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  • In the late summer of 1859, Charles Darwin finally completed the last

  • paragraph of his greatest work on The Origin Of Species.

  • But he wasn't drawing his inspiration from the exotic islands

  • that he'd visited on his famous voyage on HMS Beagle.

  • A chalk bank in Kent, near his house at Downe,

  • provided his metaphor for the laws

  • that explain the diversity of life on our planet.

  • It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,

  • with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about,

  • and with worms crawling through the damp earth,

  • and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,

  • so different from each other,

  • and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,

  • have all been produced by laws acting around us.

  • Darwin was unleashing a new vision of nature,

  • where species evolved independently from the guiding hand of a creator.

  • The established vision of a harmonious world, divinely ordaine

  • to serve God's noblest creation, mankind, would be shattered.

  • He was very aware

  • that what he was dealing with was effectively intellectual dynamite,

  • and he kept most of his thoughts about what he was doing

  • in terms of where man might come from,

  • where new species might arise, effectively secret.

  • It was a secret with which Darwin had wrestled for 20 years.

  • 20 years of unflinching support from his wife Emma, who feared that

  • her beloved husband might be consigned to eternal damnation

  • for challenging traditional beliefs.

  • Together they would endure two decades of debilitating illness,

  • self-doubt, and family tragedy.

  • It was a life struggle that Darwin also saw

  • among the animals and plants in the fields and tangled banks

  • of the Kentish countryside.

  • A struggle that is a founding principle of his theory of natural selection.

  • And the last paragraph of the Origin Of Species really goes out with a perfect bang.

  • The whole book has been about the struggle for existence

  • and what Tennyson had called nature red in tooth and claw.

  • The last paragraph gives, to me, a sense of hope.

  • It sort of shows that this war of all against all,

  • actually has a result and the result is the living world we see around us.

  • The beauties of the tangled bank,

  • the worms and the butterflies and the grass and the orchids,

  • all of these beauties of nature emerge from Darwin's simple idea.

  • There is grandeur in this view of life,

  • with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms

  • or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along

  • according to the fixed laws of gravity,

  • from so simple a beginning

  • endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful

  • have been, and are being, evolved.

  • Just as beauty and wonder emerge out of a war of nature,

  • so too did Charles Darwin's great book evolve out of years

  • of painstaking research and inner conflict.

  • At the age of 33,

  • Charles Robert Darwin was already an established gentleman naturalist.

  • His substantial private income

  • enabled him to pursue his particular interest,

  • solving what had been called "the mystery of mysteries".

  • How animals and plants might transmute or evolve.

  • It was to find a quiet place to write

  • that in 1842 he and his burgeoning family had moved to a house

  • just outside London near the village of Downe, in Kent.

  • After several fruitless searches in Surrey and elsewhere,

  • we found this house and purchased it.

  • I was pleased by the diversified appearance

  • of the vegetation proper to a chalk district,

  • and so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the Midland counties.

  • And still more pleased with the extreme quietness

  • and rusticity of the place.

  • Darwin knew in the country there was space to expand his experiments,

  • to walk, to observe nature.

  • There was plenty of information there for him to draw on

  • and then there was a very important factor for Darwin

  • of getting into a space where he felt safe,

  • with his secret theory of transmutation.

  • In the early 1840s, transmutation or evolution was still a radical idea,

  • associated with social revolution.

  • It was a secret that he shared with his wife and first cousin

  • Emma Wedgwood, whom he had married three years earlier.

  • I marvel at my good fortune that Emma, so infinitely my superior

  • in every single moral quality, should have consented to be my wife.

  • Emma was the precondition for everything that he did.

  • She... created a love-shaped space

  • where he felt safe to work obsessively without fearing

  • the loss of love and damaging their relationship.

  • She was to nurse him through years of recurrent bouts of illness,

  • the nature of which remains unclear to this day.

  • Possibly damage caused by a South American parasite,

  • inflamed by anxiety and nervous tension.

  • 25 years' extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence.

  • Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying,

  • dying sensations or half-faint and copious and very pallid urine.

  • Air fatigues bring on head symptoms, nervousness when Emma leaves me.

  • I think she was always concerned about his health.

  • She was constantly trying to persuade him

  • to have a day off here, go on a trip there,

  • not because she wanted his company,

  • but because she felt if he carried on working at the pace

  • at which he was going, then he would become more ill.

  • Emma was to provide Charles with ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.

  • As a father, Charles Darwin did not conform

  • to the standard Victorian stereotype

  • of the distant and stern pater familias.

  • Darwin was very much a family man.

  • He writes rather wryly one year

  • that his wife hadn't been doing very well last year

  • because she hadn't had a baby,

  • which is pretty rude for a Victorian, I have to say.

  • But what's fascinating is that he used his children

  • as experimental animals.

  • He noted their expressions when they were crying, when they were angry

  • and he saw how similar they were to the expression of a dog.

  • He saw his family as part of the human family,

  • the human family as part of the mammal family,

  • the mammal family as at one with the primroses.

  • And that really shows that he saw humankind

  • as an intrinsic part of the living world and not apart from it.

  • This was radically different from the established Christian view

  • of the time, where mankind was God's special and separate creation.

  • He kept his real opinions in a private notebook.

  • Man in his arrogance thinks of himself as a great work,

  • worthy of the interposition of a deity.

  • More humble and I believe true,

  • to think him created from animals.

  • And Charles and Emma did what animals do,

  • only they had a bed to do it in, upstairs.

  • But then because Darwin believed strongly in analogy,

  • it's not only animals that do what people do, but it's also plants

  • that do what people do in strange and complicated ways.

  • So from the marriage bed to the flower bed was only 100 yards

  • and Darwin would go downstairs,

  • out the back door, down to his flower beds

  • where experiments were being performed and how these creatures,

  • he even regarded some plants as simple animals,

  • also reproduced themselves.

  • Just over a year after he arrived at Downe,

  • he felt bold enough to tentatively raise the issue of species change

  • with his botanist friend Joseph Hooker.

  • At last gleams of light have come

  • and I'm almost convinced that species are not immutable.

  • It is like confessing a murder.

  • Hooker's response was noncommittal.

  • Darwin retreated into his shell.

  • If Hooker wouldn't buy it, then his old teachers at Cambridge certainly wouldn't.

  • Even the most progressive members of the Anglican clergy still saw nature's beauty and abundance

  • as divinely ordained for the benefit of the Lord's highest creation, man.

  • The fundamental idea around nature for many people during the early part of the 19th century,

  • particularly in Cambridge, but throughout Anglican Britain,

  • was that of design.

  • The world was made for man and probably the best way

  • of explaining this is just to think about the 24 hour day.

  • We think of that of course as just an outcome of astronomical chance,

  • in the way that the planets work and so forth.

  • For people who were sitting in Cambridge,

  • the idea was basically the 24 hour day is...

  • that's because humans need to sleep for eight hours.

  • And everything around them is organised from that fact,

  • from human need going outwards.

  • To suggest that mankind was merely a product of nature risked attack

  • from the black robed priests, the black beasts, as Darwin called them.

  • But what he possibly feared even more was the loss of respect

  • from the Cambridge dons who had taught and inspired him.

  • Men such as the straight spoken Yorkshireman

  • the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology,

  • who saw God's design in nature.

  • "Denying this... "

  • ".. Might brutalise it and sink the human race

  • "into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen

  • "since records tell us of its history. "

  • Sedgwick represents a union, an uneasy union of science and religion

  • that had prevailed since the 17th century, in Britain particularly.

  • A division of labour in which those who study nature

  • offer to those who study God,

  • evidence of God's greatness and goodness and wisdom

  • in the world about us and those who study God's revelation in the Bible

  • offer reasons for believing in God that he has revealed to us

  • and how to go to heaven.

  • Nature doesn't tell us how to go to heaven,

  • but it tells us that there is a God in heaven,

  • who has revealed himself and how to get there in the Bible.

  • It was with these traditional views in mind that in early 1844,

  • Darwin began to prepare a manuscript

  • that he hoped would eventually show even men like Sedgwick

  • that evolution was a reality,

  • and that he had found the mechanism that made it happen.

  • But as a punctilious and cautious man,

  • he needed to marshal his evidence.

  • What he does there at Downe

  • is really create a living laboratory.

  • You know, a laboratory to go along with his career, as it were.

  • It's not just Darwin sitting alone, looking out the window.

  • Darwin didn't just use his house and gardens to observe and learn from nature.

  • He bred pigeons and orchids, raised 50 varieties of gooseberry,

  • and to counter the creationists,

  • he became a beekeeper

  • in order to show that the near perfect hexagons in honeycombs

  • were made by instinct rather than divine design.

  • My habits are methodical,

  • my love of natural science has been steady and ardent.

  • I have the strongest desire

  • to understand or explain whatever I have observed.

  • To group all facts under some general laws.

  • He would also create a place to think.

  • A rough oval shaped path of gravel was laid down and trees planted

  • to provide him with a half kilometre walking circuit.

  • He called it the Sand Walk.

  • Darwin called the Sand Walk his thinking path.

  • He watched the trees grow and many of them are still there...

  • .. in the knowledge and hope that he would be able to

  • pace around this plot and escape the pressure

  • of sitting in one place

  • and writing and squeezing one's ideas out the point of a pen.

  • Darwin would lose himself in thought on the Sand Walk,

  • so much so that the only way he could keep track of the time he spent there

  • was to keep track of the laps and he kept track of the laps

  • by a pile of flints,

  • one of which he would kick to the side after a lap

  • and when the whole pile had been moved across the path,

  • he knew he had completed his exercise, that was your thinking time for the day.

  • We, the subsequent generation, love the Sand Walk

  • because we can imagine Darwin on it and think about

  • what he can see from the sand... in the Sand Walk.

  • He can see these climbing plants, the bryony

  • in the hedge for example.

  • He can see Great Puckland's field where he will, you know,

  • formulate a concept of biodiversity.

  • Secluded in his rural laboratory, Darwin's manuscript on what he was already calling natural selection

  • developed into an essay, suitable for publication.

  • Some of his text drew on the experiences he had on his round the world Beagle expedition.

  • Out of the five years he spent on the voyage,

  • he'd stayed just five weeks on the Galapagos Islands,

  • collecting specimens of plants and different species of mockingbirds and finches.

  • The significance of his Galapagos experience in the development of his theory has been overstated.

  • Just as I think it's very common to imagine

  • that great theories appear in a rush, through inspiration, all at once,

  • as though every scientist is like Archimedes

  • streaking along a street from his bath somewhere in Syracuse.

  • So, we want the place where the inspiration hits

  • to be glamorous and exotic and the Galapagos does that perfectly,

  • but that's completely to get the origin of the origin entirely wrong.

  • It was only back in London after his Galapagos visit that Darwin realised

  • that the species of birds and plants he collected were subtly

  • different from island to island,

  • yet were closely similar to species on the South American continent.

  • In the 1844 manuscript, he used this as evidence

  • that new species had evolved

  • as continental birds and plants adapted to the different island habitats.

  • The Galapagos of course are a fantastic

  • place to go and... there's a way

  • in which they're inevitably going to be associated with Darwin.

  • But I think their importance I think is easy to misunderstand.

  • For one thing, his collections from it are really not that great.

  • He mislabelled most of his specimens,

  • he didn't identify which of the particular islands,

  • his various finches and other organisms were actually from.

  • The main thing about it is not so much about natural selection

  • at that stage, it's the Galapagos are much more important

  • in terms of helping Darwin be convinced

  • that evolution might have been taking place.

  • The Galapagos evidence was just part of Darwin's awakening.

  • Only a way mark on the twisting path

  • to his completed theory of evolution.

  • Now at Downe, he was able to draw on nine years of intellectual struggle.

  • He'd set down some of his most brilliant insights

  • in what would become known as the transmutation notebooks.

  • It was in these pocketbooks that he first drafted the idea

  • that the vast range of living species

  • must have all evolved from a shared common ancestry.

  • Twigs and branches, stemming from one tree of life.

  • He is brainstorming with total abandon, totally unorthodox,

  • unacceptable to philosophers in his day.

  • Maybe there were a few enlightenment rationalists in France

  • who would do that, but no-one in Britain would countenance someone

  • seriously trying to find out about the world by doing what Darwin did.

  • And he wasn't just tapping physics and theology,

  • he was going to economics,

  • he was going to animal breeding, he was reaching out in every direction

  • for evidence of intuitions

  • to build up the world as he sensed it existed.

  • Yet that vision of the world was changing all the while,

  • he was testing what he thought might be the case,

  • this is the brainstorming with what people were saying was the case.

  • Darwin's 1844 manuscript was based on wide reading

  • from Milton's Paradise Lost

  • to the evolutionary speculations of his grandfather Erasmus

  • and the radical French biologist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck.

  • His great geologist mentor Charles Lyell taught him

  • that the Earth's surface had been formed

  • gradually over countless ages.

  • But it was the political economist, Thomas Malthus who would stimulate

  • the closest parallel to a eureka moment that Darwin would ever have.

  • In October 1838, 15 months after I had begun my systematic inquiry,

  • I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population.

  • In terms of natural selection,

  • there's a crucial moment in Darwin's discovery

  • and that is I think when he reads Thomas Malthus's essay

  • on the Principle Of Population.

  • Now, this was an incredibly controversial book.

  • It was controversial basically

  • because it argued that there were limits to growth.

  • A lot of philosophers in the 18th century had said,

  • "Mankind can progress indefinitely, everything's gonna be great. "

  • Malthus says, "No, that's not the case.

  • "In fact we've got limited food supply,

  • "and effectively what happens is you're going to get this population exploding exponentially,

  • "and it's going to be cut off by the need for food. "

  • What Darwin does is turn this into a creative principle in nature.

  • Death becomes the way of explaining life.

  • And so what happens is you get this incredible idea that all

  • of these thousands of forms, all these slightly different species

  • are competing for these tiny spaces on the Earth and in nature.

  • Each one trying to live and only those that are most fit,

  • only those that are really going to match in to that little spot,

  • those are the ones that are going to survive and all the thousands,

  • the millions, the billions, the rest are going to die.

  • It at once struck me that under these circumstances,

  • favourable variations would tend to be preserved

  • and unfavourable ones destroyed.

  • The result of this would be the formation of new species.

  • Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.

  • He says that this population growth

  • is like 100,000 wedges pounding into the face of nature.

  • You know, pushing in stronger ones and throwing out weaker ones.

  • Therein capturing the essence of struggle for existence,

  • of survival of the fittest.

  • He had a moment, where he got very excited,

  • you definitely can tell the excitement

  • because it's very, very tight, very, very careful.

  • It's controlled thrill I would say, very, very detailed writing,

  • layer upon layer really, of a reaction to this thing.

  • By 1844, Darwin had placed Malthus's ideas on population

  • at the core of his theory of natural selection,

  • as a mechanism by which evolution occurred.

  • The war of nature destroyed the weaklings.

  • Only the best adapted went on to reproduce,

  • passing on their successful characteristics

  • to succeeding generations.

  • In having so many children, Charles and Emma were effectively conducting their own Malthusian experiment.

  • By the time he had finished the manuscript,

  • one baby child had died and Emma was about to be pregnant with a fifth.

  • William and Annie, their first two were thriving.

  • Anne Elizabeth Darwin was born in March 1841.

  • She became indispensable to her mother by the time she was that wonderful age, eight or nine.

  • She showed her parents great tenderness.

  • And I think that that increased Emma and Charles's love for Annie.

  • She would pet them and stroke their hands and stroke their hair

  • and take her father's hair and plait it and fix it just so.

  • Then take his hand and walk around the Sand Walk and skipping ahead.

  • And she had her own little flower patch in the back, all these endearing things

  • as they watched their eldest daughter become a young woman.

  • Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance,

  • and rendered every movement elastic and full of life and vigour.

  • It was delightful and cheerful to behold her.

  • Her dear face now rises before me, as she used to sometimes come

  • running down the stairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me.

  • Her whole form radiant with pleasure of giving pleasure.

  • And as these children grew up, these were not only loved children,

  • but they were creatures, they were little developing organisms.

  • They were like the orang-utan in the London zoo and Darwin would compare

  • his son, William and Annie growing up, with the orang-utan in the zoo.

  • At Downe, Annie and her siblings provided an emotional relief

  • from the constant struggle with his new and contentious theory.

  • But there was another long-term source of unease.

  • Emma read his completed manuscript.

  • Darwin must have known that she would find it uncomfortable reading.

  • In a strong and loving relationship, his rejection of traditional

  • religious teachings made her anxious about his salvation.

  • Although the manuscript acknowledged the existence of a creator,

  • Emma felt it undermined the belief

  • that man was specially created by God.

  • If you put yourself in the mind of a 19th century reader,

  • the notion that species had evolved, that humans had evolved,

  • would be deeply upsetting because of this presumption

  • that humans are at the top of the ladder of the hierarchy,

  • perfect formed, noble, all of those things.

  • To suggest that we had evolved from apes and before that from primitive sea creatures,

  • must have seemed deeply heretical.

  • Darwin's very aware that he needs to tell his wife the general tenure

  • of the work that he's actually doing,

  • but he's also quite aware too that she's going to be upset.

  • I mean, Emma's quite liberal in her general outlook,

  • but she also is a practising Christian and a strong believer.

  • Emma feared that her husband's religious doubts would mean

  • that he might not be saved and join her in the afterlife.

  • When I am with you all melancholy thoughts keep out of my head,

  • but since you are gone some sad ones have forced themselves in,

  • of fear that our opinions on the most important subject

  • should differ widely. My reason tells me

  • that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin,

  • but I feel it would be a painful void between us.

  • The big question for Emma was were they going to spend eternity together?

  • Or when she died and then he died

  • was that something where they were going to be apart,

  • and I think that was a terrible kind of burden for her

  • and it remained a burden right up till the end of their lives.

  • I do not wish for any answers about all this.

  • It is a satisfaction for me to write it.

  • Don't think it's not my affair and does not signify much to me.

  • Everything that concerns you concerns me.

  • And I would be most unhappy if I thought that we would not belong to each other forever.

  • That became an item of unfinished business in their relationship.

  • It was buried perhaps many times,

  • but when a child was sick and dying or when Darwin, as so often the case,

  • fell ill and she had to care for him,

  • it was the spectre of being eternally without her beloved,

  • that haunted Emma and made her bring it up to him.

  • We don't know how many times in private.

  • We do know that the issue weighed heavily on Darwin from a note he later added to Emma's letter.

  • When I am dead, know how many times I have kissed and cried over this.

  • Whatever her personal misgivings,

  • Emma loyally read and commented on the essay.

  • Darwin was still not confident enough to have it published

  • and his anxieties about hostile attitudes to evolutionary ideas were soon to be confirmed.

  • He finishes this essay, and I think any decision that he had

  • that he was thinking about publishers

  • is certainly knocked on its head in October of 1844,

  • when he learns through an advertisement in the London Times

  • that a book has been published

  • called the Vestiges Of The Natural History Of Creation.

  • This is an anonymous book. Who its author was subject of great guessing and uncertainty

  • and it's a book which even the advertisements say,

  • deals with the whole range of natural phenomena and explains it

  • through a natural law of development.

  • In other words, there's some sort of evolution

  • that will explain how everything in the universe came in to being.

  • It becomes one of the great sensations of the 1840s.

  • Everybody reads it, from Queen Victoria to the poet Tennyson,

  • most of Darwin's friends.

  • It's discussed very extensively by a whole range of different people.

  • The whole train of animated beings,

  • from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent,

  • are then to be regarded as a series of advances

  • of the principle of development.

  • It has pleased providence to arrange

  • that one species should give birth to another

  • until the second highest gave birth to man.

  • The identity of the author, Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist,

  • was not revealed for another 40 years.

  • He had feared the inevitable backlash.

  • In the vanguard of the attack was Darwin's old Cambridge teacher,

  • the Reverend Adam Sedgwick.

  • He detected the "serpent coils of false philosophy"

  • in the book's vision of transmutation.

  • People came down on it very hard.

  • His professor Sedgwick here at Cambridge,

  • referred to it as a filthy abortion, whose head ought to be crushed.

  • Now of course that's consistent with seeing it as the offspring

  • of a frail, female mind, this book, this filthy abortion.

  • That's hard talk from the Reverend Adam Sedgwick,

  • Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  • I cannot but think the work is from a woman's pen.

  • It's so well dressed and so graceful in its externals.

  • This mistake was woman's from the first.

  • She longed for the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

  • And she must pluck it, right or wrong.

  • And Sedgwick absolutely loathes Vestiges.

  • For him as for many evangelical Christians, Vestiges is, which was bound in red, is the scarlet harlot.

  • It's a book that has the beautiful attraction of a woman.

  • What you need to do, he says, is rip off the pretty clothes

  • and reveal underneath the foul mass of corruption within.

  • If the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain.

  • Religion is a lie, human law is a mass of folly and a base injustice,

  • morality is moonshine.

  • Our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen,

  • and men and women are only better beasts.

  • And Darwin reads this, as he says, in fear and trembling.

  • It also, I think, serves a very useful role for Darwin though,

  • because when he reads the review,

  • when he looks at what Sedgwick has to say,

  • in many ways he's able to start ticking off the kinds of things

  • that he needs to look into,

  • the kinds of questions he needs to answer,

  • in order to make sure that his theory is safe,

  • it has the right kind of armour around it,

  • so that it can go forward in the world without having

  • the same kind of reaction against it that Vestiges has.

  • Still reeling from the savage response to Vestiges,

  • Darwin seems to have gone into a period of self doubt.

  • His fears of being regarded as a lightweight speculator were possibly

  • raised by some words of advice from his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker.

  • Hooker said to him that he thought that no-one had the right

  • to pronounce on species unless they had examined many.

  • A throwaway line in a letter from Hooker to his friend,

  • and yet, clearly a remark

  • that haunted Darwin, that he knew, absolutely that Hooker was right.

  • That if anyone was going to believe this enormous claim

  • that he was going to make,

  • then he really had to do the examining of many.

  • He had to really do the work with the microscope

  • and with the dissection tools, and once he'd done that,

  • and once people admired him for the detail of that work,

  • then he would have a better chance with the big ideal.

  • Darwin decided to embark on a comprehensive description

  • of an entire subclass of marine organisms, barnacles.

  • It was a project he anticipated would take a matter of months.

  • It was to take him eight years.

  • There are two types of barnacles, mainly. There's the coned barnacles.

  • They're little white volcanic, tiny cones that cover every rock.

  • Inside the cone there's a little creature,

  • which is cemented to the rock by its head and which fishes with its feet.

  • So, when the tide comes in, the feet come out through the little hole,

  • and there's this wonderful pulsing movement, like feathers almost,

  • as the feet fish for tiny plankton.

  • They also, barnacles, the coned barnacles, have the largest penises

  • proportionate to size in the entire animal kingdom,

  • so every now and again you can also see,

  • coming out of one of the tops of these cones, an enormous penis,

  • which will come out the top and then go in to the top of another valve,

  • maybe four or five barnacles away.

  • So he quite quickly comes to see and express this sense of wonder.

  • That here they were, seemingly ordinary, you know,

  • covering every shoreline of the temperate world,

  • and yet when you go in really, really close,

  • what seems like a simple organism becomes a very sophisticated one

  • and you see that pattern over and over again in Darwin's early work,

  • that sense of, we must stop talking

  • about higher animals and lower animals.

  • That actually the lower animals are often very sophisticated,

  • almost fantastic in the way that they've adapted to their conditions.

  • You can almost hear him gasp, you know, as he goes further and further in at the beauty of these things.

  • There was another pay-off.

  • Darwin's barnacle research relied on people sending him specimens from all over the world.

  • Downe House developed into the hub of a network of contacts

  • which would supply vital evidence for writing The Origin Of Species.

  • Darwin's communication networks are absolutely remarkable.

  • They're partly a tribute to the sophistication

  • of the Victorian postal service,

  • without which most 19th century science would have collapsed.

  • Pigeon breeders and orchid fanciers,

  • colonial physicians and Royal Naval officers were badgered

  • by Darwin from his study in Downe,

  • so that flowing on to that desk were piles and piles of paper.

  • It was while he was still laboriously dissecting his way

  • through hundreds of barnacle specimens

  • that one more of Darwin's own children was struck down

  • with what is now thought to have been tuberculosis.

  • When Annie was about nine years old, she began to have tummy troubles,

  • which isn't surprising in a house

  • where the father was periodically throwing up in his study

  • and doing all kinds of odd things to keep himself from becoming violently physically ill.

  • It was one of the ways one got attention at Downe House,

  • was to be sick, very sick preferably.

  • And finally her illness became so acute

  • that while Emma was seriously pregnant,

  • she was having her ninth child,

  • Charles put Annie under his own doctor

  • and the doctor immediately diagnosed

  • a grave situation that was bound to get worse

  • and finally over the Easter weekend, she died.

  • Her eyes sparkled brightly, she often smiled.

  • Her step was elastic and firm.

  • She held herself upright and often threw her head backwards

  • as if she defied the world in her joyousness.

  • A week after Annie died, this is what's most remarkable,

  • Charles sat down and in a single draft, you can tell by reading it,

  • wrote a magnificent threnody for this loved and sorely missed child,

  • in which he describes Annie's human nature in all of its physicality.

  • This is not just a struggle for existence

  • in which a vulnerable life is crushed,

  • this is a loved person who is their offspring.

  • We have lost the joy of the household

  • and the solace of our old age.

  • She must've know how we loved her.

  • Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still

  • and shall forever love her dear joyous face, blessings on her.

  • Annie's death came just three years after Darwin's father had died, an unbeliever.

  • With his own belief in a Christian God already shaken,

  • Darwin now severed his ties with traditional faith.

  • Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate,

  • but it was at last complete.

  • I indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity can be true,

  • for if so, the plain language seems to show that men who do not believe will be everlastingly punished.

  • And this is a damnable doctrine.

  • There it seems to me is the quintessence

  • of any anger that he felt at Annie's being torn away at Easter, focused into a single moral statement.

  • And it's the statement of a non believer.

  • A non Christian, but still a believer in God.

  • Just a god who will not punish ten year olds.

  • Death in the war in nature had been the driving force

  • of Darwin's theory of evolution from the time he read Malthus.

  • Eight years after her death,

  • Darwin would weave his daughter into that vision.

  • Annie is in chapter three of The Origin Of Species where Darwin talks about the struggle for existence.

  • And, in that chapter, Darwin,

  • he's now writing five, six years, seven years after Annie's death.

  • He describes for us nature as it appears

  • and then nature how it really is.

  • He refers to the smiling face of nature.

  • He refers to the nature that we look out upon

  • and is so celebrated, the green and pleasant land of England,

  • the insects flitting through the air, the birds sporting themselves.

  • We do not see, he says, beneath the surface.

  • It's a continual state of war.

  • Under this surface of nature,

  • the young are dying young

  • and the rest of the animal life struggles to survive.

  • And then he says that this struggle for existence is like,

  • and he uses the old notebook figure, wedges being driven into the face.

  • We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.

  • Every single organic being around us may be seen to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers,

  • that each lives by a struggle at some period of its life,

  • that heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old

  • during each generation or at recurrent intervals.

  • The face of nature may be compared to a yielding surface with 10,000 sharp wedges

  • packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows.

  • Sometimes one wedge being struck and then another with greater force.

  • And there's this nature with a smiling face

  • and then there are wedges being driven...

  • It's the most horridly anthropomorphic figure.

  • When I first read that, after studying Annie's death,

  • I thought, "Could it be her face?"

  • And, of course, when you read his account of her, a week after she died,

  • over and over again, it's her brilliance face,

  • her beaming face, her smiles that he remembers

  • with the picture of the daguerreotype sat next to him.

  • In writing this chapter in the struggle for existence in The Origin of Species

  • he's portraying Annie's fate in falling victim

  • to a remorseless struggle that gives rise to higher forms of life.

  • She suffered at Easter that others may live.

  • Darwin now lost himself in barnacles again, taking three more years to finish his huge study.

  • At last he now felt able to return to his big theory but, for some time,

  • something had been nagging him.

  • How did a group, like barnacles, evolve consisting as they did of

  • thousands of slightly different species, many living side by side?

  • Was his idea of natural selection enough by itself

  • to explain the extraordinary diversity of living things?

  • At that time, I overlooked one problem of great importance.

  • The problem is the tendency in organic beings

  • descended from the same stock to diverge in character

  • as they become modified.

  • There's a place in the autobiography where he talks about

  • the moment of discovery

  • of the principle of divergence.

  • You can see a... small piece of paper among many

  • that are dated the same date, November '54,

  • in which his handwriting is extremely jagged

  • in pencil.

  • And I can remember the very spot in the road,

  • whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.

  • The solution, as I do believe, is that the modified offspring

  • of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted

  • to the many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature.

  • What Darwin realised was that the more individuals differed from each other,

  • the better able they would be to take advantage of the particular environment in which they lived.

  • Just as importantly,

  • species would diverge even more as they adapted to each other.

  • This interdependence had a parallel

  • in what would eventually become the Victorian factory system.

  • He uses, I would call it more like the Adam Smith phase

  • of Darwin's encounter with the political economists,

  • because, you know, Adam Smith had this idea of the division of labour,

  • that you can produce more wealth if you have people who are specialists,

  • you know, instead of everybody being a farmer.

  • If some people become tailors and some people become leather workers,

  • you can produce more wealth.

  • Darwin uses the essentially the same idea

  • and applies it to these little plots of ground

  • and his view is that more life can be sustained

  • on a square plot if the organisms use different parts of the environment.

  • If you think about this in terms of this kind of lawn plot experiment.

  • You've got grasses and other plants growing and its roots might go down to a certain depth,

  • so it can take nutrients from that level,

  • but another might grow to a deeper depth,

  • You can sustain more life that way than if they are all growing to the same depth.

  • If they were all one kind.

  • And he's seeing that as a process of divergence.

  • Darwin set up innovative trials to test out his ideas.

  • Leaving a few square feet of his lawn unmown for three years,

  • he regularly noted the change in composition in the struggle for life

  • among 20 plant species, recording 11 winners and nine losers.

  • In Great Puckland's meadow

  • he counted 142 different species, the first ever survey of its kind.

  • The chalk fields and banks around Downe support

  • as many as 40 different species per square metre.

  • An abundance explained by natural selection and the principle of divergence.

  • And his applications of Adam Smith's ideas of capitalist manufacture

  • were not lost on the inventor of the idea of class struggle, Karl Marx.

  • Darwin discovers among the beasts and plants the society of England, with its division of labour,

  • competition, opening up of new markets, inventions

  • and the Malthusian struggle for existence.

  • And certainly Darwin, when he looks at those tangled banks,

  • where new varieties

  • and eventually new species are preferentially being produced

  • by competition and the physiological division of labour,

  • Darwin calls those "manufactories of species. "

  • The very phrase "factory system" is about 30 years old

  • and it had first been applied to this new system of economy,

  • based on industrial production,

  • ferocious division of labour, automation and mechanisation.

  • Now Darwin was using those principles

  • to try and make sense of what was happening

  • when competition was particularly vigorous

  • and therefore adaptations peculiarly intensely favoured.

  • It was at this time that Darwin began to feel confident enough to come out in public with his theory.

  • He started to prepare a master work where every possible criticism could

  • be anticipated and every assertion backed up by evidence.

  • He wanted to win over his Victorian readers

  • with striking and familiar examples.

  • Understanding their fascination with domestic animals,

  • he chose a particularly popular species, the pigeon,

  • in order to make an analogy.

  • Fancy pigeon breeding by artificial selection

  • showed how natural selection worked in the wild.

  • He was especially concerned with just the sheer diversity of pigeons,

  • all the different forms, the amazing types of pigeons

  • and how those related then to a single ancestor.

  • On the one hand you had fantails,

  • really beautiful birds with beautiful feathers

  • down to the almond tumblers, very small birds with beaks so small

  • that they could hardly get out of their egg shells.

  • Carrier pigeons were very large, had these kind of big ugly beaks.

  • They showed this incredible diversity.

  • How could they all come from one ancestor?

  • Just as pigeon breeders bred different varieties,

  • so nature acted in the same way over longer periods of time,

  • naturally selecting different varieties,

  • each passing on their own inherited characteristics.

  • So in some sense what Darwin was saying was just as the pigeon fanciers had a fancy,

  • nature had a fancy and that fancy

  • was to produce these incredible varieties,

  • all these different kind of forms

  • and types of animals and plants that we see around us.

  • That diversity could actually be explained by looking at something as simple as pigeons.

  • Pigeons were to be one example amongst many

  • in a work that might have amounted to three heavy volumes,

  • had Darwin not been interrupted.

  • My plans were overthrown.

  • For early in the summer of 1858 Mr Wallace,

  • who was then in the Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay

  • on the Tendency Of Varieties To Depart Indefinitely From The Original Type,

  • and this essay contained exactly the same theory as mine.

  • Alfred Russel Wallace had been supplying Darwin, and other rich collectors

  • with animal and plant specimens from the Indonesian archipelago.

  • Now, Darwin, one has to say, was a toff, there's no question of it.

  • Wallace was exactly the opposite.

  • He had a few years of schooling, he was kicked out,

  • and he went to the university of life, that's all he could afford,

  • and he decided to set up shop as a collector of animals

  • and he had an extraordinarily adventurous life.

  • He went to Indonesia and had a tremendously challenging and difficult time.

  • I mean, he was living out in the jungle for year after year after year

  • and then suddenly one day, he had a good idea.

  • Like Darwin,

  • Wallace had been struck by Thomas Malthus's essay on population.

  • His theory came to him while he was lying incapacitated with malaria struggling for life.

  • So he wrote with a certain amount of trepidation to the grand

  • and already famous fellow of the Royal Society, Charles Darwin,

  • with this idea and, of course, it landed on Darwin's breakfast table,

  • here in Downe, with the force of an hand grenade.

  • So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.

  • Though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated

  • as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.

  • Darwin was distraught. Also his daughter, Henrietta, was sick

  • and his infant son, Charles, gravely ill.

  • He put his trust in his friends Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell,

  • to decide the fate of his theory.

  • With Wallace far away in Indonesia, they resolved to have papers

  • by both naturalists presented

  • at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London.

  • Remarkably, the joint presentation stirred up little interest.

  • Darwin too was absent from the event.

  • His infant son had died.

  • Once recovered, he resolved

  • to publish his book as soon as possible.

  • The great thing that Wallace did, I think in many ways, was to make

  • sure that Darwin basically finished his book and wrote it in such a way

  • that it was readable to a much wider audience than it would have otherwise been.

  • Darwin was basically writing a three volume treatise on natural selection,

  • with all the evidence, pigeons, bees, ants, everything, all put in.

  • There was going to be a chapter on man, it was everything.

  • What Wallace did would galvanise Darwin.

  • He recaptured much of the energy he had when he was working

  • in the Beagle voyage and he suddenly started writing with a real passion.

  • In September 1858, I set to work on the strong advice of Lyell and Hooker

  • to prepare a volume on the transmutation of species.

  • It cost me 13 months' and ten days' hard labour.

  • It was published under the title of

  • The Origin Of Species in November 1859.

  • Darwin was to describe his book of nearly 500 pages

  • as one long argument.

  • He gently and tentatively coaches his reader

  • through a developing series of observations and examples.

  • Throughout the same pattern is repeated

  • of moving from specific details to grand overarching conclusions.

  • I often think that the theory of evolution of natural selection

  • is a bit like the grammar of biology.

  • You can't learn a language without understanding at least something about its grammar,

  • and you couldn't be a biologist before 1859

  • because none of the facts seem to fit together.

  • You could be studying flowers, or earthworms,

  • you could be collecting birds on the Galapagos but they were sort of independent discoveries.

  • But suddenly The Origin Of Species made it all make sense.

  • It gave you a framework onto which you could bolt all these facts.

  • So it really was, and still is,

  • the central book of the science of biology.

  • The book appealed to a new breed of professional men of science who were prepared to accept

  • that all nature was governed by fixed laws, The Origin Of Species

  • as much as the motions of the planets.

  • But Darwin had invested so many years developing the book

  • because he also hoped to win over his old Anglican mentors.

  • On The Origin Of Species only twice refers to the origins of mankind

  • but for old naturalists,

  • such as his respected teacher Professor Adam Sedgwick,

  • the implications were obvious and odious.

  • Adam Sedgwick wrote him a letter.

  • This old man sat down and sorrowfully

  • told his geological student

  • how much he disapproved of this book, The Origin Of Species,

  • which in places Sedgwick said,

  • "attempts to break the link

  • "between the world of nature and the reality of God. "

  • I have read your book with more pain than pleasure.

  • Parts of it I admired greatly,

  • parts I laughed at till my sides were almost sore,

  • parts I read with absolute sorrow

  • because I think them utterly false and grievously mischievous.

  • Sedgwick hoped that they would see each other in heaven

  • and that said it all, didn't it?

  • Sedgwick realised perfectly well what was at stake

  • and what Darwin himself always knew was at stake.

  • Sedgwick saw the fabric tottering and falling.

  • That is the fabric of salvation and eternal life.

  • If you make a man out of a monkey that all comes down.

  • The family was really quite upset about this. I think it's probably

  • for Darwin the most upsetting letter he gets about The Origin Of Species

  • because it represents the kind of, on some level,

  • his failure in a certain way to be able to reach

  • the kind of person that Sedgwick actually was.

  • And it's particularly upsetting, I think also for Emma,

  • because Sedgwick is somebody that she particularly admired and whose views she respected quite heavily.

  • And so there's quite a lot of sense that there's upset in the household

  • as a result of Sedgwick's intervention in the debate.

  • Whatever the personal set-backs, Emma steadfastly supported Charles

  • throughout the years of controversy that followed

  • enabling him to write nine more books,

  • despite further breakdowns and mounting exhaustion.

  • But he was later to call The Origin Of Species

  • the chief work of his life.

  • The book has never been out of print.

  • In it he immortalised a chalk bank at Downe to illustrate

  • the extraordinary diversity and interdependence of living beings

  • that result from the process of natural selection.

  • It might also serve as a metaphor for his struggle to write the book.

  • And, of course, the entangled bank that he describes at the end is also a vision of his own life, you know,

  • the entangled bank that he sees, central to his vision of nature

  • is also the world that he's lived in.

  • There's a sense of worship in that,

  • a worship of nature as he sees it fully.

  • That he accepts the war, the destruction, the famine,

  • the pain, the suffering, the loss of children

  • but nonetheless you put all of that together,

  • the death and the suffering and the beauty and the miracle of it

  • and you end with wonder.

  • There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers

  • having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one,

  • and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along,

  • according to the fixed laws of gravity,

  • from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful

  • and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

  • Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

  • E- mail subtitling@bbc. co. uk

In the late summer of 1859, Charles Darwin finally completed the last

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達爾文--提出進化論的生物學家(A Luta de Darwin (Documentário-2009)

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