Darwin's Origin of Species - a biography of a book

By: Janet Brown, Portico Series. Attic Books and Yediot Books. From English: Broria Ben-Baruch. The first part of the first chapter of the book, which describes the process of writing the most influential book in the last 150 years - Darwin's Origin of Species.

back cover

"There is greatness in this picture of life, about its various powers, which were first produced in the form of a few forms, or of only one form; And which, while this planet rotates in its cycle according to the fixed law of gravity, have developed from such a simple beginning into an infinity of infinitely beautiful, infinitely wonderful forms, which are still being added and developed."
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859

"Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, was published in London in November 1859." This is how Janet Brown, who is considered to be the most important scholar of Darwin, his teachings and his life, opens this book, which is being published in Israel on the one hundred and fifty anniversary of his original brother, and two hundred years since the birth of his father who created it. Darwin's Descent of Species: A Book Biography is a rare and innovative gem. As the subtitle suggests, this is a biography of a book, not of its author (by Darwin's leading biographer, of course). And the book is perhaps the most important in the history of science.

And not only in science. There is no need to exaggerate, these days, the political importance of the origin of species. Brown tells about Darwin's hesitations, about changes he made in different editions, some following enormous pressures that were exerted on him (and are still being exerted on his successors today). It explains where Father Darwin got the ideas for his theory, how it developed, and finally, how it was received then and why it continues to provoke such tremendous controversy, even today. So here it is before you: the story behind the book that freed man to see himself as one of nature's wonderful creations. No less - no more.

"diamond! Janet Brown explains with great clarity the origins, ideas, and acceptance of the legacy of the origin of species."
The Times
"Brilliant...the perfect introduction to understanding Darwin's thought...intellectually stimulating and easy to read."
Sunday Telegraph
"Janet Brown presents Darwin's ideas in a wonderfully fresh way. Just a pleasure to read.”
The New Statesman

Janet Brown, a trained biologist and historian of science, is Darwin's most important biographer. The two volumes of Charles Darwin's biography (Voyaging, 1995; The Power of Place, 2002) were showered with every possible praise: "wonderful", "a spectacular victory", "the closest you can get to Darwin's mind". Prof. Brown is also the editor of the many volumes of Darwin's letters - excellent training for writing the biography of the origin of species.

Darwin's Descent of Species - Book Biography by Janet Brown. Portico series.
Attic Books and Yediot Books. 196 pages. Price: 88 NIS

Chapter 1 - The beginnings

The history of the origin of species began long before the day the book was published.

Charles Robert Darwin (Darwin), the fifth child and second son of a well-to-do doctor named Robert Wearing Darwin and his wife Susanna Wedgwood, was born in Shrewsbury in February 1809. His family played a leading role in the fair society of the field towns and often visited relatives, participated in local charities and went out For vacations in the spectacular landscapes of the coast of Wales. Although his mother died when he was eight, Darwin remembered his early childhood as a very happy time. In his autobiography he said that he remembers very few things about his mother or her death, perhaps because his three older sisters cared for him with great motherly affection. As far as can be seen, this major event of his childhood left no trace of any real psychological problems in him.

He was apparently a pleasant boy, who loved more than anything to spend time with his friends and family, had a great affection for the village and its surroundings, and enjoyed reading a wide variety of books and listening to music. He also received great love from those around him: all the manuscripts available today in libraries and archives, all over the world, confirm that despite the illnesses and disputes that would torment him, he was a kind, sociable and easy-going person, with a talent for making friendships and maintaining them over time, and also To live in love and happiness with his wife until his last day.

One of his grandfathers was the poet and physician Erasmus Darwin, the pioneers of evolutionary thought. His maternal grandfather was the renowned pottery maker Josiah Wedgwood. Both made significant contributions to the industrial revolution and were key partners in the impressive intellectual flourishing of the eighteenth century. Such a magnificent family tree cannot but attract attention, and many historians tend to attribute at least part of Darwin's genius to those two personalities. But in terms of character traits there was no similarity between him and any of them, except for the fact that he too grew up in an intellectual, scientific and free family atmosphere. However, the fact that Darwin was the third generation of the Wedgwood family's wealth is of considerable importance. This very modern combination of productive affluence, respectable social status, religious skepticism and cultural wealth bought Darwin a permanent place in the ranks of the upper middle class and also guaranteed him the chance of a handsome inheritance - two factors whose influence was very evident in his future achievements. It can be said that he was born into the circles of the British intelligentsia that enjoyed economic security.

From 1818 to 1825, Darwin studied at Shrewsbury School (a private school for boys). As a teenager he aspired to be a doctor, and sometimes accompanied his father on his sick visits. He liked to collect samples from nature. At school he showed a fondness for studying chemistry, and he and his older brother Erasmus set up a small laboratory at home where they conducted experiments on vacation days. Such tendencies were quite typical of young people in their social status and era, but they reveal the beginnings of Darwin's continuous fascination with science and the natural world. Like many other boys he also liked to wander in the fields. The documents preserved from those days show that the rigid classical structure of boys' education in those days was not the place where he was able to flourish.

An exciting turn occurred in his life in 1825, when his father decided to take him out - at a relatively young age - from private school and sent him and his brother Erasmus to study medicine at the Edinburgh School of Medicine. In those days, the study arrangement was much less formal than is customary today: the students paid tuition for each medical course they needed - anatomy, obstetrics, medicine, pharmacy. This arrangement made it possible for very young people to study individual courses at the university, and only then invest their energy in serious studies. Although the sixteen-year-old Darwin began his studies very diligently, the reality of medicine at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not please him. Two "very bad" surgeries, one of them on a child, convinced him that he would never succeed in becoming a doctor (in those days anesthesia was still a distant vision), and he left school in 1827.

However, in that short period, Darwin was exposed to the most formative influences of his chosen period, and they continued to accompany him until the end of his life. Biographers tend to return to the years Darwin spent in Edinburgh with a clear feeling that all the seeds of his later thinking lie there - and to a large extent they were right. The University of Edinburgh was the leading center for science and medicine studies in Great Britain. She was up-to-date on the scientific research being done in those days in Europe and offered courses in all aspects of modern science, both inside the university and outside it. Darwin enrolled in Thomas Hope's chemistry classes and Robert Jameson's natural history course, a course also supported by a fine natural history museum. Darwin loved visiting the museum and met the house taxidermist there, a freed slave named John Edmonstone who came to Scotland from the West Indies, and from whom he learned the art of bird taxidermy. He also spent many pleasant hours in the company of the treasurer William McGillivray, with whom he talked at length about shells and birds. In Jameson's course he first encountered the science of geology and became aware of the disputes that were abandoned in those days in the questions of the history of the earth and the fossil record - although according to him he hated Jameson's dry and dreary lectures and swore he would never return to engage in this field.

Darwin also did much practical work of his own in the field of nature. He joined the Fellini Society - a small student association in which he first met Robert Grant, a charismatic lecturer at the medical school, who showed an inclination and sympathy for developmental anatomy and the evolutionary views that came from France at the time. Under Grant's guidance, Darwin began to make observations of soft-bodied marine creatures from the North Sea, and made his first scientific discovery: he found that the "eggs" of the species Flustra, which form a kind of gelatinous floating carpet, are in fact not eggs at all, but larvae that swim in a manner free. The discovery was publicly announced at the meeting of the Finnish Society on March 27, 1827.

Grant opened new and wide horizons for Darwin. He introduced him to the scientific circles of Edinburgh and encouraged him to expand his interests in the study of nature. From him Darwin acquired the curiosity that would henceforth accompany him in the question of "formation" (sexual and asexual reproduction processes) and the embryology of invertebrates such as molluscs, sponges and polyps. Grant also encouraged Darwin to read Lamarck's System of Invertebrate Animals (1801), and one day burst into song in praise of Lamarck's views on transmutation (also known as transformism; the word "evolution" was not yet then came into use). Darwin remembered listening to him, but to the best of his memory the words did not make a deep impression on him. But he had already read his grandfather's book on the laws of life and health, Zoonomia (1796-1794), a short chapter of which included a theory of development that was very reminiscent of Lamarck's theory. It is true that Erasmus Darwin and Mark had not been alive for decades at the time, but they were not considered obsolete. In the twenties of the nineteenth century, they were greatly appreciated by important radical thinkers, thanks to their biological theories and especially thanks to their ideas in the field of transmutations. These ideas in their updated form were used by Grant as the basis for the concept that sponges are the basic creatures from which all other life forms evolved, and from there progressed to form the evolutionary tree. Darwin therefore left Edinburgh with his intellectual horizons much wider than is common for young people of his age. He already stood for the value of lofty questions about origins and causes, and directly encountered evolutionist explanations of life patterns, although there is no reason to believe that he had already become an evolutionist.

Darwin's father was not happy with the change of direction that was evident in his son. Soon after, after a few short arguments at home and a feverish repetition of all the Latin and Greek he had managed to forget since his studies at school, Darwin began studying at Christ College, Cambridge University in preparation for receiving a priest's degree - the first accepted step towards joining the ranks of the Anglican clergy. His family was admittedly not particularly religious, but in the Victorian period, joining the church was considered an acceptable path towards acquiring a respectable profession in the ranks of the middle class, and a few and a few people in the circles of the Darwin and Wedgwood families were excellent clergymen in the rural districts. In the spirit of the tradition established by Reverend Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne, young men of adequate social status and education could expect to find a comfortable clerical position in a rural community, which would allow them plenty of leisure for independent research in the field of nature or for various activities in the bosom the nature

Darwin later wrote in his autobiography that the idea of ​​becoming a priest was definitely to his liking, even if he had fleeting religious doubts. He was well aware of the irony of that. "In light of the fierce attacks I received from the clergy," he wrote, "it is ridiculous to think that I once qualified myself to be a priest." His father apparently instilled in him the idea that a person should find a decent job for himself: he cannot afford to rely financially on private income from an inheritance alone. "You only care about guns, dogs and rat-hunting, and you will bring disgrace upon yourself and your whole family," Dr. Darwin once said, much to his son's relief. If not medicine, because then the church was now the main topic of their conversations.

The continuation of the first chapter - tomorrow, for the rest of the chapters you are invited to purchase the book