Where Australia Collides with Asia The epic voyages of Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and the origin

Where Australia Collides with Asia

And then it continues:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them, high or lowly,

And ordered their estate.

In January 1844, Darwin felt the need to share his big idea with somebody. He
took the important step of writing to the twenty-six-year-old botanist Joseph Hooker,
who had previously sailed as the naturalist on a voyage to the southern continents and
Antarctica. He was a friend and colleague whom he could trust to secrecy:

I have been now ever since my return engaged in very presumptuous work ... I was so

struck with the distribution of the Galapagos organisms ... and with the character of the

fossil American mammifers ... that I determined to collect blindly every sort of fact, which

could bear in any way on what are species ... At last gleams of hope have come, and I am

almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is

like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from the Lamarck nonsense of

a ‘tendency to progression’, ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’ etc. But the

conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his. Though the means of change

are wholly so. I think I have found out (here’s the presumption!) the simple way by which

species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. You will now groan, and think to

yourself, ‘On what a man I have been wasting my time and writing to’. I should, five years

ago have thought so.

Except for sharing his ideas with Joseph Hooker, Darwin decided to keep his work
secret. The idea of the transmutation of species was an anathema to most respectable
scientists and heresy to conservative Christian England. Darwin’s wife Emma and all
his family and friends were conservative Christians and his idea would be in his own
words ‘like confessing to a murder’ and not just any murder. This was the murder of
the belief in God as the Creator.
Darwin himself had slowly lost his faith. Emma and their children regularly
attended Sunday service at the church which was just a short walk from their house.
Darwin would accompany the family there but then continue his walk or return home
before the service commenced, and as he later tried to explain:

Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed

at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an

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