25 DARWIN’S SINGULAR NOTION

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    IE summer or early autumn of 1859, Whitwell Elwior of the respectedBritish journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book by thenaturalist Charles Darwin. Elwihe book with i and agreed that it had merit, butfeared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin towrite a book about pigeons instead. “Everyone is ied in pigeons,” he observedhelpfully.

    Elwin’s sage advice was ignored, and On the in of Species by Means of NaturalSele, or the Preservation of Favoured Races iruggle for Life ublished in lateNovember 1859, priced at fifteen shillings. The first edition of 1,250 copies sold out on thefirst day. It has never been out of print, and scarcely out of troversy, in all the time si bad going for a man whose principal other i was earthworms and who, but for asingle impetuous decision to sail around the world, would very probably have passed his lifeas an anonymous try parson known for, well, for an i ihworms.

    Charles Robert Darwin was born on February 12, 1809,1in Shrewsbury, a sedate markettown in the west Midlands of England. His father rosperous and well-regardedphysi. His mother, who died when Charles was o, was the daughter of JosiahWedgwood, of pottery fame.

    Darwin enjoyed every advantage of upbringing, but tinually pained his widowed fatherwith his lackluster academic performance. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catg, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family,” his father wrote in a li nearly always appears just about here in any review of Darwin’s early life. Although hisination was to natural history, for his father’s sake he tried to study medie at EdinburghUy but couldn’t bear the blood and suffering. The experience of witnessing aion on an un<q>藏书网</q>derstandably distressed child—this was in the days before ahetics, ofcourse—left him permaly traumatized. He tried law instead, but found that insupportablydull and finally managed, more or less by default, to acquire a degree in divinity fromCambridge.

    A life in a rural vicarage seemed to await him when from out of the blue there came a moretempting offer. Darwin was io sail on the naval survey ship HMS Beagle, essentiallyas dinner pany for the captain, Robert FitzRoy, whose rank precluded his socializing withaher than a gentleman. FitzRoy, who was very odd, chose Darwin in part because heliked the shape of Darwin’s nose. (It betokened depth of character, he believed.) Darwin wasnot FitzRoy’s first choice, but got the nod when FitzRoy’s preferred panion dropped out.

    From a twenty-first-tury perspective the two men’s most striking joiure was their1An auspicious date in history: on the same day iucky, Abraham Lin was born.

    extreme youthfulness. At the time of sailing, FitzRoy was only twenty-three, Darwin justtwenty-two.

    FitzRoy’s formal assig was to chart coastal waters, but his hobby—passion really—was to seek out evidence for a literal, biblical interpretation of creation. That Darwin wastrained for the ministry was tral to FitzRoy’s decision to have him aboard. That Darwinsubsequently proved to be not only liberal of view but less than wholeheartedly devoted toChristian fuals became a source of lasting fri between them.

    Darwin’s time aboard HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, was obviously the formativeexperience of his life, but also one of the most trying. He and his captain shared a small ,which ’t have been easy as FitzRoy was subject to fits of fury followed by spells ofsimmeriment. He and Darwin stantly engaged in quarrels, some “b oninsanity,” as Darwin later recalled. O voyages teo beelancholyuakings at the best of times—the previous captain of the Beagle had put a bullet throughhis brain during a moment of lonely gloom—and FitzRoy came from a family well known fora depressive instinct. His uncle, Vist Castlereagh, had slit his throat the previous decadewhile serving as cellor of the Exchequer. (FitzRoy would himself it suicide by thesame method in 1865.) Even in his calmer moods, FitzRoy proved strangely unknowable.

    Darwin was astouo learn upon the clusion of their voyage that almost at ozRoy married a young woman to whom he had long beehed. In five years inDarwin’s pany, he had not once hi an attat or eveioned her name.

    In every other respect, however, the Beagle voyage was a triumph. Darwin experiencedadventure enough to last a lifetime and accumulated a hoard of spes suffit to makehis reputation and keep him occupied for years. He found a magnifit trove of giant afossils, including the fi Megatherium known to date; survived a lethal earthquake inChile; discovered a new species of dolphin (which he dutifully named Delphinus fitzroyi);ducted diligent and useful geological iigations throughout the Andes; and developeda new and much-admired theory for the formation of coral atolls, which suggested, nottally, that atolls could not form ihan a million years—the first hint of hislong-standing attat to the extreme antiquity of earthly processes. In 1836, aged twenty-seveurned home after being away for five years and two days. He never left Englandagain.

    Ohing Darwin didn’t do on the voyage ropound the theory (or even a theory) ofevolution. For a start, evolution as a cept was already decades old by the 1830s. Darwin’sown grandfather, Erasmus, had paid tribute to evolutionary principles in a poem of inspiredmediocrity called “The Temple of Nature” years before Charles was even born. It wasn’t untilthe younger Darwin was ba England ahomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principleof Population (which proposed that increases in food supply could never keep up withpopulation growth for mathematical reasons) that the idea began to percolate through his mindthat life is a perpetual struggle and that natural sele was the means by whiespecies prospered while others failed. Specifically what Darwin saw was that all anismspeted for resources, and those that had some innate advantage would prosper and pass onthat advao their offspring. By such means would species tinuously improve.

    It seems an awfully simple idea—it is an awfully simple idea—but it explained a great deal,and Darwin repared to devote his life to it. “How stupid of me not to have thought ofit!” T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the in of Species. It is a view that has beenechoed ever since.

    Iingly, Darwin didn’t use the phrase “survival of the fittest” in any of his work(though he did express his admiration for it). The expression was ed five years after thepublication of On the in of Species by Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology in 1864.

    Nor did he employ the word evolution in print until the sixth edition in (by which timeits use had bee too widespread to resist), preferring instead “dest with modification.”

    Nor, above all, were his clusions in any way inspired by his notig, during his time inthe Galápagos Islands, an iing diversity in the beaks of fihe story asventionally told (or at least as frequently remembered by many of us) is that Darwin,while traveling from island to island, noticed that the finches’ beaks on each island weremarvelously adapted for exploiting local resources—that on one island beaks were sturdy andshort and good for crag nuts, while on the  island beaks were perhaps long and thinand well suited for winkling food out of crevices—and it was this that set him to thinking thatperhaps the birds had not beeed this way, but had in a sense created themselves.

    In fact, the birds had created themselves, but it wasn’t Darwin who noticed it. At the timeof the Beagle voyage, Darwin was fresh out of college and not yet an aplished naturalistand so failed to see that the Galápagos birds were all of a type. It was his friend theornithologist John Gould who realized that what Darwin had found was lots of finches withdifferent talents. Unfortunately, in his inexperience Darwin had not noted which birds camefrom which islands. (He had made a similar error with tortoises.) It took years to sort themuddles out.

    Because of these hts, and the o sort through crates and crates of other Beaglespes, it wasn’t until 1842, six years after his return to England, that Darwin finallybegan to sketch out the rudiments of his heory. These he expanded into a 230-page“sketch” two years later. And then he did araordinary thing: he put his notes away andfor the  decade and a half busied himself with other matters. He fathered ten childreed nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles (“I hate a barnacle as noman ever did before,” he sighed, uandably, upon the work’s clusion), and fell preyte disorders that left him ically listless, faint, and “flurried,” as he put it. Thesymptoms nearly always included a terrible nausea and generally also incorporatedpalpitations, migraines, exhaustion, trembling, spots before the eyes, shortness of breath,“swimming of the head,” and, not surprisingly, depression.

    The cause of the illness has never beeablished, but the most romantid perhapslikely of the many suggested possibilities is that he suffered from Chagas’s disease, alingering tropical malady that he could have acquired from the bite of a Benchuga bug inSouth America. A more prosaic explanation is that his dition syati eithercase, the misery was not. Often he could work for no more thay mi a stretetimes not that.

    Much of the rest of his time was devoted to a series of increasingly desperate treatments—icy pluhs, dousings in vinegar, draping himself with “electric s” that subjectedhim to small jolts of current. He became something of a hermit, seldom leaving his home i, Down House. One of his first acts upon moving to the house was to erect a mirroroutside his study window so that he could identify, and if necessary avoid, callers.

    Darwi his theory to himself because he well khe storm it would cause. In 1844,the year he locked his notes away, a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creationroused much of the thinking world to fury by suggesting that humans might have evolvedfrom lesser primates without the assistance of a divine creator. Anticipating the outcry, theauthor had taken careful steps to ceal his identity, which he kept a secret from even hisclosest friends for the  forty years. Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author.

    Others suspected Prince Albert. In fact, the author was a successful and generally unassumingScottish publisher named Robert Chambers whose reluce to reveal himself had a practicaldimension as well as a personal one: his firm was a leading publisher of Bibles. Vestiges waswarmly blasted from pulpits throughout Britain and far beyond, but also attracted a good dealof more scholarly ire. The Edinburgh Review devoted nearly aire issue—eighty-fivepages—to pulling it to pieces. Even T. H. Huxley, a believer in evolution, attacked the bookwith some venom, unaware that the author was a friend.

    2Darwin’s manuscript might have remained locked away till his death but for an alarmingblow that arrived from the Far East in the early summer of 1858 in the form of a packettaining a friendly letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallad the draftof a paper, Oendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the inal Type,outlining a theory of natural sele that was unily similar to Darwin’s secret jottings.

    Even some of the phrasing echoed Darwin’s own. “I never saw a more striking ce,”

    Darwin reflected in dismay. “If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, hecould not have made a better short abstract.”

    Wallace didn’t drop into Darwin’s life quite as uedly as is sometimes suggested.

    The two were already corresponding, and Wallace had more than once generously sentDarwin spes that he thought might be of i. In the process of these exgesDarwin had discreetly warned Wallace that he regarded the subject of species creation as hisowory. “This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, onthe question of ho; in what way do species &amp; varieties differ from each other,” he hadwritten to Wallae time earlier. “I am now preparing my work for publication,” headded, even though he wasn’t really.

    In any case, Wallace failed to grasp what Darwin was trying to tell him, and of course hecould have no idea that his own theory was so nearly identical to ohat Darwin had beenevolving, as it were, for two decades.

    Darwin laced in an agonizing quandary. If he rushed into print to preserve his priority,he would be taking advantage of an iip-off from a distant admirer. But if he steppedaside, as gentlemanly duct arguably required, he would lose credit for a theory that he hadindepely propounded. Wallace’s theory was, by Wallace’s own admission, the result of aflash of insight; Darwin’s was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. Itwas all crushingly unfair.

    To pound his misery, Darwin’s you son, also named Charles, had tracted scarletfever and was critically ill. At the height of the crisis, on June 28, the child died. Despite thedistra of his son’s illness, Darwin found time to dash off letters to his friends CharlesLyell and Joseph Hooker,  to step aside but noting that to do so would mean that allhis work, “whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” Lyell and Hooker came up with thepromise solution of presenting a summary of Darwin’s and Wallace’s ideas together. Thevehey settled on was a meeting of the Linnaean Society, which at the time was strugglingto find its way bato fashion as a seat of stific eminence. On July 1, 1858, Darwin’s2Darwin was one of the few to guess correctly. He happeo be visiting Chambers one day when an advancecopy of the sixth edition of Vestiges was delivered. The keenness with which Chambers checked the revisionswas something of a giveaway, though it appears the two men did not discuss it.

    and Wallace’s theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the dayof the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son.

    The Darwin–resentation was one of seven that evening—one of the others was onthe flora of Angola—and if the thirty or so people in the audience had any idea that they werewitnessing the stific highlight of the tury, they showed no sign of it. No discussionfollowed. Nor did the event attract muotice elsewhere. Darwin cheerfully later hatonly one person, a Professor Haughton of Dubliiohe ters in print and hisclusion was “that all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old.”

    Wallace, still in the dista, learned of these maneuverings long after the event, butwas remarkably equable and seemed pleased to have been included at all. He even referred tothe theory forever after as “Darwinism.” Much less ameo Darwin’s claim of prioritywas a Scottish gardener named Patrick Matthew who had, rather remarkably, also e upwith the principles of natural sele—in fact, in the very year that Darwin had set sail intheBeagle. Unfortunately, Mattheublished these views in a book called Naval Timberand Arboriculture, which had been missed not just by Darwin, but by the entire world.

    Matthew kicked up in a lively manner, with a letter to Gardener’s icle, when he sawDarwin gaining credit everywhere for ahat really was his. Darologized withouthesitation, though he did note for the record: “I think that no one will feel surprised thather I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard of Mr. Matthew’s views, sideringhow briefly they are given, and they appeared in the Appendix to a work on Naval Timberand Arboriculture.”

    Wallace tinued for another fifty years as a naturalist and thinker, occasionally a verygood one, but increasingly fell from stific favor by taking up dubious is such asspiritualism and the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe. So the theorybecame, essentially by default, Darwin’s alone.

    Darwin never ceased being tormented by his ideas. He referred to himself as “the Devil’sChaplain” and said that revealing the theory felt “like fessing a murder.” Apart from allelse, he k deeply pained his beloved and pious wife. Even so, he set to work at onceexpanding his manuscript into a book-length work. Provisionally he called it An Abstract ofan Essay on the in of Species and Varieties through Natural Sele —a title so tepidaive that his publisher, John Murray, decided to issue just five hundred copies. Butonce presented with the manuscript, and a slightly more arresting title, Murray resideredand increased the initial print run to 1,250.

    On the in of Species was an immediate ercial success, but rather less of a critie. Darwin’s theory presewo intractable difficulties. It needed far more time than LordKelvin was willing to cede, and it was scarcely supported by fossil evidence. Where,asked Darwin’s more thoughtful critics, were the transitional forms that his theory so clearlycalled for? If new species were tinuously evolving, then there ought to be lots ofintermediate forms scattered across the fossil record, but there were not.

    3In fact, the record asit existed then (and for a long time afterward) showed no life at all right up to the moment ofthe famous Cambrian explosion.

    3By ce, in 1861, at the height of the troversy, just such evideurned up when workers inBavaria found the bones of an a archaeopteryx, a creature halfway between a bird and a dinosaur. (It hadfeathers, but it also had teeth.) It was an impressive and helpful find, and its significe much debated, but asingle discovery could hardly be sidered clusive.

    But now here was Darwin, without any evidence, insisting that the earlier seas must havehad abundant life and that we just hadn’t found it yet because, for whatever reason, it hadn’tbeen preserved. It simply could not be otherwise, Darwin maintained. “The case at presentmust remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views hereeained,” he allowed most didly, but he refused to eain an alternative possibility.

    By way of explanation he speculated—iively but incorrectly—that perhaps thePrecambrian seas had been too clear to lay down sediments and thus had preserved no fossils.

    Even Darwin’s closest friends were troubled by the blitheness of some of his assertions.

    Adam Sedgwick, who had taught Darwin at Cambridge and taken him on a geological tour ofWales in 1831, said the book gave him “more pain than pleasure.” Louis Agassiz dismissed itas poor jecture. Even Lyell cluded gloomily: “Darwioo far.”

    T. H. Huxley disliked Darwin’s insisten huge amounts of geological time because hewas a saltationist, which is to say a believer in the idea that evolutionary ges happen notgradually but suddenly. Saltationists (the word es from the Latin for “leap”) couldn’taccept that plicated ans could ever emerge in slow stages. What good, after all, is oh of a wing or half an eye? Such ans, they thought, only made sense if they appeared ina fiate.

    The belief was surprising in as radical a spirit as Huxley because it closely recalled a veryservative religious notion first put forward by the English theologian William Paley in1802 and known as argument from design. Paley tehat if you found a pocket wat the ground, even if you had never seen such a thing before, you would instantly perceivethat it had been made by an intelligey. So it was, he believed, with nature: itsplexity roof of its design. The notion owerful one in the eenth tury,and it gave Darwin trouble too. “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder,” heaowledged in a letter to a friend. In the in he ceded that it “seems, I freely fess,absurd in the highest possible degree” that natural sele could produce su instrumentin gradual steps.

    Even so, and to the unending exasperation of his supporters, Darwin not only insisted thatall ge was gradual, but in nearly every edition iepped up the amount of timehe supposed necessary to allow evolution tress, which pushed his ideas increasingly ou<var></var>tof favor. “Eventually,” acc to the stist and historian Jeffrey Schwartz, “Darwin lostvirtually all the support that still remained among the ranks of fellow natural historians andgeologists.”

    Ironically, sidering that Darwin called his book On the in of Species, the ohinghe couldn’t explain was how species inated. Darwin’s theory suggested a meism forhoecies might bee stronger or better or faster—in a word, fitter—but gave noindication of how it might throw up a new species. A Scottish engineer, Fleeming Jenkin,sidered the problem and noted an important flaw in Darwin’s argument. Darwin believedthat any beneficial trait that arose in one geion would be passed on to subsequentgeions, thus strengthening the species.

    Jenkin pointed out that a favorable trait in one parent wouldn’t bee dominant insucceeding geions, but in fact would be diluted through blending. If you pour whiskeyinto a tumbler of water, you don’t make the whiskey stronger, you make it weaker. And if youpour that dilute solution into anlass of water, it bees weaker still. In the same way,any favorable trait introduced by one parent would be successively watered down bysubsequent matings until it ceased to be apparent at all. Thus Darwin’s theory was not a recipefor ge, but for stancy. Lucky flukes might arise from time to time, but they wouldsoon vanish uhe general impulse t everything back to a stable mediocrity. Ifnatural sele were to work, some alternative, unsidered meism was required.

    Unknown to Darwin and everyone else, eight hundred miles away in a tranquil er ofMiddle Europe a retiring monk named Gregor Mendel was ing up with the solution.

    Mendel was born in 1822 to a humble farming family in a backwater of the Austrianempire in what is now the Czech Republic. Schoolbooks once portrayed him as a simple butobservant provincial monk whose discoveries were largely serendipitous—the result ofnotig some iing traits of iance while p about with pea plants in themonastery’s kit garden. In fact, Mendel was a trained stist—he had studied physid mathematics at the Olmütz Philosophical Institute and the Uy of Vienna—and hebrought stific disciplio all he did. Moreover, the monastery at Brno where he livedfrom 1843 was known as a learned institution. It had a library of twenty thousand books and atradition of careful stifivestigation.

    Before embarking on his experiments, Mendel spent two years preparing his trolspes, seven varieties of pea, to make sure they bred true. Then, helped by two full-timeassistants, he repeatedly bred and crossbred hybrids from thirty thousand pea plants. It wasdelicate work, requiring them to take the most exag pains to avoid actal cross-fertilization and to note every slight variation in the growth and appearance of seeds, pods,leaves, stems, and flowers. Mendel knew what he was doing.

    He never used the we wasn’t ed until 1913, in an English medicaldiary—though he did ihe terms dominant and recessive. What he established wasthat every seed taiwo “factors” or “elemente,” as he called them—a dominant oneand a recessive one—and these factors, when bined, produced predictable patterns ofiance.

    The results he verted into precise mathematical formulae. Altogether Mendel spe years on the experiments, then firmed his results with similar experiments onflowers, , and other plants. If anything, Mendel was too stifi his approach, forwhen he presented his findings at the February and March meetings of the Natural HistorySociety of Brno in 1865, the audience of about forty listened politely but was spicuouslyunmoved, even though the breeding of plants was a matter of great practical io manyof the members.

    When Mendel’s report ublished, he eagerly sent a copy to the great Swiss botanistKarl-Wilhelm von N?geli, whose support was more or less vital for the theory’s prospects.

    Unfortunately, N?geli failed to perceive the importance of what Mendel had found. Hesuggested that Mery breeding hawkweed. Mendel obediently did as N?geli suggested,but quickly realized that hawkweed had none of the requisite features for studyiability.

    It was evident to him that N?geli had not read the paper closely, or possibly at all. Frustrated,Mendel retired from iigatiability and spent the rest of his life growingoutstandiables and studying bees, mice, and sunspots, among much else. Eventuallyhe was made abbot.

    Mendel’s findings weren’t quite as widely ignored as is sometimes suggested. His studyreceived a glowiry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica —then a more leading record ofstific thought than now—and was cited repeatedly in an important paper by the GermanWilhelm Olbers Focke. Indeed, it was because Mendel’s ideas never entirely sank below thewaterline of stific thought that they were so easily recovered when the world was readyfor them.

    Together, without realizing it, Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of lifesces iweh tury. Darwin saw that all living things are ected, thatultimately they “trace their ary to a single, on source,” while Mendel’s workprovided the meism to explain how that could happen. The two men could easily havehelped each other. Mendel owned a Germaion of the in of Species, which he isknown to have read, so he must have realized the applicability of his work to Darwin’s, yet heappears to have made no effort to get in touch. And Darwin for his part is known to havestudied Focke’s iial paper with its repeated refereo Mendel’s work, but didn’tect them to his own studies.

    The ohing everyohinks featured in Darwin’s argument, that humans are desdedfrom apes, didn’t feature at all except as one passing allusion. Even so, it took no great leap ofimagination to see the implications for human development in Darwin’s theories, and itbecame an immediate talking point.

    The showdown came on Saturday, June 30, 1860, at a meeting of the British Associationfor the Adva of S Oxford. Huxley had been urged to attend by RobertChambers, author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, though he was still unawareof Chambers’s e to that tentious tome. Darwin, as ever, was absent. The meetingwas held at the Oxford Zoological Museum. More than a thousand people crowded into thechamber; hundreds more were turned aeople khat something big was going tohappen, though they had first to wait while a slumber-indug speaker named John WilliamDraper of New York Uy bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductoryremarks on “The Intellectual Development of Europe sidered with Refereo the Viewsof Mr. Darwin.”

    Finally, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to speak. Wilberforce had beenbriefed (or so it is generally assumed) by the ardent anti-Darwinian Richard Owen, who hadbeen a guest in his home the night before. As nearly always with events that end in uproar,ats vary widely on what exactly transpired. In the most popular version, Wilberforce,when properly in flow, turo Huxley with a dry smile and demanded of him whether heclaimed attat to the apes by way of his grandmother randfather. The remark wasdoubtless intended as a quip, but it came across as an icy challenge. Acc to his ownat, Huxley turo his neighbor and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into myhands,” then rose with a certain relish.

    Others, however, recalled a Huxley trembling with fury and indignation. At all events,Huxley declared that he would rather claim kinship to ahan to someone who used hisemio propound uninformed twaddle in what was supposed to be a serious stifi. Such a riposte was a sdalous impertinence, as well as an insult to Wilberforce’soffice, and the proceedings instantly collapsed in tumult. A Lady Brewster fainted. RobertFitzRoy, Darwin’s panion on the Beagle twenty-five years before, wahrough thehall with a Bible held aloft, shouting, “The Book, the Book.” (He was at the fereopresent a paper on storms in his capacity as head of the newly created MeteicalDepartment.) Iingly, each side afterward claimed to have routed the other.

    Darwin did eventually make his belief in our kinship with the apes explicit in The Desan in 1871. The clusion was a bold one sihing in the fossil record supportedsuch a notion. The only known early human remains of that time were the famous Neaalbones from Germany and a few uain fragments of jawbones, and many respectedauthorities refused to believe even in their antiquity. The Dest of Man was altogether amore troversial book, but by the time of its appearahe world had grown less excitableand its arguments caused much less of a stir.

    For the most part, however, Darwin passed his twilight years with other projects, most ofwhich touched only taially oions of natural sele. He spent amazingly longperiods pig through bird droppings, scrutinizing the tents in an attempt to uandhow seeds spread between tis, and spent years more studying the behavior of worms.

    One of his experiments was to play the piano to them, not to amuse them but to study theeffects on them of sound and vibration. He was the first to realize how vitally importantworms are to soil fertility. “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals whichhave played so important a part in the history of the world,” he wrote in his masterwork on thesubject, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the A of Worms (1881), which wasactually more popular thanOn the in of Species had ever been. Among his other bookswere On the Various trivances by Which British and Fn Orchids Are Fertilised byIs (1862), Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which sold almost5,300 copies on its first day, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the VegetableKingdom (1876)—a subject that came improbably close to Mendel’s own work, withoutattaining anything like the same insights—and his last book, The Power of Movement inPlants. Finally, but not least, he devoted much effort to studying the sequences ofinbreeding—a matter of private io him. Having married his own cousin, Darwinglumly suspected that certain physical aal frailties among his children arose from alack of diversity in his family tree.

    Darwin was often honored in his lifetime, but never for On the in of Species orDesan. When the Royal Society bestowed on him the prestigious Copley Medal it was for hisgeology, zoology, and botany, not evolutionary theories, and the Linnaean Society wassimilarly pleased to honor Darwin without embrag his radiotions. He was neverknighted, though he was buried iminster Abbey—o on. He died at Down inApril 1882. Mendel died two years later.

    Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptail the 1930s and 1940s, withthe advance of a refiheory called, with a certain hauteur, the Modern Synthesis,bining Darwin’s ideas with those of Mendel and others. For Mendel, appreciation wasalso posthumous, though it came somewhat sooner. In 1900, three stists wseparately in Europe rediscovered Mendel’s work more or <cite>..</cite>less simultaneously. It was onlybecause one of them, a Dut named Hugo de Vries, seemed set to claim Mendel’sinsights as his own that a rival made it noisily clear that the credit really lay with the fottenmonk.

    The world was almost ready, but not quite, to begin to uand how we got here—howwe made each other. It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twehtury, and for some years beyond, the best stifids in the world couldn’t actuallytell you where babies came from.

    And these, you may recall, were men who thought sce was nearly at an end.

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