What if聟 the Nazis had won; Newton had abandoned science; electric motors had pre-dated steam engines; Darwin had not sailed on the Beagle; Charles II had no interest in science and a young Einstein had been ignored?
IN EARLY September 1830 Charles Darwin, just 21 years old, nervously approached the Admiralty buildings in London. A week before, he had received a letter inviting him to serve as captain鈥檚 companion on HMS Beagle as it charted the coastal waters of South America. Already a passionate naturalist, his spirits had soared 鈥� only to be dashed by his physician father Robert, who said he could not go. Charles was meant to be donning a dog collar and settling down to life as a parson, not gadding around the world bagging wildlife. Luckily, his father was persuaded to relent by his brother-in-law Josiah, who learned about the trip while seeking advice from the physician about a 鈥渂uffy discharge from his bowels鈥�.
But even now the way wasn鈥檛 clear. The Beagle鈥檚 captain, Robert FitzRoy, was subject to depressive episodes and wanted a companion to ease the burdens of command. On paper at least, Darwin was not a good proposition. FitzRoy was a Tory aristocrat 鈥� anti-republican, pro-slavery and devoted to the Church of England. Darwin came from a family of Whigs and abolitionists. To make matters worse, as an amateur physiognomist, FitzRoy surmised that Darwin鈥檚 flabby nose indicated a 鈥渓ack of energy and determination鈥�. Luckily, during that first meeting at the Admiralty, Darwin鈥檚 unaffected enthusiasm won the captain over.
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鈥�Bignose strikes again
Darwin鈥檚 large, fleshy nose almost cost him a berth on the Beagle and a place in history鈥�
Just how different would history be if uncle Jos had not been troubled by digestive complaints, if Darwin鈥檚 father had stood his ground, or if FitzRoy had refused to share a cabin with a man so different to him? Would we now see ourselves as fallen angels rather than upright apes? Would creationism rule?
On at least one thing most Darwin scholars agree: had Darwin not sailed aboard the Beagle he would not have arrived at his theory of evolution by natural selection. It took the raw novelty of travel in alien climes to shatter his received views of nature as harmonious, benign and static. So many aspects of wild nature posed awkward, even embarrassing questions for this cosseted young man. And so, in the months after his return, he began questioning the unquestionable: the immutability of species. Isaac Newton had shown that God was a law-maker, not a tinkerer. So didn鈥檛 it make more sense to imagine that the different species of Galapagos mockingbirds and South American rheas had arisen as the result of natural laws rather than as the creations of an interventionist deity? As for those fossilised mega-mammals he had dug up in Patagonia 鈥� extinct llamas, sloths and armadillos 鈥� surely they were the forebears of modern species?
To Darwin in early 1837 it seemed positively medieval to imagine God stepping in with each new geological or climatic shift to create a new suite of species. But the only clear alternative to this orthodox view was politically, religiously and scientifically subversive. The theory of evolution 鈥� that organisms change by degrees over time 鈥� had been around for decades, but it was an idea that few respectable naturalists would entertain. Yet, driven by what he had seen on the Beagle voyage, Darwin secretly became an evolutionist.
He then began the search for a plausible mechanism of change. At first, he favoured an idea expounded by his grandfather, Erasmus, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that organisms progressively adapt to their environments by inheriting characteristics acquired by their parents over the course of their lives. But in the early winter of 1838, Darwin came up with his own theory: natural selection.
It is very hard to imagine Darwin making the same cognitive leaps if he were a vicar in rural England. It was the Beagle experience that pushed him towards the heterodox doctrine of evolutionism. But does this really matter historically? After all, Darwin was not the only person of his generation to suggest the idea of natural selection. In 1858, a younger naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, suffering from a severe bout of malaria on a small island in the Malay archipelago, arrived at pretty much the same theory. Perhaps, then, had Charles Darwin not sailed aboard the Beagle we would simply refer to 鈥淲allaceism鈥� instead.
It is important to note here that neither Wallace nor Darwin achieved fame in their lifetimes for coming up with a plausible mechanism for evolution. Until early in the 20th century, only a minority of biologists accepted natural selection as the main driving force of evolutionary change. Most preferred to invoke some variant of Lamarck鈥檚 idea of inheriting acquired characteristics. Darwin鈥檚 great accomplishment in his own time was to persuade other biologists to embrace the idea of evolution itself. And in this he was remarkably successful. Within a decade of the publication of On The Origin of Species, roughly 60 per cent of British biologists were card-carrying evolutionists. Wallace contributed to this astonishing achievement, but could he have won through on his own?
Possibly, but it would have been a hard fight. For a start, in 1858 Wallace had only a tiny fraction of the data available to Darwin. For 30 years, Darwin had amassed staggering quantities of evidence on biogeography, taxonomy, embryology, palaeontology, physiology, heredity, anthropology, animal husbandry and horticulture, with which he could back up his argument. Just as importantly, Darwin鈥檚 previous publications 鈥� not least his study of barnacles 鈥� had already won him a solid scientific reputation. Wallace had yet to win his scientific spurs.
There were also less creditable reasons why Wallace鈥檚 campaign might have foundered. In a society riven by class distinctions, he had the misfortune to be the son of a hard-up lawyer. True, the elites of English science did tolerate the 鈥渓ower鈥� orders getting involved in science. But since Wallace paid his way by sending rare finds to wealthy collectors back home, his work carried the stigma of trade. And scientific tradesmen, no matter how skilled, were meant to get on with 鈥渇act-gathering鈥� and leave theorising to their social 鈥渂etters鈥�.
Wallace鈥檚 humble origins might not have mattered had he been drawn to a less controversial area of scientific enquiry. But since the late 18th century, evolution had been a dangerous idea. Challenging Genesis alarmed the religious and political establishments, both of which freely invoked God in defence of monarchy, aristocracy and inequality. Hence evolutionism鈥檚 popularity among freethinking democrats and republicans. As a result, however, advocates of evolution who, like Wallace, were of humble birth could expect an angry reaction from the scientific elites, many of them clerics and nearly all well-heeled.
鈥�Obscurities
Neither Charles Darwin nor Alfred Russel Wallace achieved fame in their lifetimes鈥�
Darwin was different. By 1859, he was the absolute embodiment of intellectual and social respectability. By backing evolutionism, he wrested it from the grasp of political radicals and made it an acceptable way of looking at the natural world; he made talk of ape-ancestry a fit subject for polite scientific enquiry. It is hard to imagine anyone else in the front ranks of Victorian science who could have conferred the same respectability on the subject. Nor were any of the other big guns keen to try. As evolution鈥檚 inside man, Darwin made a genuine difference. Only someone of his eminence could have said that humans are mere beasts and finished up with a state funeral in Westminster Abbey.
Without Darwin, we would still 鈥� mostly 鈥� believe in evolution by natural selection. To think otherwise would be to ignore the huge advances in biological science in the first half of the 20th century that made the theory irresistible. But although we can鈥檛 say how long it would have taken biologists to embrace evolutionism without him, one thing is fairly certain: in 1859 Charles Darwin gave the still-fragile theory of evolution the protection it needed to take root and become perhaps the most powerful idea of modern science.