Evolution of a Scientist

On a December night in 1831, HMS Beagle, on a mission to chart the coast of South America, sailed from Plymouth, England, straight into the 21st century. Onboard was a 22-year-old amateur naturalist, Charles Darwin, the son of a prosperous country doctor, who was recruited for the voyage largely to provide company for the Beagle's aloof and moody captain, Robert FitzRoy. For the next five years, the little ship--just 90 feet long and eight yards wide--sailed up and down Argentina, through the treacherous Strait of Magellan and into the Pacific, before returning home by way of Australia and Cape Town. Toward the end of the voyage, the Beagle spent five weeks at the remote archipelago of the Galapagos, home to giant tortoises, black lizards and a notable array of finches. Here Darwin began to formulate some of the ideas about evolution that would appear, a quarter-century later, in "The Origin of Species," which from the day it was written to the present has been among the most influential books ever published. Of the revolutionary thinkers who have done the most to shape the intellectual history of the past century, two--Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx--are in eclipse today, and one--Albert Einstein--has been accepted into the canon of modern thought, even if most people still don't understand what he was thinking. Darwin alone remains unassimilated, provocative, even threatening to some--like Pat Robertson, who recently warned the citizenry of Dover, Pa., that they risked divine wrath for siding with Darwin in a dispute over high-school biology textbooks (page 57). Could God still be mad after all this time?

Unintentionally, but inescapably, that is the question raised by a compelling new show that opened Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Here are the beetles Darwin collected fanatically, the fossils and ferns he studied obsessively, two live Galapagos tortoises like the ones he famously rode bareback, albeit these were hatched in the Milwaukee County Zoo. And here are the artifacts of his life: his tiny single-shot pistol, his magnifying glass and rock hammer--and the Bible that traveled around the world with him, a reminder that before his voyage he had been studying for the ministry. (Indeed, in a letter to his father, who opposed the trip, he list-ed all the latter's objections, starting with "disreputable to my character as a clergyman hereafter." Little did he imagine.) The show, which will travel to Boston, Chicago and Toronto before ending its tour in London in Darwin's bicentennial year of 2009, coincides by chance with the publication of two major Darwin anthologies as well as a novel by best-selling author John Darnton, "The Darwin Conspiracy," which playfully inverts history by portraying Darwin as a schemer who dispatched a rival into a volcano and stole the ideas that made him famous. Visitors to Britain will note that Darwin has replaced that other bearded Victorian icon, Charles Dickens, on the Brit-ish 10-pound note. "Even people who aren't comfortable with Darwin's ideas," says Niles Eldredge, the museum's curator of paleontology, "are fascinated by the man."

In part, the fascination with the man is being driven by his enemies, who say they're fighting "Darwinism," rather than evolution or natural selection. "It's a rhetorical device to make evolution seem like a kind of faith, like 'Maoism'," says Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, editor of one of the two Darwin anthologies just published. (James D. Watson, codiscoverer of DNA, edited the other, but both include the identical four books.) "Scientists," Wilson adds, "don't call it 'Darwinism'."

But the man is, in fact, fascinating. His own life exemplifies the painful journey from moral certainty to existential doubt that is the defining experience of modernity. He was an exuberant outdoorsman who embarked on one of the greatest adventures in history, but then never again left England. He lived for a few years in London before marrying his first cousinEmma, and moving to a country house where he spent the last 40 years of his life, writing, researching and raising his 10 children, to whom he was extraordinarily devoted. Eldredge demonstrates, in his book accompanying the museum show, "Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life," how the ideas in "The Origin of Species" took shape in Darwin's notebooks as far back as the 1830s. But he held off publishing until 1859, and then only because he learned that a younger scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had come up with a similar theory. Darwin was afflicted throughout his later life by intestinal distress and heart --palpitations, which kept him from working for more than a few hours at a time. There are two theories about this mysterious illness: a parasite he picked up in South America, or, as Eldredge believes, anxiety over where his intellectual journey was leading him, and the world. It appeared to many, including his own wife, that the destination was plainly hell. Emma, who had other plans for herself, was tormented to think they would spend eternity apart.

Darwin knew full well what he was up to; as early as 1844, he famously wrote to a friend that to publish his thoughts on evolution would be akin to "confessing a murder." To a society accustomed to searching for truth in the pages of the Bible, Darwin introduced the notion of evolution: that the lineages of living things change, diverge and go extinct over time, rather than appear suddenly in immutable form, as Genesis would have it. A corollary is that most of the species alive now are descended from one or at most a few original forms (about which he--like biologists even today--has little to say). By itself this was not a wholly radical idea; Darwin's own grandfather, the esteemed polymath Erasmus Darwin, had suggested a variation on that idea decades earlier. But Charles Darwin was the first to muster convincing evidence for it. He had the advantage that by his time geologists had concluded that the Earth was millions of years old (today we know it's around 4.5 billion); an Earth created on Bishop Ussher's Biblically calculated timetable in 4004 B.C. wouldn't provide the scope necessary to come up with all the kinds of beetles in the world, or even the ones Darwin himself collected. And Darwin had his notebooks and the trunkloads of specimens he had shipped back to England. In Argentina he unearthed the fossil skeleton of a glyptodont, an extinct armored mammal that resembled the common armadillos he enjoyed hunting. The armadillos made, he wrote, "a most excellent dish when roasted in [their] shell," although the portions were small. The glyptodont, by contrast, was close to the size of a hippopotamus. Was it just a coincidence that both species were found in the same place--or could the smaller living animal be descended from the extinct larger one?

But the crucial insights came from the islands of the Galapagos, populated by species that bore obvious similarities to animals found 600 miles away in South America--but differences as well, and smaller differences from one island to another. To Darwin's mind, the obvious explanation was that the islands had been colonized from the mainland by species that then evolved along diverging paths. He learned that it was possible to tell on which island a tortoise was born from its shell. Did God, the supreme intelligence, deign to design distinctive shell patterns for the tortoises of each island?