Darwin - Furious Emma

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Christopher Brown

Dr. Marcy Brown Marsden

Darwin

10 April 2008

This letter has had a history of doubt concerning the veracity of its origin, as most historians de-

clare it a fraud. Very recently, however, one of Henrietta Darwins estates executors has, in his

will, vouched for its veracity on Henriettas behalf, claiming it to be the genuine hand of Mrs.

Emma Darwin.

The story is said to be this: the weeks leading up to the day of the publication ofThe Descent

of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex were tense between Charles and Emma, slightly relaxed

due to Charless frequent absences from Down. On the momentous day, when for once Darwin

was home but inexorably busy, Emma wrote this letter. On signing it and sealing it in an envel-

ope, she promptly threw it into the smouldering fireplace and left the room in tears. Henrietta,

age 28 and more clear-minded than her mother, quickly retrieved the envelope, and hid it among

her own belongings and correspondence.

This letter is reprinted in full here.

Emma Darwin to C. D. Down, September 29th, 1871.

My Dear Charles,


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I am leaving you. I regret resorting to writing this (and oh, how terrible it looks in words!)

but you are in your study with your algae and ignoring my knocks.

I have been with you for thirty-two years; I have remained with you as you write and revise

and rewrite, for days in your room, alone, in which you sleep and eat (God knows what) and

write some more; this began after our honeymoon and has spanned these three decades.

Throughout your work on On the Origin of Species, I stayed in your house and raised your chil-

dren, though your eyes dulled when you looked at me, seldom as that was.

Now you have gone too far. Before this new abomination, The Descent of Man, you only

threatened God; even with the On the Origin of Species, you allowed for his presence in the very

beginning, even though as no more than a first mover. As you write on page four hundred and

fifty-nine (and I quote in full because it is beautiful):

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally

breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone

cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms

most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

You were not explicitly trying to remove God from the picture, but you wanted to use evolution

to explain our world in terms that make sense of the overwhelming evidence for evolution:

fossils, variation within species, physical similarities, &c. But now you have forsaken God and

debased man. On the Origin of Species was an idea I could live with, as it roamed about the

house, ever-present. You showed how all species arose from a single organism, or a few, and I

must admit I was convinced. Natural selection, applied as a law of nature, and set in the context

of thousands of years, can easily explain the multiplicity of species, to an extent. I fell to doubt-


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ing at one point, when I thought of the disparity such as that between male and female cardinals,

as one wears camouflage for a reason, but the other has irrationally decided to advertise itself for

all predators to take note. Then you astounded me, yet again, with your theory of sexual selec-

tion, which fits with and complements natural selection like whey complements curds. Your ex-

position of mans attempts at artificial selection demonstrates the natural power of the combina-

tion of natural and sexual selection.

Various weaknesses, of which you were aware, certainly by the time of publication, tinge

Origin. Your alliance with Mr. Lamarcks theory of use and disuse is distressing, and you obvi-

ously only adhere to it because of the shortcomings that your theory came upon, at the time. The

notion of pan-genes still lames your theory, I know, while Wallace has made it known that these

hardly stable notions of inheritance are unnecessary. I agree with you that something must cause

the high amounts of variance that we see in sexually-reproducing organisms, which cannot be

ascribed to simple randomness. You must realize this is the one of the few flaws in your theory,

which, hopefully, you will not let long remain obscure.

Herbert Spencers term, the survival of the fittest, which has caught the publics attention

much more strongly than your natural selection is nothing but the flip-side of the same coin.

Whereas your catchphrase is weak in that it entails some sort of conscious selective process,

Spencers term creates the mistaken notion of the superlative, which, as you have previously

noted, does not exist. A perfect, concretely complex creature runs against your idea of unending

variance and competition, and such a telic concept misconstrues the notion of a evolution as a

blind force, implying, rather mistakenly, some conscious finger.

Despite your friendly alliance with Charles Lyell, your rejection of his saltatory origin of spe-

cies and uniformitarianism was a good choice. As I saw in the Origin, through your comparis-


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on of opinions on species and varieties, the boundaries of many species are fuzzy, if not blurry.

This continuity between species is the fundamental idea of your work, but the problem, now, is

that you have gotten carried away with that idea.

Your remark on page thirty, which wonderfully summarizes the underlying theme of the

whole Origin, begins to show your degraded view of man:

Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt,

after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am capable, that the

view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertainednamely, that each

species has been independently createdis erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are

not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal des-

cendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknow-

ledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am

convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

Thereupon, you treat the apparent variation of species, in nature and under domestication, phys-

ical proximity, the struggle for survival, relationships within species as opposed to relationships

that form between different species, all to demonstrate the force of natural selection, which you

show is as universal as the law of gravity. This law, though, you say, applies to man no differ-

ently than any other animal, and here is where I must interject.

It was a long eighteen years from the day you read Thomas Malthuss ideas on the controls of

population (and regaled me excitedly all night long with the ideas significance in every facet of

biologyand life, for that matter) to the day that Charles Lyell warned you of young Alfred Wal-

laces work on the same matter that had occupied you for the past two decades. Wallaces work

led you to rush out an essay, on which the Origin is based, which was far behind the matters you


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discussed with daily. The subsequent scurry to produce a compromised explication of your the-

ory, to avoid alienating too many God-believers, resulted in a slapdash work considering your

current discoveries at the time. You wanted to preserve the dignity of both Christians, and hu-

manity, and purposely avoided a shocking tone, and I appreciated it, though I knew where you

were headed.

But the Origin of Species was not enough. In that work you left loopholesescape clauses

so that the conscientious God-fearer could retain his God while incorporating evolution into his

understanding of the world. You did this first through allowing God the status as creator of the

primary few forms of life, and second, by ultimately retaining the dignity of man, though you

made implicit stabs at his half-divinity. As if compelled by society and the last vestiges of reli-

gion in your life, you left mans sanctity intact, in order to refrain from making him into an anim-

al.

And now, you give us The Descent of Man. I simply cannot stand for this direct attack on

mans dignity. Although the implications of the Origin were toward this end, some things simply

ought to remain unsaid. At least, you begin in all honesty, claiming The sole object of this work

is to consider, firstly, whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existing

form on. p 18. You claim only to gather outside facts and come to conclusions not in any de-

gree new. Perhaps you are right about mans ancestry (in disgust, I did not read the entire book),

but you have no place to say it. You have no tact, in the title of the first chapter of the first part

you write: The Evidence of the Descent of Man from some Lower Formwhether you present

this evidence or not is hardly relevant. Certainly, you demonstrate, first, the physical evolution

the apparent similarities between man and other animals in embryology, rudimentary physical

structures, and now-vestigial structures. Then you move to the development of and similarity of


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the mental faculties to the higher animals, and list multitudes of examples likening the savage to

the ape, as if every semblance makes man into an animal. You admit, yourself, in Chapter Three

that The difference in mental power between the highest ape and the lowest savage [is] im-

mense. Yet you pursue this debasement of your own kinda merciless self-deprecation.

I quit reading when I reached this passage in the third chapter:

I kept a daily record of the actions of one of my infants, and when he was about eleven

months old, and before he could speak a single word, I was continually struck with the great-

er quickness, with which all sorts of objects and sounds were associated together in his mind,

compared with that of the most intelligent dogs I ever knew.

You speak as if astonished that your own son can think at the same rate as a dog. Is this the envir-

onment in which they ought to be raised: regarded as experimentsanimals to be observed with

notebook in hand? In frustration I skimmed over the next pages. Not once in the entire book do

you use the word Creator or God but to demonstrate that the idea of a divinity is not in-

stinctual in man. You have taken up the accursed term that Thomas Huxley so proudly coined

and donned, agnostic, and deserted God.

If God has no place in your life, and you seek to displace him from the hearts of the entire

human race, then I have no place in your life.

Your (previously) beloved,

Emma


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Works Cited

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species.New York: Penguin, 2003.

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.New York: Penguin,

2004.

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Darwin - Furious Emma