Welcome to So Simple A Beginning’s simple beginning.
Charles Darwin in an 1840 portrait, only a few years after returning from his time on the HMS Beagle.
As described in the “Welcome” post (and on our About page), this is the start of what will be a roughly year-long effort to produce a new, crowd/cloud sourced commentary on the most important book about science published since 1687: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
The Origin, of course, celebrates its 150th anniversary later this year, and I and the rest of the folks here are taking this bit of numerology as the opportunity to read and react to this foundational text with as nearly new eyes as we can.
We want you to help too: read, respond, write. When it’s all done, if this works as well as it could and should, we will have a jointly built a web of ideas and knowledge surrounding Charles’s original construction — one which can continue to accrete as long as people want to wrestle with the extraordinary transformation that Mr. Darwin set in motion.
So that said, lets begin at the beginning. I’m going to offer a pair of short posts today and tomorrow — dipping our collective toe into the water — on a couple of facets of the introduction to The Origin. The first one, below, considers the lie with which Darwin begins his book of revelation. The second will explain the significance of the year 1687 for any assessment of Darwin and his book.
Over the next few days, you’ll see a couple more posts on the introduction: one by John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, on Darwin’s carefully chosen epigraphs, and the other by Evo-Devo’s and the University of Wisconsin’s Sean Carroll, still aglow from his January trip to England to handle the actual notebooks in which Darwin recorded the prehistory of The Origin. After that, it’ll be on to Chapter One and off to the races.
Enough preamble: Let’s start to look at the way Darwin tried to ease his audience into the radical notions to come.
The HMS Beagle in 1841, watercolor by Owen Stanley.
So, just to get this out of the way: Darwin’s great book begins with a truthful lie. He writes, line one, first up: “When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle’ as naturalist…”
The truth: he functioned as ship’s naturalist throughout the voyage, collecting and analyzing as he went. He worked in close quarters — and usually comfortable collegiality — with the naval natural historians amongst the rest of the Beagle’s crew, including his captain, Robert Fitzroy, the other officers, and even the captain’s steward and the ship’s clerk. Within the first few months of the five year expedition, Darwin had become the central locus of all the biology and geology to be done in and amongst the naval surveying that was the official job for the voyage. There is no doubt — and no lie in the claim — that he was the chief investigator of the natural world on the Beagle for the entire five year journey.
But in fact, Darwin was not enrolled on the Beagle’s muster as its naturalist. That function on Royal Navy vessels whose duty permitted such efforts was usually performed by the ship’s surgeon. On the Beagle, that would have been Dr. Robert McCormick who fully expected to have the opportunity to build his collection at each Beagle port of call. Darwin himself was a private gentleman, the captain’s guest and dinner companion, nothing more.
Captain Robert FitzRoy, in 1836, the year the HMS Beagle returned to England.
McCormick did not last long; frozen out by Fitzroy, and faced with the sight of Darwin’s collecting apparatus where his should have had first dibs, he quarreled with his captain and took passage home from Rio de Janiero just four months into the voyage. For a detailed account of the whole episode, see Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging, pp. 191-210.
As Browne points out, at least part of the significance of this episode is the glimpse it gives of the web of connections and social hierarchies in which Darwin worked. To put it another way: the world of science in which Darwin lived mapped onto nineteenth century British society in complicated ways. It’s a cartoon to say that Darwin had the good fortune to be born into the right kind of family for genteel inquiry in Britain in the 1830s and that McCormick did not. But it is true that Fitzroy expressly required a class connection to the companion he sought to keep him sane on the long journey. The county-bred, well-to-do Darwin met that requirement and the middle-class McCormick did not.
Such simple minded pigeonholing is not the whole story, nor even perhaps most of it. The specifics of personality matter, especially in any place so confined as vessel just ninety feet long. McCormick was not the easiest person to love, prickly about position and prerogatives, and he could well have fallen out with Fitzroy with or without Darwin on the scene.
The sage of Down House: Darwin’s later, iconic appearance.
But still, Charles Darwin became the Beagle’s de-facto naturalist after displacing another man as ambitious as himself. He shed no tears for McCormick, and before and after the doctor left the voyage, Darwin pursued his own naturalization with no sense of deferring to the “official” naturalist on board. As Darwin aged, and then after he died, the image of the retiring, self-effacing sage of Down House — that old man with the heroic beard — forms the iconic portrait of the founder of modern biology. The Origin was not written by that man—or better, that caricture.
Darwin was — not ruthless, so much — but relentlessly focused on the task of gathering what he wanted to know about nature. He would seek out and gladly use whatever he could coax from correspondents, and, at least as a young man, as McCormick learned he was cheerfully prepared use whatever advantages he had to ensure his access to the natural history treasures he sought.
And the relevance of all this to reading The Origin: Don’t be fooled. Darwin is a tough man, a tough thinker, and someone prepared for the fight over facts and their meaning that will play out over the rest of the book.
[...] Darwin was not brought aboard HMS Beagle as ship’s naturalist but rather as a gentleman companion for Captain Robert Fitzroy. Read more about it at So Simple A Beginning. [...]