The book was published by Aryeh Nir, 2007
to the first part of the episode
3
For two years he led a double and strange life, as a spy in the corridors of the British scientific establishment, during which time he adapted himself to the positions of Anglican orthodoxy, and was rooted in the tradition of natural theology.
At that time, biology had not yet developed as a secular profession. The study of nature is considered a path leading to religious piety. Like Gilbert White, who wrote a small and readable book, full of observational wisdom, called Natural History of Selborne, which was first published in 1789, many authors of articles and books on natural history were priests, who preached in church on Sundays and watched birds the rest of the week and chase insects. John Ray, whose father was a blacksmith, graduated from Oxford (which, like Cambridge, was also an Anglican university at the time) and announced the subject as early as 1691 in his book: The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation expressed in the acts of creation). William Paley confirmed this again in 1802 in his book Natural Theology, whose subtitle is: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, a book that Darwin He read it to his pleasure during his stay in Cambridge. Paley simplified the analogy of the divine watchmaker: if we see a clock lying on the floor, we conclude that a skilled craftsman built it; If we find animals and plants so intricately constructed and so wonderfully adapted, we must equally conclude that a wise and powerful Creator created them. A series of essays collected and published in the XNUMXs, under the name Bridgewater Treatises, offered eight additional statements, from highly respected scholars, that make the same argument about God's wisdom, power, and direct role in the creation of the natural world. on all its components. One of the writers of Bridgewater's articles was William Wavell, a man of clusters, scientist and philosopher of science, whose influence spread in many directions, and who invented the word "scientist". Wavell's article examined astronomy and physics "in relation to natural theology".
Behind Paley's theology of nature stood even deeper and more ancient forms of accepted belief, such as essentialism, a view according to which reality is supported by a finite number of "natural types", which are the essential patterns or archetypes of the beings seen in the world. This concept already exists in Plato. Following him, the essentialists argued that these natural kinds are separate and unchanging, and that physical entities are only imprecise manifestations of them. Geometric shapes, for example, were considered natural types - triangles always have three sides, although they differ in secondary properties (equilateral triangle, isosceles triangle, isosceles triangle) but will never be distinguished from squares or octagons. Inorganic elements were another example - iron is always iron, and lead is always lead, unless an alchemist found a miraculous way to turn it into gold. Animal and plant species were also considered natural types, with rigid and unchanging boundaries between them, although individual dogs or chickens could differ from each other within their closed categories. The essential form of any species, according to this view, is more basic and enduring than the individuals embodying it at a given time. This is what William Wavell meant when in 1837 he wrote emphatically: "Species have a real existence in nature, and there is no transition from one to another." To believe otherwise was to reject the assumption that was intertwined with ecclesiastical laws and ideas of civil order.
Wavell, whose interests and writings ranged from geology, mineralogy, political economy, moral philosophy and German literature, as well as astronomy and biology, became one of the most influential intellectuals of his time. The comment about species was written in his book History of the Inductive Sciences, which was written in a later intellectual generation and in a more rigorous scientific spirit than Paley wrote his book Natural Theology. Other British scientists and philosophers of Wavell's contemporaries, such as John Herschel and John Stuart Mill, shared a belief in the existence of natural types, a belief that was hidden beneath their disagreements about the scientific method and scientific logic. In France, the renowned anatomist, Georges Quivet, proposed a classification of animals - which classifies each species into one of four large systems (embranchements), or groups - and it also rests on fundamental assumptions. Finding order within the animal world, according to Kivia, means discovering in each species the evidence of its conformity to a basic essence, and not the clues indicating change and fragmentation over time. A contemporary philosopher of science, David Hull, followed this essential thread of thought in early nineteenth-century biological thinking. Hall concludes: "In the history of ideas there have been only a few cases in which a scientific theory stood in such open contradiction to a metaphysical principle, as the theory of evolution stood against the doctrine of the permanence of species."
Darwin read Herschel's writings, as well as Paley's, while still at Cambridge. Wavell had previously served there as professor of mineralogy. Materialism and natural theology filled the air around Darwin like coal smoke and the smell of horse dung. These were not, however, the only views on the natural world that prevailed at that time. The private medical schools in London and Edinburgh sheltered, in the 1837s, wilder ideas, including some early versions of the evolutionary development approach. But these institutions, which employed scholars who taught anatomy by dissecting human corpses, scholars who lived on salary rather than inherited capital, and who drifted toward radical politics, were foreign to Darwin despite his family's medical heritage. He himself tried to study medicine in Edinburgh, when he was sixteen, trying to follow in his brother's footsteps (in his father's shadow), but hated the studies. After two years, bored by the lectures and horrified by the blood-sucking surgeries performed without anesthesia, Charles fled to Cambridge to gain a "cleaner" and less terrifying education. While there, at Christ's College, he was drawn into studies for ordination as a priest, not out of any sense of mission (he was not religious) or a commitment to the church (he came from a family whose mother's side believed in Unitarianism - belief in one God and not the Holy Trinity - and on his father's side there were people of like mind free, like his father and like old Erasmus), but by the logic of the least worst choice, according to which this step would allow him to find some respectable niche as a priest-naturalist, according to the model of Gilbert White. The Beagle trip disrupted the plan. The ship carried him away from Christ College, but in the end brought him back to the same social environment he left behind, where many of his teachers, many of his friends and a considerable part of his scientific connections - John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick in Cambridge, Leonard Jennings, the entomologist Frederick Hope, and William Wavell himself - were Anglican priests. Even his scientific idol, Charles Lyell, infused his book Principles of Geology with an orthodox view of biological creation. During the years 1838 and XNUMX, Darwin began to prepare himself for an act that would shock and upset them. His view of mutable species was in complete contradiction to materialism and all the self-righteous theology with a scientific flavor that relied on it. He jotted down his dark speculations in his notebooks, while outwardly acting like a rising young naturalist who deserved to be admitted to the club.
He reduced his social activities, on the excuse that he was too busy, and then added to his work and upgraded his status when he accepted to be secretary of the Geological Society under Wavell's presidency. He finished the manuscript of The Beagle's Diary (but could not publish it until Fitzroy's book was ready), and set off on another publishing adventure: a massive collection to be called The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle Her Majesty Beagle). He will be the editor of this multi-volume book of zoology, for which he will collect articles from the pen of his expert advisers, write introductions and commentaries, commission expensive illustrations, which will be financed by a grant from Her Majesty's Treasury. He was now firmly planted within the clearly boundless web of government, church and polite science. Secretly he continued to talk to himself and plot plots in his notebooks.
After filling notebook "B", he opened a new one, with a brown leather cover, which he called "C", and after which "D" and "E" would also come. Each of these notebooks will be dedicated to the subject of gender change. He read extensively the literature of research and nature studies, as well as a diverse selection of books on animal and plant breeding, and on the philosophy of science. Even earlier he began to pose strange questions to anyone who knew anything about the strange subjects that interested him and to which he aimed. He interrogated his father, who was a rich source of knowledge about the mental qualities of humans, and his father's gardener. He asked cattle breeders about variation and heredity among domesticated species. There were so many missing. How does heredity work? What is the difference between species and varieties? What can be concluded from the distribution patterns of a species around the world? All the islands of Oceania have golden-striped hummocks, he wrote. Wild boars in the Falklands grow stiff red-brown hair. The kingfisher in the Maluku Islands, he wrote, is almost no different from European kingfishers, except for its beak which is longer and sharper. Are these different species of kingfisher, or just varieties? Khazars in New Guinea, tenreks in Madagascar, geckos in Saint Helena. There are no snakes in the islands of the central Pacific, he wrote. Black rabbits, brought to the Falkland Islands in 1764, produced offspring of various colors for decades. Hints, hints, hints. What do they indicate? how are they doing The cuckoos of Java versus the cuckoos of Sumatra and the Philippines - species or varieties? He wanted every piece of relevant information possible, whatever the source. He went to Brigent's Park Zoo to see their new orang-utang. He became a greedy collector of seemingly unrelated facts. He racked his brain trying to connect them. It was an in-depth program of research and thought, carried out entirely in the hours he stole from his public commitments.
"The change among the species must be very slow," he thought, not at all approaching the speed of change that occurs in cases where pet breeders choose the animals they want to mate with. Slow or not, there's a problem here: if animals of different species continue to mate freely with each other, won't the adaptive differences blur? If so, "all the changes that have accumulated in them will not be able to be passed on." The isolation may prevent this in one way or another. Maybe infertility between forms. Variation, like the sterility of hybrids among domestic animals, allows the accumulated change to continue to exist. At this point he made some arrogant notes in his notebook about "my theory", although it was still too early for that. His theory has not yet been formulated. He has not yet consolidated his path in the search for the scope of the phenomenon, not to mention finding a mechanism that can explain it. "Investigate the wars of organic creatures," he advised himself. Imagine that humans don't exist, and that humans multiply, improve, and eventually produce some kind of alternative intelligent being. A creature similar to man but not man, created in a process of transformation from animals that walk on all fours and live on trees. True, it is difficult to understand, but perhaps not much more difficult than Lael's idea of slow and incremental processes that explain all phenomena in geology. Remember the kiwi (Apteryx, Darwin said to himself. If New Zealand was once divided into many islands, is it possible that there are now many species of kiwi?
In the spring of 1838, after filling seventy-five pages in notebook "C", Darwin's confidence is proud. Dealing with these questions, he admitted, is "an arduous and painful mental effort like no other" and the difficulties involved will not be resolved without thinking for a long time, or by someone with a prejudice against the approach as a whole. But from the moment you accept the statement that "there is a possibility of transition from one species to another", because then "the whole screen shakes and tears". Look around the world, Darwin instructed himself. Study the gradual changes of the intermediate forms. Study the geographic distribution. Explore the fossil evidence and geographic overlap between extinct creatures and extant similar species. Take into account all the evidence, he claimed excitedly, and "the curtain is torn".
The screen was natural theology. As far as Darwin was concerned, he was indeed torn. Behind the curtain, he saw the truth of evolution. We are not talking about just imitators, rabbits or scumbags. It is about the whole natural world. "But man—the wonderful man," he wrote, trying various ideas concerning the most dangerous point, "is extraordinary." But, he added, man is clearly a mammal. He is not a deity. He has some of the urges and emotions that animals have. Darwin dismissed the first sentence about man three lines below it, confidently concluding that no, "He is not unusual." Darwin never retreated from this terrible insight, despite the pressures and despite the implications arising from it.
4
Is this what caused his illness? It's possible. Darwin was working on the notebooks on the transmigration of the sexes at exactly the same time that he began to complain of what became chronic ill health. The symptoms were mysterious - heart rhythm disturbances, nausea, vomiting, headaches, inner restlessness, accumulation of gas in the intestines - not regularly but enough to make him miserable and slow down his work. Was he a hypochondriac? Were his nerves loose? Was he stung by a dangerous, disease-carrying insect while the Beagle docked in Argentina? Many hypotheses have been put forward, but to this day no one knows what caused his illness.
On the eve of his departure for the journey, he had slight feelings in his heart, which probably indicated the tension that was in him for the journey. Other than that he appeared to be a young and healthy man, and generally he had maintained his strength during the five years of the journey. True, he suffered from seasickness, and occasionally also from stomach upset or fever, common phenomena among foreigners visiting the tropical region; However, while he spent time on land in South America, he went on long and adventurous trips on foot and on horseback. Since he returned he has added seven kilograms to his weight, proof that the food at the Athenaeum Club has been good for him. Later, in September 1837, in a letter to John Henslow, his tutor from the Cambridge days, he wrote: "Lately I am not at my best, I suffer from rapid palpitations which cause me discomfort." His doctors advised him to stop working and go on vacation outside the city, he added, and he followed their advice. "I feel like I have to get some rest, or I'll collapse." After a stay of several weeks at his home in Shrewsbury, together with his father and sisters, he again reported to Henslow that "everything that excites me collapses me completely afterwards, and causes irregularity in the rhythm of the heart." Social gatherings annoyed him. Deep conversations annoyed him. Dealing with it, or just thinking about it, made him very nervous. Eight months later he returned to his old friend and. d. Fox about that vague sentence he wrote to Henslow: "Lately I'm not at my best..." He had too many things to do, too many things to learn and think about. He can't afford to be sick. However, the workload resulting from the tasks related to the beagle, and the terrible sense of mission associated with the change of sexes, did not benefit his stomach condition. To complicate life even more (though he may have thought it would simplify things), he began to think about marriage.
He did not think of marriage to a particular person - but of marriage as a situation, as a position, as a step in the development of a man. Should he do something about it? Leonard Horner's daughters did not attract him; They may have been overly smart and full of life. He did not mention any preferred candidate, but the question of marriage troubled his mind, in part because it was connected with another question that also seemed urgent: money. How will he pay his bills over time? He must eat, he must buy books. He thought he would like to go on more voyages (this time in more comfort than on a cramped merchant ship). His current allowance may cover all of this, but it will not be enough for the expenses of his wife and children. At this point, unaware of the extent of his menacing father's wealth and generosity, Darwin thought that if he chose to marry, it might force him to give in to the need to work in a job that carried a steady salary. And what will work? He didn't finish his medical studies and it certainly wasn't appropriate - in light of the things he believed in and those he didn't believe in - to dress up as a priest. He considered fraudulently obtaining a professorship at Cambridge, perhaps in geology. Being studious, methodical, prone to anxiety, he tried to cope with his embarrassment about marriage and money as he coped with the idea of changing sexes, by scribbling notes. Because he wanted to save paper, not only time and energy, he did it on the blank pages of a letter he received from Leonard Horner. This may also have been his way of turning the page and moving on from the Horner girls episode.
"If I don't get married," he wrote as a title on one part of the page; Then list the possible benefits. A trip to Europe. Perhaps he could go to America, conduct geological research in the United States or Mexico. Or maybe he'll buy himself a better house in London, close to Regent's Park, and work on the sex question. He will be able to raise a horse. go on summer trips. Become an expert collector of some lineage of zoological species and investigate the kinship relationships between them. It doesn't sound bad. "If I get married," he wrote - and then made another list, mostly consisting of disadvantages, as if he was trying to convince himself to withdraw from the idea. "I will feel obliged to work for money." No summer trips, no trips out of town, no large zoological collection, no books. Foy. Will he be able to bear it, living in London, in a small house full of children and the miserable cooking escapes of the poor, "like a prisoner?" Cambridge might be better, if he gets a professorship. "My destiny will be a professor at Cambridge, or a poor man," he thought. He was wrong. But coming to terms with this pair of alternatives suggests that he really wanted a woman.
He had to clear his mind. At the end of June 1838, he escaped from London and the pressures associated with it - his work as the editor of the journal Zoology, the duties associated with his work at the Geological Society, perhaps also the secret notebooks, unless he tucked notebook "C" into his pocket - and went to Scotland to engage in a little geological field work. He visited Glen Roy, a valley in the Scottish mountains known for the strange and inexplicable terraces that cross its slopes. Vacation or not, he was a keen observer and restless theorist. After eight days at Glen Roy, he already had his own opinion as to the origin of these shelves of rock, and on returning to London, among his other works, he found time to write the paper on Glen Roy. But on his way south he stopped again in Shrewsbury for a family visit.
Darwin talked to his father, and received from him a surprising and happy advice: stop worrying about money, you will have plenty, and get married before you are too old to enjoy children. Dr. Darwin himself was forty-three years old when Charles was born. The good news of financial support helped Darwin reorganize his thoughts. Again he drew a table of pros and cons of marriage, and this time the left column, entitled "to marry", was longer than the shorter column on the right, entitled "not to marry". The marriage will give him a permanent companion and a friend in his old age, which "in any case, is better than a dog". The thought that he would spend his whole life on work alone was unbearable. "Just imagine a nice and soft woman on a couch, a fire burning in the fireplace, and with books, and maybe music too." The Horner girls did not fit this picture. He turned the page, and wrote: "The power to get married... when? Sooner or later." And maybe he wrote another question: with whom?
Before setting out on his way back to London, he visited his cousins, the Wedgwood family (known for their pottery factory and the large family fortune they made), at their home in the neighboring county. It was the safest house he knew outside of his family home. Given his father's grumpiness and the supportive kindness of his uncle, Josiah Wadgwood, it was perhaps the safest home, period. And yes, there were single Wedgwood girls.
5
At this point, he had already started notebook "D", the third in the series of notebooks on the subject of gender change. "My theory is a bold theory," Darwin wrote, referring to the grand theory of species, not the little one he had just concocted on Glenn Roy, "a theory which attempts to explain, or claims to be able to explain, all animal impulses." Yes, the theory stated that the impulses of animals can be "explained" and even more than that, but it did not explain these phenomena; She merely noted the fact that the species are related to each other through common ancestry. Darwin has not yet proposed a mechanism to explain how variation occurs. As a warm-up exercise, he wrote down some facts about swans, white-headed Sussex cattle, fireflies, and again about the kiwi. He learned from Richard Owen, the anatomist, that the skeletal structure of reptiles is very similar to that of birds, as seen in the young ostrich. However, unlike Darwin, Owen was not inclined to be impressed by the similarity between reptiles and birds. "There must be some law," Darwin said to the notebook, "according to which any organization that exists in an animal, that animal will try to multiply it and improve it." But what is the law? He didn't know that yet.
Despite the lost time due to his mysterious illness at the beginning of the summer, in the fall he was already back to normal. He finished the article on Glenn Roy. He was working on another manuscript in geology, related to the ongoing and never-ending Beagle publications. He pondered the transmigration of the sexes and also, as he testified in another small diary, "thought a lot about religion." The passage is written in a coded language, but it is likely that he did not experience a religious revelation. Apparently he was concerned about the conflict between religious dogma as pervaded through natural theology, and the view of the origin of species that he now held. He eagerly searched for facts, for alternative points of view, and for authority to hang on to, and read the Journal of the East Australian Expedition, Edward Gibbon's Autobiography, John Ray's The Wisdom of God, and the three volumes of the biography of Walter Scott. He read books about birds, Mount Etna, physiognomy, epistemology, and Paraguay. Then, in September of that year, 1838, he received the sixth edition of Thomas Malthus' book, Essay on the Principle of Population.
He may already have known something about Malthus, through cultural osmosis, in the same way that an educated person today knows something about Milton Friedman or Jean-Paul Sartre. The friend with whom his brother liked to dine, Harriet Martineau, was an enthusiastic propagator of Malthus's ideas. The Essay on Population, first published anonymously in 1798 and expanded upon in subsequent editions, offered a political economist's cold analysis that bolstered the Whigs' plan for ruthless welfare reform. Charity that is easily received is bad and tasteless, according to Malthus. It only strengthens the population growth among the poor, without correspondingly increasing the food supply in the country. This causes an increase in prices for the entire population. Hassel? the provision of the relief taken for granted, force the poor to compete in the labor market or imprison them in workhouses, explain to them the disadvantages of promiscuous natural reproduction, and the problem of mass poverty will be solved, or at least improved. This was Malthusian social logic. This approach evoked rigid thinking, and with a little exaggeration or distortion, it could appear even more rigid. Darwin was a gentle and generous soul, and he might have seen this approach, as described by others, as too hard thinking.
What he did not know until he read Malthus's book is that, in addition to the human population, Malthus also talked about the animal and plant population. On the first page, he wrote, paraphrasing the words of Benjamin Franklin (he, of all people), that all species have a tendency to multiply beyond the resources available to them, and that nothing limits the total number of individuals except "their crowding and clashing over means of subsistence". Empty the earth of life, Franklin assumed, and reseed it with one or two types - fennel plants, for example, or English ones - and in a relatively short time it will be filled with only English ones and fennel plants. Naturally, the population grows in an engineering column - that is, in each generation each population can multiply itself by some factor, and not just add to itself. In humans, according to Malthus' calculation, natural growth causes the population to double every twenty-five years. With the fennel plants, on each of which hundreds of small fruits grow, the rate of natural growth is much higher. However, the natural rate is only a biological possibility; Such extreme growth rarely occurs. Under normal circumstances, on a full planet, as opposed to an empty planet, uncontrolled population growth is prevented by what Malthus called "checks".
The absolute stop is hunger. Among humans, hunger is the result of the gap between the population growth rate, which increased in the engineering column, and the growth rate in the food supply, which, despite the constant and increasing efforts to purify the land and improvements in the field of agriculture, increased in the accounting column only. That is, the series 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 moves away from the series 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. However, the food supply directly limits the size of the population only in times of famine. Another type of restraint is the human will: the decision to avoid marriage, to marry at a late age, or to use contraception (something Malthus himself, who was a moral priest with pre-Victorian views, did not agree to). Other restraints operate continuously: overcrowding, unhealthy work, extreme poverty, poor child care, endemic diseases, epidemics, wars, and anything else that may contribute to infertility, abstinence, or early death. In general, Malthus wrote, all these restraints can be reduced to three groups: "moral restraint, evil and want." Darwin read this and something sparked in him. Moral restraint and evil interested him less than the possible meaning of "scarcity" for a mockingbird, or a turtle, or a monkey, or a fennel stalk.
He reflected in notebook "D" on "the war of the sexes as a conclusion from Malthus". The increase in the population of animals, as well as that of humans, in an engineering column, is prevented with the help of such Malthusian restraints, he wrote. He imagined everything clearly. For example the birds of Europe. All of them are known to naturalists and their populations are relatively stable (or so, at any rate, it was at the time). Each year, each of the species suffers a fixed mortality rate due to predation by hawks, due to cold, or other reasons, which more or less preserves the net size of the population against the growth rate resulting from hatching. Food supplies remain limited, nesting sites remain limited, but breeding, laying and incubation continue to try and stretch those limits. Everything is connected to everything, and the balance is not constant. If the number of hawks decreases, the population of the birds they prey on will be affected in one way or another. Darwin now saw in a new light the phenomena of predation, competition, overbreeding, death, and their consequences. "It can be said that there exists a force similar to a hundred thousand pegs," he wrote, and this force tries "to push any type of structure that has adapted into the spaces in nature's economy, or perhaps even creates spaces by throwing the weak out." The end result of the process of introducing these pegs, Darwin added, "must be the selection of the proper structures and their adaptation to the change."
That was his big idea, and he scribbled it down in shorthand. Years later he would process the details and call it "natural selection".
6
The peg metaphor entered his notebook on September 28. And then a strange thing happened in terms of the visible result of this enormous revelation: a nation. Darwin kept his cards close to his chest, and to the world he kept a sealed face.
When he was alone, he continued to write his reflections in notebooks. He ended notebook "D" with a burst of notes on "differences" (i.e., variations) between offspring resulting from sexual reproduction, and began the next notebook in the series of notebooks on the variation of sexes, notebook "E," with some notes that showed increasing confidence in "My theory".
His theory explained how these small differences could accumulate into special forms of adaptation to changing circumstances. He was aware that his theory was too big and difficult for other people to digest. In an attempt to classify his thoughts, Darwin began to write in another notebook, which he called "N", which was dedicated to "metaphysical investigations" that arose in him following the scientific ideas he conceived. Does a dog have a conscience? Does Deborah have a sense of community responsibility? Is the conscience of humans nothing but another form of drive transmitted by inheritance, a special form of adaptation that enables social behavior? Is the human soul nothing but one of the functions of the human body? Does the idea of God grow naturally in the minds of men from this instinctive conscience? A few months earlier he posed almost the same question about God and conscience - could "the love of God" be a simple result of the structure of the brain? - then scolded himself with pleasure: "You materialist!" Now his materialism deepened, became stronger, and was not as complicated as before. Still, he didn't feel ready to go public. He knew that at the heart of the quarrels about the "people's rights" (Chartism), about the democratization of medical studies and the changes that brought about the "Poor Law", there are already enough radical materialists who believe in evolution, and these people are not to his taste.
It was the most dizzying time in Darwin's life. He stopped writing letters to his friends and family. He was busy with his Beagle duties, getting a volume of the Zoology printed and adding a preface to his own travel journal. He fulfilled his duties as secretary of the Geological Society. His health weakened, in a way that cannot yet be explained, and he needed rest. He revealed his most serious thoughts only to his notebooks. "If I have already proved that the human body and that of animals are of the same type," he wrote, it would be "almost unnecessary to examine the soul," adding: "Nonetheless, I will not avoid the difficulty." At the beginning of November, his writing was dominated by two themes: the importance of sex and the search for laws. Sexual reproduction (unlike asexual or asexual reproduction, in which a bacterium or plant reproduces itself exactly) involves the paradox of hereditary variation - that is, subtle differences between parents and offspring, due to the mixing of components from both parents. Basic laws (as opposed to divine whim) govern the creation of variation and the change of species. He wanted to shed light on these "laws of life". While feeling the growing danger, excitement and loneliness, he acted with uncharacteristic impulsiveness: he jumped on a train bound for Staffordshire, appeared at the house of his uncle Josiah Wadgwood, and proposed to his cousin Emma. It was a bold leap towards security.
His offer surprised her. Her mother was a thirty-three-year-old woman, Naomi Saber and a devout Christian, on the verge of what was considered in those days as an "old bachelor". She and her older sister, the hunchback, were the last of the Wedgwood girls still left at home. She had known Charles almost all her life, as her nearest cousin in age (although she was slightly older than him), and the families were connected by multiple marriages. Charles's mother, who died when he was eight years old, was Uncle Josiah's sister, but one year before the sudden marriage proposal to Emma, Charles's sister Caroline married the eldest Wedgwood son, also named Josiah . Even Charles' grandmother on the Wedgwood side, his mother's mother, was a Wedgwood by birth who married her cousin, another Wedgwood. Marriage with first cousins was common in these days and in these circles, although this does not mean that people were not aware that too many intra-family marriages could cause problems; Otherwise, they would marry their brothers and sisters. On the positive side, a union between cousins helped keep the family property within the family. So the pairing between Charles and Emma was an obvious pairing, in some ways. There must have been those in the Wedgwood family who pondered this more consciously than the main actors did. Still, as this pair of cousins got older, it seemed unlikely. Charles had paid Emma some attention during his visit in July, but she had not had enough ardor to suggest that these few conversations were to begin a process of courtship. And suddenly he came out of nowhere - after making his private calculations from all directions and concluding that he should marry some woman - and presented himself, humbly but surprisingly, as her suitor.
The surprise was twofold. When she responded to his proposal immediately, he was frightened. Then they both let the idea sink in. Joyful cheers did not echo in the house that day. Emma felt more "confused" than giddy, and Charles suffered from a headache. All the others, including the two fathers, made acceptable noises of agreement. Charlie and Emma, of course, how perfect.
It wasn't perfect. One flaw was the contrast between her mother's fervent, scriptural Christian faith and the free fall into unbelief that had just occurred in Charles. Charles himself did not yet know how far this fall would take him or where he would land. But his father had warned him, a few months earlier, that a man who had theological doubts had better hide them from his wife. No one would profit, said the practical doctor, by giving a wife reason to care for the salvation of her husband's soul. Everything can work out until one of them falls ill, and then she will suffer greatly from the thought of eternal separation, and will make him miserable too. Charles soon ignored his father's advice, (which was the most prescient thing Dr. Darwin had ever said to him), and revealed to his mother at least a touch of his heretical thinking. It is likely that he did not bring up the subject of transsexualism, our descent from the ape, the idea that divinity is an inherited drive, or the conundrum of male nipples, but whatever the degree of heresy he confessed to her, it was enough for her mother to call her a "deep hollow that separates us." Afterwards, her face lit up and she thanked him for opening his heart, reassuring herself that "honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin."
Doubts? This is a delicate wording. At that time he already had a complete and new set of metaphysical beliefs, not just doubts. But if she is willing to intertwine her fingers with his over the space that separates them and ignore it, he is also willing to do so. Not even in one of the lists of the advantages of marriage, which he compiled in such a clerical manner, did he write that the woman should be a soul mate from a philosophical point of view and an equal status from an intellectual point of view. He told his friend Layel, in the letter in which he announced the engagement, about his "sincere love and the deep gratitude he felt" towards her mother, gratitude that she was "ready to receive" someone like him. It was most likely a frank declaration, more frank than he intended: his love was lukewarm but true, his kindness immense.
On his return to London, he briefly returned to "E" notebook, before the search for a home and other preparations overwhelmed him. Towards the end of November, he wrote, with his usual bouncy punctuation:
Three principles will explain everything:
1. Grandchildren. same as. grandparents
2. Tendency to small change... especially physical change
3. High productivity in relation to parental support
Brief and to the point, it was the first complete outline of the three causal conditions for natural selection: (1) hereditary continuity over many generations; (2) additive variations among offspring; (3) the Malthusian factor of the rate of natural increase of the population, which produces so many individuals that their needs cannot be satisfied. Put them together, and you have an explanation of the way in which the process of changing the species takes place.
So much for the notebook. In his personal diary he wrote: "I completely wasted the last week of November." Did he complain, apologize, or jokingly brag about the sense of lightness that had just taken hold of him? At the beginning of December, her mother came to town and stayed there for two weeks with her brother and sister-in-law, during which time she and Charles threw themselves into a merry frenzy of building a house. She then returned to Staffordshire. Until the end of the year he continued to occupy himself with house hunting, a little reading, and occasional layoffs due to his strange illness. Having already decided on the matter of marriage, he waited impatiently for the wedding itself. His letters to his mother were cheerful. In one of them, at the end of a long day, he self-satisfiedly described himself as "stupid and relaxed".
They were married on January 29, 1839, in a small church near Wedgwood House. Charles' brother did not come from London for the occasion, and Emma's mother was ill and stayed at home. Dr. Darwin and Uncle Josiah arranged generous financial arrangements, which were officially sanctioned in a document signed at the county offices: £10,000 from Dr. Darwin's large fortune, £5,000 from Wedgwood's side, to be invested at 4 percent annual interest, in favor of the young couple. This meant that Darwin would not need a job and that they would have servants in their house. They were privileged young people, from affluent families who also worry about the future. The marriage ceremony was performed by Reverend Alan Wedgwood, who was everyone's cousin. There was no reception, but not because the Wedgwood family couldn't afford a party. There was no honeymoon, but not because the couple didn't want to be alone.
Charles and Emma left Staffordshire that day. They celebrated their marriage by sharing sandwiches and a bottle of water on the train on their way to London. This was the style they chose. A quiet couple, not prone to loud celebrations. And he had to go back to his job.
