Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

On melancholia, too, Darwin was something of an expert. These years he was depressed, exhausted, and sick most of the time. Throughout this miserable period he was consistently productive and his relationships with Emma, the survivors among their ten children, and a great number of friends seemed none the worse for it. If anything, the letters they exchanged and their written recollections testify to an openness, an emphasis on the importance of feelings, a respect for children, a harmonious family life. His daughter remembered him saying that he hoped none of his children would ever believe something just because it was he who told it to them. “He kept up his delightful, affectionate manner towards us all his life,” his son Francis wrote. “I sometimes wonder that he could, with such an undemonstrative race as we are; but I hope he knew how much we delighted in his loving words and manner … He allowed his grown-up children to laugh with and at him, and was generally speaking on terms of perfect equality with us.”²²

There were many who comforted themselves with the thought that in his last moments Darwin would renounce his evolutionary heresies and repent. There are still people today who piously believe that’s just what happened. Instead, Darwin faced death calmly and apparently without regret, saying on his deathbed “I am not the least afraid to die.”²³

The family wished to bury him on their estate at Down, but twenty Members of Parliament, with the support of the Anglican Church, appealed to them to allow him to be interred at Westminster Abbey, a few feet away from Isaac Newton. You’ve got to hand it to the Church of England. It was an act of consummate grace. For you, they seemed to be saying, who have done the most to raise doubts about the truth of what we say, we reserve the highest honor—a respect for the correction of error that is, incidentally, characteristic of science when it is faithful to its ideals.

HUXLEY AND THE GREAT DEBATE

Thomas Henry Huxley was born to a large, struggling, dysfunctional family in the England of 1825, where class was destiny for almost everyone. His formal education consisted of two years of elementary school. But he had an insatiable hunger for knowledge and legendary self-discipline. At age seventeen, on an impulse, Huxley entered an open competition given by a local college, and was awarded the Silver Medal of the Pharmaceutical Society and a scholarship to study medicine at Charing Cross Hospital. Forty years later he was President of the Royal Society, then the foremost scientific organization in the world. He made fundamental contributions to comparative anatomy and many other fields, and was, along the way, inventor of the words “protoplasm” and “agnostic.” Through his whole life he was committed to teaching science to the public. (More than one member of the upper classes was known to don shabby clothes in order to gain admittance to his lectures for working people.) He taught that a fair scientific examination of the facts demolished European claims of racial superiority.²⁴ At the end of the American Civil War, he wrote that while the slaves might now be free, half of the human species—women—had yet to be emancipated.*

One of Huxley’s interests had been the idea that all animals, including us, were “automata,” carbon-based robots, whose “states of consciousness … are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance.”²⁵ Darwin closed his last letter to him with these words: “Once again, accept my cordial thanks, my dear old friend. I wish to God there were more automata in the world like you.”²⁶

“If I am to be remembered at all,” Huxley confided late in life, “I would rather it should be as ‘a man who did his best to help the people’ than by any other title.”²⁷ What he is actually best remembered for is delivering the punch line in the decisive debate that gained acceptance for Darwin’s ideas.

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The Huxley/Wilberforce debate is the grand climactic scene in the 1930s Hollywood movie version that might be imagined of Darwin’s life:

A small item on the front page of The Daily Oxonian: “Annual Meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science to Be Held Tomorrow.” The dateline reads June 29, 1860. Front page begins to spin like a roulette wheel.