Essay on Darwin's Ghost

Essay Aug 1

Since I had recently read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it was enlightening to read Dr. Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution. It gave me a deeper appreciation of the thoughts and experiences of individuals before Darwin who had already laid the foundation for his book.

Dr. Stott explains that she grew up in a creationist household where Darwin was perceived as a messenger of Satan and it was only through her curiosity that she was able to learn something about him that would have been forbidden by her father. Her book is presented somewhat like a travelogue and you will enjoy exploring geographical locations like Lesbos with Aristotle. You can imagine him “lying on the platforms built over the lagoon…observe the fish breeding and feeding in the natural environment,” or sailing “out to sea with sponge divers,” so he could examine sponges.

Then, she leads you to Basra which some of us will remember from the Iraq war, but in 850 A.D. it was the home of Jahiz, who “produced the first extensive study of animals published in the Islamic world and came close to a theory of evolution and natural selection.” The next stop is Milan and Florence and a visit with Leonardo da Vinci, as he “puzzled over how the seashells had washed up in the mountain,” but he was not the only one interested in fossils. A potter, Bernard Palissy in France made plates that were “brightly colored, and highly glazed, they depicted pond-beds writhing with lizards, crustaceans, snails, snakes, and fish; each creature, interacting and reacting with others, is shown netted together in a staged struggle of life and death, a web of mutual predation and dependency.”

Stott travels to the Hague and tells how Abraham Trembley and the Bentinck boys discovered polyps and their ability to regenerate their bodies when cut. Trembley sent specimens of polyps all over Europe and convinced nonbelievers with facts when they observed and verified what he had told them. It was so compelling that they were recognized by the Royal Society, but it did raise a serious question about the “souls” of living organisms that had no answer.

There were many more locations and naturalists, from Maillet in Egypt to Diderot in Paris, who was subjected to surveillance and imprisonment even while he continued to write “dangerous” books that “would bring knowledge to the people and dispel superstition and ignorance.” She introduces us to Baron d’Holbach who was “Half German, half French, newly married, clever, very rich, and well connected, he lived in an elegant and spacious six-story house…to which he invited some of the most interesting intellectuals of Paris.” One of those individuals was Diderot. D’Holbach was an atheist, but he was able to provide “one place of absolute intellectual safety and freedom” in Paris.

We leave Paris for England and the home of Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus who combined his love of plants and zoological examinations with his medical profession. He devoured “James Hutton’s long-awaited Theory of the Earth [that] came out in 1788;…admiring Hutton’s bold account of a regulated earth cycling on through time and space, continents shifting and remaking themselves infinitely slowly, with ‘no vestige of a beginning and no sign of an end,’” and this motivated him to begin work on his own book Zoonomia “586 pages long and weighing four pounds, appeared in the bookshops of England in the early summer of 1794.” This was sixty-three years before his grandson’s Origin.

She returns to France and “three professors; three different versions of nature”—Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. These individuals conducted their battles in the Jardin des Plantes with Cuvier and Lamarck debating “not about transformism, but about grand theory versus dry fact.” Dr. Stott even included America with these individuals telling how in Kentucky “a retired and increasingly eccentric elderly professor, Constantine Rafinesque, was struggling to finish his life’s work, a poem called The World, or Instability, in which he proposed that the world had evolved through millions of years, species evolving after one another from simple early forms.”

Then on to Edinburgh, Scotland and Robert Grant and his research to determine “whether sea sponges were plants or animals,” and Robert Chambers who was the “anonymous” author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. “Chapter by chapter the reader’s eyes were opened to the ‘facts’ of the birth of the earth…right up to the controversial material on the emergence of species.’” It was published in 1844 and after a few months of relative peace, a deluge of vitriol poured forth from the religious establishment foreshadowing what Darwin could expect and delaying his writing and publishing of the Origin.

The final leg of our journey is to the Malay Archipelago where Alfred Wallace who had been collecting plant and animal specimens for years sending them to England had a vision during a malarial attack that resulted in his sending Darwin a letter explaining his thoughts on natural selection and this motivated Darwin after an initial period of despondency to write and publish the Origin.

What a trip and what a book; one to be re-read several times for its information and its narrative style. There was one observation I formed as I read about these individuals--they were all voracious readers as children and throughout their lives and were curious about how things worked and wanted to know why.