Now, we finally get to Darwin and his, his
great achievement in the middle of the
19th century.
Which was to tackle a problem that had
long plagued philosophers and scientists.
A problem of enormous controversy, this
had to do with the man's place in the
universe.
The how, how species of animals came about
and, and whether they change.
These are some of the, the core issues in
biology and natural philosophy.
But Darwin wanted to address them with the
kind of language that people would find
acceptable.
Even though he was saying things that in
some ways were quite shocking, he wanted
to say it and he did find a way to say it
in ways that were accessible to a general
audience.
And that people could say, yeah well, it,
that, that's the way it must be.
[laugh] And, of course, he had his
detractors, to be sure.
But he also was able to find a rhetoric
for talking about the origin of species
that didn't arouse the trad, as much of
the traditional antagonism as he might
have.
Darwin sometimes called his, his subject
the, the mystery of mysteries.
And, The Origin of Species is so
mysterious because it, it goes back to the
question of creation.
Why are there so many different kinds of
animals?
And the answer seems to be in religion
really for the west that God created all
of these animals in great abundance and
gave human beings dominion over them.
And Darwin's question is that, but why so
many and why so much variation?
I mean, one could one could attack that
question, say well, what did God have in
mind [laugh] in creating hundreds or
thousands, or hundreds of thousands of
species of insects?
Or one could say, how did these things
come about?
Not did what could God have in mind or
what does even nature intend, but how did
these variations come about, and that is
Darwin's problem.
Why is there variety?
And then the second is, species are not
permanent.
And that was a radical notion.
He's not the first one to explore that
question but still, the, the permanence of
species was something that many people
took as, as common sense.
For Darwin, these are not metaphysical
questions.
These are what you sometimes call
genealogical questions.
You know, genealogy is when you start from
the present and work your way back.
So you find an example of a certain
species, and then you say, how did this
species come about?
How do I find its genealogies?
And how do I trace its genealogy, all the
things that led up to it, all the things
that led up to its being here in the
present?
I find a mollusk or I find an ant and I
say, what, what, what led to this ant?
What are the other ants or creatures other
creatures that led to the development of
this particular species, this particular
example of the species.
Genealogy replaces metaphysics.
Darwin is, is, is a traditional scientist,
though, in, in, in several ways, and one
way is that he has this lovely wonder at
nature.
And certainly that is related to the
romantics and that's why we talked a
little bit about the romantics.
The romantic poets in England were
embracing of nature and, and saw a nature
as something which we had intense and
meaningful interaction.
And Darwin's work as field biologist, as a
cataloger of the variety of species, is
animated by a wonder at the extraordinary
richness of nature.
The other thing that I want you to hold in
mind here as we think about Darwin is how
the present is the key to the past.
That's really what geneaology insists on.
That the present is the key to the past.
And Darwin goes to investigate these
things.
He doesn't sit in his room and read about
them.
He doesn't close his eyes, a la Descartes.
And say, how can I think clearly about
them?
Darwin says, I've got to go look.
I've got to look, and I've got to collect.
And so, he goes on his famous voyage on
the, on the ship, the Beagles, from 1831
to 1836.
From 1831 to 1836.
For those 5 years, he is traveling far,
far from Europe.
And he spends a lot of time on land, but
he's always collecting.
Collecting examples of nature and then
trying to understand why these have come
to be as they are, as they've been found.
Now, once he has these collections, once
he sees the variety of nature, he does
have some tools to work with from the
science of his day.
And a couple of things are, are key.
One is the science of populations.
The science of populations.
And here, Malthus, a name which will be
familiar to many of you.
Malthus is very important that for Malthus
populations grow and to a certain point
that they enter into crisis because
they've grown beyond their resources that
are available to sustain them.
So, they grow, grow, grow, but then
there's a crisis, and the population will
then shrink again.
And that notion of population change is a
key to understanding the dynamics of the
development of people or of a species of
non-human species.
That is key for Darwin and he'll use much
of Malthus in his understanding of, of,
of, survivial.
He also is, is very interested in geology,
and geology has made great discoveries in
the 50 to 100 years before Darwin.
And that's so important because geology
shows you the gradual change is, is
fundamental.
It can even be radical, the gradualism is
compatible with radicalism.
That's a funny thing because geology
teaches you that you can have massive
changes over thousands, tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of years.
The, the, that things work in geologic
time in ways that create massive, radical
changes.
And, and for Darwin, the extension of time
was key.
Expanding the zone of time with which one
was thinking was key to his success.
So Darwin comes up with this idea really
about the, what we can call the
persistence of favorable variations.
And this is how he put it in, in the
Origin.
This preservation of favourable variations
and the rejection of injurious variations,
I call Natural Selection.
That's, that's, that's key, right?
[laugh] That's the, the key idea for
Darwin, natural selection.
The preservation of favorable variations
and the rejection of injurious variations,
that's what I call natural select,
selection, Darwin wrote.
Variations neither useful nor injurious
would not be affected by natural
selection, and would be left a fluctuating
element, as perhaps we see in the species
called polymorphic.
For our purposes, that means that positive
or favorable variations will be favored,
sorry, will be favorable variations will
be preserved.
And injurious variations will be will
become extinct and the things that are
neither favorable nor injurious will, will
go will fluctuate.
This is the, these are the key elements in
natural selection.
Darwin has three major works.
The Journal from the Beagle which is 1845.
The Origin of Species, which is 1859.
And the Descent of Man, which is from
1871.
And I want to say just a few words about
each of these.
And then just to give us again of some,
some overall sense of Darwin's
contribution.
So, Darwin's voyage on the Beagle,
sometimes called the voyage of a
naturalist, he spend, he send, he spends,
as I said before, nearly five years on
this trip.
It was important to him in many ways.
It was one, one of first time he it was
the first time he encountered a slave
owning society which was important to
Darwin because he was from a, a family
that had deep anti- slavery commitments,
and he was impressed by the brutality of
the slave owners but he was also depressed
or shocked by the primitive conditions in
which he found native people's living and
by what he thought of as their crude and
brutal lives.
And the voyage of the naturalist, Geology
is key.
Forces that shape life on the planet took
place work themselves out over thousands
of years and, and they're still active.
Millions of years and they're still
active.
That's the key here.
That's, it's that forces we still see
today are the ones over long, long periods
of time have been shaping our world and
living creatures on it.
Darwin takes about five years to write up
his observations.
That's another thing, Darwin is slow and
steady.
He is a meticulous writer.
He's also perhaps has some fear of, of
publication.
It's hard to know exactly what goes into
that meticulousness.
It's, it's perfectionism or, or something
else that's holding him back.
The Origin of Species is published in 1859
and it's published as and many of you know
because he, he realizes someone else is
coming up with the same idea.
Wallace.
Someone he knows and is someone who
admires Darwin greatly is stumbling upon
the same idea in a very different way, in
a much more impulsive way.
Wallace writes to Darwin saying, you know,
from the fields saying, I, I, I've just
kind, I've just had this idea.
And then, you know, really, it's almost
like in a dream, right?
And Darwin is shocked that his slow and
steady work actually might be outpaced by
someone who he thinks of as stumbling upon
the idea.
And Darwin gets his idea out.
He does note that Wallace is coming up
with something similar.
But Darwin gets the lion's share of the
credit and he, because he had been working
on this notion for many, many years and he
could document that.
So, Wallace is writing pretty much this
very similar story of natural selection,
right?
And Darwin had been working on this for at
least 20 years, around 20 years.
And, and then towards the end of this
period, he, he met Wallace.
Wallace knew him.
And Wallace was the kind of the, Darwin's
opposite number.
You know, Darwin was, he didn't want to
upset his life because she was religious
so he, he toned down the really, the kind
of offensive stuff as much as he could.
He was, he, he was always saying, excuse
me, he had to sit down.
He would go on these trips and he would
painstakingly classify things, and then he
would build in his house ways of things.
And, and then, and he would, would
surround himself with ways of, of, of
doing science that would keep away
everyone else.
Keep everybody else at bay, and they would
invite him to conferences I'd love to
come, but why don't you just send me the
spec, specimens.
And Wallace was the absolute opposite.
Wallace is like, the best way to
understand about nature man, is to go out
into nature.
I've got to go out and I've got to go
travel around and, I'm going to go find
some dinos, some good, in South East Asia
man, I'm going, I'm going, man, that's
where I'm headed.
I'm going to, and, you know, you know,
what really brings me close to nature, I'm
smoking this stuff.
[laugh] This is Wallace, right?
He's drinking, he's trying everything.
He is, he is in the dark, he writing
letters, and Darwin's like, this might,
okay, I'm just trying to line up one
barnacle with another one.
And Wallace is out there doing these crazy
things and he is a wild man.
He is really, but he's, he, but he's
asking himself, why is there variety?
Why is there variety?
Why are there so many different kinds of
animals?
Man, I've got to find some more.
Why is there so many different kinds of
prac, you know, procreative practices?
Well, you know, let's try some.
[laugh] He's, he is, he is thinking.
You know, there's Darwinism.
I've got to think about that.
And so, Wallace is so, I think he was in
Southeast Asia, if I remember right.
It may not be for, not for long.
And he's, he's, he's on this trip.
He's collecting all the stuff and he gets
really sick.
And he has, he's, he has a terrible fever.
Hey, maybe it was malaria related.
It's a terrible fever.
And while he is in a fever, in a dream,
the idea of natural selection comes to
him.
It's so great.
So, he writes to Darwin.
He's like, oh man, I had this wild dream,
man.
I was at this fever.
And I was thinking, and I was dreaming
about why, how is it possible that you
could have all these variations?
And then, like, and then I woke up and
realized, man, it was because like when
the variations took place if they were
strong variations they would actually
reproduce and then.
Hey, Charlie, you think I've got
something?
I wrote some stuff down after I woke up
and here, I'm sending it to you.
And Darwin's like, oh, my God.
He's right, he realizes he was right, that
Wallace was right.
And Darwin was trying to establish
evidence, evidence, evidence.
And Wallace said, it came to me in a
dream, man.
[laugh] And so, Darwin writes up his, and
Darwin, I don't know if he ever would have
written it up.
It's hard to know.
I mean, it's just, he's such a deep source
of puzzlement and genius.
It's hard to know, like some people just
can't finish it.
You know, they, everybody knows they know
it, they just can't finish whatever it is,
a painting, a, a sonata a theatrical
production.
And, but Darwin said, I better finish.
Okay.
I got to finish this.
And so he sent it off he wrote up,
finished writing it up.
And he had drafts, he didn't steal it.
But he did, he did preempt Wallace.
Although he did tell, he also told the
scientific society because Wallace was out
in, out in a field somewhere, [laugh]
experimenting.
And Char, and Darwin said, you know,
Wallace did send me this stuff and this,
he should be recognized as well.
And Wallace, he loved Darwin.
He really looked up to him.
It's like he, he, you know, when he was
out there, Darwin really was a serious
scientist.
So, I don't know how much he held it
against him a little bit probably, but,
but, Darwin then becomes the focal point
for a new way of thinking that leads, that
progress happens through, through
contingent variation.
Contingent variation that then gets, that
gets propagated again and again.
That notion that progress happens through
unintended variation, that gets propagated
and propagated again will be where we pick
up the story.
The Origin of the Species was deep
science, but it's aimed at a general
audience.
And, and some have said that it's the last
book that actually has as the, as that
great a scientific ambition that without
specialization.
And that's, that's an interesting thing to
hold in mind.
So, the second idea of the Origin of
Species that I want us to, to hold onto is
that there is no natural essence of a
species.
That species occur through breeding or
through the reproductive process.
That, that is key and, and Darwin actually
learns a lot from readers.
Many scientists thought readers were kind
of too low, low rent, low class to pay
attention to.
But Darwin pays a lot of attention to
readers because he, he understands how
variations are transmitted and controlled
through the breeding process.
And he understands that in nature,
something like that process takes place,
too.
That there's no natural essence of the
species.
