The Darwin Myth

The Life and Lies Charles Darwin

Benjamin Wiker

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781596980976
• eBook ISBN: 9781596981171
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion & Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Darwin Myth casts aside Darwinism's politically correct veneer and offers a critical, scientific analysis of Darwin's life and his history–changing theory. Without vilifying or deifying Darwin, Wiker reveals the story of the complicated man with a love for family, science, and a passion to eliminate God from public thought.

Chapter 1

A Very Ordinary Boy

Charles Darwin would change the world with his theory of evolution—only it really wasn’t so much his theory as it was his family’s theory, going back two generations.

He came from a line doctors. In fact, he was named after an uncle, a physician-in-training at the University of Edinburgh, who had inadvertently cut his own finger dissecting a corpse. The corpse had been “in a state of dangerously advanced putrefaction,”¹ infection set in, and the young Charles Darwin died, not yet twenty.

The more famous Charles Darwin was the son of Robert Darwin, himself a prosperous physician. Charles’s grandfather was Erasmus Darwin,² who was not only a physician, but a poet, a philosopher, and a propounder of what he called “transmutationism,” which was evolution by another name.

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Erasmus was the son of a corpulent barrister who had inherited a fine country manor, Elston Hall. He was a towering, celebrated figure, and an eighteenth century man in every respect. Roll the age of Enlightenment into a great ball—Deist skepticism of Christianity, political radicalism, scientific adventurism, a palpitating mercantile spirit, the romance of technology, and a polite Epicurean disrespect for traditional sexual morality—top it with a ponderous head riddled with pox-marked skin and set with penetrating eyes radiating a restless, brilliant, supremely confident intellect; give that head a witty but stammering tongue; and finally place the whole vast frame on legs, one of which was rendered lame by a carriage accident. That was Erasmus Darwin, a man and his age at once; someone who could be compared favorably to his own contemporary and friend Benjamin Franklin.

Like Franklin, he had a restless mind. He had sketched out plans for a steam-driven carriage, with an ingenious steering mechanism, several years before meeting James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine. Over the years he designed a windmill with a third more power than the ordinary model, a machine for lifting boats in canals, and even a mechanical bird. He built a speaking machine (a wooden mouth with leather lips that enunciated “the p, b, m, and the vowel a, with so great nicety as to deceive all who hear it unseen, when it pronounced the words mama, papa, map, and pam”³), and a copying machine that so neatly scribed a duplicate that it was indistinguishable from the original. And that is only a partial list of his technical creativity.

As a physician, he was so well-respected that King George III himself had asked for his services. Erasmus, however, was too much of a Whig—a liberal—to minister to the Tory of Tories. As a man of science, he wrote the Zoönomia, a medical-zoological treatise that spelled out his theory of evolution more than half a century before his grandson Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species. The Zoönomia was a huge international success, with five American editions, three Irish editions, and translations into German, Italian, French, and Portuguese.

Charles Darwin’s father, Robert, was the fainter image of the great Erasmus. He had been carefully shaped to take the Darwin place in medicine and Whig society. Charles remembered his father as a large and commanding man, “about 6 feet 2 inches in height, with broad shoulders, and very corpulent, so that he was the largest man whom I ever saw.”⁴ Robert shared much of Erasmus’s wit and his ability to dominate a room (his imposing physique helped). But he rechanneled Erasmus’s passion for science and social revolution into the passion for making money and keeping society stable.

Erasmus died before Charles was born, but his influence was great, even if his grandson inherited only his stammer and none of his boisterous charm. Unlike his masterful forbears, Charles did not sparkle. He had no electrifying physical presence. He was just under six feet tall, thick-set when young and lanky when old, at one point later in life weighing less than 150 pounds. When we see pictures of him as an older man, with his characteristic great beard and hoary, beetling eyebrows, he looks much bulkier, but that is the effect of the size of his prominent head, and several layers of clothes and a great coat to keep him warm. As a boy he was a bit chubby, but as a man, he was as thin as his father was fat.

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If his grandfather lit up a room with his presence, like a glimmering Christmas tree in the parlor, young Charles was more a comfortable brown sofa set in a darker corner, bulky and nondescript, but loved dearly by those who would sit with him long enough. He never lost this original humility, this feeling of not being the center of attention, of being merely someone who should quietly shuffle in and politely sit down. Upon walking into a great scientific banquet hall when he was old and quite famous, he was rather startled to have everyone look his way and suddenly break into applause. He instinctively turned around to see who had followed him in. It took Darwin some time to realize they were clapping for him.

Charles was not a handsome man; in fact, his contemporaries used rather unflattering adjectives to describe him: bulky, heavy-browed, thick-set, and as he noted of himself, he had a nose as big as a fist. (Captain FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle, on which Darwin later sailed around the world, was a casual devotee of phrenology. He thought Darwin’s great bump of a nose was a sign of insufficient energy and determination; the captain half-joked that he nearly rejected Darwin as the ship’s naturalist because of it.⁵) Darwin’s appearance, even as a young man, but certainly as he grew older and sported a great beard, might best be described as simian, which made no end of sport for his detractors later on, especially the cartoonists who, with little ink and effort and much spiteful glee, made him half-ape.

On the positive side, all were agreed that this most controversial of men had no sharp edges to rub against in his personality, but was unfailingly amiable and affectionate, as loyal and loving a boy and then family man as one could ever hope to find. As a child, Charles was doted on by his older sisters, especially after his mother died when he was only eight. Otherwise, he had relatively few friends, preferring to stick closely to his family. However stern his father may have been, his elder brother and four sisters provided a great nest thickly padded with affection. Those whom Charles did befriend found him a hidden treasure. He loved what was familiar, and he was deeply familiar with what and whom he loved. Even as an old man, the great and renowned center of controversy, Charles clung to his wife, his children, and his home, Down House, in Kent, about sixteen miles from London. It is said that he took pleasure in drinking from the same old Wedgwood teacup year after year, the saucer broken and the gilding worn off. Some put Charles’s unwillingness to throw away his chipped teacup to miserliness inherited from his father. I think it more likely that it brought him the great comfort of familiarity, an object like an old friend, worn by daily contact that conforms gently to one’s person and the satisfying rhythms of one’s life.

The teacup was a family heirloom, because the Wedgwood and Darwin families had been allied since his grandfather’s days. Josiah Wedgwood, an extremely successful potter—European and British royalty were among his customers—was also an amateur scientist and a close friend of Erasmus Darwin. Charles’s father Robert had married a Wedgwood. He inherited a fortune after Josiah Wedgwood’s death, and later, so did Charles. With a singular exception—his voyage on the HMS Beagle—Charles was not one to stray far from what he knew and loved.

He was very ordinary indeed, and he loved being ordinary. He loved the ordinary itself. In short, if you saw the boy Charles Darwin or the young man Charles Darwin, he would have been the last man you would ever pick to be Charles Darwin, the person credited with creating a revolution that shook and is still shaking western society.

Thomas Huxley, who would later become Darwin’s bulldog, bully-pulpit preacher, defender, and tireless evolutionary propagandist, would certainly have made a much better Charles Darwin. Huxley was a take-no-prisoners revolutionary, dashing in appearance, electrifying on stage, and armed with a wit that would make a razor dull by comparison. If I were casting history, I’d pick Huxley to play the part of Darwin.

And there was Charles’s grandfather Erasmus, the first Darwin who championed evolution. He did so with the unfailing charm of a man simultaneously inebriated by the poetic muse and intoxicated by a (nearly) godless vision of species transforming, one into another, from the first shapeless ancestor, through every variation of every living being, each “possessing the faculty of continuing to improve . . . and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!”⁶

Nothing in the childhood of Charles himself would have appeared to indicate future greatness. He was born on February 12, 1809, the very day that, half-way across the world in a log shack in Kentucky, Nancy Lincoln gave birth to Abraham, a boy with a likewise hidden destiny. Charles was preceded by Marianne, Caroline, Susan, and his best boyhood friend and only brother, Erasmus, and then Emily came along afterward.

Charles emulated and adored Erasmus, who had all of the sparkling qualities Charles lacked. Considered by everyone to be more intelligent and evidently more of a wit, Erasmus seemed a much likelier candidate to carry forward the Darwin name in medicine. Charles was taken to be all too ordinary in intelligence—a mistake as it turns out—and was far more fond of play than school. He loved the outdoors, and in this promised to grow into a good country gentleman, shooting, running dogs, and collecting curiosities from the stream, wood, and field, and generally living a long, happy life on inherited money without any of the burdens of achievement.

He certainly loved to collect things, but then so do many boys. He later mused that the “passion for collecting, which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso or a miser, was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brother ever had this taste.”⁷ His grandfather Erasmus had it, for he greedily collected every scrap of scientific and technical knowledge as signs that a new Enlightenment world was dawning, leaving the old world of superstition behind. His father Robert had it, too, but in his case it was for collecting money. But apparently none of his siblings had it. Charles had it for every fascinating tidbit of nature, the more minute the better.

Soon after his mother’s death, Charles was sent off to a nasty little boarding school in his hometown of Shrewsbury, in Shropshire County. Boarding school was the usual fate of English boys of his class. Shrewsbury School was almost Dickensian in its melodramatic bleakness. The students were unruly and barbarous, the masters bland and rigorously demanding, and the comfort and hygiene of the boarders were ignored or neglected. Charles once bragged to his sisters, who seemed disgusted rather than impressed, that he washed his feet once a week whether they needed it or not.

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It was at Shrewsbury that Charles discovered his inaptitude for math and foreign languages (either ancient or modern). “When I left school,” he recalled in his autobiography, “I was for my age neither high nor low in it; and I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my Father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.”⁸

Charles was no doubt being unfair to himself. The truth is more likely that his first school experience was dismal. He was away from the comforts of home too soon after his mother’s death. For the first time in his life he was immersed in complete discomfort (“20 or 30 boys” stuffed into a dormitory with “only a single window at the end,” creating a miasma so vile that the memory of the “atrocious smell of that room in the morning” could still sicken him three score years afterwards⁹). The food was nauseating and the academics stale. But his experiences were far from unique, as many boys marched disconsolately through the deadening halls of similar schools only to come out at the end flaunting their school ties and, in turn, sending their own sons through the very same trial by ashes.

Darwin did find his compensations. One was being introduced to the glories of Euclid—the one aspect of math he understood. He enjoyed reading Shakespeare on his own. He found pleasure in trolling the woods and fields—for nature, he thought, was a far better teacher than the musty old books he was required to read. Above all, he enjoyed opportunities to hunt. “In the latter part of my school life I became passionately fond of shooting, and I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds.”¹⁰

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He also enjoyed his own chemistry lab, primitive as it was, that he set up with his brother Erasmus, but this was at home, and therefore something he could use only during his holidays. Here too, the man was in the boy. Charles and Erasmus liked nothing better than amateur chemistry, using scraps of this and that, and whatever bottles and containers could be gathered and nicked from kitchens and shelves to fill out the laboratory as best they could. So passionate was he about chemistry, that his schoolmates nicknamed him “Gas.” Many years later, Darwin’s own fascinating studies of plants and earthworms, central to filling out the broad contours of his evolutionary theory with the minutest details of nature, were carried on at Down House using bits and pieces of string, kitchen crocks, gardening tools, and every odd thing he could make suit his ends (much to the dismay of the cook and gardener when things disappeared from their domains).

Finally, as with all schoolboys, for Charles there was the thrill of escape, the thrill of not being in school, of finally coming home for the holidays, or even of stealing away for a few precious hours. With his home, the Mount, less than a mile away from the boarding school, Charles would dash off in the time allowed before locking up at night, drink greedily of humane, domestic pleasures, and then dash back again, the threat of the bell marking curfew and his expulsion looming ahead of him. On more than one occasion, it brought him as close to sincere prayer as this scion of a distinguished line of freethinkers could get. When in doubt whether he would make it in time, “I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to the prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how generally I was aided.”¹¹ So Darwin wrote in his late sixties or early seventies, looking back on his bygone days “as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.”¹² He had long since methodically substituted quick running—or swift flying, keen eyesight, strength of limb, or more elaborate or concealing plumage—for every alleged act of God.

His grey imprisonment at Shrewsbury ended in June 1825, when Darwin was sixteen. His father could see no good was coming of it, so he was soon packed off to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, following his older brother Erasmus, his father Robert, and his grandfather Erasmus into the well-ploughed Darwin family field of medicine.

Grandfather Erasmus had gone to Edinburgh Medical School in 1753. His son Robert had been pressed into the mold even though he had no real interest in medicine. In fact, he hated the sight of blood, even as he loved the sight of money. Nevertheless, because medicine had brought the family wealth and influential contacts, Robert was determined to make doctors of his sons Erasmus and Charles.

When Charles arrived at Edinburgh, he was already famous, not for anything he or his older brother or even his father had achieved, but because he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, a man with a European-wide intellectual, medical, scientific, and literary reputation. Erasmus was also remembered for his radicalism; he had been an anti-clerical, anti-monarchical Whig, supporter of both the American and French Revolutions, a denier of the existence of the human soul, and a proponent of the theory of evolution.

Erasmus Darwin was as famous—indeed, more famous—than the other great evolutionist of the time, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lamarck, and it was pr...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - A Very Ordinary Boy
• Chapter 2 - Theology School
• Chapter 3 - The Great Adventurer
• Chapter 4 - Hatching the Evolutionary Plot
• Chapter 5 - One Long Argument, Two Long Books
• Chapter 6 - Darwin Meets His Maker
• Chapter 7 - What to Make of It All?
• Chapter 8 - Darwin and Hitler
• Chapter 9 - Christianity an Evolution
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• Copyright Page