Darwin's Island Read Free Page A

simple pill.
    Later in life, in part because of his health, the paterfamilias of Down House spent longer and longer periods without leaving home. He fed his household with fifty-three distinct varieties of gooseberries and three of cabbage. In his garden he carried out many experiments, helped by William Brooke, his ‘gloomy gardener’ (who was seen to laugh just once, when a boomerang broke a cucumber frame). The naturalist’s tale ends, in the tradition of the classics, with the hero’s death and his desire to join his beloved earthworms in the ‘sweetest place on Earth’, the village churchyard at Downe - a wish frustrated by fame, the establishment and the Abbey.
    Darwin’s Island retraces some of Darwin’s steps and moves his discoveries forward by a century and more. It will, I hope, help bring his less well-known work into the third millennium. Several people have helped in the preparation of this book. David Leibel, Michael Morgan, Kay Taylor and Anna Trench made helpful comments on parts of it. I thank them for their help.
    Three of my earlier volumes - on coral reefs, on the nature of maleness and on the theory of evolution itself - pay homage to the founder of the science of life, and each is an attempt to update his ideas for the modern age. There could be no better way to honour the most famous of all biologists at this time of concentrated attention on his history than to give his less celebrated works the exposure they deserve. For Charles Darwin, the five Beagle years that became part of Britain’s intellectual legacy led to four decades of intense labour within the confines of his native land. In that modest group of islands he underwent a second great voyage: not of the body but of the mind. This book traces that journey from its beginning to its end.

CHAPTER I
    THE QUEEN’S ORANG-UTAN

    In 1842 Queen Victoria went to London Zoo. She was less than amused: ‘The Orang Outang is too wonderful . . . he is frightfully, and painfully, and disagreeably human.’ The animal was not a male but a female called Jenny and Charles Darwin had, some years earlier, visited its mother. He too spotted the resemblance between the apes on either side of the bars. The young biologist scribbled in his notebook that ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.’ Seventeen years after Victoria’s visit, in 1859, he published the theory that proved the Queen’s kinship, and his own, to Jenny, to every inmate of the Zoological Gardens and to all the inhabitants of the Earth.
    The Origin of Species caused uproar among the Empress of India’s subjects. Her Chancellor, Benjamin Disraeli, asked famously: ‘Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new fangled theories.’ Many of his fellow citizens agreed. Even so, the notion at once entered public discourse (and Punch devoted its 1861 Christmas annual to gorilla-like humans and their opposites). In time, and with some reluctance, the notion that every Briton, high or low, shared descent with the rest of the world was accepted. A quarter of a century on, W. S. Gilbert penned the deathless line that ‘Darwinian man, though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved’ and the idea of Homo sapiens as a depilated ape became part of popular culture, where it belongs. Victoria herself congratulated one of her daughters, the crown princess of Prussia, for turning to The Origin : ‘How many interesting, difficult books you read. It would and will please beloved Papa.’
    As the Queen had noticed, the physical similarity of men to apes is clear. In 1859, Charles Darwin came up with the reason why. A certain caution was needed to promote the idea that what had made animals had also produced men and women, and he waited for twelve years before he expanded on the subject. The Descent of Man describes how - and why - Homo