Happy birthday, Charles

If you took more than a glance at this month's header for Standing On The Shoulders Of Giant Midgets, you noticed that this year marks the Darwin bicentennial: on this date, in 1809, Charles Robert Darwin entered into the world. As did Abraham Lincoln, as I'm sure many of you already know.

I like Lincoln a helluva lot, but you know, I love Darwin. Maybe it's the fact Darwin never had a chance to suspend habeas corpus. Maybe it's that part of me that never quit being a science nerd even after I realized I didn't like and really couldn't hack math well enough to be more than a science fanboy. Part of it, I have no doubt, is that Darwin represents a classical scientific ideal: while much of the popular imagination has Darwin looking at a finch and having a "Eureka!" moment, the truth is that Darwin spent decades mustering data, testing hypotheses, and considering alternatives before publishing The Origin Of Species (the conventional wisdom that Darwin was shy or afraid of fundamentalist backlash is only partially correct--Darwin also wanted to make sure he was right before he publicly committed himself). Another element of my admiration, too, I think, is that Darwin was (from all accounts) a gentle, shy man who adored his children and abandoned medicine because he couldn't stand the sight of suffering,¹ a man who felt a deep and lifelong sense of empathy that made him a staunch abolitionist.²

This will seem like silly hero worship, but I will write it anyway: Darwin, in short, was a gentle, compassionate, logical, patient, thorough, diligent, philosophical man. He had faults, to be sure, but the list of his qualities are qualities I admire in any person and frequently wish I could emulate more often.³

All of this goes beyond the fact that Darwin was essentially right, though I have to admit it's hard to tell how far beyond. Would Darwin's essential goodness as a person (which is hardly unique, after all--there are many good people in the history of the world, believe it or not) be as significant if it weren't combined with his importance to science? He might have been an unusually kind Victorian father or on the right side of history in the matter of slavery or a decent, gentle man respected by his peers--but would anyone care if he'd been mundane in his professional achievements, if he hadn't set the world on its collective ear with natural selection? I don't know the answer to that, I suppose. History records those who impacted it, not merely those who were kind or noble in spirit. But I suppose you can also take it the other way, too: far too few of our heroes, when you peer in closely, can survive the scrutiny--Darwin, I think, does remarkably well under the magnifying glass.

I wonder if I should stop here or go on about the science; I think I will stop, because this month--two hundred years since Darwin was born--will see plenty of articles and essays and blog posts and books and television shows and whatever about the science, and most of it will be produced by people far smarter than I am who have spent far more time than I could ever hope to working on the intricate problems⁴ that remain in biology. So I'll leave the science to others, and on Darwin's two-hundredth birthday I'll speak to what I know of his character as it has been passed down to others, and hopefully add something to the collective worldwide celebration of not merely his accomplishments, but his life.

Happy Darwin Day.

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¹These things go together in my mind because one of my favorite anecdotes about Darwin is that his children were afraid to go to him when they cut themselves because how upset he'd get seeing them hurt. In his The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Darwin's son Francis reproduced this letter from one of his sisters (which I started to excerpt, but it's worth reading in full; the mention of how he had trouble giving his kids sticking-plaster for their cuts is in the fourth paragraph):

My first remembrances of my father are of the delights of his playing with us. He was passionately attached to his own children, although he was not an indiscriminate child-lover. To all of us he was the most delightful play-fellow, and the most perfect sympathiser. Indeed it is impossible adequately to describe how delightful a relation his was to his family, whether as children or in their later life.

It is a proof of the terms on which we were, and also of how much he was valued as a play-fellow, that one of his sons when about four years old tried to bribe him with sixpence to come and play in working hours. We all knew the sacredness of working-time, but that any one should resist sixpence seemed an impossibility.

He must have been the most patient and delightful of nurses. I remember the haven of peace and comfort it seemed to me when I was unwell, to be tucked up on the study sofa, idly considering the old geological map hung on the wall. This must have been in his working hours, for I always picture him sitting in the horsehair arm-chair by the corner of the fire.

Another mark of his unbounded patience was the way in which we were suffered to make raids into the study when we had an absolute need of sticking-plaster, string, pins, scissors, stamps, foot-rule, or hammer. These and other such necessaries were always to be found in the study, and it was the only place where this was a certainty. We used to feel it wrong to go in during work-time; still, when the necessity was great we did so. I remember his patient look when he said once, "Don't you think you could not come in again, I have been interrupted very often." We used to dread going in for sticking-plaster, because he disliked to see that we had cut ourselves, both for our sakes and on account of his acute sensitiveness to the sight of blood. I well remember lurking about the passage till he was safe away, and then stealing in for the plaster.

Life seems to me, as I look back upon it, to have been very regular in those early days, and except relations (and a few intimate friends), I do not think any one came to the house. After lessons, we were always free to go where we would, and that was chiefly in the drawing-room and about the garden, so that we were very much with both my father and mother. We used to think it most delightful when he told us any stories about the "Beagle", or about early Shrewsbury days--little bits about school-life and his boyish tastes. Sometimes too he read aloud to his children such books as Scott's novels, and I remember a few little lectures on the steam-engine.

I was more or less ill during the five years between my thirteenth and eighteenth years, and for a long time (years it seems to me) he used to play a couple of games of backgammon with me every afternoon. He played them with the greatest spirit, and I remember we used at one time to keep account of the games, and as this record came out in favour of him, we kept a list of the doublets thrown by each, as I was convinced that he threw better than myself.

His patience and sympathy were boundless during this weary illness, and sometimes when most miserable I felt his sympathy to be almost too keen. When at my worst, we went to my aunt's house at Hartfield, in Sussex, and as soon as we had made the move safely he went on to Moor Park for a fortnight's water-cure. I can recall now how on his return I could hardly bear to have him in the room, the expression of tender sympathy and emotion in his face was too agitating, coming fresh upon me after his little absence.

He cared for all our pursuits and interests, and lived our lives with us in a way that very few fathers do. But I am certain that none of us felt that this intimacy interfered the least with our respect or obedience. Whatever he said was absolute truth and law to us. He always put his whole mind into answering any of our questions. One trifling instance makes me feel how he cared for what we cared for. He had no special taste for cats, though he admired the pretty ways of a kitten. But yet he knew and remembered the individualities of my many cats, and would talk about the habits and characters of the more remarkable ones years after they had died.

Another characteristic of his treatment of his children was his respect for their liberty, and for their personality. Even as quite a girl, I remember rejoicing in this sense of freedom. Our father and mother would not even wish to know what we were doing or thinking unless we wished to tell. He always made us feel that we were each of us creatures whose opinions and thoughts were valuable to him, so that whatever there was best in us came out in the sunshine of his presence.

I do not think his exaggerated sense of our good qualities, intellectual or moral, made us conceited, as might perhaps have been expected, but rather more humble and grateful to him. The reason being no doubt that the influence of his character, of his sincerity and greatness of nature, had a much deeper and more lasting effect than any small exaltation which his praises or admiration may have caused to our vanity.

The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I,
Francis Darwin, ed., 57-58 (1887).

²While I'm pleased to see Darwin's views on slavery given publicity--particularly given some of the recent grotesque attempts by creationists to characterize Darwin as a racist or to hold him somehow responsible for Nazism--Darwin's views on slavery and his shock at what he saw practiced in the New World while on the Beagle is hardly a new discovery and has to be well-known to anyone who's read even one decent biography of the man.

Nonetheless, if Messrs. Desmond and Moore can help repudiate some of the slanders that continue to be leveled against the great naturalist and it makes the newspapers, it's all to the good.

³I'm afraid that since I'm not as good a man as Darwin was, I also get a great deal of joy out of watching his bulldog bite.

⁴In science, if you don't already know, problems are a good thing. They're things to be worked on, things that make us wiser in the ways of the universe. There aren't any problems in astrology or alchemy--those are dead fields and there are no problems because there is nothing left to be solved, they are intellectual dead-ends unworthy of inquiry. The day there is nothing left to learn is the day the mind ceases to exist.