Inception of Darwin's theory

The inception of Darwin's theory began with a search for explanations of contradictions in current faith based ideas, and led him to formulate his theory of natural selection which was eventually published in his book On the Origin of Species.

This article covers the period during which Darwin conceived of his theory, and includes the context of his life, work and outside influences at the time. It came after the influences of Charles Darwin's education and the Voyage of the Beagle. See the development of Darwin's theory, the publication of Darwin's theory and the reaction to Darwin's theory for the periods that followed.

Contents

1 Background: influences

1.1 Education
1.2 Voyage on the Beagle

2 Return to celebrity and science

3 Transmutation

3.1 Animal observations
3.2 Malthus and Natural Law

4 Theory

5 Reference

6 See also

Background: influences

Charles Darwin grew up in a conservative era when repression of revolutionary Radicalism had displaced the 18th century Enlightenment. The Church of England dominated the English scientific establishment which saw natural history as revealing God's plan underlying and supporting the existing social hierarchy. Discoveries of fossils showing the extinction of species were explained by catastrophism, the belief that animals and plants were periodically annihilated by natural catastrophes then their places were taken by new immutable species created ex nihilo (out of nothing).

Darwin's extended family of Darwins and Wedgwoods was strongly Unitarian, and one of his grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin, was a freethinker who hypothesized that all warm-blooded animals sprang from a single living "filament" long, long ago and proposed evolution by acquired characteristics, anticipating the theory later developed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Education

Main article: Charles Darwin's education

Charles Darwin went to Edinburgh University in 1825 to study medicine, but was put off by the sight of blood and turned his attention to student societies for naturalists. He became a keen student of Robert Edmund Grant, a Lamarckian anatomist influenced by Erasmus Darwin who shared the evolutionist ideas of �tienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire regarding evolution by acquired characteristics. Charles joined Grant in pioneering investigations of invertebrate marine animals and learnt his radical theory of homology which controversially claimed the common descent of all animals, but was troubled by Grant's atheism.

At professor Robert Jameson's natural history course Darwin learnt about stratigraphic geology. The course closed with lectures on the "Origin of the Species of Animals". In 1826 Jameson had (anonymously) made the first use of the word "evolved" in a modern sense. Even medical lectures introduced him to Augustin de Candolle's natural system of classification and emphasis on the "war" between competing species. However, he loathed medicine and left in April 1827 without a degree.

Darwin now went to Christ's College, Cambridge to qualify as an Anglican clergyman. He became passionate about beetle collecting, joining his cousin William Darwin Fox. Subsequently he joined John Stevens Henslow's botany course and became the "favourite pupil". In his finals in January 1831 he shone in theology and scraped through in classics, maths and physics. He was then convinced by Paley's Natural Theology which set out the Teleological argument that complexity of "design" in nature proved God's role as Creator.

In preparation for a planned visit to Madeira he joined the geology course of Adam Sedgwick, then that summer worked with him at mapping strata in Wales. The plans fell through, but Darwin was given the opportunity to accompany HMS Beagle on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America.

Voyage on the Beagle

Main article: The Voyage of the Beagle

During the survey expedition Darwin became convinced by Charles Lyell's uniformitarian theory of gradual geological process over eons of time, and puzzled over how various theories of creation fitted the evidence he saw.

Return to celebrity and science

He returned with his reputation established as a theoretical geologist, and set about getting his huge collection of specimens properly assessed by experts as well as writing books based on his notes.

Richard Owen showed that Darwin's fossil specimens were of extinct species related to current species in the same locality. John Gould startlingly revealed that completely different birds from the Gal�pagos Islands were species of finches, and Darwin found that the finch species as well as species of tortoises were distinct to each island.

Transmutation

Early in 1837 Darwin was speculating on transmutation in his "Red Notebook" which he had begun on the Beagle. His notebooks developed an essentially materialist and deterministic view of human beings, with the conclusions that freewill was an illusion and the brain was mechanistic. At this time, when the Revd. William Whewell recruited him to the establishment position of secretary of the Geological Society, Darwin was privately scorning Whewell's faith in a human-centred universe being perfectly adapted to man and writing of "my theory" which he thought "would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy", transforming the "whole metaphysics". In July 1837 as his speculation deepened he started the first of a series of secret notebooks on transmutation.

Darwin's ideas fitted with the radical Unitarianism of his brother Erasmus's circle including Harriet Martineau, but were heretical to his Anglican friends in the scientific establishment. In his notebooks Darwin explored the metaphysical implications of a consistent positivist creed, arguing that a person can be �congratulated for doing good� but the act is actually purely conditioned and �deserves no credit�. Indeed, �wickedness is no more a man�s fault than bodily disease!�. His Anglican friends would have found this deterministic materialism more shocking than his ideas of evolution.

Such Materialist ideas had been seized on by socialist agitators, red Lamarckians who stirred the mob to overthrow the social order and Chartists who even demanded the vote for working men! The establishment and the Tory press were quick to crush such ideas, using the full force of the law at a time when blasphemy was a criminal offence. Many were denounced and overthrown for such scandalous ideas, including the surgeon William Lawrence who was forced to resign his post and lost copyright on his book Lectures on Man. This book was promptly pirated by the notorious agitator and pornography publisher William Benbow, and then published in cheap editions such as the copy that Darwin now read. As a result Darwin was secretive and very cautious in even hinting about his ideas to the friends he was bursting to share discussions with.

Animal observations

By February 1838 Darwin was on to a new pocketbook, the maroon C notebook, and was investigating the breeding of domestic animals. He found the newspaper wholesaler William Yarrell at the Zoological museum a fund of knowledge, and questioned if breeders weren't going against nature in picking varieties. He was now writing of Descent rather than transmutation, and hinting at ideas of adaption to climate. He found a pamphlet by by Yarrell's friend Sir John Sebright with a passage reading: "A severe winter, or a scarcity of food, by destroying the weak and the unhealthy, has all the good effects of the most skilful selection. In cold or barren countries no animals can live to the age of maturity, but those who have strong constitutions; the weak and the unhealthy do not live to propagate their infirmities." After reading the pamphlet, Darwin commented "excellent observations of sickly offspring being cut off".

At the zoo on 28 March he had his first sight of an ape, and was impressed at the orang-utan's antics "just like a naughty child" when the keeper held back an apple. In his notes he wrote "Let man visit Ourang-outang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see its intelligence.... let him look at savage...naked, artless, not improving yet improvable & let him dare to boast of his proud preeminence." Here Darwin was drawing on his experience of the natives of Tierra del Fuego and daring to think that there was little gulf between man and animals despite the theological doctrine that only humanity possessed a soul.

Malthus and Natural Law

On 21 June 1838 Darwin was elected to the establishment Athenaeum Club, and it was here in August that he read a review of Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy which bolstered Darwin's ideas of natural laws, making him remark "What a magnificent view one can take of the world" with everything synchronised "by certain laws of harmony". Then in late September he began reading the new 6th edition of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population which reminded him of Malthus's statistical proof that human populations breed beyond their means and compete to survive, at a time when he was primed to apply these ideas to animal species. Malthus had softened from the bleakness of the earlier editions, now allowing that the population crush could be mitigated by education, celibacy and emigration.

Already Radical crowds were demonstrating against the harsh imposition of Malthusian ideas in the Poor Laws, and a slump was resulting in mass emigration. Lyell was convinced that animals were also driven to spread their territory by overpopulation, but Darwin went further in applying to his search for the Creator's laws the Whig social thinking of struggle for survival with no handouts. He did broach the subject with Emma around the time that he proposed to her in November, and when she wrote expressing concern about his faith, his warm reply eased matters but this tension would remain.

Theory

Darwin considered Malthus's argument, that human populations breed beyond their means and compete to survive, in relation to his findings about species relating to localities, earlier enquiries into animal breeding, and ideas of Natural "laws of harmony". Around late November 1838 he compared breeders selecting traits to a Malthusian Nature selecting from variants thrown up by "chance" so that "every part of newly acquired structure is fully practised and perfected", thinking this "the most beautiful part of my theory" of how species originated.

In the inception of his theory Darwin tried to satisfy the methodology of William Whewell's metascience which is now thought to be mistaken in many ways, and in the 1860s this lead to him having to debate the merits of the methodology.

On 19 December 1838 as secretary of the Geological Society of London Darwin witnessed the vicious interrogation by Owen and his allies of Darwin's old tutor Robert Edmund Grant when they ridiculed Grant's Lamarckian heresy in a clear reminder of establishment intolerance of materialist theories

In 1839, once married and settled in smoky London, Darwin continued to look to the countryside for information and began a Questions & Experiments notebook with ideas that would have seemed bizarrely mundane to the "philosophical" scientists of the time. He printed Questions about the Breeding of Animals and sent them out to gentlemen farmers, asking for information on animal husbandry from their nurserymen and gamekeepers on how they crossed varieties or selected offspring. Of only three who responded one simply found the questions too overwhelming to answer. He found agreement with the visiting Swiss botanist de Candolle who had first mooted the idea of "nature's war". However, when he tried explaining his theory to Hensleigh Wedgwood, his cousin "seemed to think it absurd... that [a] tiger springing an inch further would determine his preservation".

The publication in May of Darwin's Journal and Remarks (The Voyage of the Beagle) brought reviews accusing him of theorising rather than letting the facts speak for themselves. He turned his attention to a book on coral atolls.

See the development of Darwin's theory for the ensuing developments, in the context of his life, work and outside influences at the time.

Reference

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Michael Joseph, the Penguin Group, 1991). ISBN 0-7181-3430-3