- Good evening and welcome to this, the first of four
lectures on Charles Darwin and his various ideas. The series is called "Darwin's Descent." And the first one I've christened
"Breeding and Barnacles." And what I'm gonna do mostly this evening is set the scene for what's to come. But I think it's worth asking
before we begin, why Darwin? Why in the age where
we're pulling down statues of dead white guys are we
still talking about this one? Is there something perhaps
problematic about that in itself? I think I'm gonna justify
that in a couple of ways. The first one is just to mention that we have a big anniversary coming up. So next year will be the 150th anniversary of the publication at
"The Descent of Man," Darwin's big book about human evolution, but also his book about sex,
about race and about morality. So a number of issues
that I'm gonna be touching on during this lecture series. The other thing I would
say about Darwin is that his ideas still
matter because of the way that they've influenced
the world that we live in. These lectures are not
particularly interested in Darwin himself and what he thought and why he thought it, more about the interaction
between him and his world, the world that shaped him and
then the world that he shaped and the world that he continues to shape, which I think is why perhaps he is still worth thinking about. One of the things I'm gonna
try and do this evening is look at the funny side of Darwin, on the slightly implausible
premise that there is a funny side to him, apart from the fun that
caricaturists had with him over the years, there are
certain stories about Darwin that get told again and again. I have to admit, being a
very serious Darwin nerd and having been to a great
many conferences and meetings and so on over the years, I've
become rather tired of these, but I'm gonna retell them
in the hope that some of you will find them new, but also that they illuminate issues that are of considerable,
I hope, interest. So let's start with the
question of marriage, whether or not it's a good idea. Darwin, as I'm sure all of you know, has spent five years aboard
HMS Beagle traveling all around the South America, spending a long time
doing geology, visiting, most famously of all the
Galapagos Islands and so on. He came back from that
with no very clear idea of what kind of career
he was going to pursue, but clearly committed
to a life in science. And he decided that perhaps
it was time to think about settling down and to weigh up the question of whether
or not to get married. He wrote these notes, which like a great many
Darwin documents are preserved at the University of Cambridge Library, and I'm grateful to them
for letting me have an image of this that we can use, and being a good scientific man, he's made out a detailed list here on the question of whether
or not to get married. And this is pretty hard to read. So I'm gonna highlight a couple of things on his scribble. So he wrote a list for "Not
Marry" on one side of the page. "Freedom to go where one
liked," would be an advantage. "Choice of society and
underlined little of it." I have the feeling that
Darwin probably wouldn't find the current restrictions
on socializing too hard. "The conversation of clever men at clubs" was a freedom that
he might lose if he married. "The expense and anxiety of children. Less money for books, et cetera. And if many children forced
to gain one's bread," a dreadful prospect. "And perhaps my wife won't like London, then the sentence is banishment and degradation into
an indolent idle fall." Not a very appealing
prospect, but we have to take a balanced view here,
being a scientific man, he wrote a list of what was
in favor of marriage as well. Under "Marry," he listed, "Home and someone to take care of house." "Charms of music and female chit-chat. These things good for one's health." A constant companion and friend in old age who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with." "Better than a dog anyhow." As you probably know, he
summed up in favor of marriage in the end, "My God, it is intolerable to think
of spending one's whole life like a neuter bee, working,
working and nothing after all. No, no, won't do. Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London house. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps. Compare this vision with the dingy reality of great Marlborough St." Where he was then living,
"Marry, marry, marry Q. E. D." And the idea that Darwin had a wife because it was better
than a dog anyhow, of course, is a story that's been told many times. I'm gonna try and unpick
this note a little bit and think a little bit
about what it tells us, not just about Darwin as a person, but more importantly
about the world that he and his soon to be wife Emma lived in. He proposed to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood in November of 1838. And in his diary, he wrote, "It was the day of days!" Because she had accepted him. This was the first of, not
the first, but the latest of several cousin marriages
between the Darwin and Wedgwood families and Darwin had more or less grown up with Emma and
her sisters and her parents and so on. So a very close marriage in lots of sense. I think that the list and the notes that
he made bear out a number of interesting points. The first is that I think
Darwin often sees analogies between the human world
and the world of animals. So if we think about peacocks, a subject that he would write about in "The Descent of Man,"
which we'll come to in a later lecture, the males
display, the females choose. And in many parts of the animal
kingdom, there is a fierce, often vicious contest between
the males for the possession of the females. And Darwin has these kinds of
combats and choices in mind. One of the things that I
think is very interesting and revealing about his
list is that he seems to have accepted the idea that one of them would do the choosing and the other one would be the chosen. He doesn't seem to have
paid any great attention to Emma's feelings or desires
in coming to this decision. And so the ideal of Victorian courtship, the natural relationships between men and women is one of the things that shaping his ideas here, as you would expect, but also as we will see, they shape his ideas
about the natural world, about animals and the
way that they behave. And then those ideas about
animals get transferred back onto the human world in
lots of different ways. One of the things that the notes reveal, I think, is the idea that is sometimes
called separate spheres. This is the idea that's quite
common in Victorian Britain that men and women have natural roles. These are ultimately biological
and can't be changed. And because of the biology,
the social roles of men and women are equally or for
ordained by the natural order. So this is a famous painting by George Elgar Hicks called
"The Sinews of Old England." And it illustrates the idea of separate spheres rather nicely. So the man of the house is
portrayed as muscular and fit. He's got a pick-axe over his shoulder. He's about to go out of the house into the world of work and he will compete against other men to
bring home his daily bread for his wife and child
who will stay there. And behind him is the domestic sphere. You can just about make out the kitchen, the pots and pans,
that's the wife's domain. And she's portrayed
softer, rounder, gentler. There's a contrast visually between them and that contrast echoes the
supposedly natural contrast in their role. So she will stay at home with their child who has her concern. Interestingly, you may
not be aware of this, but this child is a boy. We can tell that because
he's holding a shovel and he's gonna grow up to
follow in his father's footsteps and be a laborer, but all
Victorian children wore dresses in the first few years of their life. And there was a symbolic
moment when boys left the care of women, they left
the nursery or the home if they were from poor families, and they went off to the care
of men, to school typically, and at that point they would be breached. They would be given their first pair of trousers and joined the world of men. So the child belongs to
the woman, to the house, for this part of their life and
that motion of a separation, a natural separation
between the world of men and the world of women, I
think is something that comes out quite clearly in Darwin's notes. He wants a wife as someone
to take care of his home, something which Emma did
for him very energetically and successfully to raise the children. By Victorian standards, Darwin spent quite a lot of time with his
children playing with them and obviously enjoyed them a great deal. Nevertheless, he was
the one who worked even though Emma was an
heiress who brought plenty of money to the family
as did Darwin himself. So there was an equality in some ways, but it wasn't reflected in
the way that Darwin thought about the way they would live. So they married in 1839. And as I said, Emma
brought a dowery with her. Darwin inherited money from his father. So that awful necessity of having to earn this bread
never actually came to pass. They lived together on Gower Street in Central London where University College London
now has lecture theaters. There's a blue plaque outside. And many years ago when
I was teaching at UCLA, I had the honor of lecturing in Darwin's house or
in the lecture theater which stood where
Darwin's house once stood, which was quite a thrill for me. The family grows and Darwin's
health remained uncertain for years after the Beagle voyage for reasons that were never really clear. And so they moved Down House here in the village of Downe in Kent, sort of not far from Bromley. And they settled there. Darwin in fact virtually
never leaves Down. He never leaves England,
that's for certain after this. And he once compared himself
to being like a barnacle on a rock that had stuck to
itself down, never moved again. And it was at Down that he wrote his books and where he did his
experiments and produce the work which of course eventually
is gonna make him famous. So did he become an indolent
title fool? Obviously not. This is Darwin's study as it
looked some years after his, after his death when it was recreated. He worked flat out. And I think it's interesting to think about some of the reasons
why he didn't become that indolent idle fool. The first is that he wasn't banished. He wasn't exiled from
the world around him. And the key reason for that is the trains. So the railway network is
expanding at an enormous pace and Darwin takes some of
the money he's inherited from his father and some of
the money that Emma's brought to the marriage and invest
that in railway shares and makes quite a nice sum from doing so. So he's right at the
heart, in every sense. of the world of industrialization,
the world of steam. And I love this picture which captures a lot of things about this. So the trains were obviously
at the heart of this. You can see a well-known railway bookstore which got its start in Victorian times, is still very much going
on British High Street. Lots of people coming and going. The train symbolize, not
merely physical mobility, being able to get from one place to another, but
increasingly social mobility. People can move to a new
town, start a new career, a new life and reinvent
themselves as a different kind of person in those new circumstances. And they can take holidays,
then can go to the seaside, and the whole boom in
holidays and vacations comes with the growth of the railway
network in Victorian Britain. But this particular picture is actually from the history of advertising. And I think it's the adverts,
the posters on the wall that visually dominate this and which are a very powerful reminder of
something quite important about Darwin's world, which is
that competition is to people like Darwin, self-evidently,
the motor of progress. All these different companies competing for the buyer's attention
with their supposedly improved and better products provide a model for a new kind of economy. The world's first industrialized
capitalist economy. There hadn't been anything
quite like this before. And that intense competition, the companies that fail to
produce better goods go bust, is one of the things that is driving Victorian Britain, driving Darwin's personal
fame and fortune, but it's also very important for him. It provides him with a metaphor for thinking about how nature works Steam of course is essential to all kinds of aspects of Victorian life. This is the SS Great Britain setting sail and gradually during the century, transportation and communication
between different countries was gonna get faster and faster. The time that it took a
little wooden sailing ship like the Beagle to get all the way to Australia was cut
dramatically over and over again during the century as first clipper ships and then steam ships carried the, plowed on those routes faster and faster. And they brought letters with them. They brought communications, specimens, news from the rest of the world. Steam is also really important to printing and to the the industrialization of communications in the 19th century. I joke with my students that
if I ask them a question and they're not sure what the answer is, the safe guess is always
steam-powered printing and cheap machine made paper, because those two things together absolutely revolutionized communications, education and the spread of ideas in the 19th century. So a printing press
like this being powered by steam could produce
hundreds more sheets in an hour than a hand-powered press. The hand-powered press
hadn't really changed in hundreds of years before this period. And then the paper that
is printed on instead of being handmade from rags,
which made it very expensive, was made from wood pulp and made on great long
continuous cylinders by a Fourdrinier machine. So you'd get huge rolls of cheap newsprint and
those things together with a number of other
technological innovations that come about in printing make
the cost of print much, much lower than it's ever been before. And of course, all kinds
of people take advantage of cheap print to have literacy campaigns. So evangelical Christians
will print cheap Bibles and cheap tracks and hold
Bible reading classes and teach people to read. And various other kinds of people will use the printing press to promote their ideas, ideas
about science and technology. So the famous society for the
diffusion of useful knowledge, which was actually
known in Victorian times as the steam reading society is one of many groups that takes advantage of the new technology to spread ideas. And the other kind of corner of this that we're thinking
about is the telegraph. This is quite a famous cartoon from Punch called "The Rhodes Colossus" which depicts Cecil Rhodes, the adventure Explorer, arch imperialist, striding the, bestriding
the African continent, holding the Cape Town
to Cairo telegraph line in his hands to celebrate its completion. And the telegraph of course,
made communication much faster. It helped the trains to run on time and not to bump into each other. It allowed news to be
transmitted in a flash from all parts of the world to each other. But of course, as this
picture of Rhodes reminds us, it's also very importantly
a tool of imperialism. It helps the British
Empire to run efficiently and there were many people in Britain who argued
quite seriously that, unlike previous great empires,
unlike the Roman Empire, for example, the British
Empire would last forever, because of the telegraph, because the the periphery
wouldn't get separated from the center, the center would hold and it would keep the periphery in check because it could communicate. And the telegraph is used for example to give orders to the
troops during what we know in Britain as the Indian Mutiny, sometimes referred to by Indian historians as the First War of Independence, but the ease with which London could keep in touch with what was happening and send fresh orders made it
a very different proposition to the way that say the
Roman Empire would have dealt with the rebellion as
they would have seen it in one of their provinces. So all of these steam-powered
technologies are crucial to the world that Darwin lives in. And it's worth remembering that imperialism is at the
heart of everything Darwin does. His whole career is founded on it. The Beagle is a British
naval surveying vessel. I mean, Darwin's dad was rich, but he wasn't rich enough
to buy him his own boat. If the British Navy hadn't
been doing this kind of surveying and if the captain of the Beagle hadn't wanted
a gentlemanly companion to keep him company and frankly to stop him going crazy,
Darwin would never have sailed. And what the Beagle is
doing is making charts like this one, charts of the harbors, and the rivers and the
coastlines of South America. The Spanish and Portuguese empires in South America were collapsing
in the early 19th century, all these newly independent
countries present opportunities for trade and the British
were very keen to try and take advantage of them. So the Beagle is there to
help make South America safe for British commerce ,for its
merchant vessels, but also for the naval vessels that
are gonna protect them. And so that is a crucial underpinning to everything Darwin does. So the banishment that he
worried about that might follow from moving to the
countryside never happened. And a key reason that it
never happened was one of the things that comes out
of all these technologies which is the massively
improved postal service. So there are letters flowing in from all over Britain to Darwin, but
actually all over the world. And as he becomes increasingly well-known after he publishes the
journal of researches, the book we now call "The
Voyage of the beagle," he becomes quite a celebrity,
quite a well-known writer. And he's well enough
known that he can write to people all over the
empire, asking advice, asking for information, asking
for specimens and so on. So the letters provide a
lifeline to the rest of the world and they make sure that he doesn't suffer that fate of banishment and idleness that he claimed he was worrying about. As Darwin got older, he needed
to take some gentle exercise and found himself a soft stepping horse. This is Tommy who he could ride without any fear of
being thrown and so on. And in his top hat, he thought he looked like a village postman. And he's written on the back of this photograph,
"Hoorah, no letters today." So the sheer volume of correspondence that he was dealing with
became quite a burden to him. But as I said, it was also a vital research
tool that allowed him to carry on with the work that he was doing. There are a lot of Darwin's letters and they're in the process of being published by the
Darwin Correspondence Project at the University of Cambridge. These are some of the dozens and dozens of actual print
volumes, but of course, like all great scholarly
endeavors these days, they're also online. That's the website address. A great website, all the quotes from Darwin's letters
that I'm gonna give you have come from here and I
have a number of friends and colleagues who work there who've been incredibly helpful to me in doing this and with
many, many other projects. So my thanks to them, but do
go and have a look at this. 'Cause as well as the letters themselves, there is a vast amount of
supporting evidence of every kind, great editorial footnotes and so on, but also stuff about Darwin and religion, the science of his day, who
his correspondents were. It's a fascinating portal into his world. And you actually, even
if you had no interest in Darwin himself, there's a ton of material there that is really worth reading. So take a look when you have a chance. One of the things Darwin
is doing of course on the Beagle and thinking
about when he gets home, was he was collecting. So he's got various
specimens that he's collected during his travels. He brings them back to Britain. Most of them he farms out to
experts in various fields. He gives them his finches. For example, go to a man called John Gould who's the leading
ornithologists at the time. And it's Gould in fact who tells Darwin that they are all finches. We think of them now famously as Darwin's finches, but Darwin didn't actually realize the significance straight away at all. These are some of the
original Beagle specimens which Darwin brought back. These particular ones are at the University of
Cambridge Zoology Museum. Again, my thanks to them for
permission to show them to you. And one of the things
that these specialists were doing was classifying his work. This is a key underlying part of natural history in the 19th century. Things have to have names before you can begin to
think about wider questions. Like how did they get where we found them and why are they there? Things like that. So that basic labor is
something that has to be done. And that's one of the things
specialists are doing: classifying, describing,
publishing the technical details. But Darwin has on odd leftover in his collections of barnacle who he gives the nickname,
Mr. Arthrobalanus, a very old little creature and he can't find a barnacle
specialist to take these on. So he decides he's gonna
fool around just for fun for a few months and publish a
description of this barnacle. And that takes me on to the next chapter in today's lecture, Darwin's barnacles. Now there's another story about Darwin which is often told that when one of his children was
visiting a neighbor's house, he looked around and said, "But where does your
daddy do his barnacles?" On the assumption that all the fathers in the country must share his own's rather weird obsession with barnacles. And that again is another
reminder of Darwin's world of work being in the home,
but kind of separate from it. He had his own space, the study where the children
weren't allowed to be. So it's another reminder
of separate spheres in a way that he has to be kept, that the barnacles had to be
kept away from the children. And Darwin is actually gonna labor away for nearly eight years and eventually produce
four substantial books about barnacles, which
again seems kind of weird and quite strange. And he was satirized at the time for the work that he put into this. And that work that he does, and the reason he does
it is another reminder of the kind of world
that he's coming up in and the world that's shaping him. It's a world without scientists. So the word scientist
itself hasn't actually been, hasn't actually been coined. It's coined in the 1830s in Britain, but it doesn't catch on. It doesn't catch on
until the 20th century. And one of the reasons it doesn't is there isn't a clearly defined body of people who want to use that word. There are people who call
themselves biologists, botanists and zoologists, anthropologists, geologists, and so on, but they don't see themselves
as sharing an identity. And so one of the things
that has to happen in that world is you've got to prove that you're qualified to be part of it. You've got to actually make
a name for yourself somehow when there aren't formal qualifications. You can't just go to university
and do a science degree. They don't exist in British universities at the time Darwin is a student. So one of the ways that you prove you're a scientist is to buy fancy equipment. This is the actual microscope that Darwin used to do
is barnacle dissections, the most expensive and
fancy microscope available at the time. Thanks to the Whipple Museum
of the History of Science for that one. But one of the reasons
that the question of whether you're qualified as a man of science would've bothered
Darwin was this book, which came out in 1844 just a few years after he
gets back from the Beagle. He's married, he's working away
on his ideas about species. They're already starting to take shape, but he's told almost nobody
about them at this stage. And "The Vestiges" was actually
a sensational bestseller. It actually outsold
"The Origin of Species" until almost the end of the 19th century. And if you look here at the title page, you can see perhaps one reason for that. There's no author's
name on the title page. The book was anonymous
and that of course led to intense speculation about who the mysterious Mr. Vestiges might be. And all kinds of people were
mentioned as possibilities. So the mystery helped the controversy. And of course, the reason
that the author kept his name a secret was that the ideas in the book were controversial ones. They were perceive by many as being anti-religious, as
quite shocking and immoral. We now know that the
author was Robert Chambers, the middle-class Edinburgh
publisher famous, particularly if you're a
Scrabble player like me for the Chambers Dictionary, which used to be the real, the only and real Scrabble dictionary. But Chambers didn't want his
name on the book precisely because of the controversial
nature of the reviews. But it's as the reviewers,
the views in the book, as the reviewers get to work on it, even though they're not
sure who Mr. Vestiges is, it's apparent to most of the scientific experts
who review the book that whoever he might
be, he's not one of them. He clearly hasn't done
firsthand research of his own. He's relying on secondhand
knowledge, other people's work, which is repackaged into this well-written
sensational bestseller. So there's a certain
professional jealousy, I think. Nut Mr. Vestiges is pilloried for not knowing what he talks about. And if we, the reason that matters
becomes clear when we look at some of Darwin's letters and some of the people that he wrote with. As I showed you these before, the hideous handwriting on the left, which is very hard work to, believe me, I've read an awful lot of this particular man's work, is the work of this man hovering over Darwin's mantle piece
in the study at Down. If you go and visit Down House, which I strongly recommend
you do, it's all been restored the way it is in his
portrait is still there. So Joseph Dalton Hooker is one of Darwin's closest friends. He would later become the
director of Kew Gardens and a great source of
support and help to Darwin in many ways. I have to be careful not to get going on Hooker 'cause I've written a book about him and I've worked, know far more about Hooker
than most people want to hear. So I have to rein myself in a bit. But Hooker is an incredibly important corresponded to Darwin. There are in fact more letters to Darwin in the Hooker
correspondence than to anyone else. And there are more letters to Hooker in the Darwin correspondence
than there are to anyone else, more than
1,300 of them in total. And I think I've read all
of them at some point. And I want to just discuss a
couple of them this evening, 'cause they give us some
insight into why Darwin spends all these years messing
around with barnacles. So this is Hooker as he looked at the time that he wrote the letter more or less before his facial
hair had got completely out of control as he did in later years. And in these letters 1845, so this is the year after "The Vestiges," Darwin is still working away in secret but Hooker already knows
about the species idea, the idea of natural selection. And they're discussing another
rather speculative treaters on a species by a man
called Frederick Gerard. The French naturalist. And Hooker is rather
contemptuous of this book, "Gerard was neither a specific
naturalist nor a collector, nor a traveler, and therefore
merely a distorter of facts." He didn't have that
firsthand empirical knowledge that made him somebody worth listening to. "To write on species," in Hookers view, "a man must have handled
hundreds of species with a view to distinguishing them
and that over a great part or brought from a great
many parts of the globe." So you need a global perspective, the kind of thing that an empire of botanic gardens is gonna
allow Hooker to assemble and you need to have done
the descriptions yourself. You need to have published and described and really know what species
are before you venture off into speculation. And Darwin wrote back,
"Oh, how painfully, to me, true is your remark that no one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not
minutely described many." And Hooker tries to reassure him that of course he'd mean him. You'd know what you're
talking about, Charles. Don't worry about it. But one of the reasons
Darwin spends eight years on barnacles is to prove
that he really is an expert. And it's a strategy
that works triumphantly. In 1853, he's actually given the gold, the Royal Medal of the
Royal Society of London in recognition of his barnacle work. So he is really celebrated
as a technical naturalist. Somebody who has really
earned his right to venture into more difficult terrain. So when "The Origin of
Species" does finally come out, lots of people are critical of
it for all kinds of reasons. Some are very hostile, but very little of that hostility is
directed at Darwin himself. In sharp contrast to the way
Mr. Vestiges was treated, people, generally speaking, treat Darwin with courtesy and respect. Because of the barnacles particularly, he's somebody who can't be ignored. So all of those strands come together and help us understand
what the barnacle work was really about. Now, Darwin of course has a
lifelong interest in breeding and reproduction in
animal and plant breeding. He grows up in the country. He grows up among the
English gentry people who are endlessly discussing the finer points of their dogs and their
horses and their wives. And he takes information from breeders and uses it crucially as the
raw material for his books. So he keeps his own pigeons. And my students, when
they finally are forced to read "The Origin of Species," are rather surprised to find that a great deal of the book
is in fact about pigeons. And he uses domesticated
varieties to test his ideas, including the pigeons. He joins various pigeon fencing clubs. This is a very popular
hobby in Victorian Britain. There are working class
clumps that meet in pubs. And Darwin is quite funny
in the letters about some of the people he met there
and some of the awful shakings of the head there were when they'd heard that a particular person had crossed his one kind of pigeon with another in violation
of all good practice. This is one of the more
up-market pigeon clubs the Philoperisteron, pigeon-lovers club which Darwin also belonged to. And these are again another
source of information for Darwin, the kinds of people
who are gonna give him more and more facts to grind
away into his theories. But of course, it's
also worth reminding you that all these people would
eventually become an audience for Darwin as well. And so there's many sides
to this relationship. And one of the things that Darwin is doing when he's thinking about pigeons is he's looking at artificial selection. That is to say the breeding of animals and plants as a
model for natural selection. So he takes examples like this. These are Victorian fancy pigeon breeds. So there's a Pouter with a great big chest there,
fantails at the bottom. And Darwin said, "Just imagine
that these were wild birds. Just imagine I collected
these in South America, the Galapagos or somewhere, I
brought them back to London. I'd given them to an ornithologist and said, 'Classify them.' There's no doubt," he said, "that any ornithologist would regard these as different species." Several of them he might even
assign to different genera. And yet we know for a fact that all of these
varieties have been created by people in the course
of recorded history, starting with the ordinary
common or garden rock pigeons, the ordinary Columba livia that you see in the streets of London
and city parks everywhere. And if you actually stop
and look at those pigeons you'll see they vary a
great deal in their size and their color and their
shape, the way that they walk, the way that they move. And what the pigeon
breeders have done is pick out the ones they like,
cross them and select. They choose those that have
the traits they're looking for. The rest of them, I'm afraid
end up in the pigeon pie. And then from each generation, again, they select and select and select. They take the ones that
best fit their bill. And that is the kind of model that Darwin has in mind for
the way that nature works. The competition between species is going to eliminate those that
don't compete effectively. But of course, that leaves us
with an interesting question, at least Darwin with many
interesting questions, one of which is why did sex evolve at all? And this is something that
puzzles Darwin a great deal over many years of his life. So if we think about amoeba,
for example, like these ones, they reproduce asexually. They simply split into two. And every amoeba is just a fragment of the original primordial amoeba. They seem to have been
getting along for millions of years perfectly well without sex. So why did nature ever evolve sex at all? Is one of the questions that
Darwin is interested in. Why is it possible to do that work of breeding and varying and
selecting in the first place? What benefit does it have? And if you want to know why, what's wrong with asexual reproduction, the kind of reproduction that amoeba go in for,
you could ask an elm tree. So this is a British elm
and it's damaged there by Dutch Elm disease. And Dutch Elm disease swept through Britain and
many other parts of Europe during the 20th century in
the 1970s, when I was a lad, 25 million British elm trees died in very short space of time. And the British countryside has never really recovered from that. Doesn't look the same as it did in the generation before that. And the reason for that is
that Elm trees naturally reproduce by suckering. So they send up a special kind
of root and that root grows into another elm tree. Most of their reproduction is asexual. And in 2004, geneticists proved
what had long been suspected which is basically that all
Britain's elms were clones of a single tree. They actually managed to trace
the DNA to a single specimen that had been imported to Britain and had then been
the parent of all the others. And the result of course was a chronic lack of genetic diversity within the elm population, which meant that there was no variation, for example, in their
resistance to disease. This is something that is of course, very much in everybody's minds
at the moment with COVID-19. Why do some populations seem
more effective than others? There are great many issues around that that of course we don't understand yet. But one of them seems to be
natural genetic variability in disease resistance. And again, some populations will be more subject to diseases. Those that don't have the
resistance will be wiped out. Those that do have it will
pass on their resistance. That's one of the many
mechanisms of evolution that Darwin sees as having
happened in the past. But for the poor old elm trees, the lack of variability meant that they didn't have any variability in their resistance and they
were absolutely decimated. So it would seem, on the face of it, that sex evolves for
the good of the species. Sex increases variability. And it's very obvious
that all amoeba alike and sexually reproduction
organisms like beetles, another one of Darwin's passions. These are some more of his specimens here. They vary much more. Natural selection has much
more variability to work on, much more raw material. And that allows species
to evolve more rapidly and get themselves out of the cul-de-sac of coping with an epidemic disease, for example. The problem is of course, as Darwin recognized very clearly, and I hope is obvious to
you, that that's nonsense. Nothing can evolve for
the good of the species. Natural selection has no foresight. It cannot think about
the needs of organisms that haven't been born yet and what the species
might need down the line. There has to be an immediate payoff to the individual organism that possesses a particular variation and that is needed to
make the explanation. So this is another
reason why barnacles are so interesting to Darwin. What struck him about them was that a lot of barnacle species are hermaphroditic. That is to say they have male and female reproductive
organs as most flowers do. But some of them are
what he called bisexual. They have two separate species. And this intrigued him because he assumed that every living thing must've evolved from a common ancestor and those common ancestors must
have been very, very simple. In the case of animals, something like amoeba that
just split by fission. And to get to a position where
you've got two separate sexes which need each other, clearly you couldn't have had
one evolved before the other. They must've evolved side by side. They must, he thinks, have gone through a hermaphroditic stage and then eventually to separate sexes. And he writes to Hooker in another one of these letters, "I have lately got a bisexual cirripede," that's the technical name for barnacle, "the male being microscopically small and parasitic within
the sack of the female. I tell you this to boast of my species theory for the nearest and closest allied genus to it
is, as usual, hermaphrodite, but I had observed some minute
parasites adhering to it. And these parasites, I can now
show, are supplemental males, the male organs in the
hermaphrodite being unusually small, though perfect, and containing sperm." So the details of this
are probably obscure but the basic point is that Dar, this is Mr. Arthrobalanus
we're talking about here. This is the strange species
which has Darwin puts in another letter, the female carries her
husbands around in her pockets. The males have reduced a little more than packets of sperm, entirely dependent. And so he can imagine in steps
like that, the various stages by which sex, separate sexes
could possibly have evolved. And as he says to Hooker, "I should never have made this out, had not my species theory convinced me that an hermaphrodite species must pass into a bisexual species by
insensibly small stages." And this is a key part
of Darwin's argument in everything that we
can't observe a great deal about the past. We have fossils, but we have very few, and things like the reproductive organs of organisms never fossilize. So we have to intuit the
steps that must have happened by looking at examples
from the living world, from the animals and
plants, we can see around us and assembling those into imaginary, but plausible steps of
links that would allow us to see how you might've got from A to B. And Darwin is very
frank about there's lots of ifs and buts and maybes, and all kinds of objections to this, but ultimately he says,
well, can you think of a better theory? And people have been trying to think of a better theory ever since. And science has generally
speaking failed to think of a better theory. But the point that I think
is really important here is that the species theory led
him to investigate this problem and to make sense of the observations. And that's what he's crowing
about in the letter to Hooker. He goes on that Hooker might, "Perhaps wish my barnacles and species theory al Diablo altogether. I don't care what you say. My species theory is all gospel." And it's really one of the
many things that's interesting about reading these
letters over the decades before Darwin publishes is that Hooker is a great foil for Darwin: he's endlessly offering
skeptical comments, counterexamples, potential problems, and he sort of will send
Darwin a plant and say, Don't think you're gonna
be able to do anything with this one with your theory. And Darwin will write back and say, well, I think perhaps I may, and then
he offers some explanations and so on and they argue back and forth. And you can see not only
the theory taking play, taking shape, but you can see
Darwin anticipating objections and learning how to anticipate them. And one of the things that's very striking about "The Origin" as a book is that he constantly
anticipates the objections that he thinks readers
are going to formulate and does his best to answer
them as he goes along. So the letters give us all those kinds of insights too. The barnacles incidentally are also a lovely example of that
point I was making about the world of competition, the world of Victorian capitalism. In one of his technical descriptions of the larval of one of the barnacles, he writes in glowing terms about
how beautifully made it was and how well it worked and what fine legs and eyes it had. And one of his children said it sounded as if he was
writing an advertisement. And I think that the language
of Victorian commerce seeps into Darwin's writing
in a very literal sense. One of the ways to think
about natural selection the way Darwin imagined it is that nature was a perfect free market. Organisms will like
products in a marketplace. They competed with each other. The best one succeeded
and dominated the market. The lousy ones went bust and disappeared from the market and so on. So the transference works
very vividly in that case. And the other thing about the barnacles and the way that Darwin writes
about them is a reminder of something that he wrote in his "Recollections of the Development
of my Mind and Character" which is sometimes
called his autobiography. He mentions reading the
work of Thomas Malthus, the political economist in the 1830s. 1838 just after he got
back from the Beagle. And he wrote that he had at last got a theory by which to work. That the glimmer of natural
selection that animals and plants produced far more offspring that could possibly live to maturity and reproduce. And that that would lead
to intense overcrowding and competition for food,
for resources, for mates, and just for space and for light, even plants struggle against each other. A plant, as Darwin says,
struggles in the desert. It struggles against the drought. So it doesn't mean struggle just in the literal sense of combat but all the kinds of challenges
that an organism faces. And Malthus gave him the clue of seeing where the pressure that equated to the human breeder in the analogy with that, an artificial
selection came from. Nature, the competition of nature, the struggle for existence as he calls it, as he called it, would mean that the best
adapted organisms would survive and would pass on those adaptations. And these are the six additions to "The Origin" that Darwin
published in his lifetime, and a reminder back, this
is very much a theory by which to work, not the idol fool but he worried he was going to be. The theory constantly prompted
him to do new kinds of work. I think it helped to
persuade Darwin that he was on the right track because
it allowed him to make sense of observations that
have been puzzling him. But it also, I think, became very important persuading others that he knew what he was talking about. So it served these multiple
different purposes. And a lot of his later books, which I'll be coming
to in another lecture, are demonstrations of
natural selection in action. But once you understand
this theory, Darwin says, natural history just becomes
so much more interesting, because instead of simply
describing and naming and cataloging things,
we're now explaining them, we're looking at underlying fact forces that allow us to say how and why things came about as they did. So these are some of his botanical books. Darwin is more a botanist
than any other kind of scientists I would argue. And I'll come back to that
topic in my final lecture. So let me finish by
wrapping this together and by drawing the barnacles
and the question of breeding and sex together, and thinking
a bit about Darwin's family and showing how some of these links work. This is Emma in the middle and several of their grown-up
children in the House Down. When he was contemplating marriage, we go back to that list where I started, Darwin read this book, which
had just been published, "Intermarriage" by Alexander Walker. And the subtitle of
this is quite striking, "How and why beauty, health, and intellect result
from certain marriages and deformity disease and
insanity from others." So a book that was likely to catch many of prospective parents' eye. But I think Darwin would have
been particularly interested by this claim that Walker made, "The functions and capacities which each parent in every pair bestows on children are in conformity
with certain natural laws. And by an account of the corresponding effects
in the breeding of animals," he's gonna show what those laws are. And what I was just saying
about natural history being transformed from
mere describing cataloging into a question of
explanations is very much bound up in this notion of natural law that we
can explain these things in the same way that Newton
explained the movements of planets and apples supposedly by reference to the theory of gravity. That is the model of good science for most Victorians. And natural history doesn't
really look anything like that before evolution. So the notion that laws
would reveal relationships between human and animal mating
would have been interesting. But of course, how could
you tell whether you had a good marriage or not, is one of the things
Walker is promising here. And as I mentioned,
Darwin is worried about, he's married his cousin, and this is something that worries him. There is a certain,
this is perfectly legal, but there is a certain worry that close inbreeding is
harmful to the children. And so just after he reads Walker's book, just after he gets married, Darwin starts experimenting with flowers. This is one of the places his
botanical obsession begins. This is his greenhouse at
Down House restored exactly to the way it was in his day. Again, as I said, well worth a visit. But Darwin actually spends
a lot of time seeing whether inbred flowers are
in fact unhealthy relative to those that are cross-fertilized. And he discovers that they are, that cross-fertilized
plants produce more seed and the seed tends to be more vigorous and produce more vigorous seedlings than those of inbred flowers. And that explains why the fact that although flowers have, most plants have male and female parts, why In fact they gradually
evolve mechanisms that favor cross-fertilization
of various kinds, something that Darwin writes a lot about and which I'll come back
to in another lecture. But if any random
variation makes the chance of self-fertilization a bit lower, and thus a chance of
cross-fertilization a bit higher, it's going to produce more seeds and more vigorous seeds of
plants that carry that variation, which will increase the chances of cross-fertilization
in later generations. And something similar would have happened in the ancestors of barnacles and every other kind of organism, little variations that would gradually make cross-fertilization more common, because it had advantages as Darwin demonstrated in his own garden. (sighs) Charles and Emma's
marriage in many ways was a very happy one, but it had some very
unfortunately sad aspects to it as well. In 1842, their third child Mary died. She was just a few weeks old. in 1851, Annie, in many ways
Darwin's favorite, died. She was 10. My daughters always
reminded me that parents, like teachers are not
allowed to have favorites, but I think this one hit
him and Emma very hard, particularly because she was kind of out of infancy and they probably
thought they were safe. Victorian parents sadly had to expect a high level infant mortality, but Annie was well past that stage. And their last Charles Waring, this is as far as I
know is the only picture of him with Emma. He lived for less than two years. And so the Darwins who are
wealthy, highly educated people with the absolute best medical
care that money could buy, nevertheless, lost three
children in childhood. And Darwin worried that his
children seemed rather sickly. And so there's this very
pressing anxiety about whether the decision to
marry his cousin was actually a wise one. And he petitions unsuccessfully
to have a question on cousin marriage added to
the British National Census in order to gather hard
scientific evidence to see whether this is really true. Was it just a coincidence or
is it something that the law should actually consider banning? And as you may know,
many states in America, cousin marriage is actually illegal under state marriage laws. So many people took that
idea and ran with it and it's become a permanent
part of the legislation as one small example of the way Darwin's thinking
percolates through a great many other channels and has other kinds of influences. With that in mind, we're
thinking about a passage from "The Origin." Darwin wrote, "When we
reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves
with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant. That no fear is felt, that
death is generally prompt and that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply." And I've maybe read too much into this, but I find these words quite poignant, because I think for Victorian readers, the word console would
automatically have evoked the idea of the consolations of religion, the comfort that is traditionally provided by the priest when you lose
somebody such as a child. And for Emma, those
consolations remain very real and very important to
her throughout her life. But Charles lost his faith in conventional
Christianity very early on. And in some ways he's offering an alternative consolation here. It's not anything like, of course, conventional Christianity. And this is something I'll come back to in the next lecture
and explore a bit more. This is a kind of statistical comfort: death is generally prompt. And it's worth thinking
about the cruelty of nature in relation to the cruelty
the free market as well. That, of course, some
people get worked to death and some businesses go bust and
some countries get conquered and Darwin is a little blase
about all those things. On the whole, things work out
for the best. Things improve. Butter knives get cheaper,
railway shares go up. And the British Empire provides me with an endless store of barnacles, so he can see the positive
side in that struggle. And I think there's a similar
kind of thinking here. But I wonder if it had a
more personal element as well as that other one. So the garden of Down House,
the place where he does so much of his research, where he
plays with his children, where he gets them to help
him with his experiments, I think was both the place
where he thought very long and hard about breeding
and its consequences and its meaning in a scientific sense. But perhaps it provided a
welcome relief from some of the more painful consequences
of the science that he was doing and the things that
it forced him to think about. Thank you very much for listening. (footsteps thudding) - Well, Professor Endersby,
thank you very much for a very interesting lecture. We do have a few questions
from the online audience. I believe you've answered
a couple of them. There were questions about
cousin marriage that came through early that I
think have been addressed. There was a question though,
was Darwin also interested in parthenogenesis whereby
females reproduce without males? For example, in sharks. - It is an issue that he does
write about very occasionally but not that much. And because I think that, as I said, one of the keys to dominance
theory is variability that offspring resemble their
parents, but never precisely. And that variability is
precisely what allows selection to work. It's what allows breeders
to change pigeons and it's what allows natural selection to produce new species. And any asexually
reproducing species is going to be less variable and therefore slightly
less interesting to Darwin. So he touches on it now and again, but I can't remember
any place where he goes into it in great detail. - There's also some,
obviously some interest in barnacles themselves. The barnacle has a tendency to migrate in a few observed conditions. And the question from
the audience member is did Darwin have a particular
interest in that kind of migration or was he more focused on the actual structure
of the animals themselves? - He's very interested in geographical distribution generally, but I can't recall. I mean, Darwin wrote a great deal and the old brain is not as
retentive as it used to be. I can't recall him writing
about barnacle migrations. It is very much the
structure and the anatomy of them that fascinates
him more than anything, but he does have a general interest in why particular species are found in particular parts of the
world and not elsewhere. And the two things that
particularly fascinated him are why in some places you seem to
get two different species doing the same job as it were in the economy of nature fitting the same, what we would now call
an ecological niche. And in other places you get very similar, closely related species
doing quite different jobs. And those are the things that I remember him writing about most. The Galapagos finches are a famous example of that where lots of
finches have all been adapted to different niches that would in, on the mainland of South
America or in Europe be occupied by many different species,
many different genera. The Galapagos only had
finches to work with. And so finches had to
be pressed into service to do the work of crossbills or mockingbirds or other kinds
of birds in other countries. - There was also a question about the word barnacle
itself and its origin. Any idea? Did he- - I'm afraid not. The person to ask is Shelley Innes. One of my friends had the
Darwin Correspondence Project in Cambridge who has forgotten more about barnacles than I will ever know. And I'm sure would be very
happy to answer that question. She once turned up at a meeting I was at, clutching a copy of a magazine
called Crustacean Issues, which is all about barnacles and the joke that even crustaceans
have issues has been part of the Darwin project ever since, but she is the barnacle woman and a lot of what I know
I've gleaned from her. So I would try Shelly for that one. - Okay, and one last
one, one of our readers, one of our listeners is interested that Malthus influenced Darwin's thought and they were just wondering if you could speak a bit more about that. - Yeah, in "The Recollections,"
Darwin actually talks about reading Malthus for amusement, which always makes me
feel incredibly grateful for television, frankly. The idea that had to read
Malthus for amusement. But of course Malthus is very topical in the 1830s when Darwin reads him because of the new Poor Law. So Britain's had these ancient Poor Laws which were a forerunner
to welfare payments. And the traditional form of welfare was what was
called outdoor relief, which meant that in hard times, that your parish would
give you a helping hand. It might be a bit of firewood. It might be some work. It might be some food,
maybe even a bit of money. but one way or another, they would help you through the bad times. And then when good times returned, you'd be able to stand
on your own two feet. And Malthus among other things argues that this simply makes things worse, because if you give the poor help and allow them to stay in their own homes, they're gonna while away
the long winter evenings, be getting even more children that they can't afford to feed. So the new Poor Law involves the building of workhouses and the
segregation of men and women. So when you go on the
parish, you go for relief, you're put in a workhouse and the sexes are segregated precisely to ensure that they can't produce any more children that they can't feed. And the workhouses are made
as unpleasant as possible so that people would rather
do anything than go there. And the fear of the workhouse
haunts Victorian fiction. You find many characters,
notably in Dickens, who would literally rather starve to death in the streets and go to a workhouse. So Malthus is in the news
when Darwin reads him and very much in the news for people like Darwin with his political
background and so on. But what Darwin gets from
it is he sees that the, this analogy, the intense competition and the consequences it's gonna have, the struggle for existence, he compares at one point to numerous wedges being
hammered into a surface. You can't hammer another one in without something popping out and in that intense competition,
any organism that varies, and there's that word again, variation, anything, they all varies just slightly so that it has a slight advantage in the competition, has a slightly better chance of surviving and therefore of reproducing and therefore of passing on that variation
to the next generation. And of course, each generation then starts where the previous one finished, so over millions of years, you can then accumulate quite
enormous amounts of change. - There's another
question about influences. Was he aware of the work of Humboldt? - Mm, absolutely, by a funny coincidence, I was actually talking to my students at Sussex this morning about this because Humboldt is one of the people that
inspires Darwin to travel. Before the offer of the journey on the Beagle has even happened, he's already read Humboldt's
personal narrative and being absolutely inspired partly by Humboldt's literary style and the vision of the
sublime tropical nature which he describes the
great snowy mountains rising above tropical
rainforests, the sheer diversity of living things that the tropics hold. And he writes in his own journal of the Beagle voyage that his
first glimpse of the tropics, even though Humboldt had
prepared him mentally for the extraordinary
splendor and the grandeur, he still found his breath taken away. That even Humboldt's words
couldn't quite do justice to it. So he was a great inspiration and Hooker, who I mentioned as well, was also a great fan. Humboldt really inspires a generation of naturalists around the world. And one of the things that they all love about Humboldt is that he is part of this wide project of
turning natural history into a much more explanatory
science by making links between the different sciences
and showing how the data from geography and geology and meteorology and so can all be woven together into a grand explanatory framework. So that's a prospect that
greatly appeals to them. Hooker has a nice story. He goes to Berlin not long
after his own big voyage around the Antarctic. And he actually gets to meet Humboldt. And he said, "I had visions of him like a Colossus striding the Andes," leaping up and down mountains and so on. And there was this punchy little German, this old man in his study. (chuckles) He was a bit underwhelmed by him. But Humboldt's writing
was absolutely crucial to Darwin and to many other
naturalists of his generation. - And one last one. Did Darwin have anything to say
about natural hybridization, common in plants and
its effect on evolution? - He did, but I mean that, that's a story that he was well aware of because of course the great figure for Darwin as for most naturalists of the period is Linnaeus
the Swedish naturalist, who, having been originally
convinced that God had created all the species, including all the species of
plants exactly as they were, as we now see them, he realized that hybridization
could actually give rise to new species in nature. And so that was an idea
that was already around and there's a whole tradition
of German plant breeding of people like Gartner and
Kolreuter and so on who work with those inspirations
and have demonstrated in some detail that
hybridization does indeed or can occasionally produce new species. But of course, hybridization between species is not
that rare in plants, although it's not that common either. It's almost unheard of in animals. So although Darwin knew that work and was very interested by it, he didn't see it as being
enough of an explanation, because it didn't seem to
apply to animal evolution. And he was convinced that there must be a single theory that
would explain everything. And the model of Newton, the great synthesizer, I
think, is very important to Darwin in thinking about what a really good scientific
theory would have to look like. It would have to explain
a great many things with a spew in simpler terms as possible. So he tends to shy away from what will have one
theory for this group and one theory for that group and another theory for this group. He wants to find one argument, evolution by natural selection. And he does say natural selection isn't the only evolutionary mechanism, but he very clearly says he thinks it's the most important one. So it is the master key that holds the whole project together. - I think that's all we have time for. I wanted to thank you
again, Professor Endersby, for a wonderful lecture and a
wonderful start to the series. Those of you at home, you may wish to know that the next lecture, "Making a Monkey out
of Darwin" will be held on Monday the 30th of
November at 06:00 pm. So please do join us for the
second lecture in the series. Thank you for listening. - Thank you.
