Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

He tried his best to avoid the public version of this domestic tension. Our past was then a dark and shameful secret. To expose it would have been perceived by many as an affront to the prevailing religious norms and as an assault against human dignity. But to suppress it would have been to reject the data because the implications were disturbing. Darwin recognized that if he was to convince anyone he would have to support his argument with a compelling body of evidence.

In 1844, a sensational book, fundamentally pseudoscience, called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published. Robert Chambers, the encyclopedist and amateur geologist who was its anonymous author, claimed that he had traced human ancestry all the way back to … frogs. Chambers’ reasoning was half-baked (although no more so than Erasmus Darwin’s) but its audacity attracted a great deal of attention. Nagging doubts about Creation were beginning to bubble to the surface, and Darwin felt that he should write down his own theory in as irrefutable a form as possible. He expanded a short essay, begun two years before, into a two-part work entitled “On the Variation of Organic Beings under Domestication and in the Natural State” and “On the Evidence Favourable and Opposed to the View That Species Are Naturally Formed Races Descended from Common Stock.” However, he was not ready to publish. He wrote a letter to Emma that he asked be considered as a codicil to his will. In the event of his death, he wanted her todevote £400 to its publication and further will yourself … take trouble in promoting it—I wish that my sketch be given to some competent person, with this sum to induce him to take trouble in its improvement and enlargement.¹⁹

He felt he was on to something important, but feared—perhaps especially in view of his frequent bouts of illness—that he would not live to complete the work.

In what superficially seems an odd next move, he now put his evolutionary studies aside and for the next eight years devoted his life almost exclusively to barnacles. His great friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, would later observe to Darwin’s son, Francis, “Your father had Barnacles on the brain from Chili [Chile] onwards!”²⁰ It was this exhaustive project that really earned him his credentials as a naturalist. Another close friend, the anatomist and brilliant polemicist Thomas Henry Huxley, observed that Darwinnever did a wiser thing … Like the rest of us, he had no proper training in biological science, and it has always struck me as a remarkable instance of his scientific insight, that he saw the necessity of giving himself such training, and of his courage, that he did not shirk the labour of obtaining it … It was a piece of critical self-discipline, the effect of which manifested itself in everything [he] wrote afterwards, and saved him from endless errors of detail.²¹

Darwin had not been the only scientist to get a jolt from Chambers’ Vestiges. Alfred Russel Wallace, a surveyor who had become a naturalist, was also unimpressed with Chambers’ arguments, but also intrigued by the notion that there was a knowable process at work in the evolution of life. In 1847, he traveled to the Amazon in search of factual support for this idea. A fire on the ship taking him back to England consumed every one of his specimens. Wallace persevered, setting off to the Malay Peninsula to gather a new collection. In the September 1855 issue of Annals and Magazine of Natural History, his paper “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” appeared.

By this time, Darwin had been wrestling with such problems for two decades. Now, it was entirely possible that his claims of priority to the solution of life’s greatest mystery would be snatched away. If science were in the business of conferring sainthood, the conduct of Darwin and Wallace towards one another would have earned it for them both. Darwin wrote a letter of hearty congratulation to Wallace in which he mentioned how long he’d been working on the same problem.