JANET BROWNE: Thank you
very much for coming.
It's a real pleasure for all
of us to be here, I hope.
It's very nice to see
so many distinguished
scholars and so many friends.
And Liz has made this evening
of celebration possible,
so I should make a special
remark of thanks to her.
While Liz mentioned that the
students have been working
fabulously well all today
with a very large number
of Darwinian events, and
they're due to conclude about 9
o'clock tonight, when the
final paragraphs of The Origin
of Species will be read.
They began at about 10
o'clock this morning,
so they've been
working hard at it.
It's not the same
ones, but there's
been a lot going
through the book.
And like all Harvard
students, they've
being fabulously inventive.
You may have seen a
gorilla in the yard today.
[LAUGHTER]
We had one in class.
[LAUGHTER]
You may have had a photo
opportunity with three Mister
Darwins.
[LAUGHTER]
And for us tonight,
there's a special resonance
in meeting in this historic
museum, the temple to Nature's
laws that Louis Agassiz
founded in 1859, the same year
that Darwin published
his famous book.
Agassiz never accepted Darwin's
proposals, as you know.
But my goodness, he knew how to
make a natural history museum.
[LAUGHTER]
The first of its kind
in the United States,
and very remarkable
for representing
the animals of the
world room by room,
as if they were in
their native regions.
It's a historic place of
which we're very proud.
And for me, it's a
real privilege to be.
This image, taken in the
1970s-- black and white photo,
as you can see-- purports
to show Darwin's ghost.
[LAUGHTER]
It's taken at midnight
with an infrared camera
by a very reputable
ghost photographer.
[LAUGHTER]
And the house and garden
are not Darwin's, but they
are recognizably
a house very close
to his in the village of
Down in Kent in England.
And according to the text
which goes with this, written
by the photographer, Darwin can
be here in his hat and cloak,
with his walking stick
and his telltale beard.
And I would be grateful
if anyone can spot him.
[LAUGHTER]
Because I've looked and looked.
And in fact, I've
shown this in class,
and we've looked
together as a group.
And we've had a
number of suggestions
that there's a chimpanzee in
here and several other things.
But possibly, there is
something going on around here.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's the ghost of Darwin
that concerns me tonight--
not in a literal sense, although
the existence of this photo
and its claim to depict a man
who didn't believe in ghosts
is really very interesting.
So if Darwin is in this picture,
he would be very disgruntled.
[LAUGHTER]
I wanted, instead, to use it
as a metaphor-- as a metaphor
for thinking about history.
Because most of history,
or much of history,
consists of tracing what people
thought they believed, what
they thought they saw, and
the impact of certain figures
or events long after
their time, that
gathers up a kind of
a steamroller effect.
It's the historians'
happy task to bring people
alive again, to recreate
them for a new generation
of readers, and to
explore the different ways
that specific figures or groups
of figures have been regarded.
And in Darwin's case,
it's fascinating to see
how he created a system of
thought that not only shook
the world that he lived
in, but also presented
ideas that became
an integral part
of the great transformations
of the 19th and 20th centuries,
changing the way we
think about ourselves
and the natural world.
And I want to move
from this to say
that Darwin isn't a ghost to us.
We only have to think of what
we've been enjoying today.
He's not a ghost.
He's more than real to us.
He's as present in
our modern minds
as he ever was
when he was alive.
And there is, for example,
a city called after him
in northern Australia.
There's a University College in
Cambridge also named after him.
There's a high-level
computer program
named after him,
a Dutch rock band.
[LAUGHTER]
Named after him.
We've got grad
students onto this one.
And we're looking to
get some of their music.
A [INAUDIBLE] company.
[LAUGHTER]
With this-- the very famous
sequence of evolutionary
forms at the top.
I have it on my front.
Many of us are wearing
this kind of imagery today.
There are other
sorts of food stuff.
[LAUGHTER]
A very powerful British
beer-- Darwin's Downfall.
And you'll notice
a very witty label.
[LAUGHTER] The sequence
of evolutionary forms
goes the other way--
Darwin's Downfall.
And many of you in
the biological world
will know of the
Darwin Awards, which
is a humorous, web-based
annual award that
notes those people
who have inadvertently
contributed to
natural selection.
[LAUGHTER]
There are other ways of
displaying your allegiance,
as we know.
Here is a great number
plate that I would like.
[LAUGHTER]
And something
[LAUGHTER]
Very interesting.
This is a young woman who
I actually met, who had,
in celebration of her
PhD in Anthropology,
run out and put Darwin's
first illustration
of his evolutionary
thought-- see
Darwin, 1837, down the bottom.
Well, not at the bottom, but--
[LAUGHTER]
It's on her side.
[LAUGHTER]
And of course, there's
always the cartoons.
This is from the New Yorker,
oh, 18 months ago by now,
showing the typical
juxtaposition of themes that's
very characteristic of
cartoons of all kinds.
Darwin is here portrayed as King
Kong on the top of the Empire
State Building,
being attacked as we
know he is in the modern day.
We imagine planes
piloted by creationists.
[LAUGHTER]
So it's juxtaposing
several issues together.
The cartoons are a
very fertile, way
of showing how much Darwinism,
evolutionary thought,
has become embedded
in our world.
There are a zillion
different kinds of postcards.
[LAUGHTER]
Many of you know
this postcard where
the man at the end of
the evolutionary sequence
says, "Are we nearly there yet?"
Other versions of this, more--
[LAUGHTER]
More topical, and if we add
a dash of gender studies,
there are these kinds of
moving images available.
[LAUGHTER]
So I could show that
again, if you liked.
[LAUGHTER]
Darwin is enough of a
national hero to the British
that you find him on
the 10-pound note.
He will be there for
another few months.
He's likely to be
taken off in 2010.
I did ask about that when
I was back last year.
And he's been there
for a good, long time.
And he is currently
the only scientist
on the British currency.
You will notice, perhaps,
if you study it carefully
that it shouldn't really
be a hummingbird there.
I'm sure they took advice.
And it's very beautiful.
But surely should have
been some finches.
If you go to
England this summer,
this will possibly get
you a cup of coffee.
[LAUGHTER]
And in all this-- and there are
many other images that we could
have chosen-- but in
all this, Darwin's
evidently being used to
represent far more than the man
himself.
He's come to embody not only
the theory of evolution,
but many of the ideals
of modern science.
Even if we're of the
40% of North Americans
who doubt the truth of
evolutionary theory,
these visual references
need no explaining.
Darwin and the
theory of evolution--
whether we believe
it or not-- have
become part of our
modern consciousness.
And that's what I
want to dwell tonight.
What do we need to make of
this high visibility, past
and present?
And of course,
there's the theory.
This is The Origin of Species,
the book that we're celebrating
this year-- the
sesquicentennial of publication
of Origin of Species.
This is the first edition.
This is actually photographed
from Darwin's copy.
You can see the Cambridge
University Library call mark up
at the top there.
Of course there's the theory,
a magnificent achievement
that lives on as the
central organizing
concept of modern biology.
We heard a fabulous
lunch-time symposium,
organized by the
students today, where
they invited five professors
round and about Harvard
to come and talk
about the way they
used Darwinism in their work.
It was so interesting.
His achievement
really does live on.
You don't need me
to tell you that.
In 1859, also, the
clarity and the insight
of Darwin's vision in this
book provided real answers
to the biggest natural
history problems of his day.
And forgive me if you already
know this remark from Alfred
Russel Wallace, but
it's a wonderful remark
about Darwin's achievement.
Even Alfred Russel Wallace,
who independently formulated
the same idea of evolution
by natural selection,
said of The Origin of
Species, "Mister Darwin
has given the world
a new science.
And his name should,
in my opinion,
stand above that of
every philosopher
of ancient or modern times
The force of admiration
can no further go."
Now, he may have
been exaggerating,
but it's clear
that Wallace-- who
was most qualified to judge--
thought it was magnificent.
And since 1859, to the idea of
evolution by natural selection
has, of course, had
its ups and downs.
But over the long
term, it's dramatically
expanded in scope, and
in the range of evidence
that supports it.
So despite all the changes--
or maybe because of them--
the key principles
remain intact.
Darwin and Wallace made a truly
remarkable joint announcement
in 1858, and Darwin's Origin
of Species, published the year
afterwards, has demonstrated
its explanatory power
for 150 years.
It's really an extraordinary
accomplishment.
And since we're in
commemorative mode tonight,
I'd like to review some
of the main moments
of that extraordinary
accomplishment,
before turning to some thoughts
about commemoration in general.
And it will be a
lightning overview,
but I'll try to indicate
where recent research has made
a difference to the
customary story.
So here is our man, younger
than the image we have here.
You sometimes see this
reversed-- the other way
around.
This is the right way.
[LAUGHTER]
He's born 12th of
February, 200 years ago.
He was the fifth child,
and the second son,
of Robert Waring Darwin and
his wife, Susannah Wedgwood.
They were a very
prosperous family.
They lived in Shrewsbury, in
Shropshire in central England,
slightly to the west of
England, quite close to Wales.
And this is the
house-- an old photo,
because the newer
photographs are unfortunately
disfigured by the signs that
indicate it's now the local tax
office for Shrewsbury.
And you can visit inside, but
it's-- and it's actually quite
easy to visit inside.
But it's a nice,
old picture that
gives a sense of the
family background.
This is a pastel drawing that
is the first image of Darwin
as a child-- the
only image of Darwin
as a child-- in 1816,
just a moment or two
after his mother died.
Darwin was actually brought
up by his older sisters.
And he always remained
very fond of them.
And there's no obvious
sign of permanent trauma
from the death of his mother.
Historians have always
been interested in the fact
that he had two very
famous grandfathers.
Erasmus Darwin, the poet,
philosopher, medical man,
and evolutionary thinker,
and Josiah Wedgwood,
a liberal industrialist who
founded the pottery firm that
used to be very prosperous,
and only a month ago crashed.
They had bought up
another-- a glass company,
and weren't able to pay for
it, and just had to fold.
So the Wedgwood
Company has gone.
But nevertheless, in those
days-- the early days
and continuing through into
Darwin's own lifetime--
it gave the family a very
handsome private fortune.
And although they could have
become very conservative,
this family is notable for
its liberal political stance,
for its commitment to the
anti-slavery movements,
both in the early years
of the 19th century
and through the 1930s.
So Darwin came from a background
that encouraged science.
His father was a doctor.
There was a strong
sense that the children
should grow up as intellectuals.
He went to Shrewsbury
School, a local school,
followed by
Edinburgh University,
with the intention of
becoming a physician.
And we know the shape
of his story, of course.
I know you know this.
I just wanted to say that
Darwin's autobiography is
the source for a great
deal of our opinions
on these times in his life.
And in his autobiography,
Darwin claimed
that his time at
Edinburgh was wasted--
that he hated the medical
curriculum, that he dodged out
of class whenever he
could, and recoiled
from the first sight
of an operation.
And within a few
moments of arriving,
he had decided he didn't
want to pursue medicine,
but that he wouldn't
quite yet tell his father.
And he would enjoy himself
pursuing natural history
whilst he was there--
which he did do.
And recent research
outside his autobiography,
outside his own
self construction,
shows that he left
Edinburgh University
after two years there
very accomplished
in natural history.
He had attended lectures.
He had started
ornithology independently.
He had been working
in marine biology
with one of the very famous
biologists of the day, Robert
Grant.
He had learned
chemistry and geology.
But nevertheless, the
story is that he went home.
His father discussed
with him, what now?
If not medicine, what
are you planning?
And after some
discussion-- it appears
to have taken several
months-- Darwin and his father
agreed that he would go
to Cambridge University
with a view of taking an
ordinary degree, which
was the first step towards
becoming a Anglican clergyman,
with a view of going
into holy orders.
And several members of
family were country parsons--
rather secular country parsons--
but they were country parsons,
including his
cousin, William Fox,
who was training to become
a parson, who was also
at Cambridge a few
years ahead of Darwin,
and became his closest friend.
And Darwin certainly
recognized the irony later on,
and expressed a few
hesitations at the time
about some points of doctrine.
But in general, he
seemed pleased enough
with the idea of the
future in the church.
And this is where he went--
Christ's College, Cambridge.
And again, Darwin said
that his time at Cambridge
was completely wasted, too.
[LAUGHTER]
But he was misremembering,
or in fact,
maybe even constructively
obliterating his debt
to the professors
who taught him there,
in particular the professor
of botany, John Stevens
Henslow, and the Professor
of Geology, Adam Sedgwick.
And Henslow's lecture
notes have recently
surfaced from the depths of the
Cambridge University Library.
And it seems that Henslow
was much more interesting
than we've given him credit for,
that he was full of the latest
physiology and taxonomical
thought from France.
And that he was one of
the first in Europe,
since Jean Baptiste Lamarck, to
suggest that animals and plants
were united right at the
bottom of the taxonomic tree.
And similarly,
Darwin's experiences
with Adam Sedgwick,
the geologist,
provided one of the
best possible educations
in field geology that a young
man could hope to obtain.
He graduated in 1831 with
a fine, practical knowledge
of Natural History.
And much of this,
like in Edinburgh,
was acquired through his
strong amateur interest.
He pursued natural history
outside the curriculum,
in collecting natural history
specimens-- particularly
beetles.
And you may know this image from
Cambridge University Library
from the manuscript connection.
It's in a letter to Darwin.
It's from one of Darwin's
university friends
during his university
time at Cambridge,
saying or asking him, "Have
you found any good beetles
this summer?"
And you'll see
the far image here
is labeled "Darwin
on his hobby,"
with a butterfly
net, beetle net.
And here he is on a
beetle with the milestone
behind him saying, "One
mile to Cambridge."
It's a very nice
sense of who he was
through the eyes
one of his friends.
So I'm stressing that Darwin
had a really good background
in the natural history sciences.
Because when the invitation
to join the Beagle
came in the months
after he graduated,
it's no surprise
that Henslow thought
Darwin would be the very man
to accompany the expedition.
Henslow thought that, but
Darwin's father objected.
You may know this list of
his father's objections.
But it is quite nice
to show it to you.
This is Darwin's handwriting.
And it appears that his
father spoke to him about why
it would not be a good idea
to accept this invitation,
and that Darwin agreed
with his father,
and sent a note-- a
polite note-- saying,
"I withdraw from
this invitation."
And then went to visit
his uncle, another Josiah
Wedgewood-- the
uncle, who eventually
becomes his father-in-law.
And the uncle Wedgewood
asked Darwin to write down
what his father had said.
So that's why we have this
list-- rather long set
of reasons, but
nevertheless, it's
a great thing that we
still have this list.
And I just like them very much.
I won't read them
all, but perhaps you
could just look at
the top one, where
the father-- this is the
voice of the father--
disreputable to my character
as a clergyman hereafter.
A wild scheme that they must
have offered to many others
before me, the
place of naturalist.
And so it goes on
down to the bottom.
And again, you hear
the father's voice--
it's a wonderful
document-- that it
would be a useless undertaking.
So this is a very
vivid document.
And of course, Uncle Wedgewood
persuaded Darwin's father
that the boy should go, that
it was a wonderful opportunity.
And indeed, off Darwin
went, as we know.
And this-- I'm
going to [INAUDIBLE]
through these high points
of the Beagle voyage.
The Beagle, as you know,
changed Darwin's life.
Its captain was
Robert FitzRoy, who
has been unfairly represented
in the historical record
as a raging fundamentalist.
He certainly believed.
He certainly
expressed his views.
But it's only after
the voyage that FitzRoy
became deeply committed
to a literalist account
of the Bible.
Stories of them
arguing in the cabin
throughout the voyage about
the creation of species,
or about the literal
truth of the Bible,
are mostly inaccurate.
FitzRoy, like Darwin,
was deeply impressed
by the geological work
of Charles Lyell, who
was writing at
exactly those years
that the Beagle set
out from London.
Lyell's Principles of
Geology offered a new view
of thinking about the Earth that
rested very much on the idea
that many small and gradual
changes would accumulate
into large effects.
And when we look about us at
the land forms of the Earth,
we only see those large effects.
And it takes a great
reshifting of the vision
to understand this has
come about over many,
many epochs just by the
accumulation of tiny changes.
Darwin was deeply impressed by
this methodological principle,
and in fact, one of the most
important findings of research
into the Beagle voyage is to
explore the way that Darwin
used that motif of many
small changes adding up
to big effects.
He takes it out of-- he
uses it within geology
to explain what he sees
in geological terms.
But he also takes
it out of geology
to start explaining the
biology that he sees,
and indeed even to explain some
of the variety of human beings
that he meets.
He uses that principle
for the rest of his life.
And we can see it
echoed, of course,
in The Origin of Species and
the theory of natural selection.
Lyell's very important.
Darwin's work on the Beagle
voyage took much of its tone
from his geological interest.
And here is a map of his
from the Darwin Collections
at Cambridge with
his own coloring
done during the voyage
indicating areas of subsidence.
The blue all down the East
Coast indicates subsidence.
He was very lucky
at finding fossils--
giant fossils, fossils
of forms that could still
be found in the same
areas, but much smaller.
So they were kind of
a chronological link
between the past
and the present--
although not the same species.
He galloped around.
He had a wonderful time.
His letters home
suggest that he really
did have a wonderful time-- very
exciting, full of adventure,
this voyage.
And went out with the gauchos
many times seeking this rhea.
And as well as
thinking about the way
fossils were
arranged in time, he
began to think about the way
organisms, living organisms,
were arranged in
topographical space.
And this bird was one of
those that he thought about.
He thought about the humans
he was meeting, particularly
in Tierra del Fuego.
On the Galapagos
Islands, as we know,
he was deeply interested
by the tortoises,
by the iguanas by the volcanic
remains that he was finding,
and interested
enough in the birds,
but not enough to
label them individually
from the islands
where he visited.
He put all the birds,
or all the little birds,
in one single bag, and was
content to label them just
as Galapagos.
So that when he returned,
unsettled by the idea
of variation, adaptation,
diversification--
when he returned, it was the
work of the naturalist John
Gould in March, 1837, that
really tipped him over the edge
towards evolutionary thought.
The finches were a
very significant part
of his transition into
evolutionary thought.
But not so much on
the Beagle voyage.
It was mostly an event
that happened afterwards.
So Darwin learned to look.
He learned to collect.
He learned to think
during that voyage.
And something that has emerged
in the last five or six years,
most significantly-- he
learned to write things down.
And here is just a small sample
of the records of that voyage.
Darwin became a man who wrote.
It's wonderful for
historians, of course.
But it's something
that he used as a way
of accessing information and
manipulating information.
He didn't have a computer,
but he wrote things down
in different places.
He filed them.
He kept everything orderly.
As well as the notebooks,
he had some other--
he had some Beagle notebooks.
He had some
notebooks that we now
call transmutation notebooks
where his evolutionary thoughts
were worked through.
This is his first
attempt at visualizing
evolutionary change-- in
fact, the same image we
saw on the young woman's torso.
When he arrived home
from the Beagle voyage,
he threw himself into work.
Again, this is something
that the historians are truly
now appreciating-- that
Darwin was a devil for work.
He really worked hard.
Through these
years, he continued
to write everything down.
And to the great
advantage of historians,
we find that personal things
were written down, also.
And that several
months before he
proposed to his
cousin, Emma Wedgewood,
he wrote, for example,
this kind of balance sheet
asking himself whether he
should marry or not marry.
This is the question.
And he may have had Emma
in mind, or he may not.
We're not entirely sure.
And on the side of not marry,
he lists the disadvantages
at the top.
And then there's
all the advantages
of not marrying-- freedom
to go where I like.
Not forced to visit relatives.
[LAUGHTER]
Loss of time, and cannot
read in the evenings.
And then on the side, the
plus side for marriage,
there's a number of
very nice reasons.
He would have a companion.
He would have someone
who would love him.
He would have someone
who would look after him.
And then he says, "Better
than a dog, anyhow."
[LAUGHTER]
And then towards the
bottom of the marry side,
he says it would be
intolerable to spend
one's life like a neuter bee.
And right down at the bottom
on the left-hand side,
you may see marry, marry, marry,
QED-- quod erat demonstrandum.
So here's who he marries--
Emma Wedgwood, his cousin,
And a few months older than him.
They had a very long, happy,
sustaining relationship.
Interestingly, they
probably only fell in love
after they had got engaged.
It's a rather Victorian
way of going about things.
They moved to the country.
They had a large family.
And during this time, Darwin
was writing his books,
but also thinking
through his theories.
And I simply wanted to mention
here whilst I'm hurrying on
through, that it's often said
Darwin delayed publishing--
that he had the germs, the
gist of his theory in hand,
certainly by 1844, when he
wrote it out as an essay
that he gave to his wife Emma
to publish if he should die.
Why?
Well, nowadays it's
much more common
to think that there
is not delay--
that Darwin was a
different kind of person--
that he was so conscientious,
so aware that this
was a difficult,
dangerous, hard theory
to understand that it needed all
the evidence he could possibly
supply.
And in a very
courageous step, he
dedicated himself to
finding that evidence.
He developed a tremendous
correspondence network
all over the world.
He tried to do as
much experimental work
as he could in his gardens.
Here he used pigeon
breeds in order
to hybridize the very prominent,
different fancy breeds
of the mid-Victorian period.
He cross-bred them,
tried to reduce them
back down to the
original pigeon form.
He wasn't very
successful in that,
but he was trying to
provide the evidence.
He spent eight years on
the taxonomy of barnacles.
Again, he'd only begun
with one barnacle,
but he decided that he
needed to understand
the whole of the barnacle
world-- living and fossil,
pedunculated and sessile--
before he could explain
this one single aberrant
form that he had brought back
from the Beagle.
And as he worked through
these eight years,
he understood that
he was giving himself
the classificatory, the
taxonomic expertise that
would allow him to speak
about species with authority
in his world.
And he used letters
very extensively
as a research tool-- I really
am going to scamper through.
Wallace wrote to him
in 1858 with an essay
that appeared to Darwin
to completely recapitulate
his own theories.
This is an entirely
fictitious image
done in 1955 by a
Russian biologist.
Interestingly, it shows Darwin
reading Wallace's letter
with his two friends, Charles
Lyell and Joseph Hooker
beside him.
It was Lyell and
Hooker-- as you know--
who persuaded Darwin not just
to publish Wallace's essay,
but to add his own
writings to that,
so that there would be a joint
announcement of evolution
by natural selection that
Hooker and Lyell organized
to take place at the
Linnaean society of London
on the 1st of July, 1858.
Darwin then turned
to the writing
of The Origin of Species
that was published
on the 24th of
November, 1859, followed
by a storm of controversy.
The controversy included the
United States of America.
Since we're standing
in Agassiz' kingdom,
we ought to mention that this
controversy in the United
States began with words
being exchanged between Louis
Agassiz and Asa Gray, the
great botany professor here
in Harvard.
They apparently, when Gray
arranged for Darwin's work
to be published in
the United States,
Gray had actually received
a copy directly from Darwin,
the very first one that
arrived in the United States
came here to Harvard.
And it was read--
for those of you
that would like to know-- in the
basement of our Boylston Hall
which was the apartments, the
academic rooms of Jeffries
Wyman.
And they say-- Gray says they
grew warm in Wyman's room
around Wyman's fireside,
Christmas 1859,
discussing the new book
of Mister Darwin's.
And the company was James
Russell Lowell, Henry Tory,
Charles Eliot Norton, and
Asa Gray, and Jeffries Wyman.
They also report
that Agassiz was
overheard saying, "It's poor.
Very poor."
[LAUGHTER]
So this is a story with
which we're all familiar.
I'm sorry that it has
taken us quite some time
to get through it.
Yet history tells us that
Darwin wasn't the only one
to think of evolution.
There were important
evolutionary thinkers
before Darwin's time, including
his own grandfather and Jean
Baptiste Lamarck, and
increasing numbers
of thoughtful proponents
in his own lifetime.
The idea of
progressive development
was commonplace in the 10
years before Darwin published,
especially in France.
In Britain, thinkers like
Baden-Powell, Robert Chambers,
Alfred Russel Wallace, who
was actually in Indonesia
at that time, and
Herbert Spencer
were deeply engaged
with questions
that we now see as evolutionary.
And even the phrase that we
most associate with Darwin,
the expression "survival
of the fittest" wasn't his.
It was coined by Spencer,
the great philosopher
of biological progress.
And history also tells us
that interest in Darwinism
rose and fell in the decades
after Darwin's death in 1882.
The theory fell out
of favor around 1900
when the new genetics came into
being, and again in the 1950s
when molecular biology emerged.
And it's increasingly suggested
by historians, especially
Peter Bowler, that
Darwinism actually
needed a number of
intellectual boosts--
in computer
terminology, we might
say rebooting-- at strategic
movements in the 20th century
in order to become the
theory that it is today.
And that the need
for these boosts
has been obscured
by the very success
that evolutionary
theory has today.
So it seems possible, and I want
to explore with you tonight,
that Darwin anniversary
celebrations over the last 150
years might have been used,
in part, to reestablish
the relevance of
natural selection
at particular delicate moments.
And I think just to start, that
Darwin's funeral might well
have been one of those moments.
Darwin was buried in 1882
in Westminster Abbey,
the first such event available
for national glorification,
as Jim Moore has demonstrated.
The active scientific
reformers in the Royal Society,
like Huxley, his great
friend, Francis Galton,
his cousin-- the eugenicist
Francis Galton-- and John
Lubbock, his neighbor,
moved rapidly
to get permission to bury
Darwin in Westminster Abbey, one
of the primary religious
buildings in Great Britain.
It's a far cry from
the simple funeral
that Darwin had anticipated
in his village church.
And this Abbey funeral service,
and many of the obituaries,
stressed that Darwin
was not irreligious,
that he was a good man
committed to truth and honesty.
The choir sang a
psalm, "Happy is
the Man who Possesseth
Wisdom," which
was valuable
propaganda at a time
when the relations between
science and religion
were intensely fraught.
So the men at the Royal Society
in 1882 used Darwin's funeral,
I'm suggesting, as
a way of asserting
the importance of science in
the high Victorian period.
They turned a man who was a
self-acknowledged agnostic
into a national hero with
full religious ceremony.
Now next, in England, I want
to turn to the Natural History
Museum in London.
Because this was the first
academic institution to stake a
claim on Darwin, by erecting
a magnificent marble statue
by Joseph Boehm in the
central hall of the museum,
exactly where the
high altar would
be if this was a cathedral.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll show it to you
in just one moment.
The structure of the
building is modeled
on a Romanesque cathedral,
on a Greek temple,
as many other Natural
History Museums are.
The ceremony, the
unveiling was conducted
by Huxley, who you can see
here, very characteristic
representation of Huxley
here, still in his prime
as Darwin's bulldog.
Now the reason that the Natural
History Museum was so quick
off the mark was that it was
losing intellectual authority
to the new experimental
and developmental sciences
in the universities.
The focus of science was
shifting to the universities.
It didn't seem that
old natural history
tradition of
observation-- collecting--
did not seem to be
cutting edge any longer.
And by erecting a
statue to Darwin,
the museum hoped to
regenerate pride,
both in British brain
power, and in the collection
and systematization of facts.
But Darwin's moment
in the museum
didn't last all that long.
[LAUGHTER]
40 years later, in
1927, a new director
came in who was
keen to disassociate
the museum from mere
natural history.
And Darwin was demoted
from his altar.
And he was moved
to the cafeteria.
[LAUGHTER]
However, this has a happy story.
He's back again.
[LAUGHTER]
I owe this image
to Jim McCarthy,
who very kindly sent it to me.
Darwin was reinstated
back at the altar in 2008
in preparation for this year.
And you can see him here in
the center of the stairwell,
with this kind of
green halo behind him.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm very gland that
Jim went there last year
and got that picture for me.
Now I'm going to move on.
One of the most
of commemorations
came about in the
inter-war period,
when plans were set
in motion to buy
Darwin's old home
for the nation.
There were protracted
financial difficulties,
during which time,
Thomas Hunt Morgan,
the great American
geneticist, stepped forward
to offer American support,
which was turned down
by the Royal Society of London.
And then a British
surgeon, a wealthy surgeon
who had lost his son in
the war and had nowhere
to give his money,
stepped in and financed
the purchase of this house
and its refurbishment
as a museum in 1929.
And here is the opening
ceremony in 1929.
And this was during a period of
marked change and uncertainty
for British science.
One can think about the
way the house was restored
as presenting reassurance
in an age of anxiety.
The peaceful ambiance,
the traditional gardens,
the very homely furnishings
encouraged visitors
to think that
world-class science,
that Darwin's brainpower
wasn't threatening.
It wasn't even political.
And at Down House,
science could be
humanized as
patient observation,
meticulous research, and needing
minimal laboratory equipment.
This is Darwin's study
as it was then recreated.
It's been upgraded since then.
It's a very fine photograph.
It's very evocative.
I, myself, find this
a wonderful image.
And you can see that Darwin here
has almost recreated his Beagle
cabin-- that here he is.
Its a masculine place.
It's enclosed.
It's personal.
It's private.
It's where he thought.
And here are his friends over
the mantelpiece-- his relatives
and friends-- his wife in
an image down the side here.
Here is his portfolio of notes.
And here is the chair in which
he wrote The Origin of Species.
Here is a stuffed dog.
I can't quite see that.
We're losing my red spot--
down at the bottom here.
Here is his dog waiting for
him to finish the writing,
and go out for a walk.
The dog was refurbished
ever such a long time ago.
[LAUGHTER]
And so as the world became
modern in the 1920s, '30s,
and '40s, this house
suggested that all Darwin
had needed for his
great work were
his eyes and pencil and paper.
And then, just to bring
us up to date, in 1959,
100 years after the
publication of The Origin,
it was the turn of
the United States.
In the wake of the evolutionary
synthesis of the 1940s
and Ernst Mayr's influential
book-- our very own Ernst
Mayr-- Systematics and
the Origin of Species,
1942-- the Darwin anniversary
of 1959 was held in Chicago.
And this celebrated many things.
But it particularly
celebrated the integration
of selection theory
with genetics
and populational statistics.
And here we have a number of
the individuals concerned.
Ernst Mayr is the
fifth from the left.
There's Julian
Huxley in the middle.
There's Sewall Wright
on the far side here.
Dobzhansky's over
there on the left.
It was almost as if
UNESCO or its precursor,
the League of Nations,
had come together
to make a treaty between
the various elements
of evolutionarily and
biological science
that were pulling
apart through the '40s.
So 1959 celebrated the
way they were now united,
moving forward together.
The story of Darwin's finches
becomes very widely distributed
at about this point in time.
David Lack had been in the
Galapagos studying the finches
and then writing about them
afterwards through the 1940s.
The second edition, in which
he calls them Darwin's finches,
was published in the late '40s.
But the story of the
finches, the thought
that they were
Darwin's finches--
that they were the evidence
that Darwin stumbled upon
on the Galapagos-- emerges
during these 1959 celebrations.
The peppered moth is also
broadcast very publicly
at this time, too.
There are the elements
that we perhaps
don't really have time to go
into, but considerable pressure
during this meeting and
immediately afterwards put
on Ecuador to allow the
Galapagos Archipelago to become
a World Heritage site.
There were many archives
donated to different libraries
through this period, also.
And biographies
began to be written.
It's a time in which
modern selectionism
was actually created.
These individuals rejected any
form of directed evolution.
They kicked Lamarck
right out of the story.
And they expand
Darwinian thought
to cover the evolution
of mind and behavior.
And during the conference,
Julian Huxley--
the grandson of
Thomas Henry Huxley--
gave a secular sermon in the
style of his grandfather,
and declared that
religious belief was just
a biological adaptation.
And others promoted the
idea that the natural world
and ourselves could only be
understood through science.
And here I'd just like to
pause and say thank you
to the researches of one
of our graduate students
in the History of
Science, Melissa Lowe,
who's been in the
Harvard archives
in the Ernst Mayr papers.
And she has found that,
in his, in Mayr's Nat Sci,
wonderful old classes
at Harvard in 1959--
that he told his
students that opposition
to the evolutionary theory has
died down almost completely.
[LAUGHTER]
So we're in a
different world now.
That kind of confidence
could-- well,
it could be expressed now,
but it would not be accurate.
Now here we are in
2009-- the bicentenary
of Darwin's birth,
and 150th anniversary
of The Origin of Species.
Anniversaries, as historians
Penina [INAUDIBLE] and Clark
Elliott have reminded
us, are big business.
They've long been acknowledged
as strategic events
for promoting culturally
significant agendas.
They help us in how
we would now think
about the construction
of memory.
Anniversaries-- the
celebration of anniversaries--
reveal a wish to establish
a collective identity
on the basis of
some shared descent.
They also set out our anxieties.
They shape our collective
desires for the future.
So what of the
celebrations this year?
What about today?
Governor Patrick Deval--
perhaps you saw it today--
has officially declared
today as Darwin Day
throughout the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts.
What do we make of that?
[LAUGHTER]
Down in the Holyoke Arcade,
just for today only,
you could get a Darwin
vegetarian pizza.
[LAUGHTER]
What do we make of that?
And it seems churlish to mention
all the other anniversaries
that are temporarily
obscured by Darwin's
200th, such as the birth
of Abraham Lincoln,
as well as Felix Mendelssohn,
Kit Carson the frontiersman,
Alfred Tennyson the poet,
Benjamin Pierce the professor
of math here at
Harvard, and William
Gladstone the British prime
minister four times over.
And there were other books.
It's not just The
Origin of Species
that was published in 1859,
of which John Stuart Mills On
Liberty, and George Eliot's
Adam Bee, maybe even Charles
Dickens' Tale of
Two Cities came out
the month after
Darwin stand out.
And even Jean Baptiste Lamarck
has an anniversary this year,
commemorating his
most famous work,
the Philosophie Zoologique
published in 1809.
So I have been very
interested as a historian
and as a sort of anthropologist
of science, if you will,
what it is today
that we're doing.
Are we making a statement
about our belief
that evolution is true?
I think we are.
Scientists throughout
this year will surely
hope to establish
beyond any further doubt
that the theory of
evolution has never
been stronger or more
useful in their work.
And while we can all acknowledge
that the Darwinian revolution
was not solely due to Darwin,
and even that it might not
have been quite as revolutionary
as the popular press suggests,
Darwin's work has
nevertheless become
one of the most potent
symbols of modern science,
with Darwin himself being seen
as an icon of rationality,
a figurehead for
rational endeavor
behind whom it's become
necessary to muster.
50 or 100 years ago, this
sense of defensiveness,
this sense of necessity, would
not have been felt so strongly,
if at all.
And today the
situation is different,
in that evolution faces
intense criticism.
Many supporters of evolutionary
theory in the United States
will surely welcome
the opportunities
offered by this anniversary
year to explain Darwinism
more widely and more
publicly than ever before.
And I'm part of this.
I have been very happy.
I, too believe in
evolution-- that we
should go out there
and use this year
to explain to people who are not
willing to hear it in the way
that we hear it.
And we have an opportunity
to reintroduce Darwin
as a historical figure,
a good, kindly man,
with no desire to be
characterized as an atheist.
Like Jerry Coyne, the population
geneticist at Chicago,
who will be engaged in
another celebratory event
later this year,
2009-- Jerry Coyne
feels that there's a
sense now that books
need to be written with the
title, Why Evolution Is True.
We would not have needed to
write that book 25 years ago.
And myself, I hope that
historians can help, too.
We can also reflect on
Darwin's high visibility
and his public profile
in the year 2009.
And perhaps the one thing that
has emerged through these 150
years since Darwin published
is that we can still
keep our sense of humor.
And I want to end
just with an image
here that we're all able--
[LAUGHTER]
We're all able to contemplate
the most difficult
philosophical issues
with a sense of humor.
So happy birthday,
Mister Darwin.
[APPLAUSE]
