Darwin: The Expert View

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Darwin

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Dr Paul Underhill considers the emotional turmoil Charles Darwin underwent as he faced the prospect of exposing his research on evolution to the Victorian public.

Characteristically, after publication, Darwin wanted to get out of the limelight and virtually retired from public life, leaving the forceful task of propagandising the theory to “Darwin’s bulldog”, T. H. Huxley. Darwin seldom made public pronouncements on religion, all too painfully aware of the hurt inflicted on his wife, Emma, for whom “Darwinian evolution” amounted to heresy. Darwin’s maladies waxed and waned over the years, but in the last decade of his life, when he concentrated on botanical research and no longer speculated about evolution, he experienced his best health since his time at Cambridge.

Political and religious attitudes to the evolutionary debate often overlapped. Anglicans upholding the natural theological tradition were more likely to be Tory in their political outlook (the quip about the Anglican Church being the Tory party at prayer springs to mind) while materialists who believed in transmutation might well be radical, republican and atheistic. New ideas such as evolution acquired political overtones because they symbolised a challenge to the existing power structure both within science and within the wider society. The spotlight shines once again on Darwin’s personal dilemma.

We have already seen the influence of political economy (Malthus) in the germination of Darwin’s ideas, and many have argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution through individual competition reflects the competitive ethos of Victorian capitalist society – that Darwin portrayed the world of nature as almost identical to the world as Victorian political economists saw it. But this is a misconception. The doctrine of "social Darwinism" had more to do with the ultimate apostle of Victorian laissez-faire, Herbert Spencer; it was Spencer - not Darwin - who coined and popularised the term “the survival of the fittest”.

Historians are not usually allowed to engage in speculation, but for all his Victorian respectability, I like to envisage Darwin as a progressive who, if he were alive today, would delight in debunking the daffy reactionary nonsense of present-day Creationists and perhaps even take issue with today’s “ultra-Darwinists” and their blinkered obsession with genes and memes. In any event, Darwin should be viewed as a great revolutionary who inaugurated a new era in the cultural history of mankind – a titan of a scientist and, in his own idiosyncratic way, a titan of a man.

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Content last updated: 29/07/2004

About our expert

Paul Underhill read History and Social and Political sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, followed by a PhD in Social History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He combines work as a reporter for Hansard in Westminster with teaching History of Science and Humanities for the Open University. He lives in Wiltshire with his wife and young child.