BBC Darwins Struggle The Evolution of the Origin of Species
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00:00In the late summer of 1859, Charles Darwin finally completed the last paragraph of his
00:08greatest work on the origin of species. But he wasn't drawing his inspiration from the
00:14exotic islands that he'd visited on his famous voyage on HMS Beagle. A chalk bank in Kent,
00:20near his house at Down, provided his metaphor for the laws that explain the diversity of
00:26life on our planet.
00:29It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,
00:36with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling
00:41through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different
00:47from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced
00:53by laws acting around us.
00:58Darwin was unleashing a new vision of nature, where species evolved independently from the
01:03guiding hand of a creator. The established vision of a harmonious world, divinely ordained
01:09to serve God's noblest creation, mankind, would be shattered.
01:16He was very aware that what he was dealing with was effectively intellectual dynamite,
01:21and he kept most of his thoughts about what he was doing, in terms of where man might
01:26come from, where new species might arise, effectively secret.
01:32It was a secret with which Darwin had wrestled for twenty years. Twenty years of unflinching
01:37support from his wife, Emma, who feared that her beloved husband might be consigned to
01:42eternal damnation for challenging traditional beliefs.
01:47So they would endure two decades of debilitating illness, self-doubt, and family tragedy.
01:58It was a life struggle that Darwin also saw among the animals and plants, in the fields
02:03and tangled banks of the Kentish countryside. A struggle that is a founding principle of
02:09his theory of natural selection.
02:12The last paragraph of The Origin of Species really goes out with a perfect bang. The whole
02:17book has been about the struggle for existence, and what Tennyson had called nature red in
02:23tooth and claw. The last paragraph, to me, gives a sense of hope. It sort of shows that
02:29this war of all against all actually has a result, and the result is the living world
02:34we see around us. The beauties of the tangled bank, the worms and the butterflies and the
02:39grass and the orchids, all of these beauties of nature emerge from Darwin's simple idea.
02:48There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally
02:53breathed into a few forms or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along
02:59according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most
03:05beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.
03:12Just as beauty and wonder emerge out of a war of nature, so too did Charles Darwin's
03:18great book evolve out of years of painstaking research and inner conflict.
03:36At the age of 33, Charles Robert Darwin was already an established gentleman naturalist.
03:46His substantial private income enabled him to pursue his particular interest, solving
03:51what had been called the mystery of mysteries, how animals and plants might transmute or
03:58evolve. It was to find a quiet place to write that in 1842, Charles Darwin wrote a book
04:05about the time when he and his burgeoning family had moved to a house just outside London
04:09near the village of Downe, in Kent.
04:14After several fruitless searches in Surrey and elsewhere, we found this house and purchased
04:19it. I was pleased by the diversified appearance of the vegetation proper to a chalk district,
04:25and so unlike what I had been accustomed to in the Midland counties, and still more pleased
04:31with the extreme quietness and rusticity of the place.
04:38Darwin knew in the country there was space to expand his experiments, to walk, to observe
04:46nature. There was plenty of information there for him to draw on. And then there was a very
04:52important factor for Darwin of getting into a space where he felt safe with his secret
05:00theory of transmutation.
05:04In the early 1840s, transmutation or evolution was still a radical idea associated with social
05:12revolution. It was a secret that he shared with his wife and first cousin, Emma Wedgwood,
05:18whom he had married three years earlier.
05:20I marvel at my good fortune that Emma, so infinitely my superior in every single moral
05:27quality, should have consented to be my wife.
05:32Emma was the precondition for everything that he did. She created a love-shaped space where
05:40he felt safe to work obsessively without fearing the loss of love or damaging their relationship.
05:51She was to nurse him through years of recurrent bouts of illness, the nature of which remains
05:56unclear to this day, possibly damage caused by a South American parasite, inflamed by
06:03anxiety and nervous tension.
06:06Twenty-five years, extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence, vomiting preceded
06:12by shivering, hysterical crying, dying sensations or half-faint, and copious and very pallid
06:19urine. Air fatigues bring on head symptoms, nervousness when Emma leaves me.
06:26I think she was always concerned about his health. She was constantly trying to persuade
06:32him to have a day off here, go on a trip there, not because she wanted his company but because
06:39she felt if he carried on working at the pace at which he was going, then he would become
06:44more ill.
06:47Emma was to provide Charles with ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. As a
06:53father, Charles Darwin did not conform to the standard Victorian stereotype of the distant
06:59and stern paterfamilias.
07:02Darwin was very much a family man. He writes rather wryly one year that his wife hadn't
07:07been doing very well last year because she hadn't had a baby, which is pretty rude for
07:11a Victorian, I have to say. But what's fascinating is that he used his children as experimental
07:18animals. He noted their expressions when they were crying, when they were angry, and he
07:24saw how similar they were to the expression of a dog, let's say.
07:30He saw his family as part of the human family, the human family as part of the mammal family,
07:36the mammal family as one with the primroses. And that really shows that he saw humankind
07:43as an intrinsic part of the living world and not apart from it.
07:49This was radically different from the established Christian view of the time, where mankind
07:54was God's special and separate creation. He kept his real opinions in a private notebook.
08:03Man in his arrogance thinks of himself as a great work, worthy of the interposition
08:09of a deity. More humble, and I believe true, to think him created from animals.
08:19And Charles and Emma did what animals do, only they had a bed to do it in upstairs.
08:26But then, because Darwin believed strongly in analogy, it's not only animals that do
08:31what people do, but it's also plants that do what people do in strange and complicated
08:35ways. So from the marriage bed to the flower bed was only 100 yards. And Darwin would go
08:41downstairs, out the back door, down to his flower beds where experiments were being performed
08:46and how these creatures, he even regarded some plants as simple animals, also reproduced
08:54themselves.
09:02Just over a year after he arrived at Down, he felt bold enough to tentatively raise the
09:08issue of species change with his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker.
09:13At last gleams of light have come, and I'm almost convinced that species are not immutable.
09:21It is like confessing a murder.
09:27Hooker's response was non-committal. Darwin retreated into his shell. If Hooker wouldn't
09:32buy it, then his old teachers at Cambridge certainly wouldn't. Even the most progressive
09:38members of the Anglican clergy still saw nature's beauty and abundance as divinely ordained
09:44for the benefit of the Lord's highest creation, man.
09:49The fundamental idea around nature for many people during the early part of the 19th century,
09:54particularly in Cambridge but throughout Anglican Britain, was that of design. The world was
10:00made for man. And probably the best way of explaining this is just to think about the
10:0424-hour day. We think of that, of course, as just an outcome of astronomical chance
10:10in the way that the planets work and so forth. For people who were sitting in Cambridge,
10:15the idea was basically the 24-hour day is, that's because humans need to sleep for eight
10:21hours, and everything around them is organised from that fact, from human need, going outwards.
10:30To suggest that mankind was merely a product of nature risked attack from the black robed
10:35priests, the black beasts as Darwin called them. But what he possibly feared even more
10:43was the loss of respect from the Cambridge dons who had taught and inspired him. Men
10:49such as the straight-spoken Yorkshireman, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Professor of Geology,
10:55who saw God's design in nature. Denying this might brutalise it and sink the human race
11:03into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since records tell
11:08us of its history.
11:15It represents a union, an uneasy union, of science and religion that had prevailed since
11:20the 17th century, in Britain particularly. A division of labour in which those who study
11:28nature offer to those who study God evidences of God's greatness and goodness and wisdom
11:35in the world about us. And those who study God's revelation in the Bible offer reasons
11:42for believing in God that he has revealed to us and how to go to heaven. Nature doesn't
11:48tell us how to go to heaven, but it tells us that there is a God in heaven who has revealed
11:53himself and how to get there in the Bible.
11:58It was with these traditional views in mind that in early 1844, Darwin began to prepare
12:04a manuscript that he hoped would eventually show even men like Sedgwick that evolution
12:09was a reality and that he had found the mechanism that made it happen. But as a punctilious
12:16and cautious man, he needed to marshal his evidence.
12:21What he does there, in town, is really create a living laboratory, a laboratory to go along
12:29with his career, as it were. It's not just Darwin sitting alone looking out the window.
12:36Darwin didn't just use his house and gardens to observe and learn from nature. He bred
12:41pigeons and orchids, raised 50 varieties of gooseberry, and to counter the creationists,
12:48he became a beekeeper in order to show that the near-perfect hexagons in honeycombs were
12:53made by instinct rather than divine design.
12:59My habits are methodical. My love of natural science has been steady and ardent. I have
13:04the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I have observed, to group all facts
13:10under some general laws.
13:13He would also create a place to think. A rough oval-shaped path of gravel was laid down and
13:20trees planted to provide him with a half-kilometre walking circuit. He called it the Sand Walk.
13:28Darwin called the Sand Walk his thinking path. He watched the trees grow, and many of them
13:35are still there, in the knowledge and hope that he would be able to pace around this
13:42plot and escape the pressure of sitting in one place and writing, and squeezing one's
13:50ideas out the point of a pen.
14:04Darwin would lose himself in thought on the Sand Walk, so much so that the only way he
14:10could keep track of the time he spent there was to keep track of the laps, and he kept
14:15track of the laps by a pile of flints, one of which he would kick to the side after a
14:23lap. And when the whole pile had been moved across the path, he knew he had completed
14:27his exercise. That was your thinking time for the day.
14:33We, the subsequent generation, love the Sand Walk because we can imagine Darwin on it,
14:40and think about what he can see in the Sand Walk. He can see these climbing plants that
14:46Brian eat in the hedge, for example, something he will write about. He can see great pot
14:50clans afield, where he will formulate a concept of biodiversity.
15:04Secluded in his rural laboratory, Darwin's manuscript on what he was already calling
15:09natural selection developed into an essay suitable for publication. Some of his text
15:16drew on the experiences he had on his round-the-world beagle expedition. Out of the five years he
15:22spent on the voyage, he had stayed just five weeks on the Galapagos Islands, collecting
15:27specimens of plants and different species of mockingbirds and finches. The significance
15:33of his Galapagos experience in the development of his theory has been overstated.
15:41Just as I think it's very common to imagine that great theories appear in a rush, through
15:49inspiration, all at once, as though every scientist is like Archimedes streaking along
15:54a street from his bath somewhere in Syracuse. So we want the place where the inspiration
16:02hits to be glamorous and exotic, and the Galapagos does that perfectly. But that's completely
16:08to get the origin of the origin entirely wrong.
16:14It was only back in London, after his Galapagos visit, that Darwin realised that the species
16:19of birds and plants he collected were subtly different from island to island, yet were
16:25closely similar to species on the South American continent. In the 1844 manuscript, he used
16:31this as evidence that new species had evolved as continental birds and plants adapted to
16:37the different island habitats.
16:40The Galapagos, of course, are a fantastic place to go, and there's a way in which they're
16:44inevitably going to be associated with Darwin. But I think their importance, I think, is
16:49easy to misunderstand. For one thing, his collections from it are really not that great.
16:54He mislabeled most of his specimens. He didn't actually identify which of the particular
16:58islands his various finches and other organisms were actually from. The main thing about it
17:04actually is not so much about natural selection at that stage, it's actually the Galapagos
17:09are much more important in terms of helping Darwin to be convinced that evolution might
17:13have been taking place.
17:16The Galapagos evidence was just part of Darwin's awakening, only a waymark on the twisting
17:22path to his completed theory of evolution.
17:28Now at Down, he was able to draw on nine years of intellectual struggle. He'd set down some
17:36of his most brilliant insights in what would become known as the transmutation notebooks.
17:42It was in these pocketbooks that he first drafted the idea that the vast range of living
17:48species must have all evolved from a shared common ancestry. Twigs and branches stemming
17:55from one tree of life.
18:00He is brainstorming with total abandon, totally unorthodox, unacceptable to philosophers in
18:09his day. Maybe there were a few Enlightenment rationalists in France who would do that,
18:16but no one in Britain would countenance someone seriously trying to find out about the world
18:21by doing what Darwin did.
18:26And he wasn't just tapping physics and theology. He was going to economics. He was going to
18:32animal breeding. He was reaching out in every direction for evidence and intuitions to build
18:39up the world as he sensed it existed. And yet that vision of the world was changing
18:46all the while he was testing what he thought might be the case. This is the brainstorming
18:51aspect with what people were saying was the case.
18:56Darwin's 1844 manuscript was based on wide reading from Milton's Paradise Lost to the
19:02evolutionary speculations of his grandfather Erasmus and the radical French biologist Jean
19:08Baptiste Lamarck. His great geologist mentor Charles Lyell taught him that the earth's
19:14surface had been formed gradually over countless ages. But it was the political economist Thomas
19:21Malthus who would stimulate the closest parallel to a Eureka moment that Darwin would ever
19:27have.
19:30In October 1838, 15 months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read
19:37for amusement Malthus on population.
19:40In terms of natural selection, there's a crucial moment in Darwin's discovery, and that is
19:45I think when he reads Thomas Malthus' essay on the principle of population. Now this was
19:50an incredibly controversial book. It was controversial basically because it argued that there were
19:56limits to growth. A lot of philosophers in the 18th century had said, you know, mankind
20:01can progress indefinitely. Everything's going to be great. Malthus says, no, that's not
20:05the case. In fact, we've got limited food supply. And effectively what happens is you're
20:12going to get this population exploding exponentially, and it's going to be cut off by the need for
20:18food.
20:22What Darwin does is turn this into a creative principle in nature. Death becomes the way
20:27of explaining life. And so what happens is you get this incredible idea that all of these
20:33thousands of forms, all these different, slightly different species are actually competing for
20:38these tiny spaces on the earth and in nature, each one trying to live. And only those that
20:46are most fit, only those that are really going to match into that little spot, those are
20:52the ones that are going to survive. And all the thousands, the millions, the billions,
20:56the rest are going to die.
21:04It had once struck me that under these circumstances, favorable variations would tend to be preserved
21:17and unfavorable ones destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.
21:25Here then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.
21:29He says that this population growth is like a hundred thousand wedges pounding into the
21:38face of nature, pushing in stronger ones and throwing out weaker ones. They're in capturing
21:48the essence of struggle for existence, survival of the fittest.
21:59He had a moment where he got very excited. You definitely can tell by the way he was
22:30excited, because it's very, very tight, very, very careful. It's controlled thrill, I would
22:37say, very, very detailed writing, layer upon layer, really, of reaction to this thing.
22:49By 1844, Darwin had placed Malthus's ideas on population at the core of his theory of
22:55natural selection as a mechanism by which evolution occurred. The war of nature destroyed
23:06the weaklings. Only the best adapted went on to reproduce, passing on their successful
23:12characteristics to succeeding generations. In having so many children, Charles and Emma
23:20were effectively conducting their own Malthusian experiment. By the time he had finished the
23:25manuscript, one baby child had died, and Emma was about to be pregnant with a fifth. William
23:32and Annie, their first two, were thriving.
23:36Anne Elizabeth Darwin was born in March 1841. She became indispensable to her mother by
23:43the time she was that wonderful age, eight or nine. She showed her parents great tenderness,
23:51and I think that that increased Emma and Charles's love for Annie. She would pet them and stroke
23:56their hands and stroke their hair and take her father's hair and plait it and fix it
24:01just so, and take his hand and walk around the sand walk, skipping ahead. She had her
24:07own little flower patch in the back, all these endearing things as they watched their eldest
24:11daughter become a young woman.
24:15Her joyousness and animal spirits radiated from her whole countenance and rendered every
24:21movement elastic and full of life and vigour. It was delightful and cheerful to behold her.
24:28Her dear face now rises before me, as she used to sometimes come running downstairs
24:33with a stolen pinch of snuff for me. Her whole form radiant with pleasure of giving pleasure.
24:42And as these children grew up, these were not only loved children, but they were creatures,
24:48they were little developing organisms. They were like the orangutan in the London Zoo,
24:55and Darwin would compare his son, William, and Annie growing up with the orangutan in
25:01the zoo.
25:03At Down, Annie and her siblings provided an emotional relief from the constant stress
25:12and struggle with his new and contentious theory. But there was another long-term source
25:17of unease. Emma read his completed manuscript. Darwin must have known that she would find
25:24it uncomfortable reading. In a strong and loving relationship, his rejection of traditional
25:30religious teachings made her anxious about his salvation. Although the manuscript acknowledged
25:37the existence of a creator, Emma felt it undermined the belief that man was specially
25:42created by God.
25:45If you put yourself in the mind of a 19th century reader, the notion that species had
25:50evolved, that humans had evolved, would be deeply upsetting because of this presumption
25:58that humans are at the top of the ladder of the hierarchy, perfect, formed, noble, all
26:06of those things. To suggest that we had evolved from apes and before that from primitive sea
26:12creatures must have seemed deeply heretical.
26:19Darwin's very aware that he needs to tell his wife the general tenor of the work that
26:24he's actually doing, but he's also quite aware too that she's going to be upset. Emma's quite
26:31liberal in her general outlook, but she also is a practicing Christian and a strong believer.
26:38Emma feared that her husband's religious doubts would mean that he might not be saved and
26:43join her in the afterlife.
26:45When I am with you, all melancholy thoughts keep out of my head. But since you are gone,
26:51some sad ones have forced themselves in, of fear that our opinions on the most important
26:55subject should differ widely. My reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot
27:01be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us.
27:07The big question for Emma was, were they going to spend eternity together? Or when she died
27:12and then he died, was that something where, you know, they were going to be apart? And
27:16I think that was a terrible kind of burden for her, and it remained a burden right up
27:20till the end of their lives.
27:24I do not wish for any answers about all this. It is a satisfaction for me to write it. Don't
27:31think it's not my affair and does not signify much to me. Everything that concerns you concerns
27:37me, and I would be most unhappy if I thought that we would not belong to each other forever.
27:44That became an item of unfinished business in their relationship. It was buried perhaps
27:54many times, but when a child was sick and dying, or when Darlene, as so often the case
27:59was, fell ill and she had to care for him, it was the specter of being eternally without
28:06her beloved that haunted Emma and made her bring it up to him. We don't know how many
28:12times in private.
28:15We do know that the issue weighed heavily on Darwin, from a note he later added to Emma's
28:19letter.
28:22When I am dead, know how many times I have kissed and cried over this.
28:31Whatever her personal misgivings, Emma loyally read and commented on the essay. Darwin was
28:38still not confident enough to have it published, and his anxieties about hostile attitudes
28:43to evolutionary ideas were soon to be confirmed.
28:49He finishes this essay, and I think any decision that he had that he was thinking about publishing
28:55is certainly knocked on its head in October of 1844, when he learns through an advertisement
29:03in the London Times that a book has been published called The Vestiges of the Natural History
29:08of Creation. This is an anonymous book. Who its author was, was a subject of great guessing
29:15and uncertainty. And it's a book which, even the advertisements say, deals with the whole
29:21range of natural phenomena and explains it through a natural law of development. In other
29:27words, there's some sort of evolution that will explain how everything in the universe
29:32came into being. It becomes one of the great sensations of the 1840s. Everybody reads
29:37it, from Queen Victoria to the poet Tennyson, most of Darwin's friends. It's discussed
29:43very extensively by a whole range of different people.
29:47The whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and
29:53most recent, are then to be regarded as a series of advances of the principle of development.
30:00It has pleased providence to arrange that one species should give birth to another until
30:05the second highest gave birth to man.
30:10The identity of the author, Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist, was not revealed for
30:15another 40 years. He had feared the inevitable backlash. In the vanguard of the attack was
30:22Darwin's old Cambridge teacher, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick. He detected the serpent coils
30:28of false philosophy in the book's vision of transmutation.
30:34People came down on it very hard. His professor, Sedgwick, here at Cambridge, referred to it
30:40as a filthy abortion whose head ought to be crushed. Now, of course, that's consistent
30:45with seeing it as the offspring of a frail female mind, this book, this filthy abortion.
30:52It's hard talk from the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
30:59I cannot but think the work is from a woman's pen. It's so well-dressed and so graceful
31:05in its externals. This mistake was woman's from the first. She longed for the fruit of
31:12the tree of knowledge and she must pluck it, right or wrong.
31:17Sedgwick absolutely loathes Vestiges. For him, as for many evangelical Christians, Vestiges,
31:24which was bound in red, is the scarlet harlot. It's a book that has the beautiful attraction
31:29of a woman. What you need to do, he says, is rip off the pretty clothes and reveal underneath
31:35the foul mass of corruption within.
31:39It the book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain. Religion is a lie.
31:45Human law is a mass of folly and a base injustice. Morality is moonshine. Our labours for the
31:51black people of Africa were works of madmen. And men and women are only better beasts.
31:59And Darwin reads this, as he says, in fear and trembling. It also, I think, serves a
32:04very useful role for Darwin, though, because when he reads the review, when he looks at
32:09what Sedgwick has to say, in many ways he's able to start ticking off the kinds of things
32:14that he needs to look into, the kinds of questions he needs to answer, in order to make sure
32:18that his theory is safe, that it has the right kind of armour around it, so that it can go
32:22forward in the world without having the same kind of reaction against it that Vestiges
32:26actually has.
32:31Still reeling from the savage response to Vestiges, Darwin seems to have gone into a
32:35period of self-doubt. His fears of being regarded as a lightweight speculator were possibly
32:41raised by some words of advice from his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker.
32:47Hooker said to him that he thought that no-one had the right to pronounce on species unless
32:53they had examined many. A throwaway line in a letter from Hooker to his friend, and yet
33:01clearly a remark that haunted Darwin, that he knew absolutely that Hooker was right,
33:07that if anyone was going to believe this enormous claim that he was going to make, then he really
33:13had to do the examining of many, he had to really do the work with the microscope and
33:19with the dissection tools. And once he'd done that, and once people admired him for the
33:23detail of that work, then he would have a better chance with the big idea.
33:29Darwin decided to embark on a comprehensive description of an entire subclass of marine
33:33organisms, barnacles. It was a project he anticipated would take a matter of months.
33:40It was to take him eight years.
33:43There are two types of barnacles, mainly. There's the coned barnacles, the little white
33:49volcanic tiny cones that cover every rock. Inside the cone, there's a little creature
33:57which is cemented to the rock by its head and which fishes with its feet. So when the
34:03wind tide comes in, the feet come out through the little hole, and there's this wonderful
34:07pulsing movement, like feathers almost, as the feet fish for tiny plankton.
34:18They also, barnacles, the coned barnacles, have the largest penises proportionate to
34:24size in the entire animal kingdom. So every now and again, you can also see coming out
34:29of one of the tops of these cones, an enormous penis, which will come out the top and then
34:36go into the top of another valve, maybe four or five barnacles away.
34:44So he quite quickly comes to see and express this sense of wonder, that here they were,
34:52seemingly ordinary, covering every shoreline of the temperate world. And yet, when you're
35:03going really, really close, what seems like a simple organism becomes a very sophisticated
35:07one. And you see that pattern over and over again in Darwin's early work, that sense of,
35:12we must stop talking about higher animals and lower animals, that actually the lower
35:17animals are often very sophisticated, almost fantastic in the way that they've adapted
35:23to their conditions. You can almost hear him gasp, you know, as he goes further and further
35:29in, at the beauty of these things.
35:33There was another payoff. Darwin's barnacle research relied on people sending him specimens
35:38from all over the world. Downhouse developed into the hub of a network of contacts, which
35:45would supply vital evidence for writing the origin of species.
35:50Darwin's communication networks are absolutely remarkable. They're partly a tribute to the
35:56sophistication of the Victorian postal service, without which most 19th century science would
36:01simply have collapsed. Pigeon breeders and orchid fanciers, colonial physicians and Royal
36:09Naval officers were badgered by Darwin from his study in Down, so that flowing onto that
36:17desk were piles and piles of paper.
36:25It was while he was still laboriously dissecting his way through hundreds of barnacle specimens
36:30that one more of Darwin's children was struck down with what is now thought to have been
36:35tuberculosis.
36:37When Annie was about nine years old, she began to have tummy troubles, which isn't surprising
36:43in a house where the father was periodically throwing up in his study and doing all kinds
36:49of odd things to keep himself from becoming violently physically ill. It was one of the
36:53ways one got attention at Downhouse, was to be sick, very sick, preferably. And finally
37:00her illness became so acute that while Emma was seriously pregnant, she was having her
37:05ninth child. Charles put Annie under his own doctor, and the doctor immediately diagnosed
37:12a grave situation that was bound to get worse. And finally, over Easter weekend, she died.
37:22Her eyes sparkled brightly. She often smiled. Her step was elastic and firm. She held herself
37:30upright and often threw her head backwards as if she defied the world in her joyousness.
37:36A week after Annie died, this is what's most remarkable. Charles sat down and in a single
37:43draft, you can tell by reading it, wrote a magnificent frenedy for this loved and sorely
37:52missed child, in which he describes Annie's human nature in all of her ways.
37:59All of its physicality. This is not just a struggle for existence in which a vulnerable
38:06life is crushed. This is a loved person who is their offspring.
38:17We have lost the joy of the household and the solace of our old age. She must have known
38:21how we loved her. Oh, that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still, and
38:28shall forever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.
38:34Annie's death came just three years after Darwin's father had died, an unbeliever.
38:40With his own belief in the Christian God already shaken, Darwin now severed his ties with traditional
38:46faith. Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate,
38:52but it was at last complete. I indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity
38:58can be true. For if so, the plain language seems to show that men who do not believe
39:04will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
39:10There it seems to me is the quintessence of any anger that he felt at Annie's being torn
39:16away at Easter, focused into a single moral statement. And it's the statement of a non-believer.
39:24A non-Christian, but still a believer in God. Just a God who will not punish ten-year-olds.
39:35Death in the war in nature had been the driving force in Darwin's theory of evolution from
39:41the time he read Malthus. Eight years after her death, Darwin would weave his daughter
39:49into that vision. Annie is in Chapter 3 of The Origin of Species,
39:55where Darwin talks about the struggle for existence. And in that chapter, Darwin, he's
40:02now writing five, six years, seven years after Annie's death. He describes for us nature
40:10as it appears and then nature how it really is. He refers to the smiling face of nature,
40:16refers to the nature that we look out upon and is so celebrated. The green and pleasant
40:22land of England, the insects flitting through the air, the birds sporting themselves. We
40:27do not see, he says, beneath the surface. It's a continual state of war. Under the surface
40:35of nature, the young are dying young. And the rest of the animal life struggles to survive.
40:48And then he says that the struggle for existence is like, and he uses the old notebook figure,
40:55wedges being driven into the face. And he says that the struggle for existence is like
41:05We behold the face of nature bright with gladness. Every single organic being around us may be
41:12seen to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers. That each lives by a struggle
41:17at some period of its life. That heavy destruction inevitably falls either on the young or old
41:24during each generation or at recurrent intervals. The face of nature may be compared to a yielding
41:30surface with 10,000 sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows.
41:38Sometimes one wedge being struck and then another with greater force.
41:45And there's this nature with a smiling face and then there are wedges being driven. It's
41:51the most horridly anthropomorphic figure. And when I first read that after studying
41:58Annie's death, I thought, could it be her face? And of course, when you read his account
42:03of her a week after she died, over and over again, it's her brilliance face, her beaming
42:09face, her smiles that he remembers with the picture of the daguerreotype set next to him.
42:16In writing this chapter on the struggle for existence and the origin of species, he's
42:21portraying Annie's fate in falling victim to a remorseless struggle that gives rise
42:31to higher forms of life. She suffered at Easter that others may live.
42:41Darwin now lost himself in barnacles again, taking three more years to finish his huge
42:47study. At last he now felt able to return to his big theory. But for some time, something
42:54had been nagging him. How did a group like barnacles evolve, consisting, as they did,
43:00of thousands of slightly different species, many living side by side? Was his idea of
43:06natural selection enough by itself to explain the extraordinary diversity of living things?
43:12At that time, I overlooked one problem of great importance. The problem is the tendency
43:18in organic beings descended from the same stock to diverge in character as they become
43:24modified. There's a place in the autobiography where he talks about the moment of discovery
43:32of the principle of divergence. You can see a small piece of paper among many that are
43:38dated the same date, November 54, in which his handwriting is extremely jagged in pencil.
43:48And I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the
43:54solution occurred to me. The solution, as I do believe, is that the modified offspring
44:01of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to the many and highly diversified
44:07places in the economy of nature.
44:11What Darwin realised was that the more individuals differed from each other, the better able
44:16they would be to take advantage of the particular environment in which they lived. Just as importantly,
44:22species would diverge even more as they adapted to each other. This interdependence had a
44:28parallel in what would eventually become the Victorian factory system.
44:33He uses, I would call it more like the Adam Smith phase of Darwin's encounter with the
44:38political economists, because Adam Smith had this idea of the division of labour, that
44:44you can produce more wealth if you have people who are specialists. Instead of everybody
44:50being a farmer, if some people become tailors and some people become leather workers, you
44:57can produce more wealth. Darwin uses essentially the same idea and applies it to this little
45:02plot, sort of brown. And his view is that more life can be sustained on a square plot
45:11if the organisms use different parts of the environment. If you think about this in terms
45:18of this kind of lawn plot experiment, you've got grasses and other plants growing and its
45:23roots might go down to a certain depth, so it can take nutrients from that level, but
45:27another might grow to a deeper depth. You can sustain more life that way than if they're
45:34all growing to the same depth, if they're all one kind. And he's seeing that as a process
45:41of divergence. Darwin set up innovative trials to test out his ideas. Leaving a few square
45:49feet of his lawn unmowed for three years, he regularly noted the change in composition
45:54in the struggle for life among 20 plant species, recording 11 winners and 9 losers. In Great
46:02Pucklin's meadow, he counted 142 different species, the first ever survey of its kind.
46:10The chalk fields and banks around town support as many as 40 different species per square
46:16metre, an abundance explained by natural selection and the principle of divergence.
46:33And his applications of Adam Smith's ideas of capitalist manufacture were not lost on
46:38the inventor of the idea of class struggle, Karl Marx.
46:42Darwin discovers among the beasts and plants the society of England, with its division
46:49of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, inventions and the Malthusian struggle
46:57for existence. And certainly Darwin, when he looks at those tangled banks, where new
47:05varieties and eventually new species are preferentially being produced by competition and the physical
47:12division of labour, Darwin calls those manufactories of species.
47:20The very phrase factory system is about 30 years old and it had first been applied to
47:26this new system of economy based on industrial production, ferocious division of labour,
47:32automation and mechanisation. Now Darwin was using those principles to try and make sense
47:40of what was happening when competition was particularly vigorous and therefore adaptations
47:46peculiarly intensely favoured.
47:51It was at this time that Darwin began to feel confident enough to come out in public with
47:55his theory. He started to prepare a masterwork where every possible criticism could be anticipated
48:02and every assertion backed up by evidence. He wanted to win over his Victorian readers
48:08with striking and familiar examples. Understanding their fascination with domestic animals, he
48:14chose a particularly popular species, the pigeon, in order to make an analogy. Fancy
48:20pigeon breeding by artificial selection showed how natural selection worked in the wild.
48:27He was especially concerned with just the sheer diversity of pigeons, all the different
48:32forms, the amazing types of pigeons and how those related then to a single ancestor. On
48:38the one hand you had fantails, really beautiful birds with beautiful feathers, down to the
48:44almond tumblers, very small birds with beaks so small that they could hardly get out of
48:48their eggshells. Carrier pigeons were very large, had big ugly beaks. They really showed
48:55this incredible diversity. How could they all come from one ancestor?
49:00Just as pigeon breeders bred different varieties, so nature acted in the same way over longer
49:06periods of time, naturally selecting different varieties, each passing on their own inherited
49:12characteristics. So in some sense what Darwin was saying was just as the pigeon fanciers
49:17had a fancy, nature had a fancy and that fancy was to produce these incredible varieties,
49:24all these different kind of forms and types of animals and plants that we see around us.
49:29The diversity could actually be explained by looking at something as simple as pigeons.
49:37Pigeons were to be one example amongst many in a work that might have amounted to three
49:42heavy volumes had Darwin not been interrupted.
49:46My plans were overthrown. For early in the summer of 1858, Mr Wallace, who was then in
49:53the Malay archipelago, sent me an essay on the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely
49:59from the original type and this essay contained exactly the same theory as mine.
50:11Alfred Russell Wallace had been supplying Darwin and other rich collectors with animal
50:15and plant specimens from the Indonesian archipelago.
50:20Now Darwin, one has to say, was a tough, there's no question of it.
50:24Wallace was exactly the opposite. He had a few years of schooling, he was kicked out
50:28and he went to the University of Life, that's all he could afford and he decided to set
50:32up shop as a collector of animals and he had an extraordinarily adventurous life.
50:36He went to Indonesia and had a tremendously challenging and difficult time.
50:41I mean he was living out in the jungle for year after year after year and then suddenly
50:46one day he had a good idea.
50:50Like Darwin, Wallace had been struck by Thomas Malthus' essay on population.
50:55His theory came to him while he was lying incapacitated with malaria, struggling for life.
51:01So he wrote with a certain amount of trepidation to the grand and already famous fellow of
51:06the Royal Society, Charles Darwin, with this idea and of course it landed on Darwin's
51:11breakfast table here in town with the force of a hand grenade.
51:18So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.
51:22Though my book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated.
51:28As all the labour consists in the application of the theory.
51:33Darwin was distraught. Also his daughter Henrietta was sick and his infant son Charles gravely ill.
51:41He put his trust in his friends Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyle to decide the fate of his theory.
51:48With Wallace far away in Indonesia, they resolved to have papers by both naturalists
51:53presented at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London.
51:58Remarkably the joint presentation stirred up little interest.
52:02Darwin too was absent from the event. His infant son had died.
52:08Once recovered, he resolved to publish his book as soon as possible.
52:14The great thing that Wallace did, I think, in many ways, was to make sure that Darwin
52:19basically finished his book and wrote it in such a way that it was actually readable
52:24to a much wider audience than it would have otherwise been.
52:26Darwin was basically writing a three volume treatise on natural selection,
52:31with all the evidence, pigeons, bees, ants, everything all put in.
52:36There was going to be a chapter on man. It was everything all together.
52:39What Wallace did would galvanise Darwin.
52:41He recaptured much of the energy he had when he was working in the Beagle Voyage
52:45and he suddenly started writing just with a real passion.
52:50In September 1858, I set to work on the strong advice of Lyle and Hooker
52:56to prepare a volume on the transmutation of species.
52:59It cost me 13 months and 10 days hard labour.
53:03It was published under the title of The Origin of Species in November 1859.
53:11Darwin was to describe his book of nearly 500 pages as one long argument.
53:17He gently and tentatively coaches his reader through a developing series of observations and examples.
53:25Throughout, the same pattern is repeated, of moving from specific details
53:30to grand, overarching conclusions.
53:34I often think that the theory of evolution, of natural selection,
53:38is a bit like the grammar of biology.
53:41You can't learn a language without understanding at least something about its grammar.
53:45And you couldn't be a biologist before 1859 because none of the facts seemed to fit together.
53:51You could be studying flowers, or you could be studying earthworms,
53:54you could be collecting birds on the Galapagos,
53:56but they were all sort of independent discoveries.
53:59But suddenly The Origin of Species made it all make sense.
54:02It gave you a framework onto which you could bolt all these facts.
54:06So it really was, and still is, the central book of the science of biology.
54:14The book appealed to a new breed of professional men of science
54:18who were prepared to accept that all nature was governed by fixed laws,
54:22the origin of species as much as the motions of the planets.
54:27But Darwin had invested so many years developing the book
54:30because he also hoped to win over his old Anglican mentors.
54:38On The Origin of Species, only twice refers to the origins of mankind.
54:45But for old naturalists, such as his respected teacher, Professor Adam Sedgwick,
54:50the implications were obvious and odious.
54:55Adam Sedgwick wrote him a letter.
54:57This old man sat down and sorrowfully told his geological student
55:05how much he disapproved of this book, The Origin of Species,
55:12which in places, Sedgwick said, attempts to break the link
55:19between the world of nature and the reality of God.
55:25I have read your book with more pain than pleasure.
55:29Parts of it I admired greatly.
55:32Parts I laughed at till me sides were almost sore.
55:37Parts I read with absolute sorrow because I think them utterly false
55:42and grievously mischievous.
55:46Sedgwick hoped that they would see each other in heaven,
55:50and that said it all, didn't it?
55:52Sedgwick realised perfectly well what was at stake
55:55and what Darwin himself always knew was at stake.
55:58Sedgwick saw the fabric tottering and falling.
56:03That is the fabric of salvation and eternal life.
56:06If you make a man out of a monkey, that all comes down.
56:13The family was really quite upset about this.
56:15I think it is probably for Darwin the most upsetting letter he gets
56:18about The Origin of Species
56:20because it represents the kind of, at some level,
56:23his failure in a certain way to be able to reach
56:26the kind of person that Sedgwick actually was.
56:29And it's particularly upsetting, I think, also for Emma
56:32because Sedgwick is somebody that she particularly admired
56:36and whose views she respected quite heavily.
56:39And so there's quite a lot of sense that there's upset in the household
56:43as a result of this Sedgwick's intervention in the debate.
56:48Whatever the personal setbacks,
56:50Emma steadfastly supported Charles
56:52throughout the years of controversy that followed,
56:55enabling him to write nine more books
56:58despite further breakdowns and mounting exhaustion.
57:01But he was later to call The Origin of Species the chief work of his life.
57:06The book has never been out of print.
57:09In it, he immortalised Achok Bankert Down
57:12to illustrate the extraordinary diversity
57:15and interdependence of living beings
57:17that result from the process of natural selection.
57:20It might also serve as a metaphor for his struggle to write the book.
57:27And, of course, the entangled bank that he describes at the end
57:30is also a vision of his own life.
57:32The entangled bank that he sees central to his vision of nature
57:36is also the world that he's lived in.
57:38And there's a sense of worship in that,
57:41of worship of nature as he sees it.
57:44Fully, that he accepts the war, the destruction,
57:48the famine, the pain, suffering, the loss of children.
57:51But, nonetheless, you put all of that together,
57:54the death and the suffering and the beauty and the miracle of it,
57:58and you end with wonder.
58:05There is grandeur in this view of life,
58:08with its several powers having been originally breathed
58:12into a few forms or into one,
58:14and that whilst this planet has gone cycling along
58:17according to the fixed laws of gravity,
58:20from so simple a beginning,
58:22endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
58:26have been and are being evolved.
58:38One creature, one life, two bodies.
58:41The ultimate evolutionary magic trick next on BBC Four
58:44in Metamorphosis, the science of change.