Darwin’s Delay

Few events inspire more speculation than long and unexplained pauses in the activities of famous people. Rossini crowned a brilliant operatic career with William Tell and then wrote almost nothing for the next thirty-five years. Dorothy Sayers abandoned Lord Peter Wimsey at the height of his popularity and turned instead to God. Charles Darwin developed a radical theory of evolution in 1838 and published it twenty-one years later only because A. R. Wallace was about to scoop him.

Five years with nature aboard the Beagle destroyed Darwin’s faith in the fixity of species. In July, 1837, shortly after the voyage, he started his first notebook on “transmutation.” Already convinced that evolution had occurred, Darwin sought a theory to explain its mechanism. After much preliminary speculation and a few unsuccessful hypotheses, he achieved his central insight while reading an apparently unrelated work for recreation. Darwin later wrote in his autobiography:

In October 1838 … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.

Darwin had long appreciated the importance of artificial selection practiced by animal breeders. But until Malthus’s vision of struggle and crowding catalyzed his thoughts, he had not been able to identify an agent for natural selection. If all creatures produced far more offspring than could possibly survive, then natural selection would direct evolution under the simple assumption that survivors, on the average, are better adapted to prevailing conditions of life.

Darwin knew what he had achieved. We cannot attribute his delay to any lack of appreciation for the magnitude of his accomplishment. In 1842 and again in 1844 he wrote out preliminary sketches of his theory and its implications. He also left strict instructions with his wife to publish these alone of his manuscripts if he should die before writing his major work.

Why then did he wait for more than twenty years to publish his theory? True, the pace of our lives today has accelerated so rapidly—leaving among its victims the art of conversation and the game of baseball—that we may mistake a normal period of the past for a large slice of eternity. But the span of a man’s life is a constant measuring stick; twenty years is still half a normal career—a large chunk of life even by the most deliberate Victorian standards. Conventional scientific biography is a remarkably misleading source of information about great thinkers. It tends to depict them as simple, rational machines pursuing their insights with steadfast devotion, under the drive of an internal mechanism subject to no influence but the constraints of objective data. Thus, Darwin waited twenty years—so the usual argument runs—simply because he had not completed his work. He was satisfied with his theory, but theory is cheap. He was determined not to publish until he had amassed an overwhelming dossier of data in its support, and this took time.

But Darwin’s activities during the twenty years in question display the inadequacy of this traditional view. In particular, he devoted eight full years to writing four large volumes on the taxonomy and natural history of barnacles. Before this single fact, the traditionalists can only offer pap—something like: Darwin felt that he had to understand species thoroughly before proclaiming how they change; this he could do only by working out for himself the classification of a difficult group of organisms—but not for eight years, and not while he sat on the most revolutionary notion in the history of biology. Darwin’s own assessment of the four volumes stands in his autobiography.

Besides discovering several new and remarkable forms, I made out the homologies of the various parts … and I proved the existence in certain genera of minute males complemental to and parasitic on the hermaphrodites. Nevertheless, I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time.

So complex an issue as the motivation for Darwin’s delay has no simple resolution, but I feel sure of one thing: the negative effect of fear must have played at least as great a role as the positive need for additional documentation. Of what, then, was Darwin afraid? When Darwin achieved his Malthusian insight, he was twenty-nine years old. He held no professional position, but he had acquired the admiration of his colleagues for his astute work aboard the Beagle. He was not about to compromise a promising career by promulgating a heresy that he could not prove.

What then was his heresy? A belief in evolution itself is the obvious answer. Yet this cannot be a major part of the solution; for, contrary to popular belief, evolution was a very common heresy during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was widely and openly discussed, opposed, to be sure, by a large majority, but admitted or at least considered by most of the great naturalists.

An extraordinary pair of Darwin’s early notebooks may contain the answer (see H. E. Gruber and P. H. Barrett, Darwin on Man, for text and extensive commentary). These socalled M and N notebooks were written in 1838 and 1839, while Darwin was compiling the transmutation notebooks that formed the basis for his sketches of 1842 and 1844. They contain his thoughts on philosophy, esthetics, psychology, and anthropology. On rereading them in 1856, Darwin described them as “full of metaphysics on morals.” They include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism—the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. No notion could be more upsetting to the deepest traditions of Western thought than the statement that mind—however complex and powerful—is simply a product of brain. Consider, for example, John Milton’s vision of mind as separate from and superior to the body that it inhabits for a time (Il Penseroso, 1633).

Or let my lamp, at midnight hour,
Be seen in some high lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,
With thrice-great Hermes¹, or unsphere
The spirit of Plato, to unfold
What worlds or what vast regions hold
The immortal mind that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook.

The notebooks prove that Darwin was interested in philosophy and aware of its implications. He knew that the primary feature distinguishing his theory from all other evolutionary doctrines was its uncompromising philosophical materialism. Other evolutionists spoke of vital forces, directed history, organic striving, and the essential irreducibility of mind—a panoply of concepts that traditional Christianity could accept in compromise, for they permitted a Christian God to work by evolution instead of creation. Darwin spoke only of random variation and natural selection.

In the notebooks Darwin resolutely applied his materialistic theory of evolution to all phenomena of life, including what he termed “the citadel itself”—the human mind. And if mind has no real existence beyond the brain, can God be anything more than an illusion invented by an illusion? In one of his transmutation notebooks, he wrote:

Love of the deity effect of organization, oh you materialist! … Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.

This belief was so heretical that Darwin even sidestepped it in The Origin of Species (1859), where he ventured only the cryptic comment that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” He gave vent to his beliefs, only when he could hide them no longer, in the Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). A. R. Wallace, the codiscoverer of natural selection, could never bring himself to apply it to the human mind, which he viewed as the only divine contribution to the history of life. Yet Darwin cut through 2,000 years of philosophy and religion in the most remarkable epigram of the M notebook:

Plato says in Phaedo that our “imaginary ideas” arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience—read monkeys for preexistence.

In his commentary on the M and N notebooks, Gruber labels materialism as “at that time more outrageous than evolution.” He documents the persecution of materialistic beliefs during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and concludes:

In virtually every branch of knowledge, repressive methods were used: lectures were proscribed, publication was hampered, professorships were denied, fierce invective and ridicule appeared in the press. Scholars and scienlists learned the lesson and responded to the pressures on them. The ones with unpopular ideas sometimes recanted, published anonymously, presented their ideas in weakened forms, or delayed publication for many years.

Darwin had experienced a direct example as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh in 1827. His friend W. A. Browne read a paper with a materialistic perspective on life and mind before the Plinian Society. After much debate, all references to Browne’s paper, including the record (from the previous meeting) of his intention to deliver it, were expunged from the minutes. Darwin learned his lesson, for he wrote in the M notebook:

To avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock.

The most ardent materialists of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels, were quick to recognize what Darwin had accomplished and to exploit its radical content. In 1869, Marx wrote to Engels about Darwin’s Origin:

Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.

A common bit of folklore—that Marx offered to dedicate volume 2 of Das Kapital to Darwin (and that Darwin refused)—turns out to be false. But Marx and Darwin did correspond, and Marx held Darwin in very high regard. (I have seen Darwin’s copy of Das Kapital in his library at Down House. It is inscribed by Marx who calls himself a “sincere admirer” of Darwin. Its pages are uncut. Darwin was no devotee of the German language.) Darwin was, indeed, a gentle revolutionary. Not only did he delay his work for so long, but he also assiduously avoided any public statement about the philosophical implications of his theory. In 1880, he wrote:

It seems to me (rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and Theism hardly have any effect on the public; and that freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of human understanding which follows the progress of science. I have therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself to science.

Yet the content of his work was so disruptive to traditional Western thought that we have yet to encompass it all. Arthur Koestler’s campaign against Darwin, for example, rests upon a reluctance to accept Darwin’s materialism and an ardent desire once again to invest living matter with some special property (see The Ghost in the Machine or The Case of the Midwife Toad). This, I confess, I do not understand. Wonder and knowledge are both to be cherished. Shall we appreciate any less the beauty of nature because its harmony is unplanned? And shall the potential of mind cease to inspire our awe and fear because several billion neurons reside in our skulls?