The Reluctant Mr. Darwin Read Online Free PDF Page B

be called The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle . He would be the editor of this multi-volume Zoology , gathering contributions from his consulting experts, writing introductions and commentaries, commissioning expensive illustrations, to be financed with a grant from Her Majesty’s Treasury. He was now well embedded within the seamless matrix of government, Church, and gentlemanly science. Secretly, he continued talking to himself in the seditious notebooks.
    When he’d filled notebook “B,” he started a new one, in maroon leather and labeled “C,” after which would come “D” and “E,” each devoted to transmutation. He was reading widely in the literature of exploration and natural history, plus a diverse selection of books on animal and plant breeding, history, and philosophy of science; and he had begun putting cryptic questions to anyone who knew anything about the odd, targeted topics that interested him. He debriefed his father, a gusty source of lore on human mental attributes, and his father’s gardener. He quizzed livestock breeders about variation and heredity among domestic species. There were so many unknowns to consider. How did inheritance work? What was the difference between species and varieties? What might be deduced from patterns of species distribution around the world? All the islands of Oceania have skinks with golden streaks, he noted. Wild pigs in the Falklands grow stiff, brick-red hair. The kingfisher of the Moluccas scarcely differs from European kingfishers, he wrote, except that its beak is longer and sharper. Were they separate kingfisher species, or just varieties? Cassowaries in New Guinea, tenrecs in Madagascar, geckos on St. Helena. There are no snakes on islands of the central Pacific, he wrote. Black rabbits, introduced onto the Falklands back in 1764, had yielded decades worth of variously colored offspring. Clues, clues, clues. What did they signify, how did they fit? The cuckoos of Java versus the cuckoos of Sumatra and the Philippines—species or varieties? He wanted every possible piece of relevant data, whatever the source. He went to the Regent’s Park Zoo to see its newly acquired orangutan. He became a greedy amasser of seemingly unconnected facts. He busted his brain to connect them. It was an intense program of research and cogitation, all in hours stolen from his public commitments.
    â€œThe changes in species must be very slow,” he figured, not nearly so fast as when domestic breeders select which animals they want to pair. Slow or not, there was a problem to address: When animals continue interbreeding freely, won’t the adaptive differences get blurred away? If so, “all the change that has been accumulated cannot be transmitted.” Maybe isolation somehow prevents that. Maybe sterility between different forms, like the sterility of hybrids in domestic breeding, allows the accumulated change to persist. By now he was making some cocky comments in the notebook about “my theory,” although that was premature. His theory hadn’t yet coalesced. He was still groping to see the scope of the phenomenon, let alone to find a mechanism that would explain it. “Study the wars of organic being,” he advised himself. Imagine that mankind didn’t exist and that monkeys, breeding, improving, eventually produced some sort of alternate intellectual being. Manlike but not Man, and transmuted from four-handed, arboreal animals. That was hard to grasp, sure, but maybe not so much harder than Lyell’s idea about slow, incremental processes accounting for all the big effects in geology. Remember the apteryx, Darwin told himself. If New Zealand had been divided into many islands, would there now be many apteryx species?
    Seventy-five pages into the “C” notebook, in spring 1838, Darwin’s confidence swelled. Grappling with these questions, he admitted, was “a most laborious,