IN THE LATE summer or early autumn of 1859, Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respectedBritish journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book by thenaturalist Charles Darwin. Elwin read the book with interest and agreed that it had merit, butfeared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin towrite a book about pigeons instead. “Everyone is interested in pigeons,” he observedhelpfully.
Elwin’s sage advice was ignored, and On the Origin of Species by Means of NaturalSelection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in lateNovember 1859, priced at fifteen shillings. The first edition of 1,250 copies sold out on thefirst day. It has never been out of print, and scarcely out of controversy, in all the time since—not bad going for a man whose principal other interest was earthworms and who, but for asingle impetuous decision to sail around the world, would very probably have passed his lifeas an anonymous country parson known for, well, for an interest in earthworms.
Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809,1in Shrewsbury, a sedate markettown in the west Midlands of England. His father was a prosperous and well-regardedphysician. His mother, who died when Charles was only eight, was the daughter of JosiahWedgwood, of pottery fame.
Darwin enjoyed every advantage of upbringing, but continually pained his widowed fatherwith his lackluster academic performance. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family,” his father wrote in a linethat nearly always appears just about here in any review of Darwin’s early life. Although hisinclination was to natural history, for his father’s sake he tried to study medicine at EdinburghUniversity but couldn’t bear the blood and suffering. The experience of witnessing anoperation on an understandably distressed child—this was in the days before anesthetics, ofcourse—left him permanently traumatized. He tried law instead, but found that insupportablydull and finally managed, more or less by default, to acquire a degree in divinity fromCambridge.
A life in a rural vicarage seemed to await him when from out of the blue there came a moretempting offer. Darwin was invited to sail on the naval survey ship HMS Beagle, essentiallyas dinner company for the captain, Robert FitzRoy, whose rank precluded his socializing withanyone other than a gentleman. FitzRoy, who was very odd, chose Darwin in part because heliked the shape of Darwin’s nose. (It betokened depth of character, he believed.) Darwin wasnot FitzRoy’s first choice, but got the nod when FitzRoy’s preferred companion dropped out.
From a twenty-first-century perspective the two men’s most striking joint feature was their1An auspicious date in history: on the same day in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln was born.
extreme youthfulness. At the time of sailing, FitzRoy was only twenty-three, Darwin justtwenty-two.
FitzRoy’s formal assignment was to chart coastal waters, but his hobby—passion really—was to seek out evidence for a literal, biblical interpretation of creation. That Darwin wastrained for the ministry was central to FitzRoy’s decision to have him aboard. That Darwinsubsequently proved to be not only liberal of view but less than wholeheartedly devoted toChristian fundamentals became a source of lasting friction between them.
Darwin’s time aboard HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, was obviously the formativeexperience of his life, but also one of the most trying. He and his captain shared a small cabin,which can’t have been easy as FitzRoy was subject to fits of fury followed by spells ofsimmering resentment. He and Darwin constantly engaged in quarrels, some “bordering oninsanity,” as Darwin later recalled. Ocean voyages tended to become melancholyundertakings at the best of times—the previous captain of the Beagle had put a bullet throughhis brain during a moment of lonely gloom—and FitzRoy came from a family well known fora depressive instinct. His uncle, Viscount Castlereagh, had slit his throat the previous decadewhile serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer. (FitzRoy would himself commit suicide by thesame method in 1865.) Even in his calmer moods, FitzRoy proved strangely unknowable.
Darwin was astounded to learn upon the conclusion of their voyage that almost at onceFitzRoy married a young woman to whom he had long been betrothed. In five years inDarwin’s company, he had not once hinted at an attachment or even mentioned her name.
In every other respect, however, the Beagle voyage was a triumph. Darwin experiencedadventure enough to last a lifetime and accumulated a hoard of specimens sufficient to makehis reputation and keep him occupied for years. He found a magnificent trove of giant ancientfossils, including the finest Megatherium known to date; survived a lethal earthquake inChile; discovered a new species of dolphin (which he dutifully named Delphinus fitzroyi);conducted diligent and useful geological investigations throughout the Andes; and developeda new and much-admired theory for the formation of coral atolls, which suggested, notcoincidentally, that atolls could not form in less than a million years—the first hint of hislong-standing attachment to the extreme antiquity of earthly processes. In 1836, aged twenty-seven, he returned home after being away for five years and two days. He never left Englandagain.
One thing Darwin didn’t do on the voyage was propound the theory (or even a theory) ofevolution. For a start, evolution as a concept was already decades old by the 1830s. Darwin’sown grandfather, Erasmus, had paid tribute to evolutionary principles in a poem of inspiredmediocrity called “The Temple of Nature” years before Charles was even born. It wasn’t untilthe younger Darwin was back in England and read Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principleof Population (which proposed that increases in food supply could never keep up withpopulation growth for mathematical reasons) that the idea began to percolate through his mindthat life is a perpetual struggle and that natural selection was the means by which somespecies prospered while others failed. Specifically what Darwin saw was that all organismscompeted for resources, and those that had some innate advantage would prosper and pass onthat advantage to their offspring. By such means would species continuously improve.
It seems an awfully simple idea—it is an awfully simple idea—but it explained a great deal,and Darwin was prepared to devote his life to it. “How stupid of me not to have thought ofit!” T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the Origin of Species. It is a view that has beenechoed ever since.
Interestingly, Darwin didn’t use the phrase “survival of the fittest” in any of his work(though he did express his admiration for it). The expression was coined five years after thepublication of On the Origin of Species by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology in 1864.
Nor did he employ the word evolution in print until the sixth edition of Origin (by which timeits use had become too widespread to resist), preferring instead “descent with modification.”
Nor, above all, were his conclusions in any way inspired by his noticing, during his time inthe Galápagos Islands, an interesting diversity in the beaks of finches. The story asconventionally told (or at least as frequently remembered by many of us) is that Darwin,while traveling from island to island, noticed that the finches’ beaks on each island weremarvelously adapted for exploiting local resources—that on one island beaks were sturdy andshort and good for cracking nuts, while on the next island beaks were perhaps long and thinand well suited for winkling food out of crevices—and it was this that set him to thinking thatperhaps the birds had not been created this way, but had in a sense created themselves.
In fact, the birds had created themselves, but it wasn’t Darwin who noticed it. At the timeof the Beagle voyage, Darwin was fresh out of college and not yet an accomplished naturalistand so failed to see that the Galápagos birds were all of a type. It was his friend theornithologist John Gould who realized that what Darwin had found was lots of finches withdifferent talents. Unfortunately, in his inexperience Darwin had not noted which birds camefrom which islands. (He had made a similar error with tortoises.) It took years to sort themuddles out.
Because of these oversights, and the need to sort through crates and crates of other Beaglespecimens, it wasn’t until 1842, six years after his return to England, that Darwin finallybegan to sketch out the rudiments of his new theory. These he expanded into a 230-page“sketch” two years later. And then he did an extraordinary thing: he put his notes away andfor the next decade and a half busied himself with other matters. He fathered ten children,devoted nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles (“I hate a barnacle as noman ever did before,” he sighed, understandably, upon the work’s conclusion), and fell preyto strange disorders that left him chronically listless, faint, and “flurried,” as he put it. Thesymptoms nearly always included a terrible nausea and generally also incorporatedpalpitations, migraines, exhaustion, trembling, spots before the eyes, shortness of breath,“swimming of the head,” and, not surprisingly, depression.
The cause of the illness has never been established, but the most romantic and perhapslikely of the many suggested possibilities is that he suffered from Chagas’s disease, alingering tropical malady that he could have acquired from the bite of a Benchuga bug inSouth America. A more prosaic explanation is that his condition was psychosomatic. In eithercase, the misery was not. Often he could work for no more than twenty minutes at a stretch,sometimes not that.
Much of the rest of his time was devoted to a series of increasingly desperate treatments—icy plunge baths, dousings in vinegar, draping himself with “electric chains” that subjectedhim to small jolts of current. He became something of a hermit, seldom leaving his home inKent, Down House. One of his first acts upon moving to the house was to erect a mirroroutside his study window so that he could identify, and if necessary avoid, callers.
Darwin kept his theory to himself because he well knew the storm it would cause. In 1844,the year he locked his notes away, a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creationroused much of the thinking world to fury by suggesting that humans might have evolvedfrom lesser primates without the assistance of a divine creator. Anticipating the outcry, the author had taken careful steps to conceal his identity, which he kept a secret from even hisclosest friends for the next forty years. Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author.
Others suspected Prince Albert. In fact, the author was a successful and generally unassumingScottish publisher named Robert Chambers whose reluctance to reveal himself had a practicaldimension as well as a personal one: his firm was a leading publisher of Bibles. Vestiges waswarmly blasted from pulpits throughout Britain and far beyond, but also attracted a good dealof more scholarly ire. The Edinburgh Review devoted nearly an entire issue—eighty-fivepages—to pulling it to pieces. Even T. H. Huxley, a believer in evolution, attacked the bookwith some venom, unaware that the author was a friend.
2Darwin’s manuscript might have remained locked away till his death but for an alarmingblow that arrived from the Far East in the early summer of 1858 in the form of a packetcontaining a friendly letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace and the draftof a paper, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,outlining a theory of natural selection that was uncannily similar to Darwin’s secret jottings.
Even some of the phrasing echoed Darwin’s own. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,”
Darwin reflected in dismay. “If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, hecould not have made a better short abstract.”
Wallace didn’t drop into Darwin’s life quite as unexpectedly as is sometimes suggested.
The two were already corresponding, and Wallace had more than once generously sentDarwin specimens that he thought might be of interest. In the process of these exchangesDarwin had discreetly warned Wallace that he regarded the subject of species creation as hisown territory. “This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, onthe question of how & in what way do species & varieties differ from each other,” he hadwritten to Wallace some time earlier. “I am now preparing my work for publication,” headded, even though he wasn’t really.
In any case, Wallace failed to grasp what Darwin was trying to tell him, and of course hecould have no idea that his own theory was so nearly identical to one that Darwin had beenevolving, as it were, for two decades.
Darwin was placed in an agonizing quandary. If he rushed into print to preserve his priority,he would be taking advantage of an innocent tip-off from a distant admirer. But if he steppedaside, as gentlemanly conduct arguably required, he would lose credit for a theory that he hadindependently propounded. Wallace’s theory was, by Wallace’s own admission, the result of aflash of insight; Darwin’s was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. Itwas all crushingly unfair.
To compound his misery, Darwin’s youngest son, also named Charles, had contracted scarletfever and was critically ill. At the height of the crisis, on June 28, the child died. Despite thedistraction of his son’s illness, Darwin found time to dash off letters to his friends CharlesLyell and Joseph Hooker, offering to step aside but noting that to do so would mean that allhis work, “whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” Lyell and Hooker came up with thecompromise solution of presenting a summary of Darwin’s and Wallace’s ideas together. Thevenue they settled on was a meeting of the Linnaean Society, which at the time was strugglingto find its way back into fashion as a seat of scientific eminence. On July 1, 1858, Darwin’s2Darwin was one of the few to guess correctly. He happened to be visiting Chambers one day when an advancecopy of the sixth edition of Vestiges was delivered. The keenness with which Chambers checked the revisionswas something of a giveaway, though it appears the two men did not discuss it.
and Wallace’s theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the dayof the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.
The Darwin–Wallace presentation was one of seven that evening—one of the others was onthe flora of Angola—and if the thirty or so people in the audience had any idea that they werewitnessing the scientific highlight of the century, they showed no sign of it. No discussionfollowed. Nor did the event attract much notice elsewhere. Darwin cheerfully later noted thatonly one person, a Professor Haughton of Dublin, mentioned the two papers in print and hisconclusion was “that all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old.”
Wallace, still in the distant East, learned of these maneuverings long after the event, butwas remarkably equable and seemed pleased to have been included at all. He even referred tothe theory forever after as “Darwinism.” Much less amenable to Darwin’s claim of prioritywas a Scottish gardener named Patrick Matthew who had, rather remarkably, also come upwith the principles of natural selection—in fact, in the very year that Darwin had set sail intheBeagle. Unfortunately, Matthew had published these views in a book called Naval Timberand Arboriculture, which had been missed not just by Darwin, but by the entire world.
Matthew kicked up in a lively manner, with a letter to Gardener’s Chronicle, when he sawDarwin gaining credit everywhere for an idea that really was his. Darwin apologized withouthesitation, though he did note for the record: “I think that no one will feel surprised thatneither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard of Mr. Matthew’s views, consideringhow briefly they are given, and they appeared in the Appendix to a work on Naval Timberand Arboriculture.”
Wallace continued for another fifty years as a naturalist and thinker, occasionally a verygood one, but increasingly fell from scientific favor by taking up dubious interests such asspiritualism and the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe. So the theorybecame, essentially by default, Darwin’s alone.
Darwin never ceased being tormented by his ideas. He referred to himself as “the Devil’sChaplain” and said that revealing the theory felt “like confessing a murder.” Apart from allelse, he knew it deeply pained his beloved and pious wife. Even so, he set to work at onceexpanding his manuscript into a book-length work. Provisionally he called it An Abstract ofan Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection —a title so tepidand tentative that his publisher, John Murray, decided to issue just five hundred copies. Butonce presented with the manuscript, and a slightly more arresting title, Murray reconsideredand increased the initial print run to 1,250.
On the Origin of Species was an immediate commercial success, but rather less of a criticalone. Darwin’s theory presented two intractable difficulties. It needed far more time than LordKelvin was willing to concede, and it was scarcely supported by fossil evidence. Where,asked Darwin’s more thoughtful critics, were the transitional forms that his theory so clearlycalled for? If new species were continuously evolving, then there ought to be lots ofintermediate forms scattered across the fossil record, but there were not.
3In fact, the record asit existed then (and for a long time afterward) showed no life at all right up to the moment ofthe famous Cambrian explosion.
3By coincidence, in 1861, at the height of the controversy, just such evidence turned up when workers inBavaria found the bones of an ancient archaeopteryx, a creature halfway between a bird and a dinosaur. (It hadfeathers, but it also had teeth.) It was an impressive and helpful find, and its significance much debated, but asingle discovery could hardly be considered conclusive.
But now here was Darwin, without any evidence, insisting that the earlier seas must havehad abundant life and that we just hadn’t found it yet because, for whatever reason, it hadn’tbeen preserved. It simply could not be otherwise, Darwin maintained. “The case at presentmust remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views hereentertained,” he allowed most candidly, but he refused to entertain an alternative possibility.
By way of explanation he speculated—inventively but incorrectly—that perhaps thePrecambrian seas had been too clear to lay down sediments and thus had preserved no fossils.
Even Darwin’s closest friends were troubled by the blitheness of some of his assertions.
Adam Sedgwick, who had taught Darwin at Cambridge and taken him on a geological tour ofWales in 1831, said the book gave him “more pain than pleasure.” Louis Agassiz dismissed itas poor conjecture. Even Lyell concluded gloomily: “Darwin goes too far.”
T. H. Huxley disliked Darwin’s insistence on huge amounts of geological time because hewas a saltationist, which is to say a believer in the idea that evolutionary changes happen notgradually but suddenly. Saltationists (the word comes from the Latin for “leap”) couldn’taccept that complicated organs could ever emerge in slow stages. What good, after all, is one-tenth of a wing or half an eye? Such organs, they thought, only made sense if they appeared ina finished state.
The belief was surprising in as radical a spirit as Huxley because it closely recalled a veryconservative religious notion first put forward by the English theologian William Paley in1802 and known as argument from design. Paley contended that if you found a pocket watchon the ground, even if you had never seen such a thing before, you would instantly perceivethat it had been made by an intelligent entity. So it was, he believed, with nature: itscomplexity was proof of its design. The notion was a powerful one in the nineteenth century,and it gave Darwin trouble too. “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” heacknowledged in a letter to a friend. In the Origin he conceded that it “seems, I freely confess,absurd in the highest possible degree” that natural selection could produce such an instrumentin gradual steps.
Even so, and to the unending exasperation of his supporters, Darwin not only insisted thatall change was gradual, but in nearly every edition of Origin he stepped up the amount of timehe supposed necessary to allow evolution to progress, which pushed his ideas increasingly outof favor. “Eventually,” according to the scientist and historian Jeffrey Schwartz, “Darwin lostvirtually all the support that still remained among the ranks of fellow natural historians andgeologists.”
Ironically, considering that Darwin called his book On the Origin of Species, the one thinghe couldn’t explain was how species originated. Darwin’s theory suggested a mechanism forhow a species might become stronger or better or faster—in a word, fitter—but gave noindication of how it might throw up a new species. A Scottish engineer, Fleeming Jenkin,considered the problem and noted an important flaw in Darwin’s argument. Darwin believedthat any beneficial trait that arose in one generation would be passed on to subsequentgenerations, thus strengthening the species.
Jenkin pointed out that a favorable trait in one parent wouldn’t become dominant insucceeding generations, but in fact would be diluted through blending. If you pour whiskeyinto a tumbler of water, you don’t make the whiskey stronger, you make it weaker. And if youpour that dilute solution into another glass of water, it becomes weaker still. In the same way,any favorable trait introduced by one parent would be successively watered down by subsequent matings until it ceased to be apparent at all. Thus Darwin’s theory was not a recipefor change, but for constancy. Lucky flukes might arise from time to time, but they wouldsoon vanish under the general impulse to bring everything back to a stable mediocrity. Ifnatural selection were to work, some alternative, unconsidered mechanism was required.
Unknown to Darwin and everyone else, eight hundred miles away in a tranquil corner ofMiddle Europe a retiring monk named Gregor Mendel was coming up with the solution.
Mendel was born in 1822 to a humble farming family in a backwater of the Austrianempire in what is now the Czech Republic. Schoolbooks once portrayed him as a simple butobservant provincial monk whose discoveries were largely serendipitous—the result ofnoticing some interesting traits of inheritance while pottering about with pea plants in themonastery’s kitchen garden. In fact, Mendel was a trained scientist—he had studied physicsand mathematics at the Olmütz Philosophical Institute and the University of Vienna—and hebrought scientific discipline to all he did. Moreover, the monastery at Brno where he livedfrom 1843 was known as a learned institution. It had a library of twenty thousand books and atradition of careful scientific investigation.
Before embarking on his experiments, Mendel spent two years preparing his controlspecimens, seven varieties of pea, to make sure they bred true. Then, helped by two full-timeassistants, he repeatedly bred and crossbred hybrids from thirty thousand pea plants. It wasdelicate work, requiring them to take the most exacting pains to avoid accidental cross-fertilization and to note every slight variation in the growth and appearance of seeds, pods,leaves, stems, and flowers. Mendel knew what he was doing.
He never used the word gene —it wasn’t coined until 1913, in an English medicaldictionary—though he did invent the terms dominant and recessive. What he established wasthat every seed contained two “factors” or “elemente,” as he called them—a dominant oneand a recessive one—and these factors, when combined, produced predictable patterns ofinheritance.
The results he converted into precise mathematical formulae. Altogether Mendel spenteight years on the experiments, then confirmed his results with similar experiments onflowers, corn, and other plants. If anything, Mendel was too scientific in his approach, forwhen he presented his findings at the February and March meetings of the Natural HistorySociety of Brno in 1865, the audience of about forty listened politely but was conspicuouslyunmoved, even though the breeding of plants was a matter of great practical interest to manyof the members.
When Mendel’s report was published, he eagerly sent a copy to the great Swiss botanistKarl-Wilhelm von N?geli, whose support was more or less vital for the theory’s prospects.
Unfortunately, N?geli failed to perceive the importance of what Mendel had found. Hesuggested that Mendel try breeding hawkweed. Mendel obediently did as N?geli suggested,but quickly realized that hawkweed had none of the requisite features for studying heritability.
It was evident to him that N?geli had not read the paper closely, or possibly at all. Frustrated,Mendel retired from investigating heritability and spent the rest of his life growingoutstanding vegetables and studying bees, mice, and sunspots, among much else. Eventuallyhe was made abbot.
Mendel’s findings weren’t quite as widely ignored as is sometimes suggested. His studyreceived a glowing entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica —then a more leading record of scientific thought than now—and was cited repeatedly in an important paper by the GermanWilhelm Olbers Focke. Indeed, it was because Mendel’s ideas never entirely sank below thewaterline of scientific thought that they were so easily recovered when the world was readyfor them.
Together, without realizing it, Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of lifesciences in the twentieth century. Darwin saw that all living things are connected, thatultimately they “trace their ancestry to a single, common source,” while Mendel’s workprovided the mechanism to explain how that could happen. The two men could easily havehelped each other. Mendel owned a German edition of the Origin of Species, which he isknown to have read, so he must have realized the applicability of his work to Darwin’s, yet heappears to have made no effort to get in touch. And Darwin for his part is known to havestudied Focke’s influential paper with its repeated references to Mendel’s work, but didn’tconnect them to his own studies.
The one thing everyone thinks featured in Darwin’s argument, that humans are descendedfrom apes, didn’t feature at all except as one passing allusion. Even so, it took no great leap ofimagination to see the implications for human development in Darwin’s theories, and itbecame an immediate talking point.
The showdown came on Saturday, June 30, 1860, at a meeting of the British Associationfor the Advancement of Science in Oxford. Huxley had been urged to attend by RobertChambers, author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, though he was still unawareof Chambers’s connection to that contentious tome. Darwin, as ever, was absent. The meetingwas held at the Oxford Zoological Museum. More than a thousand people crowded into thechamber; hundreds more were turned away. People knew that something big was going tohappen, though they had first to wait while a slumber-inducing speaker named John WilliamDraper of New York University bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductoryremarks on “The Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Viewsof Mr. Darwin.”
Finally, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to speak. Wilberforce had beenbriefed (or so it is generally assumed) by the ardent anti-Darwinian Richard Owen, who hadbeen a guest in his home the night before. As nearly always with events that end in uproar,accounts vary widely on what exactly transpired. In the most popular version, Wilberforce,when properly in flow, turned to Huxley with a dry smile and demanded of him whether heclaimed attachment to the apes by way of his grandmother or grandfather. The remark wasdoubtless intended as a quip, but it came across as an icy challenge. According to his ownaccount, Huxley turned to his neighbor and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into myhands,” then rose with a certain relish.
Others, however, recalled a Huxley trembling with fury and indignation. At all events,Huxley declared that he would rather claim kinship to an ape than to someone who used hiseminence to propound uninformed twaddle in what was supposed to be a serious scientificforum. Such a riposte was a scandalous impertinence, as well as an insult to Wilberforce’soffice, and the proceedings instantly collapsed in tumult. A Lady Brewster fainted. RobertFitzRoy, Darwin’s companion on the Beagle twenty-five years before, wandered through thehall with a Bible held aloft, shouting, “The Book, the Book.” (He was at the conference topresent a paper on storms in his capacity as head of the newly created MeteorologicalDepartment.) Interestingly, each side afterward claimed to have routed the other.
Darwin did eventually make his belief in our kinship with the apes explicit in The Descentof Man in 1871. The conclusion was a bold one since nothing in the fossil record supportedsuch a notion. The only known early human remains of that time were the famous Neandertalbones from Germany and a few uncertain fragments of jawbones, and many respectedauthorities refused to believe even in their antiquity. The Descent of Man was altogether amore controversial book, but by the time of its appearance the world had grown less excitableand its arguments caused much less of a stir.
For the most part, however, Darwin passed his twilight years with other projects, most ofwhich touched only tangentially on questions of natural selection. He spent amazingly longperiods picking through bird droppings, scrutinizing the contents in an attempt to understandhow seeds spread between continents, and spent years more studying the behavior of worms.
One of his experiments was to play the piano to them, not to amuse them but to study theeffects on them of sound and vibration. He was the first to realize how vitally importantworms are to soil fertility. “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals whichhave played so important a part in the history of the world,” he wrote in his masterwork on thesubject, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881), which wasactually more popular thanOn the Origin of Species had ever been. Among his other bookswere On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised byInsects (1862), Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which sold almost5,300 copies on its first day, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the VegetableKingdom (1876)—a subject that came improbably close to Mendel’s own work, withoutattaining anything like the same insights—and his last book, The Power of Movement inPlants. Finally, but not least, he devoted much effort to studying the consequences ofinbreeding—a matter of private interest to him. Having married his own cousin, Darwinglumly suspected that certain physical and mental frailties among his children arose from alack of diversity in his family tree.
Darwin was often honored in his lifetime, but never for On the Origin of Species orDescentof Man. When the Royal Society bestowed on him the prestigious Copley Medal it was for hisgeology, zoology, and botany, not evolutionary theories, and the Linnaean Society wassimilarly pleased to honor Darwin without embracing his radical notions. He was neverknighted, though he was buried in Westminster Abbey—next to Newton. He died at Down inApril 1882. Mendel died two years later.
Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance until the 1930s and 1940s, withthe advance of a refined theory called, with a certain hauteur, the Modern Synthesis,combining Darwin’s ideas with those of Mendel and others. For Mendel, appreciation wasalso posthumous, though it came somewhat sooner. In 1900, three scientists workingseparately in Europe rediscovered Mendel’s work more or less simultaneously. It was onlybecause one of them, a Dutchman named Hugo de Vries, seemed set to claim Mendel’sinsights as his own that a rival made it noisily clear that the credit really lay with the forgottenmonk.
The world was almost ready, but not quite, to begin to understand how we got here—howwe made each other. It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn’t actuallytell you where babies came from.
And these, you may recall, were men who thought science was nearly at an end.
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