Discover, February 28, 2006
Mounted on a carrot and a plum, two soldiers armed with swords and trumpets make war on one another. The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers is no ordinary child’s sketch. The artist was a young Francis Darwin, son of the celebrated Charles, and the drawing appears on the back of a manuscript page of his father’s most famous work, On the Origin of Species. Tucked away in a glass case in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History’s new Darwin exhibit, the page is one of only 28 to survive from the original manuscript of what many called “the book that shook the world.”
It also succeeds in doing what all the fierce debates cannot. It shows Charles Darwin not as a figurehead in a great fight but as a real human and a devoted father, loath to waste paper, who gave his children discarded manuscript sheets to scribble upon.
Far from being an icon, Darwin was a man who led a dramatic life. He had adventures in exotic lands, fathered 10 children with his wife (and cousin), Emma Wedgwood, and conducted experiments on earthworms, barnacles, and insects (he once lay motionless on his couch to let a wasp drink from his eye). For 20 years he struggled with an idea so revolutionary that “it is like confessing a murder,” as he later said to a botanist friend. His bold spirit is captured in the exhibit’s unusual displays: Museumgoers can browse through cases filled with Darwin’s microscopes and handwritten letters as well as view live Galápagos tortoises, an iguana, and a clutch of ornate homed frogs–a sampling of the animals that the young naturalist sent back to England during his 1830s voyage on the Beagle.
In tracing Darwin’s life, the exhibit also reveals how biology was transformed from the 19th-century dalliance of a privileged youth into a scrupulous, testable science. At the University of Cambridge in the 1820s, where he planned on entering the clergy, the young Charles spent most of his time hunting beetles–a passion reflected in the cartoon that his friend Albert Way drew of him riding atop a giant beetle, captioned with the words, “Go it, Charlie!” Darwin soon branched out into the study of fossils and geology–two fields that were then changing rapidly. By examining rock formations, geologists had discovered that the world was far more ancient than the biblically derived figure of about six thousand years. Fossils showed that some species had gone extinct in the distant past, for reasons unknown.
Darwin was just beginning to understand these findings when he was invited in 1831 to serve as an unpaid naturalist on the HMS Beagle, a former navy ship set to voyage around the world. In a letter to his physician father, Robert, Charles listed the elder Darwin’s objections to the expedition: “disreputable to my character as a clergyman hereafter”; “a wild scheme”; “that my accommodations would be most uncomfortable”; and “that it would be a useless undertaking.” Yet not only did Charles Darwin embark upon the journey, it would also transform his vision of the natural world–and ours.
The exhibit admirably re-creates that revolution in his understanding. In one room, two preserved modern armadillos stand next to a model of a giant extinct relative called a glyptodont, fossils of which Darwin found in Argentina. At the time, he wondered whether one animal had given rise to the other. In the same room is a replica of a rocky outcrop on the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin saw daisies the size of trees and iguanas that dive into the ocean to eat seaweed. Such unique species on so isolated an archipelago led him to wonder if they had adapted over time to their environment.
Yet he returned to England unsure of the mechanism that could cause this adaptation. He scribbled in notebooks–facsimiles of which are on display–until he hit upon the idea of natural selection. Certain variations, he hypothesized, would lead to more reproductive success than others and, over many generations, could cause dramatic changes. Lineages could split from each other like branches on a tree. Darwin’s sketch of this evolutionary tree–as electrifying to see as Einstein’s original “E=mc²”–is fight there on display.
But Darwin was also terrified as to how his ideas would be received, and for years he amassed evidence to back them up. He laid rabbit bones on his billiard table to measure their variations and spent eight years studying barnacles. The exhibit replicates his tool-filled study in his home, Down House, but it also offers delightful clues to his family life. An 1838 letter from his then-fiancée, Emma, describes her future husband as “the most open, transparent man I ever saw.… He is particularly affectionate … and possesses some minor qualities that add particularly to one’s happiness, such as not being fastidious, and being humane to animals.”
The exhibit falls short in addressing Darwin’s impact on modern biology. Panels discuss new fossils that shed light on human evolution, as well as lab studies that show bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics via natural selection. It’s a worthwhile effort given me current controversy over teaching evolution in public schools. But this part of the exhibit feels like a jumble. Over the past century and a half, scientists have discovered many things about life that Darwin didn’t know–DNA, for starters. As a result, evolutionary biology has developed dramatically in ways that can’t be summed up as an afterthought. Darwin’s life was certainly fascinating enough to carry a one-man show. But it’s important to remember that he really was just one man.
Copyright 2006 Discover Magazine. Reprinted with permission.