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Charles Darwin is among the most cogent scientists to have enhanced our understanding IN the history of knowledge, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) occupies a unique position. His 200th birth anniversary falls on February 12. The year 2009 also happens to be a jubilee year of sorts because it was 150 years ago, in November 1859, that Darwin’s book The Origin of Species was first published. It was in this book that the greatly liberating idea of evolution was first suggested as a scientific fact.
Darwin’s claim to fame lies in an idea: the idea of evolution. Seldom has an idea — and that, too, one which has never been substantially proven without doubt — done so much to shake up the world. It redefined mankind’s perception of the world. Artists, historians, sociologists, ethnographers, litterateurs, political activists and, of course, scientists discovered parallels in their own limited universe. It was almost as if Darwin had provided a crucial key to ‘how change happens’. Even Karl Marx felt an intellectual kinship with Darwin. Marx was concerned with transformation in living societies, and from Darwin he found a kindred idea regarding the transformation of living things. Even though Darwin did not allow Marx any greater intimacy, he did share with this revolutionary émigré a philosophical concern by proving that all men were equal and that the rifts of race and class in the world were entirely man-made and not part of the natural order of things. Darwin’s ideas would be used, almost immediately, also to debunk God’s role in the creation of man. Taking on God, or His Word, as the chief adversary sparked off a conflict across the Christian world that has not fully resolved itself yet. It did initiate quite a few myths regarding Darwin that continue till today. One lasting myth concerns the belief that Karl Marx wanted to dedicate his Das Kapital to Charles Darwin. However, in Darwin’s papers at Cambridge University, the discovery of a letter from Aveling to Darwin has finally cleared the confusion. Darwin did refuse to have a ‘Marxist’ book dedicated to him. This book, published in 1881, was authored by Edward Aveling. Aveling, a proselytising atheist and the lover of Marx’ daughter Eleanor, authored a book entitled The Students’ Darwin. On October 12, 1880, he wrote to Darwin requesting the great man’s permission to include his name in the dedication. Darwin refused. The letter of refusal to Aveling got wrongly filed with the private papers of Karl Marx that Marx’ daughter Eleanor set about organising in the 1890s with the help of her lover Aveling.
The idea of evolution or the ‘doctrine of descent’, as it was known then, far pre-dated Darwin. His own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was one of the important proponents of this idea. Anatomists like Lamarck, Cuvier and St. Hiliare and embryologists like Von Baer, among others, had suggested that life forms descend (as in ‘descendant’), one generation to the next, in order to adjust to changing circumstances. Darwin’s unique contribution lay primarily at two points — one, to suggest that new species are formed from older ones through natural selection rather than conscious adaptation; two, to provide an overwhelming amount of tangible evidence to back up his suggestion. The idea that Darwin suggested is a part of widespread common sense today. He suggested — what we commonly understand as the ‘tree of life’ today — that living creatures are firmly inter-linked to their environment in complex ways and their survival is dependant on these inter-linkages. As the environment changes as a consequence of predation, competition, disease and many other factors, the earlier linkages cease to be life supporting. Subsequently, only those life forms survive that, by chance, have the innate capacity to survive in the changed circumstances. This capacity itself, Darwin suggested, is inherited and transmitted from one generation to the next. In due course of time, subsequent generations will be significantly different from their ancestors. Those unfit to survive are eliminated and only those that are best suited to survival in the new environment would flourish and increase in number. Hence, natural selection implied the survival of the fittest. Many of his examples were familiar to those who bred animals (selection by humans rather than by nature). The breeder looks for traits in the parents in order to ensure that the offspring carries them. Darwin’s suggestion that evolution is a matter of chance did not go down well with thinkers like Marx, who preferred to believe that while societies evolved, man did play an important role in consciously directing the course of social evolution from primitive to slave-owning to feudal to capitalist and, thence, to the utopian Socialist.
Darwin was particularly well read. He read each and everything that came his way — except his schoolbooks. He went out of his way to have diverse experiences, skipping from one task to another with such rapidity that it annoyed his father and teachers no end. To put it mildly, till such time that he became a great man, Darwin had considerable difficulty in figuring out his metier. His autobiography tells us of him as a young child, slightly scatter-brained, athletic and lazy in studies. His mother taught him how to change the colour of flowers by dipping them in coloured water. While his older sister Caroline was the epitome of sugar and spice, young Charles, then known as Charley or Bobby, had begun to get interested in slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails, but only to collect them (tail attached to the dog), along with stamps, coins, rocks and such like. Let alone any signs of later day academic grandeur, young Charles did not show any sign of being academically inclined. School held no interest for him; neither did college. His father declared to him that he "cared for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." At the age of 16 his father put him in medical school at the University of Edinburgh so that young Charles could train to be a doctor like his forefathers. Here, too, Charles spent far more time hiking all over northern Wales than in studying medicine. He did take the initiative to learn taxidermy from John Edmonstone who lived down the road. He also read extensively the books on natural history. His friendship with the naturalist John Henslow encouraged him to keep notes of his observations. Henslow liked sharing his observations with young Charles who provided an eager audience of one. In his second year at college Darwin also joined the local science club known as the Plinian Society that was dedicated to the understanding of the world from the natural point of view rather than the super-natural. By the third year in college, Darwin dropped out for not having had the persistence to continue with the study of medicine. Now his interest veered towards studying geology. It was while on an early geological trip that he was invited to join the research ship HMS Beagle on its voyage to South America as a naturalist. The Beagle was looking for someone who would be willing to undertake an arduous five-year-long journey and not be bored by the task of making a list of the flora and fauna encountered during this voyage. Henslow recommended young Charles for the Beagle. Dr Robert Darwin did not take too kindly to this suggestion. Charles was old enough and had shown a persistent tendency to skip from one job to another. However, after an initial refusal, he allowed his son to go on this trip— without much hope for the future. In 1839, Charles published his first book describing the trip of the Beagle. The Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, 1832–36 was a very readable and popular book, but it was nothing more than a good travelogue. In the coming decades, he conducted one of the most exhaustive surveys of the literature in field biology. By the 1850s he began to see a pattern in all these biological observations. It was this pattern that he suggested—the idea of natural selection—before the Linnean Society in London during the summer of 1858. He followed it up with writing the detailed reasons why natural selection was responsible for the creation of new species on earth. That was the celebrated book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Subsequent books by Darwin would carry his argument further in later years by commenting on the domestication of animals in his book, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), and suggesting that the human species was not created by God but descended from anthropoids in his book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Since then the world has not seemed to be the same.
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Latter day
enthusiasts in the history of Socialism and Darwinism discovered
Darwin’s letter of refusal. "Dear Sir", the letter
addressed its recipient without giving any further details as to the
identity or to the text to which Darwin was referring. People presumed
that it had been written to Marx and built up an entire fiction out of
it. The curious can today easily check out these from the originals in
the collected works of Karl Marx as also the Darwin papers, which are
available for unrestricted viewing on the World Wide Web.
