Darwin Charles - Darwin: portrait of a genius

Paul Johnson

DARWIN

Portrait of
a Genius

VIKING

ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON

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VIKING

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First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Paul Johnson, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Johnson, Paul.

Darwin : portrait of a genius / Paul Johnson.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-101-60115-0

1. Darwin, Charles, 18091882. 2. NaturalistsEnglandBiography. I. Title.

QH31.D2J64 2012

576.8'2092dc23

[B]

2012003433

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

To my grandson Ralph

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

A Heritage of Genius,
and Its Shadow

CHAPTER TWO

Education and
Self-Education of a Scientist

CHAPTER THREE

The Loss of God

CHAPTER FOUR

The Making of a Masterpiece

CHAPTER FIVE

Among the Apes and Angels

CHAPTER SIX

How the Great Botanist Missed an Opportunity

CHAPTER SEVEN

Evils of Social Darwinism

CHAPTER EIGHT

Triumph and the Reversal

of Natural Selection

A ll his life, Charles Darwin believed that inheritance was much more important in shaping a man or woman than education or environment. Nature rather than nurture was formative, in his view. Though he knew nothing of the science of genetics, and never used the word gene, which is first recorded in English in 1911, more than a quarter-century after his death, he is a classic case of genetic inheritance. Indeed, two of his grandparents and his father can reasonably be classified as geniuses.

His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (17311802) came from an old family of modest landowners. After Cambridge, he trained as a doctor in Edinburgh, and then practiced in Litchfield, Dr. Johnsons town (they did not get on). He was successful and had many patients, easily earning 1,000 a year, a handsome income then. News of his skill reached the ears of George III, who invited him to come to London as the royal doctor. But Dr. Darwin declined. The Hanoverian royals were slow at paying their doctors. In any case, Darwin was happy as he was, combining a busy provincial practice with poetry and science. The symbol of this dualism was his coach, which he designed himself. It was fitted up with a writing desk, a skylight, and a portion of his library, so that he could carry on his intellectual pursuits while going on his daily round of professional calls.

His mind was large, noble, and omnivorous. He was interested in every aspect of science, both theoretical and empirical. He had a maxim: Any man who never conducts an experiment is a fool. He read widely, in French as well as English, and two of his favorite authors were Buffon and Lamarck, both early exponents of the theory of evolution. He met and corresponded with Rousseau. He attended regular discussion groups with early industrialists and inventors, such as Watt and Boulton. His chief passions, however, were botany and animal life. As he prospered, he bought a plot of land and planted an eight-acre experimental garden. He wrote and published a two-part didactic poem, The Botanic Garden, covering The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants. It was highly successful, much praised by the fastidious Horace Walpole, and translated into French, Italian, and Portuguese. He expanded the lore of his poem in a prose work, Phytologia; or, The Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1799), which contains much speculation about the generative life of plants.

However, it is his treatise Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (179496), that best illustrates his imaginative genius. In it he assumed an enormous time span for the earth, a whole generation before Lyalls geological researches established it, and speculated accurately on the successive phases of life that emerged and on its essential unity. He wrote: As the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals, and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life? This was an extraordinarily perceptive question to ask in 1794, and the use of the term