultry. But Wallace, thrilled with what he'd hit upon, eager to announce it, had to send the manuscript to somebody, and his options were limited. He'd already heard through Samuel Stevens ofthe derogatory mutters, in London, about his ven- tures into theory. The old boys at home thought he should stick to gathering

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 17

salable beetles. He might well have ignored those dour signals and mailed his paper to Stevens anyway, for forwarding to the Annals, as he'd done with the earlier writings. But that didn't seem wise, not this time; the stakes were too large, the concept too incendiary. Or maybe he was simply aiming higher. Who else did he know? Wallace was isolated out there in the islands, and not just by miles and water. His lack of scientific credentials, educational polish, and social position left him feeling marginal. He had grown discouraged by a sense that his "law" paper came and went quietly, attracting almost no no- tice. He had even complained about that in a letter to Darwin. Darwin had responded, as a kindly aside, that it wasn't quite so—that Darwin's friend Lyell, for one, had found the "law" paper intriguing.

Lyell had? Sir Charles Lyell, Britain's foremost geologist? This was a deli- cious bit of flattery for Wallace's modest ego. Now, half a year later, Wallace was hoping to play the Lyell connection. If the enclosed manuscript on spe- cies seems sufficiently important, he asked Darwin, would you please pass it along to Sir Charles?

Darwin felt crushed. He had only himself to blame. His dilatoriness, his per- fectionism, his big mouth. Suddenly he was trapped, flattened, between the demands of honor and the claims of self-interest. He howled with pain. "Your words have come true with a vengeance" he wrote Lyell, "that I shd. be fore- stalled." Enclosed is a manuscript that Wallace asks me to send you, said Dar- win. It's well worth reading. It's also, he added glumly, the closest thing to a precis of my own theory. (In the panic of the moment, he was overlooking a significant difference: Wallace focused on competition between varieties, not between individuals—that is, selection of one group versus another, not selec- tion of individuals within a group.) "I never saw a more striking coincidence," Darwin moaned. Even some ofthe phrases Wallace used, such as the "strug- gle for existence," echoed what Darwin had already written into the draft of his big book. Wallace hadn't asked him to help get the manuscript published, Darwin noted, only to share it with Lyell; but of course Darwin would write Wallace immediately and offer to send it to any journal. "So all my originality, whatever it may amount to," he whined, "will be smashed."

Lyell, always a steady head, advised him to calm down. Maybe there was an alternative solution, less drastic than all-or-none priority. loseph Hooker, also a sensible friend as well as a faithful one, was brought into the discussion. What did Darwin have on paper, Lyell wondered, that might testify to his priority of discovery? Well, there was the manuscript essay of 1844, which Hooker had read; also a six-paragraph summary of the theory, which he'd sent last year to the botanist Asa Gray, a trusted correspondent at Harvard. These unpublished

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but witnessed writings were proof that he'd conceived the whole idea long ago, solitarily, and stolen nothing from Wallace. "I shd. be extremely glad now to publish a sketch of my general views in about a dozen pages or so," he told Lyell.

"But I cannot persuade myself that I can do so honourably." He worried that re- ceiving the Wallace manuscript—which he hadn't asked for, after all—put him in a bind. He would rather burn his own book-in-progress, he said, than be seen as behaving shabbily. But was it too late to publish a summary of his views and say he was doing so on the advice (two years earlier) of Lyell? He repeated: "If I could honourably publish. . . ." No, he couldn't persuade himself that it was okay; but implicitly he begged Lyell and Hooker to do the persuading.

Lyell and Hooker took their cue. Within days, serving him loyally as friends, serving science by their Hghts, serving justice more dubiously, they cooked up an arrangement that rescued the situation—or at least, it rescued Darwin's interests. They certainly couldn't ignore Wallace's paper entirely and connive to see Darwin given credit alone; that would have been dishonor- able, unprofessional, and scandalous when the truth came out. Instead they devised and sponsored a joint presentation of Wallace's manuscript and Dar- win's unpublished work. This peculiar duet would occur at the next meeting ofthe Linnean Society, one of London's better scientific associations, of which Hooker, Lyell, and Darwin were all governing members. Darwin consented to the arrangement, sending Hooker his 1844 essay and the six-paragraph sum- mary he'd written for Gray. Wallace, on the other hand, didn't consent to the joint reading (at least, not in advance); he couldn't, because no one consulted him. He was still doing fieldwork in the eastern islands, unreachable on short notice, far out ofthe loop. Nobody seems to have asked Lyell and Hooker: Gentlemen, what's the all-fired hurry? Nobody suggested that Darwin, having waited twenty years to publish, might reasonably wait another six months for Wallace's acquiescence. It was a done deal before anyone thought to quibble. The reason for hurry, I think, was that Lyell, Hooker, and Darwin all felt some embarrassment about this high-handed bestowal of shared credit, and they knew that delay might bring complications.

So there was no delay. The insiders moved deftly and fast. The details were settled in a flurry of overnight letters between London and Downe. Hooker chose an excerpt from Darwin's 1844 essay and inserted that, along with the Gray summary and Wallace's manuscript, into an already full agenda for the Linnean Society meeting. These three statements were ordered alpha- betically by author—Darwin's two, followed by Wallace's. On the evening of July 1, 1858, the Darwin-Wallace material and five other papers were read to an audience of about thirty people. Hooker and Lyell attended. By coincidence, so did Samuel Stevens, who may have wondered how this Wallace paper got to London without passing through his hands.

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 19

The two authors were absent. By hindsight you might view them as "con-

spicuously absent," although Wallace's nonpresence wasn't notable at the time.

He didn't belong to the Linnean Society. He was just a commercial collector,

not a gentleman-naturalist. His voice was admitted like the crawk of an exotic

parrot, interesting and indelicate. He spent July l at a place called Dorey, a

trading village on the northwestern coast of New Guinea, five hundred miles

east of Ternate. The wet season had struck again, collectible birds were scarce

around Dorey, but for insects the hunting was excellent. He'd been doing espe-

cially well with beetles. He was unaware of the event in London.

The most remarkable thing about Darwin-Wai I ace night at the Linnean Society

is how little immediately came of it. No general discussion followed the read-

ing of papers. No one stood up in response to what Darwin and Wallace pro-

posed and said. That's brilliant! or That's outrageous! Tea was served, probably.

There was some private chat. And then the Linnean fellows went home. The

foundations of science had shifted beneath their feet but they didn't notice.

Why not? This is hard to know. Possibly it was because the excerpts from

Darwin and the paper from Wallace focused on the circumstances and de-

tails of the mechanism, natural selection, not on its larger significance. The

word "transmutation" wasn't mentioned by either author, let alone the word

"evolution" (though Darwin did allude to "the origin of species"). In the ears

of a careless listener, on a hot July night, during an overlong meeting, the

Darwin-Wai lace readings with their roundabout logic may have seemed to in-

volve merely varieties and variation. Another reason that the audience missed

the point may have been that those Linnean fellows generally weren't asking

themselves the question—How do species change, one into another?—that Dar-

win and Wallace were answering.

Two months later, the society's Journal of Proceedings published Darwin's

fragments and Wallace's manu.script, lumping them as though they were a sin-

gle coauthored paper. In the editing process, someone supplied a slightly gar-

bled portmanteau title: "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and On

the Perpetuation of Varieties & Species by Natural Means of Selection." Printed,

the three pieces carried more impact than they had in spoken delivery. At least

a few scientists recognized that this was weighty stuff, for better or worse,

though some only condescended to disparage it. The president of the Geologi-

cal Society of Dublin declared to an audience, early the next year, that Darwin

and Wallace's paper "would not be worthy of notice" if Lyell and Hooker hadn't

acted as sponsors. "If it means what it says, it is a truism," according to this

man; "if it means anything more, it is contrary to fact." Darwin heard about

that criticism and savored it as "a taste of the future." He was right.

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Manuscript of Darwin's theory, first made public in this room of the Linnean Society (MARK KAUFFMAN /TIME LIFE PICTURES / GEU^'IMAL.l',)

Other readers came across the Darwin-Wallace amalgam and were deeply affected. "I shall never forget the impression it made on me," one naturalist, young at the time, wrote later. Hooker included references to "the ingenious and original reasonings" of Darwin and Wallace in his forthcoming work on Tasmanian plants, and Asa Gray described the Darwin-Wallace theory to an elite science club at Harvard, causing a disagreeable buzz in the head of Louis Agassiz, the eminent professor of natural history. So there was a scattering of strong reactions, but no explosion of acclaim or alarm. Either the central idea shared by Darwin and Wallace was too shocking for immediate absorption, or else other circumstances, somehow, hadn't favored immediate uptake. Maybe the idea hadn't been clearly enough expressed, or not cogently enough sup- ported with factual evidence—or maybe people just weren't paying attention. Anyway, it slipped past. When the president ofthe Linnean Society, Thomas Bell, gave his annual address the following May, he offered a bland retrospect

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 21

ofthe past year. It hadn't been enlivened. Bell said, by "any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize" a branch of science. Bell's comment is now famous for its obtuseness. But in a strict sense he was right. The joint Darwin-Wallace announcement didn't "at once" revolutionize biology. It was too elliptical and dry. Something more was necessary.

As for Darwin, he rebounded quickly from his low point of professional despair. The arrival of Wallace's paper had jolted him into a new frame of mind. There could be no more procrastination. No more plodding perfectionism and encyclopedic amassment of facts. No more timidity. With nudging from Hooker, he seized the idea of writing a sleek "abstract" of his theory, short enough to be published in a journal. Not just a fragmentary piece of the logic and data, as Lyell had suggested ("pigeons if you please") two years earlier; no, this would be a small version ofthe full conceptual edifice. And he'd be sole au- thor, of course, not entangled in a partnership with Wallace. Yes, that's it, he'd do an abstract. It could go to the Linnean Society Journal, for which Hooker played a guiding role. He set the big book aside and started fresh.

The new plan, and the Wallace scare, gave him new energy. During a July getaway to the Isle of Wight, complicated by transferring seven children plus servants into a seaside villa, Darwin wrote for several hours each day. His approach in these pages was slightly more brisk, more persona! than in the half-written tome. He forced himself to focus on essentials. Choose the key points, hit them clearly, move on. Pick only the strongest and most vivid of his illustrative facts. He tried to construct a beguiling argument that might carry readers along, rather than erecting a mountain of data that would crush them into surrender. He wrote conversably, in the first person singular and sometimes the first person plural: "When we look to the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals. . . ." He even found himself enjoying the work, unusual for Darwin as a writer. He was telling a great talc, as he'd told a great tale in his Beagle book—and telling it not so much from his research portfolios as off the top of his head.

This felt liberating, at least initially. Having resolved to pour his theory into an abstract, he vowed to do nothing else until it was finished. He men- tioned as much in a letter to his friend Fox. I'll send you a copy when it ap- pears in the journal, he added jauntily.

He tried to be severely concise. That wasn't easy. Just a month earlier, pan- icked by Wallace, he had longed for the chance to publish a dozen-page sum- mary of his views. Now he found himself unable to do justice to the subject in twelve pages or even in thirty or forty. There were too many angles. He knew too much. He'd need that many words just to cover variation in domestic spe- cies, only one topic among many he meant to include.

The abstract was growing, he warned Hooker at the end of the month. It

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would be longer than expected. Returning to Downe in mid-August, he con- tinued to write. He drew on his twenty-year archive of data, his notebooks and reference books and correspondence and portfolios stuffed with bits of loose paper—but he drew selectively now, striking a balance between factual evi- dence and persuasive discourse. He omitted footnotes and full citations of his sources. He mentioned other researchers and informants only passingly. His little piece on variation among chickens, dogs, ducks, and pigeons grew into a chapter. He finished a chapter on the struggle for existence and another pre- senting his central idea, natural selection. In autumn he took a week's rest at a hydropathic spa—called Moor Park, in Surrey. Then back to work. He wrote chapters on the laws of variation (as best he discerned them, which wasn't very well), hybridization, instinct, some objections that might be raised against his theory, and other topics. By the end of the year, concentrating fiercely, churning out pages like a hack, calibrating the line between too much and too little, he had produced about half of what would be a 500-page book. He was still calling it his "abstract," although soon it would be known as On the Origin of Species.

He relapsed into bad health in February 1859, a recurrence of the myste- rious ailment that had afflicted him for two decades, suffering "the old severe vomiting," plus a swimming sensation in his head. "My abstract is the cause," he figured. Probably so. During another visit to Moor Park, where he could forget about species, almost, and amuse himself reading novels, playing bil- liards, flirting jovially with young women at dinner, he got some relief. He favored junky romantic novels with pretty heroines and happy endings, but he also enjoyed Adam Bede. He liked the billiards so much that he eventually bought himself a table. Back in the traces at Downe, he had only two chap- ters to write, followed by revising, and then he'd be "a comparatively free man," he told Fox.

Free of what? Free of the burden of secrecy? Free of the fear of preemp- tion? Free of the duty to publish? Never mind, it was the casual comment of a tired man. Free of this damn book, anyway. But he was wise to qualify it: comparatively free. He would never escape the responsibilities and tensions that came with his great idea.

Wallace got news of the arrangement, by letter, when he returned to his base in Ternate. There wasn't one letter but two—from Darwin and from Hooker. Darwin's contained Hooker's as an enclosure, leaving Hooker to do the main explaining. Darwin was understandably abashed and tried to portray himself as a passive party swept along by events. (Later he would assure Wallace that

"I had absolutely nothing whatever to do in leading Lyell & Hooker to what they thought a fair course of action," a claim that was weaselly at best and ar-

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 2 3

guably untrue, given his strong hints and lamentations to both men. He would also misstate the dating of his own excerpts in the Darwin-Wallace package, teUing Wallace that they'd heen "written in 1839 now just 20 years ago!" In fact, they'd been written in 1844 and 1857.) Both letters to Wallace have been lost, but Darwin mentioned elsewhere that he considered Hooker's to be "per- fect, quite clear & most courteous" in presenting the fait accompli.

How did Wallace react? Picture a lonely, long suffering, uneducated man on a tropical island. Opening his mail, he learns suddenly that his malarial brainstorm of months earlier has yielded a theory that some of Britain's fore- most scientists consider important—so important, even, as to be worth scuf- fling over. And he finds that, the scuffle baving been settled without him, bis allotted portion is a lesser half share of inteilectual ownership and glory. His name is now famous, at least among the Linnean Society crowd; be has been recognized as a partner (a junior partner) with eminent, unimpeachable Mr. Darwin. His idea is launched, not just on the strengtb of his own arguments but with the authority of that unexpected codiscoverer. Well. It must have taken a fev̂ moments to sink in.

There was no one around, in Dorey, with whom he could really share the news. He must have reread the letters, once, twice, tasting the words. Possibly he felt a twinge of resentment. So: My brilliant idea is now ours. Then, more wisely and cannily, Alfred Wallace decided that be was delighted.

The loss of sole credit was outweighed by another consideration: the honor, not to mention the practical advantages, of being welcomed as a col- league by these scientific insiders. To this honor Wallace responded gratefully, and with humility so dignified that in retrospect it seems almost smarmy. On October 6, probably just after receiving the two letters, he wrote to thank Hooker, endorsing the Linnean Society arrangement and declaring that it would have pained him if Mr. Darwin's "excess of generosity" had resulted in his paper being published alone. He was glad to know that Darwin had stud- ied the same subject long and deeply. Tbe more discussion of these facts and questions, the better. Too often a first discoverer gets all the credit, Wallace said, to the exclusion of anotber researcher who arrives at tbe same results independently. (He was right about that. Scientists, more competitive than many classes of people, generally race one another to make and announce dis- coveries, and the politics of priority were already intense in Darwin's day, even without grant-giving agencies and Nobel prizes. Tbe adjudicated tie decreed by Hooker and Lyell went against standard scientific practice.) Notwitbstand- ing its unusualness, tbeir action had been "strictly just to both parties," Wai- lace claimed to believe, but if anything too favorable to bim. He also wrote to Darwin, saying roughly the same thing.

That was his public response, anyway. Wallace's private response was

2 4 T H E V I R G I N I A Q U A R T E R L Y R E V I E W

more revealing. On the same day as his letter to Hooker, October 6, be wrote to his motber, Mary Wallace, also back in Britain. He was bursting. He wanted to share with her his excitement at having just received personal communica- tions from two of England's most respected naturalists. He told her something (not much) about the circumstances—an essay he'd sent to Mr. Darwin, which was seen and admired by Dr. Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, "wbo thought so highly of it that they immediately read it before tbe Linnean Society." Actually, they hadn't read it but only caused it to be read; that detail got lost in the tell- ing to Mrs. Wallace. Anyway, who cared. It was read. And imagine: Darwin, Hooker, Lyell. In case his mother didn't get the implications, Alfred added:

"This assures me tbe acquaintance and assistance of these eminent men on my return home." Look, Ma, he was saying proudly, I now have connections. And not only tbat—chips to play.

In his autobiography, almost fifty years later, long after Darwin and Lyell were gone, Wallace would tell tbis part of the story a little differently. Witb a discreet editing stroke, he deleted his own bardheaded youthful opportunism. Quoting (but misquoting) tbe letter to his mother, be let bimself say: "This insures me the acquaintance of these eminent men on my return bome." By that time he had found and accepted his place, second place, in the pantheon of British evolutionary theorists. He hadn't had an easy life— n̂o family money, no financial security, no institutional position, ever—but be was proud of his austere independence. That he had once coveted the "assistance," not just the

"acquaintance," of powerful gentlemen was evidently discomfiting to recall.

In early May 1859, after just ten months of feverish work punctuated by short visits to the spa at Moor Park, Darwin finished a draft of his book. Chapter by chapter, it went to his private copyist to be made legible, and tben to tbe printers in London. John Murray, whose publishing house bad done Lyell's books and the successful second edition of Darwin's Journal of Researches, had agreed to publish it. Darwin began receiving proof sheets for correction at tbe end of the month and was appalled at how poorly his hasty prose read. The style was "incredibly bad, & most difficult to make clear & smooth." He'd never claimed to be much of a writer.

He revised heavily on tbe proofs, an expensive step in terms of additional typesetting costs, for which he offered to pay from his own pocket. His pro- posed title was deadly dull: Ar\ Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and

Varieties through Natural Selection. Tbat reflected his lingering embarrassment at the absence of scholarly citations and the abridged selection of evidence; without full credit to sources and a full panoply of supporting data, Darwin felt, the work shouldn't be considered—or labeled—anything but an abstract.

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 2 5

Fortunately, Murray and Lyell persuaded him otherwise. Murray was in busi-

ness for profit, after all, not to perform a money-losing public service, and

An Abstract of an Essay on whatever, species origins or Chinese bordellos, just

didn't sound robustly commercial. In late September, when Darwin and Fox

traded letters full of middle-aged grumping, Darwin reported that his health

had been bad again but at least the book work was nearly done. Only an index

to add, and then some revisions. "So much for my ahominable volume," he

wrote, "which has cost me so much labour that I almost hate it."

On October l, 1859, Darwin finished correcting the proofs. By his cal-

culation the abominable volume had taken thirteen months and ten days of

concerted writing effort, not counting time off for rest, travel, billiards, and

vomiting. In mid-October he warned Hooker what to expect—that he'd gone

to great lengths, positing species transmutation across the whole spectrum of

living things because he could see "no possible means of drawing [a] line, &

saying here you must stop." This was a hint about his view of human origins.

Although human evolution from other animals wasn't explicitly asserted in the

book itself, it was provocatively suggested. Lyell had already read the proofs

and seemed staggered by the implications, Darwin said, but had been help-

ful with criticisms and supportive overall. Lyell was a brick. Darwin hoped

Hooker would give candid feedback in the same vein.

By now Darwin was getting some rest and hydropathy at another watery

resort, llkley Wells, at the edge of a moor up in Yorkshire. "You cannot think

how refreshing it is to idle away [a] whole day," he told Hooker, "& hardly ever

think in the least about my confounded Book, which half killed me." That con-

founded book was now called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Se-

lection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The title

wasn't elegant but at least John Murray had convinced him to drop the word

"Abstract." Optimistically, Murray ordered a first printing of 1,250 copies. The

printer's bill for all those revisions on the proofs came to £72, a sizable chunk

of cash, but Murray waived his right to deduct that from Darwin's royalties,

correctly foreseeing that cordial relations with this author would be worth

more in the long run. Although the writing process had been torturous to Dar-

win—an almost hysterical fit of work after so many years' delay—the blessings

of forgetfulness came quickly and like a balm. He was still in Yorkshire when a

first copy of the book reached him.

Holding it in his hands, he felt an irresistible flush of satisfaction, his pri-

vate reward between the anguish of creation and the anguish that would come

with the book's reception. He wrote immediately to Murray: "My dear Sir, I

have received your kind note & the copy: I am [nf\nitdy pleased & proud at

the appearance of my child." Abominable or not, it was his offspring, and the

pride of parenthood covers a multitude of misgivings. But Darwin had grounds

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for bis satisfaction. Without yet knowing it for certain, without claiming it, without baving enjoyed it, he had dashed off a magnificently potent book that would change the world.

On November 22, several days before its official publication date, Murray offered it to booksellers. Based on wbat little they had heard about the con- tents, and on Darwin's reputation, they snatched the book up, ordering 1,500 copies against the 1,111 copies (first printing minus promotional giveaways) that were available. This is the precise reality behind a loose statement some- times made—that tbe first edition sold out on the first day. It more than sold out, yes, at tbe whoiesale level. Trickling into the bands of individual read- ers took longer. Still, the trade sale was a very strong start. Murray promptly asked Darwin to get busy on a new edition, so they could reprint with some value added.

November 22, 1859, was a Tuesday. It's an interesting day to consider, representing a nexus point between all the private turmoil that went into creating Darwin's book and all the public turmoil that has followed from it. As of that date, based on Murray's advance orders. On the Origin of Species was a commercial success, though few people had read it. Among those who had, reactions were mixed. A prepublication review in one prominent jour- nal, the Athenaeum., was caustically negative in a way that probably helped stimulate interest: "If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?" Never mind tbat nowhere in this work did Darwin say that mon- keys had changed into men. He barely alluded to the subject of human origins. Oversimplification and scandalmongering had begun even before the book hit the stores.

It's safe to say tbat The Origin of Species (as it became known after Darwin him- self dropped the On from a later edition) is one of the most infiuential books ever written. What printed works surpass it in reach and impact? Maybe the Bible, the Qur'an, the Mahabharata, and a few otber scriptural texts that have inspired millions of people to piety and bloodshed. What stands in the same category? Maybe De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Copernicus, maybe Newton's Principia, and maybe, if you count journal articles, tbe two papers of 1905 and 1916 in which Einstein described special and general relativity. Un- like those other great works of science, though. The Ori^n is written in plain everyday language and meant by its author to speak to any attentive reader. Some of its grammatical constructions are a bit sinuous in the Victorian style; much of its writing is clear and crisp. Darwin was inconsistent as a literary stylist, sometimes bad, sometimes good, but even when bad be wasn't esoteric. Occasionally he just tried to put too much into a single sentence, a run-on

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 2 7

construction with syllogistic premises, qualifications, facts, stipulations, and conclusions all linked together by semicolons and dashes like a giant protein molecule folding back on itself. Once in a while he wrote something beautiful and brilliant. Mostly he was an amiable explainer and narrator presenting one ofthe more astonishing tales ever told.

Although The Origin is the founding text of evolutionary biology, you can get a PhD in that field at many American universities, and probably at British ones too, without having read it. Such neglect of a seminal document is oddly shortsighted, given that evolutionary biology itself is a historical science, con- cerned with examining and understanding the past as well as the present. The study of evolution proceeds from observed facts and found data more than from controlled experimentation. It still relies on Darwin's ideas and Darwin's terminology—most notably, on the idea and term "natural selection"^but its professional courses of training generally don't require students to read Dar- win. That's too bad, because reading Darwin can be fun, even thrilling, as well as instructive.

It isn't always. Some of his works are far better than others, and even The Origin, his greatest, has shortcomings. One defect is Darwin's incessant apolo- gizing for the fact that the book isn't three times longer. "This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect," he writes in the introduction. "I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements." We've heard that before, in the anxious letters to his friends: Woe and alas, my stink- ing book, it's just a miserable abstract, squashed and inadequate. But now he's making a public excuse, not just fretting privately, and Darwin frames the ex- cuse in a disingenuous form. "I much regret that want of space" he says on page 2, "prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance . . . " et cetera. The italics are mine. "If I had space" he claims later (again, my italics), "I could quote numerous passages to this effect" (never mind about what) "from highly competent authorities." Later still, making a different point: " . . . but I have not space here to enter on this subject." So it's

"want of space" that's the problem?

Actually, no. Not a shortage of space but a shortage of time. Alfred Wallace had scared the bejesus out of him, he knew he'd delayed too many years, and now he felt desperately rushed to get his book into print. Dignity prevented him from admitting that.

Another quirk in The Origin is the extent to which his "one long argu- ment" relies on probability and personal attestation. Taken properly within its intellectual context—the context of inductive science, as it had lately been outlined by the philosopher William Whewell, among others—this should probably be seen as a strength of the book, not a weakness. Darwin doesn't claim to prove the reality of evolution by natural selection. In fact, "proof" is

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a word that he seldom uses—and when he does, it's often negatively, to ac- knowledge some intractable ambiguity. About the notion that embryology gives glimpses of evolutionary lineage: "This view may be true, and yet it may never be capable of full proof." About the idea, sometimes asserted, that varia- tion in the wild has strict limits: "the assertion is quite incapable of proof." More important, Darwin understands that good inductive science (which had become the ideal by the time he was writing) can never, unlike mathemat- ics, prove a result beyond any logical possibility of doubt. Instead of claiming to prove his big theory, he moves the reader toward it persuasively by way of accreting evidence. The goal is to show that his hypothesis explains a larger and more interconnected collection of data, with greater probability, than any alternative hypothesis. Along the way, Darwin makes statements such as "I think it highly probable that" and "I am convinced that," buttressing the evi- dence with his own amiable persona as a fair-minded English gentleman to suggest that these conclusions can probably be taken as right.

This is a point with some relevance, in our own time, to the conflict between evolutionism and creationism. It's an arid truth, but one that the defenders of evolutionary theory (and the teaching of it in public schools) against religion-based political challenges would do well to remember. The complexities of epistemnlogy, as well as those of biology, shouldn't get lost in the arguing. No, you can't prove that all species have evolved from com- mon ancestral lines, with natural selection as a major driving mechanism, and Charles Darwin himself didn't claim that you could. It's just very, very prob- able that this explanation ofthe living world is correct, based on the evidence Darwin mustered and all that's been added since. The alternative explanations are either less probable within the realm of physical cause and effect, or else they're scientifically meaningless (because untestable against negative data) expressions of religious belief.

Besides lacking any claim of absolute certainty. The Origin is marked by some other notable omissions. It lacks a good explanation for the source of those crucial variations upon which selection acts. It lacks an unambiguous statement about whether such variations are haphazard or somehow direc- tionally evoked. (The adjective "random" appears nowhere in the book, and to say that variations are "due to chance," Darwin admits, is to use an incor- rect expression, a convenience of speech that merely "serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause" of each one. He does imply, though, that variations are undirected.) Despite its attention to the principle of divergence, it lacks clarity on the key matter of how speciation—as distinct from adapta- tion—occurs. (When two populations of a species diverge from each other, what factor accounts at a certain point for their irreversible separation into two species?) It lacks insight into the mechanics of inheritance—the vital

D A V I D Q U A M M E N 2 9

matter of how selected variations are passed along. Final ly, the book lacks any explicit assertion that we humans share an ancestor with apes.

One thing the book doesn't lack is the idea that acquired characteristics can be inherited. Although that idea is sometimes considered synonymous with Lamarckism, it actually predated the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in the early nineteenth century, and remained more enticing than the French- man's other propositions. In Darwin's plain language, it sounds concrete and sensible: the "effects of use and disuse."

"I think there can be little doubt that use in our domestic animals strength- ens and enlarges certain parts," he writes in The Origin, "and disuse diminishes them; and that such modifications are inherited." Furthermore, it's not just domestic animals that show this trait, he says; wild ones do, too. "I believe that the nearly wingless condition of several birds, which now inhabit or have lately inhabited several oceanic islands, tenanted by no beast of prey, has been caused by disuse." The dodo of Mauritius, the cassowaries of New Guinea, the emus of Australia, and ofcourse the kiwi, all surrendered their wings to this principle, he thought. Use 'em or lose 'em. A giraffe, in his view, contrary to Lamarck's (as Darwin construed it), couldn't simply will its way to a longer neck; but by the habit of stretching for high food, it could add increments of length, and those increments (here's his mistake) could be inherited. Muscles of a blacksmith, likewise. By their efforts and habits, individual creatures earn bodily improvements . . . and they can pass those improvements along to their offspring, Darwin believed.

These confusions and omissions suggest some ofthe unfinished scientific business remaining for Darwin, and for his acolytes and successors, when The Origin of Species first appeared. Darwin himself understood that this book he'd dashed off wasn't perfect. Although he foresaw a revolution in natural history, he recognized that his "abstract" was just the opening salvo, not the declaration of final settlement terms. He knew that the work of what we now call evolutionary biology had only started, and he meant to stay engaged as it progressed. He was still struggling to comprehend variation. He wanted an explanation of heredity. He intended to address the hot topic of human origins.

Meanwhile the book made him famous—far more famous than he'd been as a conventional naturalist and writer—and profoundly controversial. It was translated (badly and irresponsibly, in some cases, by foreign thinkers with their own agendas), published abroad in authorized and unauthorized edi- tions, widely reviewed, admired, denounced, released in a cheap edition by Murray for a bigger market, and talked about by many more people than actu- ally read it. It sold roughly 25,000 copies, ofthe English editions alone, during Darwin's lifetime. "The real triumph of Darwin's book came after his death,"

3 0 T H E V I B C I N I A Q U A R T E R L Y R E V I E W

according to Morse Peckham, a close textual scholar of The Origin. "The prof- its of the American pirates must have been enormous." Those numbers are unavailable, as are totals reflecting the book's global reach. A bibliographi- cal checklist, published in 1977, recorded 425 distinct editions (not counting reprints of each edition) just to that point, including four in Hungarian, two in Hebrew, two in Romanian, two in Latvian, four in Korean, one in Hindi, and fifteen in Japanese. Darwin himself devoted a sizable share of his energies, over the dozen years following first publication, to revising it, promoting it (he mailed off quite a few complimentary copies), monitoring its reception (yes, he read his reviews), and playing his role (mainly by letter) in the sci- entific discussion it provoked. The book succeeded hugely in some ways, and failed in others. It made evolution seem plausible. But it left many of Darwin's scientific colleagues—never mind lay readers and religious critics—unv '̂illing to accept natural selection as the mechanism. That idea was still too big, too scary, too cold.

For better and worse, with its omissions and its majesties, the 1859 edi- tion of The Origin of Species stands as Darwin's ultimate statement of his theory. This is the book that, with all its courageous freshness and its flaws, triggered the most cataclysmic change in human thinking within the past four hun- dred years. It was never supplanted by the encyclopedic tome, Natural Selec- tion, that he had intermittently intended to write. Through five later editions of The Origin, he continued monkeying with his text, sometimes improving it but often just adding confusion, caution, and unnecessary words. By 1869, he sounded weary of that. "If 1 lived twenty more years and was able to work, how I should have to modify the Origin" he confided to his dear old friend Hooker—and then, changing moods, mustering resoluteness, "how much the views on all points will have to be modified!" But he wouldn't live twenty more years. Nor did he expect to. So he sighed: "Well, it is a beginning, and that is something. . . ."

It was something indeed: less than the book he had hoped to write, but more than enough to cause a ruckus.

DAVID Q U A M M E N 31

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