Seeds of Hierarchy 193
unity (Sulloway, 1982b; Gould, 1985c). Darwin had been informed that the
tortoises differed from island to island, but had failed to appreciate the significance
of this claim. Naturalists then believed, falsely, that the Galapagos tortoises were
not indigenous but had been transported in recent memory by Spanish buccaneers
and placed on the Galapagos as a source of food for revictualizing ships. Thus,
Darwin must have reasoned, if the tortoises had only been on the Galapagos for
two or three centuries, differences among islands could not be consistent or
meaningful. The Beagle had provisioned itself with several tortoises, stored live in
the hold as meat on the hoof, so to speak. In a modern version of fiddling while
Rome burned, Darwin partook of the feasts but made no plea for conservation
when his shipmates then pitched the carapaces overboard.
Darwin became an evolutionist by returning to England and immersing
himself in the scientific culture of London—by arguing with colleagues, by
reading and pondering (mostly in the library of the Atheneum Club), by seeking
good advice (learning from ornithologist John Gould, for example, that those
diverse Galapagos birds were all finches). He exploited a broad range of
humanistic Western culture in pursuing his struggle for intellectual reform in
natural history. He read Plato, Milton, and Wordsworth. He constructed the theory
of natural selection, as argued in the last chapter, in conscious analogy with the
laissez-faire theories of Adam Smith and the Scottish economic school. Darwin,
without the impetus and challenge of this intellectual environment, might have
become a country parson, with a beetle collection maintained by an ecclesiastical
sinecure as the remnant of a childhood passion for natural history.
In this enlarged perspective on the origin of Darwin's evolutionary views, the
importance of his precursors becomes greatly enhanced. Lamarck and Chambers*
do not figure as irrelevancies to be ignored, or (even worse) as impediments
*Darwin, in distancing himself from precursors as he formulated and refined his own
theory in the years before 1859, usually drew a primary contrast with Lamarck. But he
sometimes added the anonymous author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(written by the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers in 1844, though his authorship did not
become officially known until the last edition of 1884, two years after Darwin's death),
pairing "Mr. Vestiges" with Lamarck as the entirety of a background to be rejected with
vigor on the old principle that the enemy within can be more distressing than the enemy
without. Darwin wrote to Hooker in an undated letter between 1849 and 1853: "Lamarck ...
in his absurd though clever work has done the subject harm, as has Mr. Vestiges." Darwin
then adds, with his endearing capacity for self-deprecation: "... and, as (some future naturalist
attempting the same speculations will perhaps say) has Mr. D.. ." (in F. Darwin, 1887, vol.
2, p. 39).
The publication of the Vestiges in 1844 unleashed a firestorm of criticism from all sides.
"From the bottom of my soul," wrote the dour creationist (and Darwin's teacher in geology)
Adam Sedgwick, "I loathe and detest the Vestiges." Following the prejudices of his age,
Sedgwick conjectured that a woman must have written anything so stupid. But serious
evolutionists also took offense at Chambers's rank amateur ignorance of natural history, and
at the purely speculative character of his assertions (including the claim that birds evolved to
mammals in two steps via the intermediary of a duck-billed platypus). Nonetheless, Vestiges
became a succes de scandale, going through 12 editions in 40 years,