The exceptional influence of Charles Darwin

Darwin came to Cambridge after his time in Edinburgh studying medicine. His father was really disappointed about this because he had hoped that Darwin would become a successful doctor. But Darwin wasn’t cut out for that. He couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

Eventually, Darwin went to Cambridge to be trained as an Anglican priest, but his real passion is the natural sciences. The natural sciences occupied a very curious position in Cambridge at this time. They weren’t something you could study in detail. Instead, there were lectures given to help clergymen so that they could resist the attacks of atheists and others.

Through this education, Darwin could explore his interests in natural history that he had already developed in Edinburgh. He’s a very keen beetle collector, and he develops an interest in geology. In fact, he plans a short trip to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This proves to be a much longer trip when he’s invited to go on the Beagle voyage. As it were, this is the exceptional moment in Darwin’s life, the point at which he’s suddenly able to transcend the simple life of a clergyman and instead becomes someone who has seen a considerable part of the world.

As Darwin admitted himself, this voyage was the crucial event of his life. He goes around the world for about five years and sees an incredible array of different peoples and different kinds of animals and plants. He not only explores the present distribution of animals and plants, but he explores it in terms of time as well. His mind ranges back into the formation of the Andes. He sees an earthquake raise mountains and destroy a great city. He sees coral reefs being formed in the Pacific. Indeed, to appreciate Darwin, you really have to imagine him on the equivalent of a three-dimensional David Attenborough natural history film for five years, seeing this fantastic array of nature.

One of these books is Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Here, Malthus argues that there’s going to be a shortage of resources. The population is going to increase faster than the food supply. This means that just a few are going to survive. In other words, there will be a lot of death.

Darwin combines this realisation of the significance of death within populations with the problems of origins. He is able to show that, because there’s so much death, it’s only those that are best adapted that are going to survive. These individuals have the right characteristics compared to others to reproduce. Very gradually, over time, these individual differences add up to make significant differences.

This realisation is crucial for Darwin’s thinking. He thereby realises small, individual differences ultimately produce new species. Interestingly, by thinking like this, he is solving a scientific problem by reading a work in political economy. In fact, Malthus’s essay is a very controversial work, one that was being used to make British laws about how the poor shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce because they might actually be inferior. It’s important to think about the relationship between these broad philosophical and economic texts and the significant theory he then develops.

Darwin was exceptional as a Victorian. He became famous, and, in 1859, after publishing On the Origin of Species and his ideas about natural selection, he really becomes a celebrity. During this time, you could buy carte de visite photographs of Darwin. He begins to appear in the newspapers and periodicals. As gorillas start being brought back from Africa, there is a considerable gorilla craze in which Darwin’s On the Origin of Species becomes tied up in all sorts of surprising ways.

By the end of his life, Darwin is so famous that, on a rare occasion, he goes to a public meeting and when he walks into the auditorium, people start clapping. Ironically, he thinks it’s because the speaker must have come on the stage, but it’s actually because he has entered the room.

One of my favourite examples of Darwin’s fame occurs while he’s at home, at Down House. Various delegations come to visit him from the north of England and even from Germany. Famous naturalists like Ernst Haeckel also visit. Thomas Henry Huxley is a friend and comes quite often. Many, many people come to see Darwin. There’s even an Australian working man who’s so excited to see Darwin that he runs to the door of Darwin’s country house, shakes Darwin’s hands very vigorously, and then runs away again.