The world and everything in it was made for us, as we were made for God:

For the last few thousand years, and especially since the end of the Middle Ages, this proud, self-confident assertion was increasingly common belief, held by Emperor and slave, Pope and parish priest. The Earth was a lavishly decorated stage set, designed by an ingenious if inscrutable Director, who had managed to round up, from only He knew where, a multitudinous supporting cast of toucans and mealy bugs, eels, voles, elms, yaks, and much, much more. He placed them all before us, in their opening night costumes. They were ours to do with as we pleased: drag our burdens, pull our plows, guard our homes, produce milk for our babies, offer up their flesh for our dinner tables, and provide useful instruction—bumblebees, for example, on the virtues not just of hard work, but of hereditary monarchy. Why He thought we needed hundreds of distinct species of ticks and roaches, when one or two would have been more than sufficient, why there are more species of beetles than any other kind of being on Earth, no one could say. No matter; the composite effect of life’s extravagant diversity could only be understood by postulating a Maker, not all of whose reasons we could grasp, who had created the stage, the scenery, and the subsidiary players for our benefit. For thousands of years, virtually everyone, theologian and scientist alike, found this, both emotionally and intellectually, a satisfying account.

The man who wrecked this consensus did so with the utmost reluctance. He was no ideologue bent on kicking in the door of the Establishment, no firebrand. If not for a bit of happenstance he would probably have passed his days as a well-liked Church of England parson in a nineteenth-century rural, picture-postcard village. Instead he ignited a firestorm¹ that destroyed more of the old order than any violent political upheaval ever had. Through the astonishingly powerful method of science, this gentleman who was known to find lively conversation too taxing, somehow became the revolutionary’s revolutionary. For more than a century, the mere mention of his name has been sufficient to unsettle the pious and rouse the bookburners from their fitful slumbers.

——

Charles Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, England, on February 12, 1809, the fifth child of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. The Darwin and Wedgwood families were allied through the close friendship of their patriarchs, Erasmus Darwin, the noted author, physician, and inventor, and Josiah Wedgwood, who had risen from poverty to found the Wedgwood pottery dynasty. These two men shared radically progressive views, even going so far as to side with the rebellious colonies in the American Revolution. “He who allows oppression,” Erasmus wrote, “shares the crime.”²

Their club was called The Lunar Society, because it met only during the full moon when the late-night ride home would be well-lit and therefore less dangerous. Among its members were William Small, who had taught Thomas Jefferson science (at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and whom Jefferson singled out as having “probably fixed the destinies” of his life); James Watt, whose steam engines powered the British Empire; the chemist Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen; and an expert on electricity named Benjamin Franklin.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought Erasmus Darwin “the most original-minded man” he had ever known. Erasmus was also making quite a name for himself as a doctor. George III invited him to become his personal physician. (Erasmus declined the honor out of an unwillingness, he said, to leave his happy home in the countryside, but perhaps the champion of American revolutionaries had political reasons as well.) His real fame, though, stemmed from a string of hit encyclopaedic rhyming poems.

Erasmus Darwin’s two-volume work, The Botanic Garden, comprising The Loves of the Plants, written in 1789, and its eagerly awaited sequel, The Economy of Vegetation, were runaway best-sellers. They were so successful that he decided to tackle the animal kingdom next. The result was a 2,500-page tome, this one in prose, entitled Zoonomia: or, the Laws of Organic Life. In it he asked this prescient question:

Erasmus Darwin believed that “There are three great objects of desire, which have changed the forms of many animals by their exertions to gratify them: hunger, security and lust.” Especially lust. The lilting refrain of his last effort, The Temple of Nature: or, The Origin of Society,⁵ was “And hail THE DEITIES OF SEXUAL LOVE.” The capitalization is his. Elsewhere, he observed that the stag had developed horns to fight other males for “the exclusive possession of the female.” There’s no question that he was on to something. But his was a kind of disordered originality, a brilliance that could not be bothered by methodical research. Science exacts a substantial entry fee in effort and tedium in exchange for its insights. Erasmus was unwilling to ante up.

His grandson Charles, who would pay those dues, read Zoonomia twice; once when he was eighteen and again a decade later, after he’d been around the world. He took pride in his grandfather’s precocious anticipation of some of the ideas that would make Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck famous twenty years later. However, Charles “was much disappointed” by Erasmus’ failure to investigate, carefully and rigorously, whether there was any truth to his inspired speculations

Lamarck had been a soldier, a self-taught botanist, and the zoologist who had gone on to develop the precursor of the modern natural history museum. When everyone else was thinking in terms of thousands of years, he was contemplating millions. He believed that the idea of the living world walled up into separate compartments called species was an illusion; species are slowly transmogrifying, one into another, he taught, and this would be immediately apparent to us if our lives were not so brief and fleeting.

Lamarck is best known for arguing that an organism could inherit the acquired characteristics of its ancestors. In his most famous example, the giraffe strains to nibble at the leaves on the higher branches of the tree, and somehow the slightly elongated neck that attends the stretching is passed on to the next generation. Lamarck could not have been knowledgeable of the family history of many generations of giraffes, but he did have relevant data that he chose to ignore: For thousands of years, Jews and Moslems have been ritually circumcising their sons, with no break in continuity, and yet not one case is known of a Jewish or Islamic boy born without a foreskin. Queen bees and drones do no work, and have not for geological ages; yet worker bees whose parents are queens and drones (and never other workers) do not seem to be growing more indolent, generation after generation; instead, they are proverbially industrious.⁶ Domestic and farm animals have their tails docked, their ears clipped, or their flanks branded for generations, but the newborn show no signs of these mutilations. Chinese women had their feet cruelly bound and deformed for centuries, but infant girls obstinately persisted in being born with normal appendages.⁷ Despite such counterexamples, Charles would take seriously, for his entire life, the notion of Lamarck and his grandfather Erasmus that acquired characteristics could be inherited.

The mechanism by which discrete hereditary units, the genes, are reshuffled and passed on to the next generation, the way in which those genes are randomly altered, their molecular nature, and their wonderful ability to encode long chemical messages and replicate those messages precisely—all this was wholly unknown to Darwin. To attempt an understanding of the evolution of life when heredity was still an almost complete mystery would require either an exceptionally foolish or an exceptionally able scientist.

——

Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin had long entertained the hope that someday their children would formalize through marriage the bonds of affection that already united their two families. Of the two, only Erasmus lived to see it happen. His son, Robert, a generous but moody physician, a great big, fat man, a silhouette out of Dickens, who alternately comforted and terrified the patients of his far-flung practice, married Susannah Wedgwood. She was widely admired for her “gentle, sympathising nature” and the active role she took in her husband’s scientific interests. Susannah suffered an agonizing death from a gastrointestinal affliction out of sight but within earshot of her eight-year-old son, Charles. Writing near the end of his own life, he could recall nothing about his mother “except her death-bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work-table.”

In this autobiographical memoir, conceived as a gift for his children and grandchildren, and written “as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life,” Charles Darwin admitted “that in many ways I was a naughty boy … I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement.” He boasted to another boy that he “could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable.” Even at that tender age he had begun to speculate on the variability of plants. His life-long absorption in the natural world was under way. He became a passionate collector of the bits and pieces of Nature that form the gritty detritus in the pockets of children everywhere. He was particularly mad for beetles, but his sister convinced him that it would be immoral to take a beetle’s life merely for collecting. Dutifully, he confined himself to gathering up only the recently deceased. He watched the birds and recorded his observations of their behavior. “In my simplicity,” he later wrote, “I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.”

At the age of nine he was sent to study at Dr. Butler’s day school. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind,” Darwin later wrote. Butler believed that school was no place for curiosity or excitement about learning. For that, Charles looked to a well-thumbed copy of Wonders of the World, and to the members of his family who patiently answered his many questions. As an old man he could still recall the delight he felt when an uncle had explained to him how the barometer works. His older brother, Erasmus—named after their grandfather—transformed the garden toolhouse into a chemistry lab and allowed Charles to help him with his experiments. This earned Charles the nickname “Gas” at school and an angry public rebuke from Dr Butler.

Charles was doing so poorly at school that when it was time for Erasmus to go off to Edinburgh University, his father decided to send Charles with him. The boys were supposed to study medicine. Here, too, Charles found the lectures oppressively dull. He couldn’t bear to dissect anything, and the experience of seeing a botched operation on a child, “long before the blessed days of chloroform,” was to haunt him for the rest of his life. But it was in Edinburgh that he first found friends who shared his passion for science.

After two sessions at Edinburgh, Robert Darwin became resigned to the fact that Charles was not cut out for a medical career. Perhaps he would make a good clergyman? Dutiful Charles had no objections, but just the same, he thought he should check up on Church of England dogma before agreeing to commit his life to instilling it in others. “Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed, and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.”

Charles spent the next three years at Cambridge University, where he managed to get better grades. But still he felt a restless dissatisfaction with the curriculum. His happiest moments there were spent in pursuit of his adored beetles, now dead or alive.

It was as a beetle hunter that the first published reference to Charles Darwin was made. “No poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing, in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects, the magic words, ‘captured by C. Darwin, Esq.’ ”

At Cambridge he had been persuaded to take a course in geology taught by Adam Sedgwick. Darwin told Professor Sedgwick of the curious but credible claim made to him by a laborer that a “large, worn tropical Volute shell” (the spiral-shaped shell of a warm-water mollusc) had been found embedded in an old Shrewsbury gravel pit. Sedgwick was incurious and dismissive; it must have been dumped there by someone. Darwin remembered in his Autobiography,

At about that time, Darwin’s cousin brought him around to one of the Rev. John Steven Henslow’s botany lectures. This was “a circumstance which influenced my career more than any other.” A handsome man in his early thirties, Henslow had the great teacher’s genius for making his subject come alive, so much so that the same students returned year after year to attend courses they had already completed. Moreover, he exhibited an exceptional sensitivity to the feelings of his students. The novice’s “foolish” question was answered with respect. All were welcome to the open house he held every week, and there were regular invitations to dinner with his family. Darwin wrote, “during the latter half of my time at Cambridge I took long walks with him on most days; so that I was called by some of the dons ‘the man who walks with Henslow.’ ” Darwin judged his knowledge “great in botany, entomology, chemistry, mineralogy, and geology.” He added that Henslow was “deeply religious, and so orthodox that he told me one day he should be grieved if a single word of the Thirty-nine Articles [of the Anglican faith] were altered.”

Ironically, it was Henslow who left the message “informing me that Captain FitzRoy was willing to give up part of his own cabin to any young man who would volunteer to go with him without pay as naturalist to the Voyage of the Beagle.” Henslow wrote of “a trip to Tierra del Fuego, and home by the East Indies … Two years … I assure you I think you are the very man they are in search of.”

The scene is not hard to imagine: The twenty-two-year-old races home from college breathless with excitement. He squirms in his chair while Father, an intimidating man in the best of circumstances, harangues him with a litany of past indulgences and harebrained schemes. First, doctor, then, clergyman, now, this? Afterwards, what congregation will want you? They must have first offered it to others and been turned down … Doubtless something is seriously wrong with the vessel … Or the expedition …

And then, after much discussion: “If you can find any man of common sense, who advises you to go, I will give my consent.”¹⁰ The chastened son regards the situation as hopeless and sends Henslow polite regrets.

The next day he rides over to the Wedgwoods’ for a visit. Uncle Josiah—named after Charles’ grandfather’s boon companion—sees the voyage as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He drops what he’s doing to write Charles’ father a point-by-point refutation of his objections. Later that same day, Josiah worries that a personal appearance might accomplish what a note might not. He grabs Charles and gallops over to the Darwin household to try to convince the young man’s father to let him go. Robert keeps his word and agrees. Touched by his father’s generosity and feeling a little guilty over past extravagances, Charles seeks to reconcile him, saying, “I should be deuced clever to spend more than my allowance whilst on board the Beagle.”

“But they tell me you are very clever,” his father answers with a smile.

Robert Darwin had given his blessing, but some obstacles still remained. Captain Robert FitzRoy was having second thoughts about sharing such close quarters for such an extended period of time. A relation of his had known the young Darwin at Cambridge. He said he wasn’t a bad sort, but did FitzRoy, the high Tory, know that he’d be rooming for two years with a Whig? And then there was the pesky problem of Darwin’s nose. FitzRoy was, as were many of his contemporaries, a believer in phrenology, which held that the shape of the skull was indicative of intelligence and character, or their absence. Some adherents expanded this doctrine to include noses. To FitzRoy, Darwin’s nose proclaimed at a glance grave deficiencies in energy and determination. After the two men had spent a little time together, though, FitzRoy, despite his reservations, decided to take a chance on the young naturalist. Darwin wrote, “I think he was afterwards well satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.”

The Beagle’s earlier survey mission to South America had been such an unpleasant experience, the weather so consistently rotten, that her Captain had committed suicide before it was over. The British admiralty office in Rio de Janeiro turned to the twenty-three-year-old Robert FitzRoy to assume command. By all accounts he did brilliantly. He was at the helm when the Beagle resumed her survey of Tierra del Fuego and the islands nearby. After the theft of one of the Beagle’s whale boats, FitzRoy kidnapped five of the local people, who were called Fuegians by the British. When he gave up hope of recovering the boat and humanely released his hostages, one of them, a little girl they called Fuegia Basket, didn’t want to leave—or so the story goes. FitzRoy had been wondering about bringing some Fuegians back to England so they might learn its language, mores, and religion. Upon returning home, FitzRoy imagined, they would provide a liaison with other Fuegians and become loyal protectors of British interests at the strategic southern tip of South America. The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty granted FitzRoy permission to bring the Fuegians to England. Although they were vaccinated, one died of smallpox. Fuegia Basket, a teenaged boy they called Jemmy Button, and a young man they called York Minster survived to study English and Christianity with a clergyman in Wandsworth, and to be presented by FitzRoy to the King and Queen.

Now it was time for the Fuegians—whose real names no one in England had bothered to learn—to go back; and for the Beagle to resume her survey of South America and “to determine more accurately … the longitude of a large number of oceanic islands as well as of the continents.”¹¹ This assignment was expanded to include “observations of longitude right round the world.” She would sail down the east coast of South America, up the west coast, cross the Pacific, and circumnavigate the planet before returning home to England. Once the Beagle had been re-commissioned under Captain FitzRoy’s command, he took measures to insure that this new expedition would be very different from the previous one. Largely at his own expense, he had the 90-foot square-rigger completely re-fit. He resurfaced her hull, raised her deck, and festooned her bowsprit and her three tall masts with state-of-the-art lightning conductors. He tried to learn everything he could about weather and became one of the founders of modern meteorology in the process. On December 27, 1831, the Beagle was finally ready to sail.

On the eve of her departure, Darwin had suffered an anxiety attack and heart palpitations. There would be episodes of these symptoms, gastrointestinal distress, and profound bouts of exhaustion and depression throughout his life. Much speculation has been offered on the cause of these spells. They’ve been attributed to a psychosomatic reaction to the traumatic loss of his mother at so tender an age; to anxieties about the reactions his life’s work might elicit from God and the public; to an unconscious tendency to hyperventilate; and, strangely, although the symptoms pre-date his marriage by many years, to the pleasure he took in his beloved wife’s genius for nursing the sick. The sequence of events also makes implausible the contention that his illness was due to a South American parasite acquired during the Beagle’s voyage. We simply do not know. His symptoms caused this explorer to be mainly housebound for the last third of his life.

Darwin’s personal library on the journey included two books, each a bon voyage gift. One was an English translation of Humboldt’s Travels that Henslow had given him. Before Darwin left Cambridge he had read Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and Herschel’s Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy, which together evoked in Darwin “a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.”¹² The other gift was from the Captain. It was Volume I of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and FitzRoy would live to regret bitterly his choice of going-away present.

The scientific revelations of the European Enlightenment had posed disturbing challenges to the biblical account of the Earth’s origin and history. There were those who tried to reconcile the new data and new insights with their faith. They held that Noah’s flood was the primary agent responsible for the present configuration of the Earth’s crust. A big enough flood, they thought, could transform the Earth’s geology in just forty days and forty nights, consistent with an Earth only a few thousand years old. With a little spin control on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, they felt they had managed to pull it off.

Lyell had been a lawyer for as long as he could stand it. When he was thirty years old, he abandoned the law for geology, his true passion. He wrote Principles of Geology to advance the “Uniformitarian” view that the Earth has been shaped by the same gradual processes that we observe today, but operating not merely over a few weeks, or a few thousand years, but ages. There were distinguished geologists who held that floods and other catastrophes might explain the Earth’s landforms, but that the Noachic flood wasn’t enough. It would take many floods, many catastrophes. These scientific Catastrophists were comfortable with Lyell’s long time scales But for the biblical literalists Lyell posed an awkward problem. If Lyell was right, the rocks were saying that the Bible’s six days of Creation, and the age of the Earth deduced by adding up the “begats,” were somehow in error It was through this apparent hole in Genesis that the Beagle would sail into history.

Hired mainly as FitzRoy’s companion and sounding board, Darwin was obliged to bear with equanimity the Captain’s politically conservative, racist, and fundamentalist harangues. For most of the voyage, the two men managed to maintain a truce with regard to their philosophical and political differences. However, Darwin was simply unable to let FitzRoy’s opinion on one particular issue go unchallenged:

Darwin fully expected to be kicked off the ship. But when the gunroom officers heard of the row, they vied with each other for the privilege of sharing their quarters with him. FitzRoy calmed down and actually apologized to Darwin, rescinding the eviction. Possibly, Darwin’s evolutionary views emerged, in part, out of his exasperation with FitzRoy’s inflexible conventionalism, and the necessity of the young man to suppress for five years the counterarguments that were welling up inside him¹⁴

Perhaps it was the legacy of his grandfathers that enabled Darwin to detect the inconsistencies and injustices that other members of his social class would not see. At the very beginning of his book, The Voyage of the Beagle, he tells of a place not far from Rio de Janeiro:

Darwin had been lured to South America by the prospect of discovering new birds and new beetles, but he couldn’t help noticing the carnage the Europeans were inflicting. Colonial arrogance, the institution of slavery, the extirpation of countless species for the enrichment and entertainment of the invaders, the first depredations of the tropical rain forest—in short, many of the crimes and stupidities that haunt us today—troubled Darwin at a time when Europe was confident that colonialism was an unalloyed benefit for the uncivilized, that the forests were inexhaustible, and that there would always be enough egret feathers for every millinery shop until the Day of Judgment. In part because of these sensitivities, in part because Darwin always wrote as clearly and directly as he could—striving to communicate to the greatest number of people—The Voyage of the Beagle is still a stirring and accessible adventure story.

However, this book has watershed status because it was during the course of the expedition it recounts that Darwin began to amass the great body of evidence—not intuition, but data—that makes the case for evolution by natural selection. “At last gleams of light have come,” he was later to write, “and I am almost convinced that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”

The Galapagos is an archipelago of thirteen good-sized islands and many smaller ones lying off the coast of Ecuador. If all the species on Earth were immutable, then why did the beaks of the otherwise very similar finches on islands separated by no more than fifty or sixty miles of ocean vary so dramatically? Why narrow, tiny, pointy beaks on the finches of one island and larger, parrot-like curved beaks on the finches of the next? “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one, small intimately related group of birds,” he later wrote in The Voyage, “one might really fancy that, from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” (These volcanic islands, we now know, are less than 5 million years old.) And it wasn’t just the finches that raised such problems, but the giant tortoises and the mockingbirds, too.

Back in England, Henslow and Sedgwick had been reading Darwin’s letters aloud at meetings of scientific societies. When Darwin returned home in October 1836, he found he had acquired something of a reputation as an explorer and naturalist. His father was now well pleased with him, and all talk of a parsonage ceased. The same month he met the geologist, Lyell, for the first time. Though not without its rough spots, it was to be a lifelong friendship.

Darwin made important contributions to geology. His interpretation of coral reefs—that they mark the locations of slowly subsiding sea-mounts that had once been islands—was substantiated on the Beagle and corresponds to the modern understanding. In 1838 he published a paper arguing that earthquakes, volcanoes, and the thrusting up of islands are all caused by slow, intermittent, but irresistible global motions in the semi-liquid interior of the Earth. This “almost prophetic”¹⁶ thesis, as far as it goes, is part and parcel of modern geophysics. In his 1838 Presidential Address to the Geological Society, William Whewell mentioned Darwin’s name (in the context of this work) more than twice as often as any other geologist, living or dead. In geology, following Lyell, as in biology, Darwin championed the idea that profound changes are worked little by little over vast intervals of time.

In 1839, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Through ten children and more than four decades they shared a deep, loving, and almost entirely harmonious relationship. During their early married life he was writing down, but certainly not for publication, his first tentative sketch for a theory of evolution. Their rare differences were over religion. “Before I was engaged to be married,” he wrote in his autobiography, “my father advised me to conceal carefully my doubts, for he said that he had known extreme misery thus caused with married persons.”¹⁷ A few weeks after their wedding, she wrote to him:

Years later, Darwin wrote at the bottom of Emma’s letter,

He tried his best to avoid the public version of this domestic tension. Our past was then a dark and shameful secret. To expose it would have been perceived by many as an affront to the prevailing religious norms and as an assault against human dignity. But to suppress it would have been to reject the data because the implications were disturbing. Darwin recognized that if he was to convince anyone he would have to support his argument with a compelling body of evidence.

In 1844, a sensational book, fundamentally pseudoscience, called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published. Robert Chambers, the encyclopedist and amateur geologist who was its anonymous author, claimed that he had traced human ancestry all the way back to … frogs. Chambers’ reasoning was half-baked (although no more so than Erasmus Darwin’s) but its audacity attracted a great deal of attention. Nagging doubts about Creation were beginning to bubble to the surface, and Darwin felt that he should write down his own theory in as irrefutable a form as possible. He expanded a short essay, begun two years before, into a two-part work entitled “On the Variation of Organic Beings under Domestication and in the Natural State” and “On the Evidence Favourable and Opposed to the View That Species Are Naturally Formed Races Descended from Common Stock.” However, he was not ready to publish. He wrote a letter to Emma that he asked be considered as a codicil to his will. In the event of his death, he wanted her to

He felt he was on to something important, but feared—perhaps especially in view of his frequent bouts of illness—that he would not live to complete the work.

In what superficially seems an odd next move, he now put his evolutionary studies aside and for the next eight years devoted his life almost exclusively to barnacles. His great friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, would later observe to Darwin’s son, Francis, “Your father had Barnacles on the brain from Chili [Chile] onwards!”²⁰ It was this exhaustive project that really earned him his credentials as a naturalist. Another close friend, the anatomist and brilliant polemicist Thomas Henry Huxley, observed that Darwin

Darwin had not been the only scientist to get a jolt from Chambers’ Vestiges. Alfred Russel Wallace, a surveyor who had become a naturalist, was also unimpressed with Chambers’ arguments, but also intrigued by the notion that there was a knowable process at work in the evolution of life. In 1847, he traveled to the Amazon in search of factual support for this idea. A fire on the ship taking him back to England consumed every one of his specimens. Wallace persevered, setting off to the Malay Peninsula to gather a new collection. In the September 1855 issue of Annals and Magazine of Natural History, his paper “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” appeared.

By this time, Darwin had been wrestling with such problems for two decades. Now, it was entirely possible that his claims of priority to the solution of life’s greatest mystery would be snatched away. If science were in the business of conferring sainthood, the conduct of Darwin and Wallace towards one another would have earned it for them both. Darwin wrote a letter of hearty congratulation to Wallace in which he mentioned how long he’d been working on the same problem.

Darwin’s friends Huxley and Hooker prodded him to quit stalling and write the paper that would make an ironclad case for evolution. He complied and was nearing its completion in 1858, while Wallace, now in Indonesia and sick with malaria, tossed and turned, grappling with the question “Why do some die and some live?”²² Emerging from his stupor, he understood natural selection. He wrote “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” and promptly mailed it to Darwin, asking him to use his judgment about what should be done with it. Darwin was distressed to see how very close Wallace’s work was to his own writings of 1839 and 1842. In 1844 he had combined them into an essay, but it remained unpublished. Darwin turned to his friends for guidance on how to deal ethically with this dilemma. Hooker and Lyell came up with a wise solution: Present both the Wallace paper and a version of Darwin’s unpublished 1844 essay at the next meeting of the Linnaean Society and publish them together in the Society’s Proceedings.²³ Thereafter, Wallace always spoke of evolution as being Darwin’s theory and Darwin always credited Wallace with its independent discovery. Darwin now applied himself to the task of writing the book that would cause so much trouble.

On November 24, 1859, The Origin of Species was published. The first edition of 1,250 copies was snapped up by the booksellers. Darwin had been careful to make only one reference to humans in the whole book: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”²⁴ Anything more from his pen on this delicate matter would have to wait another twelve years, for the publication of The Descent of Man. His restraint fooled no one. Given its formidable armamentarium of data, there could be no reconciling The Origin with a literal rendition of Genesis.