Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin
“The Oxford debate is but one worthy page in that unending story of humans understanding the world they live in.”
Origin Story explores the nearly forgotten but hotly contested “Battle of Oxford,” as Charles Darwin called the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), an event that gave “an early and important view of the shifting moral authority from the church to the intellectual power of science . . . if the fracas at Oxford was an opening salvo in a war that has never ended, it is because our quest for better explanations of our world—and beyond—has never ended, either.”
Before reporting on the battle, author and medical doctor Howard Markel surveys the skirmishes. Markel’s Darwin is a loving husband and grieving father, an intellectual renegade, fierce competitor, and survivor of a world of illnesses largely unknown today. Having begun his research in the 1830s, by the 1840s, Darwin had an “incomplete manuscript” for his argument that species were neither unchanging across time, which was the religious view, nor changed by the will of the animal. Instead, new species arose through a process of natural selection, whereby individuals inherited varying traits that conferred greater survival advantages, and therefore greater reproductive success in passing those traits to offspring, who in turn were more favorably adapted to their environment. With enough time, new species that shared a common ancestor could evolve.
In 1858, Darwin, suffering from fierce boils, rashes, flatulence, and vomiting, and procrastinating about publishing his findings, received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. Rather than confirmation, “For Darwin, the words, sentences, and paragraphs of Wallace’s 1858 essay on natural selection represented his personal Pompeii. Far less stressful situations often precipitated a painful constriction of his chest, shortness of breath, and a rapid and bounding pulse. . . . This single post from a journeyman naturalist, however, represented a watershed moment in Darwin’s intellectual life. . . . Wallace’s essay was a near-perfect summary of the same complexities of thought that Darwin had pondered for more than two decades.”
While neither man could firmly claim priority, Wallace’s letter spurred Darwin to write and publish On the Origins of Species By Means of Natural Selection. Ironically, this brilliant treatise on life’s resilience arose when Darwin was grieving the death of one child, fearing for the life of another, and facing his own professional death from Wallace’s independent research.
Origins was a lightning rod for religious and scientific controversy. When BAAS proposed a plenary session on Darwin’s strange ideas, advocates for and against lined up for a battle royale that continues to this day. Unfortunately, Markel focuses more on the personalities involved than the substantive arguments. His overview of the impact of Darwin’s ideas on the Church of England is cursory, and he mentions without deeply examining arguments against Darwin’s model of natural selection, ones that even “Darwin’s bulldog,” the zoologist Thomas Huxley, admitted existed, such as sterility in hybrids, the speed at which evolution occurred, and evolution’s “true cause.”
As Markel notes, the process of developing factual evidence for scientific theories was coming into development in Darwin’s era. This made non-religious objections to Darwin’s work valid within the framework of the time. The importance of the Oxford debate rests not so much in Thomas Huxley’s forceful arguments against Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s religious objections, but on the botanist Joseph Hooker’s calm, quiet call to have the questions of how species develop, evolve, go extinct, or survive be ones that spur investigations, accumulate empirical evidence, and foster challenge based on facts, not vitriol and rhetoric, fear and fancy.
Markel discusses possible causes of Darwin’s decades of gastrointestinal distress (he was at a “water cure” in Surrey during the Oxford debate, relying on Huxley and Hooker to be his advocates) and settles on systemic lactose intolerance but qualifies his diagnosis as conjecture unless a genetic analysis of Darwin’s remains occurs.
Origin Story concludes with hasty references to how Herbert Spencer created the notion of “social Darwinism,” and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” to give a scientific veneer to political and economic theories. Similarly, Frances Galton’s “pseudoscientific framework of heredity,” launched after Darwin’s death, led to the eugenics movement and its horrors.
Darwin is not to blame for how his ideas have been misapplied, but as Markel notes, “we must acknowledge the throughline that extends from Darwin’s Origins and The Descent of Man [that] discussed the struggle for life embodied by evolving species in the natural world” even though Spencer and Galton’s “theories were characteristic of a human-made world where those in power abused science to justify and protect their positions of entitlement.”
Darwin’s last words were those of a man grateful for all his life had brought, whether sorrow or joy, physical distress or endless curiosity. Little wonder that Darwin closed Origins with that glorious phrase “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” The word “evolved” comes “from the Latin root evolutio, which describes the unrolling of a long scroll or ancient book, the telling of a complex story without end.”
The Oxford debate is but one worthy page in that unending story of humans understanding the world they live in.