2009 is the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and numerous celebrations and publications devoted to his works and life abound. One of the most intriguing is a special supplement to volume 372 of the world-class medical publication, The Lancet, issued December, 2008.
While there are many interesting essays within it, this blog will take note of two of them, while recommending all the others to the reader’s attention.
One essay touches on Darwin as a scientific writer of his times, and why he preferred authoring entire books in an age when articles in journals had already become the principal means by which scientists communicated their results.
The other essay deals with the somewhat touchy issue of Darwin’s ancestors and his descendants, with the idea that perhaps studying this can tell us a bit about whether the Darwin family penchant for producing geniuses was primarily genetic, or that the Darwin’s family success was due in no small part to the role of cumulative educational, social, and financial advantages.
Or to the contrary of either proposition, was the family genius inevitably dissipated over succeeding generations, much as dynastic fortunes can be?
Darwin & the Ways and Means of Communicating Science in the Victorian Age
Richard Horton is the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, and is the author of the piece on Darwin’s writing, ( supplement pages s76-s84.)
One of the most important things Horton notes was that Darwin was, far and away, more gladly a writer of books, rather than a writer of articles in scientific journals.
This is intriguing for modern librarians in that most of our scientific and clinical clientele have largely abandoned book writing, except for chapters that effectively function as review articles in advanced texts or reference works.
(A good test of changed priorities is to ask today’s molecular biologist what he would do with $5,000 more in his or her library budget…..the answer will be invariably the reinstatement of a journal lost to budget cuts or perhaps starting a subscription to a new journal title from either the Cell or Nature presses. The mention of buying books would be very secondary, if it happened at all. )
There were several reasons for Darwin’s preference of books as outlets.
Darwin seemed not to care a great deal about establishing priority of discovery, something at which the more quickly prepared article and more frequently issued periodical already had a clear advantage.
Part of this may have had to do with Darwin’s rather presumptuous belief that virtually no other scientist was likely to come up with “his” overarching hypotheses of evolution.
Darwin was quite wrong in this case, as a self-trained explorer named Alfred Russell Wallace, was doing pretty much exactly that.
When Wallace sent Darwin a journal article manuscript with his own ideas of evolution, Darwin was afraid he had been scooped.
But mutual friends arranged to have separate preliminary articles on evolution, one by Wallace and one by Darwin. published in the same issue of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society) effectively giving each the same time stamp, so to speak.
Luckily for Darwin, his book a year later reached a far greater audience in both lay and scientific communities, and he got almost all the credit in succeeding generations.
Wallace was in no position to contest this.
Wallace was wholly without financial backers, without a university pedigree , and without social connections. He eventually had to ask Darwin for a loan just to get by.
Surely the theory ought to have been Wallace-Darwin or Darwin-Wallace in the same way that DNA’s discovery was Watson & Crick and perhaps even ought to have been Watson, Crick & (Rosalind) Franklin, after the pioneering x-ray crystallographer who took the micrographic pictures of DNA that Watson & Crick used, but died of breast cancer before she could get her share of the Nobel Prize.
It is interesting to note that the Linnean Society of London, publishers of the Wallace and Darwin early articles on evolution in their journal, has as its highest award the Darwin-Wallace Medal, in recognition of their mutual worthiness of being honored as founders of evolutionary theory.
Darwin also preferred writing books to articles because he could practice his own unique literary style, much as he pleased. Darwin fancied himself a great writer, and took enjoyment in developing a signature approach to framing his arguments with colorful allusions and multiple examples that were not part of an increasingly dispassionate, and numerical-data-driven style that had become de rigeur for journal article writing.
Insofar as can be determined, Darwin had proof-readers but no real literary editors for his books, who could demand rewrites.
Darwin in particular did not feel that he should have had to revise his books prior to their publication to suit nonscientists because he thought that book reviewers ought to be of a certain level of education and sophistication that they would naturally be able to follow his arguments. Those who could not, well, the book was simply above their station in life. (Darwin did make those changes between editions that he personally felt warranted owing to changed scientific developments, however.)
Darwin also preferred writing books as opposed to relying on journal articles because he anticipated (correctly) that his breakthrough ideas of evolution were big enough and sufficiently intriguing to be recognized as a newsworthy achievement by the book-buying upper classes of society. The book-buying classes were quite a bit larger the scientific journal-reading audience.
In point of fact, Darwin’s books sold very, very well right off the bat, and he could have (but did not need to) live off his considerable royalties. Darwin was arguably as much a celebrity, if somewhat an eccentric one, in his own Victorian era in England as was Einstein (also an eccentric) in Europe and the metropolitan US between World Wars I & II.
Darwin is often portrayed as a kind of lonely, antisocial recluse, but in fact, he was well-connected with high society, partly through attending Cambridge University where in his youth he studied very little and partied very hard, along with other scions of other monied families, and partly through his many well-to-do and socially well-connected relations.
His father married into the Wedgewood China fortune, and other relatives were prosperous gun makers (ironically they were Quaker pacifists despite the fact that the guns were sold largely to the military). Darwin himself married his first cousin, another heiress to the Wedgewood fortune.
The Darwins as a whole displayed a penchant for intermarrying with the financial, academic, and socially-connected elites of their day, a fact played out in the frequent and sometimes confusing recurrence of similar names between generations.
The fact that Darwin socialized less as he grew older had more to do with his extreme hypochondria, rather than from a lack of people who personally knew him well or appreciate his books. (if there were genetic disadvantages to the Darwin family genes, they seem to reside in assorted bouts of depression and an inexplicable string of odd dyspepsias upon which they famously dwelled excessively in discussions with their friends and acquaintances.)
Finally, Darwin assumed that the Victorian passion of the wealthy for having large personal libraries in one’s home would continue unabated into the future, and that these books would provide him with an enduring legacy.
He looked upon his books and their illustrations as likely to stand the test of time in terms of being bought, housed and actually browsed or read, owing to their fine production quality long after he died. Darwin saw them as collectible classics: elegantly written, nicely plated, and sold by a prestigious publisher who was likely to stay long in business.
What Factors Made Darwin Such A Stunning Success? Good Genes or the Inheritance of Money and Other Cumulative Advantages?
In a piece in the same supplement, (pages s40-s44), David Sharp, makes the point that Darwin was definitely descended from a line of well-published scientific intellectuals, with the confounding variable that most of them were also very wealthy, and could afford to become amateur scientists (there being very few full-time scientists, apart from university professors).
Virtually all of Darwin’s male relatives were university educated, a rarity in his day, but not so among those of Darwin’s social class.
Darwin had a grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) who was arguably the most noted scientific writer on botany, zoology and medicine of his day, with several well-selling compendia and textbooks.
There was also a notable bachelor uncle (a Robert Darwin from Elston, as opposed to Robert Darwin, father of Charles Darwin, who was the result of Erasmus’s second marriage) who wrote a Botany treatise that went through three editions.
Darwin’s own father, was a physician who wrote relatively little, but what was written was published in the leading scientific journals of the day.
Ultimately, three of Darwin’s older relations, were Fellows of the Royal Society of London, the epitome of scientific recognition at the time (and pretty much now as well among the British, save for winning the Nobel Prize).
In Darwin’s own generation, Darwin’s younger cousin, Francis Galton (1822-1911), another Fellow of the Royal Society, was arguably the most famous anthropologist, psychometrician, and statistician of his age. Galton developed the field of biological measurement and statistics today known as Biometry.
Galton was arguably an even more prodigious and controversial writer than Darwin, stressing the differences between people in terms of various physical traits and mental capabilities. He is thought of today as the founder of the Eugenics movement, which sought to rid society of “mental defectives” through diminished breeding among “the lower classes,” and increased fertility among the educated wealthy.
Galton ultimately decided that genius was largely hereditary, based on tracing the biographies of the eminent men of science of his day. He found that the number of scientists present in first degree relatives was greater than in those related as second degree relatives, which in turn was greater than those who were third degree relatives.
Unfortunately, even now this result seems inextricably tied to the fact that the only people who could afford to be scientists in that generation were largely the wealthy. Galton seemed to have codified the convention in Victorian fiction of the better off people almost always having those unfortunate poor cousins who were so perplexing with which to deal.
Furthermore, Galton seemed to be blind to the obvious influence of grandfathers, fathers and uncles on career choice in the young men of the upper class family, which was likely to be very strong, and indeed, in many cases, the grandsons, sons and nephews were ordered to do as they were told, or they would be cut off from the family fortune.
Darwin was something of a rebel in that his father first sent him off to become a physician, and when Darwin failed to make any progress along those lines, the plan was to have him become a member of the clergy.
Fortunately, the opportunity to go on a voyage of exploration presented itself, and Darwin’s wealthy Wedgewood uncle prevailed on Darwin’s father to let the young Darwin do so, without cutting the young man off from his allowance.
Darwin was not paid any salary for five years during that voyage. He simply lived off his private income all that time.
Darwin had three sons that, like their father, grandfather, great grandfather and assorted uncles, were also named Fellows of the Royal Society.
George (1845-1912) was a professor of Mathematics & Astronomy at Cambridge; Francis (1848-1925) taught Botany at the same university; Horace (1851-1928) was a prosperous maker of scientific instrumentation in that university town.
Charles Galton Darwin (1887-1962), another Fellow of the Royal Society, and son of the Math & Astronomy professor, George, became the director of the prestigious National Physical Laboratory of the UK, an institution roughly parallel to the National Institute of Science & Technology in the US.
Two great grandsons of Darwin became neuroscientists. Richard Darwin Keynes, born in 1919, (and also related to the family of the famous economist John Maynard Keynes) is the author of over 90 papers in the Journal of Physiology, with eight in Nature, and others in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Keynes successfully exploited the squid and its giant axon as a model for electrical signal propagation in the nervous system through the flow of sodium and calcium ions. (A 1957 paper on the subject, see below, has been cited a remarkable 596 times.)
Horace Basil Barlow (born 1921) is not only related to Darwin but to Darwin’s most notable teacher, a Cambridge University professor named Barlow. This generation of Darwin-Barlow is an expert in visual perception. One of his papers in the Journal of Physiology of 1965 on retinal responses within living rabbit eyes which are tracking direction and speed (see below) , has been cited a stunning 763 times. He also has several other very prominent papers in Nature and Science.
Unsurprisingly at this point, both are also Fellows of the Royal Society.
So it might seem that there is ample evidence that genius, or at least scientific genius, is largely inherited, a belief that Darwin himself held, if publically less so than the controversial Galton.
But if it had not been for the voyage of the Beagle, something for which Darwin had no special training apart from a hobbyist’s interest in Nature as well as the social and academic connections to get himself recommended to the Admiralty in spite of this, the authors in this supplement note that Darwin might well have lived a genteel but rather less famous life, with sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, (and daughters) who became something successful at something very much apart from science.
And in fact, this is the case with the majority of his great, great grandchildren.
So was luck also just as much a factor?
Although Darwin became himself less and less religious, over time, the following quotation from Ecclesiastes 9:11 might prove particularly appropriate in describing this key factor in the outcomes of the lives of eminent people and their families, apart from the inheritance of wealth and connections, and the genetics of genius :
“I saw that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Tony Stankus tstankus@uark.edu Life Sciences Librarian & Professor
University of Arkansas Libraries MULN 223 E
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Fayetteville, AR 72701-4002
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Three Notable Scientific Papers by Darwin’s Descendants
Barlow, H.B., & Levick, W.R. (1965). Mechanism of directionally selective units in rabbit retina. Journal of Physiology, London. 178 (3), 477.
Galton, F. (1879). Inquiries into human faculty: Psychometric experiments. (reprinted 2004). American Imago, 61, (3), 365-378.
Hodgkin, A.L. & Keynes, R.D. (1957). The movements of labeled calcium in squid giant axons. Journal of Physiology, London. 138 (2), 253-281.
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