24 The New York Review
only began to ponder species and vari-
eties in a new way. He went home with-
out a theory. The moral, for Hennessy,
seems to be: If you think the Galápagos
tortoises are so inviolable and precious,
be aware that Darwin didn’t, and that
the notion of his great epiphany having
occurred here is a myth.
By the early twentieth century, she
writes, the sailors and settlers and hun-
gry scientists had accounted for the
deaths of some 200,000 giant tortoises,
eliminating the populations on three is-
lands and devastating the others. “The
remaining tortoises are ‘living fos-
sils,’” she asserts, “remnants of a pre-
historic world when giant reptiles and
other megafauna roamed the Earth.”
This seems to imply that Galápagos
tortoises date back to the time of the
dinosaurs (which weren’t reptiles),
an impression that’s wrong on several
counts. Land tortoises of any sort first
appeared about 10 million years after
the last dinosaurs died, and those na-
tive to the Galápagos are probably
much younger. Hennessy must know
that, but she portrays them as very an-
cient, or perceived as very ancient by
those who dote upon them, in order to
argue that saving them is a dreamy act
of nostalgia.
The fulcrum of Hennessy’s quarrel
with Galápagos conservation efforts is
that their avowed purpose is to create
an “evolutionary Eden,” a sort of “nat-
ural laboratory,” pristine and devoid
of people, in which the tortoises can
be bell-jarred as priceless biological
antiques. She harps on the wrongness
of the “evolutionary Eden” metaphor,
noting that it’s not only a f utile goal and
unfair to the interests of humans on the
islands (especially those engaged in
any form of livelihood besides scientific
research and tourism), but also contra-
dictory, given that conservationists,
in trying to preserve the place and its
biota in some ideal, primordial form,
are ignoring Darwin’s lessons that
life is about evolution and evolution is
about change.
She notes rightly that conflicts about
wildlife “are not just about wildlife.”
They also involve “the validity of deep-
seated questions about identity, belong-
ing, and access to resources.” Again,
true and important. But the “Edenic
science” she criticizes is largely a straw
man, supported in her book by some
well-selected statements by Galápagos
popularizers speaking loosely about
“Eden” and a land “where time stood
still”—statements that look silly nowa-
days but don’t define what’s at issue and
are not, in my view, representative.
Although Hennessy knocks the straw
man over, she doesn’t prove the illegit-
imacy of conservation biology. Most
people and organizations involved in
it are not arguing for the preservation
of some “evolutionary Eden.” They’re
saying: Let’s protect biological diver-
sity wherever possible, including on
islands, where evolutionary change has
produced unique creatures—creatures
of the present, such as giant tortoises,
giant prickly pear cacti, flightless cor-
morants, seagoing iguanas—that are
precious beyond any practical measure.
And biological diversity is not a subjec-
tive matter. It can be measured. It can
even be counted.
Bill Jenkins’s Evolution Before Dar-
win traces the development of ideas
about evolution (or, as it was then
called, transmutation or transformism)
among certain scientists and teachers
in Edinburgh during the first three
decades of the nineteenth century.
That’s an important place and period
in scientific history, only partly because
Darwin attended the University of Ed-
inburgh as a medical student from 1825
to 1827 (he detested it, quit, then ended
up at Cambridge doing more general
studies, which didn’t involve dissecting
corpses), and was exposed to some of
those transformist thinkers. “Out of
the ferment of ideas that were current
in Edinburgh in the 1820s and 1830s,”
Jenkins writes, “came the building
blocks” of Darwin’s later evolutionary
theory. But did the young Darwin ac-
quire those blocks directly from teach-
ers he met in Edinburgh—despite his
later claim not to have—or did he mix,
mold, and fire his own from raw materi-
als found elsewhere? And if Edinburgh
voices gave him his start in transform-
ist thought, why did he choose to deny
it afterward?
Jenkins’s book on the evolutionary
ferment in Edinburgh hangs implicitly
on one teacher–student relationship:
that between Charles Darwin, an im-
pressionable seventeen-year-old, and
Robert Grant, thirty-three, a lecturer
on invertebrate animals at one of the
private anatomy schools that func-
tioned as supplements to the universi-
ty’s medical program. Darwin probably
met Grant through a natural history
society of which both were members
and became a sort of protégé to him
in marine zoology (as Darwin himself
described fifty years later in his auto-
biography). Grant was brilliant, mer-
curial, educated partly in Paris under
the great anatomists Georges Cuvier
and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,
and radical both in his scientific and
his religious views. He believed in
transformism, though without a clear
theory of how it worked, and among
his main influences were the writings
of Jean- Baptiste Lamarck, still alive
then in Paris, and the eclectic En-
glish physician, poet, and philosopher
Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s long-dead
grandfather, who had published a
book containing inchoate transformist
speculation.
Sometime during their shared days
in Edinburgh, Grant vented to Darwin
his enthusiasm for Lamarck’s ideas.
Darwin recalled in his autobiography
that he had “listened in silent astonish-
ment, and as far as I can judge, without
any effect on my mind.” Yes, the seed
of Lamarckian transformism may have
been tossed onto the moist soil of my
teenage brain, Darwin was saying, but
it never sprouted. Jenkins suggests that
this was disingenuous, and that old
Charles had reasons for harrumphing
away what young Charles may have ab-
sorbed in Edinburgh.
The central figure in Jenkins’s story
is neither Darwin nor Grant but Rob-
ert Jameson, Regius Professor of Nat-
ural History at the university for half
a century, one of the leading geologists
in Britain, and editor of the Edinburgh
New Philosophical Journal, which
during the 1820s and 1830s published
some daring articles with transformist
insinuations by Grant, Robert Knox,
Ami Boué, and other young men of
their freethinking Edinburgh circle.
Jameson came off poorly in Darwin’s
later recollection as “that old, brown
dry stick Jameson” whose lectures
were “incredibly dull” and repelledhim from geology (though at Cam-
bridge, geology would become his first
scientific love).
Other testimony is kinder to
Jameson, and Jenkins shows that he
used his considerable influence “to
promote the careers of some of the
most radical thinkers of their genera-
tion,” including Grant and Knox. Like
his friend Grant, Knox had studied in
Paris under Geoffroy, becoming en-
amored of his “doctrines of transcen-
dental anatomy and unity of plan,” as
Jenkins calls them, which were one
big step toward evolutionary think-
ing. Back in Edinburgh and running
the private anatomy school where he
and Grant taught, Knox was a colorful
figure, blind in one eye, pockmarked,
given to frilly clothes and jewelry, and
by contemporary accounts a riveting
lecturer.
We can imagine it was a lively milieu,
at least for those brief two decades,
with the spirit of David Hume still alive
in the city and the radical French ideas
coming back across the Channel in the
heads of young Scotsmen. Grant was
the only one of them to publish overtly
transformist papers under his own
name in Jameson’s journal, but others
(including probably Jameson himself)
wrote anonymously about the progres-
sion of life forms presented in the fossil
record, teasing at what that must mean.
Jenkins concludes that a significant
portion of the ideas about nature that
“formed the underpinnings” of Dar-
win’s theory “were present in the Edin-
burgh of the late 1820s, being discussed
and debated by his friends, teachers
and fellow students.”If so, why did Darwin prefer to for-
get or deny it? Jenkins’s explanation
is plausible: Darwin at middle age was
very concerned to present himself as an
inductive thinker in the spirit of Fran-
cis Bacon, whom he quoted in an ep-
igram to On the Origin of Species, or
of John Herschel, whose 1830 book on
scientific method, A Preliminary Dis-
course on the Study of Natural Philos-
ophy, had made a huge impression on
him in his Cambridge days. When he
published his own big book (The Ori-
gin) in 1859, after twenty-one years of
secretly nurturing his theory and gath-
ering data to support it, he knew that
he would face a cyclone of criticism.
Some of that reflected sheer religious
defensiveness, and some came from
the scientific community, challenging
his credentials (he had virtually none;
he was just a wealthy man, with no
professorship anywhere, working out
of his home study), his epistemological
methods, and his conclusions. Was he
just another dizzy theorist, spinning
out wild notions without any ground-
ing in fact? No, just the opposite, Dar-
win insisted. He had “worked on true
Baconian principles, and without any
theory collected facts on a wholesale
scale.” That collecting had begun in
January 1832 on St. Jago of the Cape
Verde Islands, where the Beagle made
its first landfall after leaving England,
and continued throughout the voy-
age and afterward. The theory arose
from the data gathered (in the Galápa-
gos and from many other sources);
the data-gathering was not, at least
in the early phase, driven by the
theory.
That was his story, largely true but of
course oversimplified. And there wasno place in it for the sort of wild spec-
ulations that had buzzed around his
head in Edinburgh. Darwin was always
a brilliant plodder, moving through in-
tellectual terrain like a giant tortoise
on the run, and that’s how he desired
to be seen.
He never liked public argument or
disputation. Stressful interactions with
other people made him literally sick to
his stomach, part of a mysterious pat-
tern of physical ailment that affected
him intermittently throughout much
of his adult life. He vomited often. He
took quackish water cures. And then,
after The Origin appeared, after the
controversy it provoked, after Thomas
Huxley and others defended him like
paladins for a reclusive prince, after
he published The Descent of Man,
and Selection in Relation to Sex in
1871, taking his theory of evolution
one step closer to the touchy matter
of human origins, and after that book
was fiercely attacked, he seems to have
felt a bit beaten up. His old colleague
Wallace, with whom codiscovery of
the evolution theory had led to friend-
ship, wrote him that summer, “I am
very sorry you are so unwell, & that
you allow criticisms to worry you so.”
Darwin had slightly more than a de-
cade to live.
But there were more books in him,
and they were mainly about plants. He
had already published the orchid book
and another about climbing plants.
Now he shifted entirely to botanical
projects for a stretch of five years, as
recounted by Thompson: insectivorous
plants, the effects of self-fertilization
versus cross-fertilization, the differ-
ent forms of flowers that can appear
on plants of the same species—some
intriguing topics and some numbingly
dull ones. How many readers could get
excited by the fact that a single prim-
rose plant can produce two kinds of
flowers, virtually identical but one with
a long style (the stalk that channels pol-
len tubes to the ovary) and one with a
short style? How many critics would be
incited to contest hotly the explanation
for such a phenomenon? The answer is
essentially none, and I suspect that’s a
clue to understanding Darwin’s final
years. I’ve long cherished a pet theory
that he turned to these arcane botan-
ical studies—producing more than
one book that was solidly empirical,
discreetly evolutionary, yet a “horrid
bore”—at least partly so that the clam-
orous controversialists, fighting about
apes and angels and souls, would leave
him the hell alone.
By the time he died, painfully but
with quiet dignity, of heart disease on
April 19, 1882, he had lived seventy-
three years and written more than a
dozen books. Some of those books are
easily ignored or forgotten. Some (the
Beagle journal, the little volume on
earthworms and their role in creating
soil) are fun and charming. Some grind
along through important stuff. One
of them flows briskly and changed the
world. Sadly, not enough people read
On the Origin of Species today—even
graduate students in evolutionary bi-
ology don’t all read it—but no one
escapes its meaning and its implica-
tions. It was a brilliant start toward
understanding how life works, how the
wonders of diversity and complexity
and adaptation have come to be, and
we’ll need plenty more good books
before we fully comprehend where it
leads. Q