A biographical sketch by John van Wyhe
CHARLES Robert Darwin (1809-1882) was born the fifth of six children into a wealthy Shropshire gentry family in the small market town of Shrewsbury. His father, the hugely portly Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848), was a successful physician and financier and son of the famous poet, Erasmus Darwin. Charles Darwin's mother, Susannah Wedgwood (1765-1817), died when he was eight years old. Darwin watched over by his elder sisters and maidservants grew up amidst wealth, comfort and country sports. He attended the nearby Shrewsbury School as a boarder from 1818-1825. In October 1825 Darwin went to Edinburgh University with his brother Erasmus to study medicine with a view to becoming a physician. While in Edinburgh, Darwin investigated marine invertebrates with the guidance of Robert Grant. Darwin's name first appeared in print in one of Grant's articles. Darwin did not like the study of medicine and could not bear the sight of blood or suffering and so his father proposed the church as a respectable alternative. The advantage to becoming a country parson, as Darwin saw it, would be the freedom to pursue his growing interest in natural history. He read several books on Christianity while making up his mind. Some of these survive here. To become ordained in the Church of England he must first obtain a B. A. degree from an English university.
On 15 October 1827 he was admitted a member of Christ's College, Cambridge. However, as he had forgotten most of the Greek he had learned at school, and advanced Greek was required in the daily college lectures, Darwin could not come up in October. He studied under a private tutor at home until he was able to translate Greek with some ease. Therefore he did not come into residence in Cambridge until 26 January 1828. As all of the College rooms were full, Darwin first lived in lodgings for Christ's students above W. Bacon, the tobacconist, on Sidney Street just down the street. (The original building was destroyed in the 1930s but two plaques on the site of a branch of Boots the chemist mark the location today.) He matriculated, that is signed the role as a member of the University, at the Senate House on 26 February 1828 (not in January as maintained by some biographies). Darwin's student bills were recently discovered at Christ's College and shed new light on his time in Cambridge.
Darwin was never a model student, but he did become a passionate amateur naturalist. He began avidly collecting beetles along with fellow undergraduates. His name appeared in print when some of his records of insect captures were published by Stephens in his British Entomology in 1829. Darwin's first published word was "Cambridge". Darwin became the devoted follower of Professor of botany John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861). Through their close friendship Darwin learned a great deal about the practice of natural science. Darwin passed his B.A. examination in January 1831. As he had not fulfilled the residence requirement to take a degree, it was not awarded until 26 April 1831. Shortly thereafter he was taught the rudiments of field geology by Professor Adam Sedgwick during a tour of north Wales.
Henslow was able to pass on to Darwin the offer of Commander Robert FitzRoy of travelling on a survey ship, HMS Beagle, as a "scientific person" or naturalist. The round-the-world journey lasted five years. Darwin spent most of these years investigating the geology and zoology of the lands he visited, especially South America, the Galapagos islands, and Pacific oceanic islands. He recorded many of his specimens and observations immediately in field notebooks. His telegraphic pocket notes were later used in writing up more formal notes, such as his animal notes. Later he recorded his experiences in a diary which became the basis of his famous book Journal of researches (1839) now known as Voyage of the Beagle. (This latter title was first used on the title page of a 1905 edition.)
Darwin was particularly influenced by the works of men of science like astronomer Sir John Herschel, traveller Alexander von Humboldt and geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell's new book, Principles of Geology (1830-3), profoundly influenced Darwin. Lyell offered not just a new geology but a new way of understanding nature. Lyell showed how tiny, slow, gradual and cumulative change over immense periods of time could produce large changes. Natural, visible, non-miraculous causes should be sought to explain natural phenomenon. Darwin had the opportunity to witness all of these forces, such as erosion, earthquakes and volcanoes, during the Beagle voyage and he became convinced that Lyell's views were correct. Darwin made several very important discoveries about the geology of South America, volcanic islands and the origins of coral reefs by building on Lyell's ideas. Darwin later wrote in the 2nd edition of his Journal of researches:
“Where on the face of the earth can we find a spot, on which close investigation will not discover signs of that endless cycle of change, to which this earth has been, is, and will be subjected?”
Darwin also collected organisms of all sorts which he recorded in his specimen lists and zoology notes. These formed the basis of the five volume series he edited and superintended after returning home The zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1838-43).
Geological sections from Darwin's Geological observations on South America.
Darwin also unearthed many fossil creatures in South America. He wondered why the fossils resembled the present inhabitants of that continent more than any other species. Where had the new species come from? In fact, why was the world covered with so many different kinds of living things? Why were some very similar to one another and others vastly different? If species were somehow created to fit their environments, as was then believed, why were jungle species different in Asia, Africa and South America despite the similarity of climate?
Darwin did not conceive of a solution during the Beagle voyage, but rather a few years later in London, while writing books on his travels and studying the specimens he had collected. Experts in London, such as the ornithologist John Gould, were able to tell him how many of the specimens of plants and animals he had collected in the Galapagos Islands unique species, found nowhere else were. Clearly they resembled species from South America 600 miles away. It seemed to Darwin as if stray migrants from South America had come to the Galapagos, after the islands rose from the sea as volcanoes, and then changed over time in isolation on the islands.
Darwin began to speculate on how new species could arise by natural observable causes. His idiosyncratic eclecticism led him to investigate some unconventional evidence. He made countless inquiries of animal breeders, both farmers and hobbyists like pigeon fanciers, trying to understand how they made distinct breeds of plants and animals. Gradually Darwin concluded that organisms were infinitely variable, and that the supposed limits or barriers to species were a belief without foundation. In modern terms we would say that Darwin came to accept that life evolves. One conventional view of the time was that species had been created where they are now found, in accordance with the environment. Few men of science then held to the view that there had been only a single species creation event. The fossil evidence seemed to show very many creations had occurred in different geological eras.
Darwin then sought to explain how living forms changed over time. He was familiar with the evolutionary speculations proposed earlier by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and by the great French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. But already Darwin's theorizing had extended in novel directions. He was thinking of the history of life not as a number of independent lineages somehow impelled to progress upwards from monads to monkeys. Instead Darwin saw all life as a single genealogical tree, branching and re-branching. Thus similarities between different kinds of living things would be expected from their joint ancestry or common descent. Darwin's speculations and early theorizing were recorded in a series of notebooks similar to those he kept during the Beagle voyage.
In September 1838 Darwin read Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). As Janet Browne has written, Darwin was 'clearly following up lines of inquiry relating to individual variation, averages, and chance, as well as seeking information on human population statistics.' (Browne 1995, p. 385) Malthus argued that human population growth, unless somehow checked, would necessarily outstrip food production. Population growth was geometrical. For example, two parents might have four children, each of whom could have four children, whose children could also have four children. Thus in four generations there would be an increase from 2 to 4 to 24 to 96 and so forth.
The focus of this argument inspired Darwin. He realized that an enormous proportion of living things are always destroyed before they can reproduce. This must be true because every species would otherwise breed enough to fill the earth in a few hundred generations. Instead populations remain roughly stable year after year. The only way this can be so is that most offspring (from pollen, to seeds and eggs) do not survive long enough to reproduce.
Darwin, already concentrating on how new varieties of life might be formed, suddenly realized that the key was whatever made a difference between those that survive to reproduce and those that do not. He came to call this open-ended collection of causes 'natural selection' because it was analogous to breeders choosing which individuals to breed from and thus changing a breed markedly over time.
As Darwin wrote in his Autobiography in 1876:
'In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work'.
Below is the famous passage from Darwin's notebook where these ideas were first recorded:
[Sept] 28th.[1838] Even the energetic language of <Malthus> «Decandoelle» does not convey the warring of the species as inference from Malthus.— «increase of brutes, must be prevented soley by positive checks, excepting that famine may stop desire.—» in Nature production does not increase, whilst no checks prevail, but the positive check of famine & consequently death..
...—The final cause of all this wedging, must be to sort out proper structure, and adapt it to change.—to do that for form, which Malthus shows is the final effect by means however of volition of this populousness on the energy of man. One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones. [Notebook D 134e-135e]
Or, as Darwin later put it in the Origin of Species (1859):
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
Therefore only the survivors would pass on their form and abilities. Their characteristics would persist and multiply whilst characteristics of those that did not live long enough to reproduce would decrease. Darwin did not know precisely how inheritance worked—genes and DNA were totally unknown. Nevertheless he appreciated the crucial fact of inheritance. Offspring resemble their parents. Darwin thought in terms of populations of diverse heritable things with no essence—not representatives of ideal types as many earlier thinkers had done. From his observations and experiments with domesticated and wild plants and animals he could find no limits to the extent organic forms could vary and change through generations. Thus the existing species in the world were related not along a 'chain of being' or separated into artificially separate species categories but were all related on a genealogical family tree through 'descent with modification'.
As Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species (1859):
“Why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America? There is nothing in the conditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate, or in the proportions in which the several classes are associated together, which resembles closely the conditions of the South American coast: in fact there is a considerable dissimilarity in all these respects. On the other hand, there is a considerable degree of resemblance in the volcanic nature of the soil, in climate, height, and size of the islands, between the Galapagos and Cape de Verde Archipelagos: but what an entire and absolute difference in their inhabitants! The inhabitants of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the Galapagos to America. I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation; whereas on the view here maintained, it is obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists, whether by occasional means of transport or by formerly continuous land, from America; and the Cape de Verde Islands from Africa; and that such colonists would be liable to modification;—the principle of inheritance still betraying their original birthplace.”
Darwin also identified another means by which some individuals would have descendants and others would not. He later called this sexual selection. This theory explained why the male sexes in many species produce colorful displays or specialized body parts to attract females or to compete against other males. Those males who defeat other males, or are selected for breeding by females leave more offspring and so subsequent generations resemble them more than those who succeed less often. As Darwin pointed out, "A hornless stag or spurless cock would have a poor chance of leaving offspring." (Origin p. 88)
Darwin, deeply studied in the sciences of his time, yet living somewhat independently from his colleagues, was able to think in new ways and to conceive of worlds quite unimaginable to his more orthodox friends. However, the legend of Darwin as a lone genius discovering evolution on the Galapagos Islands is now known by historians to be a groundless myth.
It is now clear that Darwin did not keep his ideas about species changing secret; he discussed them with many friends, family and colleagues during succeeding years. But his full-time occupation before and long after he became an evolutionist was the publication of his recollections and scientific work resulting from the Beagle voyage.
Darwin in 1840. Watercolour by George Richmond. Reproduced courtesy of the Darwin Heirlooms Trust.
He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood (1808-1896) in 1839. Darwin's many acute and innovative books and articles forged a great reputation as a geologist, zoologist and scientific traveller. His eight years grueling work on barnacles, published 1851-4 enhanced his reputation as an authority on taxonomy as well as geology and the distribution of flora and fauna as in his earlier works. Nevertheless there is no reason to allege, as is so often done, that Darwin needed to supplement his reputation or skills before he could publish his species theory. Marine invertebrates had been of central interest for Darwin since his student days in Edinburgh. During the Beagle voyage a large percentage of his notes were devoted to them, and he did not give this class of organisms to another expert to identify but kept them for himself.
Darwin conducted breeding experiments with animals and plants and corresponded and read widely for many years to refine and substantiate his theory of evolution. In 1842 he prepared an essay outlining his theory. This was greatly expanded in another essay written in 1844. After completing his work on barnacles Darwin immediately turned to his theory to explain species. He was more than half way through a great work on the subject when he was interrupted in 1858 by a letter from an English naturalist and collector, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) ( see picture left). Wallace was then collecting in South East Asia. In an essay enclosed Wallace described his ideas 'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type'. Darwin was struck by the similarity to his concept of Natural Selection. He sent the letter on to Lyell and it was decided, together with Darwin's friend J. D. Hooker, to avoid competition for priority, to publicize abstracts by both men as soon as possible. The papers were read, in the absence of Darwin and Wallace, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society of London on 1 July 1858 and later published in their Proceedings. Darwin was urged by friends to publish an 'abstract' or overview of his work-in-progress on natural selection. This abstract became one of the most famous books ever written: On the Origin of Species (1859).
Although Darwin convinced most of the scientific community within 15-20 years that descent with modification, or evolution, was true, many rejected natural selection as the primary mechanism. Darwin was not the first to propose that species can change. A glance at his 'An historical sketch of the progress of opinion on the origin of species' shows that Darwin made no pretense to have originated or discovered evolution. However, Darwin's understanding of branching descent was more accurate, refined and convincing than his predecessors who considered, for example, that the members of one genus might be commonly derived. We know that a wide popular literature such as George Combe's Constitution of Man (1828) and the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) had already shocked and converted vast popular audiences to belief in the power of natural laws to control the development of nature and society. Historians of science now believe that Darwin's effect was, as James Secord put it, a 'palace coup' amongst elite men of science rather than a revolution. Indeed recent research suggests that the reaction to Darwin's Origin was less of a furore than once believed. (Fleming & Goodall 2002) Nevertheless to the end of his life Darwin was regarded as a great scientific revolutionary who had overturned the ideas of his generation.
Darwin, as an unquestionably respectable authority in elite science, publicly threw his weight on the side of evolution, and soon young allies like Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and John Tyndall publicly threw their own weight towards the same position. Darwin's name is so linked with evolution because his works convinced the international scientific community that evolution was true. In the two decades after the publication of Origin the great majority of the scientific community came to accept that Darwin was right about the evolution of life. But natural selection was often not accepted. In fact, a generation of biologists regarded Darwin as correct in uncovering the evolution of life but mistaken in stressing natural selection. Natural selection's canonisation had to wait until the modern synthesis of Darwinism with Mendelian genetics in the 1930s.
Like Combe, Charles Babbage, Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer and countless other authors before him, Darwin represented his doctrine as furthering the domain of natural laws. We see this in the following epigraph Darwin used for the Origin of Species:
" But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so
far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by
insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."
Darwin even saw the power of his law of natural selection extending beyond life to what we would call psychology, linguistics and to society and history (see for example Descent of Man, 1871, chapter 3).
The Origin of Species
In the Origin of Species Darwin first tried to convince his readers that organisms are malleable and not fixed natural kinds. He demonstrated that domesticated plants and animals were known to be highly variable and to have changed so much as to be classified as different species if they were not already familiar.
He then showed that the existence and abundance of organisms was dependent on many factors, which tended to hold their numbers in check such as climate, food, predation, available space etc.
Only then did Darwin set about showing the effects of differential death and survival on reproduction and the persistence and diversification of forms—natural selection. In other words Darwin's theory of evolution has three main elements or requirements: variation, selection and heredity. If all individual life forms are unique, which no one denied, and these differences could make a difference to which organisms lived to reproduce and which did not, then, if these differences could be inherited by offspring, subsequent generations would be descended from those which were lucky enough to survive.
An illustrative example is seen in the recent work of biologists in the Galapagos Islands. During a drought season when no new seeds were produced for an island's finches to eat, the birds were forced to hunt for remaining seeds on the ground. Soon all the visible seeds had been devoured. It so happened that those with slightly thicker beaks than average could turn over stones a little bit better than the rest to find the remaining seeds and so the birds which survived the famine tended to be thicker beaked. When the drought ended and the birds again had young, this new generation had slightly thicker beaks. This is an example of Darwinian evolution observed and measured in the field. (See Weiner. 1994. Beak of the Finch.)
Darwin's theory of genealogical evolution (as opposed to earlier theories by Lamarck or Vestiges which entailed independent lineages unfolding sequentially because of an innate tendency towards progress) made sense of a host of diverse kinds of evidence such as the succession of fossil forms in the geological record, geographical distribution of life (biogeography), recapitulative appearances in embryology, homologies like the hand of a man and the wing of a bat, vestigial organs, nesting taxonomic relationships observed throughout the world and so forth.
The famous last paragraph of the Origin of Species is a concise and eloquent précis of Darwin's vision:
“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed 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.”
Modern readers often misunderstand the meaning of the title of Darwin's book. They take the origin of species to mean the origin of life. Then it is pointed out that Darwin 'failed' to throw light on the origin of life. Others seem to think that his book is called The origin of THE species i.e. aimed at human beings. But this was not Darwin's aim. Darwin argued that species—that is the different kinds of organisms in the world —come not from multiple unique creation events on each island or particular place—but instead that species are the modified descendants of earlier forms. Darwin demonstrated that the origination of species could be entirely explained by descent with modification and that a host of facts were inconsistent with the belief in spontaneous creations according to environmental circumstances or divine interventions.
The reactions to Darwin's evolutionary theories were varied and pronounced. In zoology, taxonomy, botany, paleontology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literature and religion Darwin's work engendered profound reactions—many of which are still ongoing. Most disturbing of all, however, were the implications for the cherished uniqueness of man. Although Darwin refrained from discussing the derivation of any particular species, including man, in the Origin except for his famous sentence: 'Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history' many people who read the book could think only about what this genealogical view of life meant for human beings. This is a subject Darwin later took up in The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872). In these brilliantly original and seminal works Darwin showed that there is no difference of kind between man and other animals, but only of degree. Rather than an unbridgeable gulf, Darwin showed there is a gradation of change not only between man and other animals, but between all organic forms which is a consequence of the gradual change continuously and cumulatively operating over time.
Darwin's extraordinary achievements are not restricted to his early scientific works and his evolutionary works. His keen observation, imagination, curiosity and determination allowed him to make strikingly prescient contributions to ecology, botany and a dozen of what would later be distinct disciplines. Darwin was very impressed by the inter-relatedness of different species, climate and environment. He stressed that the life in any area was the outcome of an amazing history of struggle or 'great battle for life'. He proposed new solutions to how organisms spread across the globe. His numerous discoveries and theories are too numerous to list here. Only by reading his works themselves can one gain an accurate sense of Darwin's achievements.
His final book, The formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms (1881), was published the year before his death. In it Darwin made another important contribution, and, characteristically, revealed the amazing complexity and importance of a natural process of gradual accumulation, which no one seemed to have grasped before, and that had all along been under our feet.
A myth about Darwin still circulates today—that he repented of evolutionism or converted to Christianity on his deathbed. These stories are usually told by those who would like them to be true, but they are not. There are no mysteries surrounding Darwin's death; his relatives present at the time wrote detailed accounts of his last hours. The history of the legend, however, is revealed in James Moore, The Darwin legend (1994). For most of his life Darwin was not an atheist, but a deist; that is he believed that a creator had designed the universe and set up natural laws according to which all of nature was unwaveringly governed. It was the pursuit of a man of science to discover the laws by which nature operated. He discussed his religious views in his autobiography (these appear, however, only in the 1958 edition by Nora Barlow with original omissions restored.)
Darwin's new study at Down House, engraved shortly after his death by Axel Haig.
Charles Darwin was a kind, good-humored, pleasant man, unassuming and profoundly modest. He suffered from ill health much of his adult life. We will probably never know the causes for his illness. He nevertheless remained driven to understand nature and to remain part of the elite scientific world he respected and admired. Darwin died in April 1882 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
After his death Darwin's private papers were mostly preserved and many of these were later deposited in Cambridge University Library
In 1909 over 400 scientists and dignitaries from 167 different countries gathered at Cambridge to celebrate the centenary of Darwin's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. The event was an unprecedented success - never before had such a celebration been held, not for an institution or a nation - but for an individual scientist. In the year 2000, we witnessed another unprecedented celebration of an extraordinary man.
Questions to answer
1. Describe Darwin’s family life and his schooling experience with school. Was he a model student? Where did he attend college? What did he study? What was his reaction to medical school?
2. What professor made biggest impact on Darwin while at Cambridge? How did his influence affect Darwin after graduating from Cambridge?
3. Darwin was influenced by several scientists, but especially by Charles Lyell. How did Lyell’s work change the way Darwin viewed the world?
4. What does Darwin think about fossils?
5. What influenced did breeders have on Darwin’s understanding of how traits are passed on? What conclusion did he come to?
6. Explain the key idea that Darwin gains by reading Thomas Malthus. How does this lead to his formation of the process of natural selection?
7. Summarize Darwin’s concept of sexual selection. How are the roles of males different from females?
8. How did Alfred Wallace’s work affect Darwin’s writing of book?
9. What effect did the publishing of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection have on the scientific community?
10. Darwin did not set out on his voyage on the Beagle with solving the mystery of evolution. What observations did he make along the way lead to the formation of the process of natural selection?
11. Previous to Darwin, how was the origin of life explained? After the publication of Origin, how was the origin of life explained?
Source: https://my-ecoach.com/online/resources/6661/Charles_Darwin_-_Biography_(Day_16___17).doc
Web site to visit: https://my-ecoach.com
Author of the text: indicated on the source document of the above text
The Lost World: A reader’s guide
Word version of the readers’ guide produced for The Lost World Read 2009
The Lost World Read 2009
The Lost World Read 2009 celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin with a mass-read of the classic adventure story The Lost World. It is part of Darwin 200 – the global celebrations of the life and work of the man who transformed the world with his theory of evolution by natural selection.
The project brings communities together to share the joy of reading, learn about the past and discuss issues of current concern. People will be taking part in locations across England and Scotland.
Thousands of copies of the full-text version of the book and a specially commissioned adaptation for younger or less confident readers are being distributed across the participating areas, along with a graphic-style biography of Darwin.
Support material includes a dedicated website providing information on activities taking place during the course of the project. Visit www.lostworldread.com for further details.
This illustrated guide provides historical background information of relevance to the novel. It includes biographies of Conan Doyle and Darwin, pointing out where their lives and interests overlapped; a look at fossils and dinosaurs and the impact their discovery had upon the popular imagination; and a survey of evolutionary themes in British science fiction.
Further background material can be found on the website. This guide can also be downloaded from the website in PDF and Word format.
Once you’ve finished the book please submit your comments via the online survey.
We hope you enjoy taking part in The Lost World Read 2009.
*** SPOILER ALERT *** You may want to leave this guide and the other background material until you have read the book in case you see something that will give the plot away.
Key Dates
Year |
Darwin |
Conan Doyle |
Other Events |
1809 |
Born in Shrewsbury |
|
Fulton’s steamboat |
1825 |
University of Edinburgh |
|
Stockton & Darlington Railway |
1828 |
University of Cambridge |
|
Wellington becomes PM |
1831 |
Graduates. Beagle departs Plymouth |
|
Reform Bill riots |
1836 |
Beagle returns |
|
Battle of Alamo |
1839 |
Marries Emma. First child born |
|
Chartist riots |
1842 |
Moves to Down House |
|
Britain acquires Hong Kong |
1851 |
Death of daughter Anne |
|
Great Exhibition |
1859 |
On the Origin of Species |
Born in Edinburgh |
Deaths of Stephenson and Brunel |
1868 |
Variation of Animals and Plants |
Starts boarding school |
Gladstone becomes PM |
1876 |
Writes autobiography |
University of Edinburgh |
Bell patents telephone |
1879 |
Biography of grandfather published |
First story and first non-fiction published |
Zulu rebellion |
1881 |
Revises his autobiography |
Graduates Bachelor of Medicine (CM) |
End of first Boer War |
1882 |
Dies |
Plymouth. Southsea |
Treasure Island |
1885 |
|
Marries Louise. Graduates MD |
Benz Patent motorcar |
1887 |
Life and Letters published |
‘A Study in Scarlet’ |
Golden Jubilee |
1891 |
|
Full-time writer |
Edison’s kinetoscope |
1895 |
|
Visits Egypt |
Dreyfus Affair |
1900 |
|
Serves in Boer War |
Relief of Mafeking |
1901 |
|
‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ |
Death of Victoria |
1907 |
|
Marries Jean |
New Zealand independent dominion |
1912 |
|
The Lost World book |
Titanic sinks |
1917 |
|
Speaks publicly on spiritualism |
Russian Revolution |
1918 |
|
Son Kingsley dies |
End of World War One |
1920 |
|
Cottingley fairies |
Prohibition in USA |
1925 |
|
The Lost World film |
Scopes’ ‘Monkey Trial’ |
1930 |
|
Dies |
Gandhi leads salt protest |
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh. He was one of nine Doyle children and the eldest son. His father, Charles Doyle, was a London-born clerk employed by the Office of Works. His mother, Mary, had emigrated to Scotland from Ireland with her mother and sister, and claimed a distinguished family history. His paternal grandfather, John – also Irish – was a successful cartoonist and painter known by the pseudonym HB.
As a result of the turmoil at home caused by his father’s alcoholism, Conan Doyle lived for a time with his mother’s friend, Mary Burton at Liberton Bank in Edinburgh. She was the sister of the Scottish historian and political economist, John Hill Burton, who encouraged the future author’s interest in history. His mother had already instilled in him a love of reading and of ancestry. When Conan Doyle rejoined his family they had moved to a tenement flat at 3 Sciennes Hill Place.
In 1868, dissatisfied with the education he was receiving at Newington Academy in Edinburgh, Mary persuaded Charles’ more prosperous brothers to pay for Conan Doyle to attend Hodder, a Jesuit preparatory school in Lancashire. He transferred to its upper school, Stonyhurst College, two years later. While at school he developed his talent as a story-teller and was also a keen sportsman (in later life he continued to play cricket, rugby, football and golf, and was a cross-country skier). Among his favourite authors at this time were Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Jules Verne.
In 1875, Conan Doyle was sent to Feldkirch in Austria – another Jesuit school – before taking up a place at the University of Edinburgh the following year to study medicine. While still a student, he submitted the story ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’ to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, but it was rejected. He had more luck with ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’, which was published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879. He received a payment of three guineas. That same year his first work of non-fiction, ‘Gelseminium as a Poison’, was published in the British Medical Journal.
Conan Doyle took a break from his studies in 1880 when he signed on as a surgeon for a voyage to the Arctic on the whaling ship Hope. He returned to Edinburgh to graduate as Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery in 1881. In October that year he joined the steamer Mayumba as the ship’s medical officer. This voyage took him out to Sierra Leone and Liberia. He returned home in January 1882.
By the summer, Conan Doyle had moved to Plymouth to join Dr George Budd, a fellow Edinburgh graduate, in general practice. The unpredictable Budd proved to be an unscrupulous business partner and Conan Doyle soon left for Southsea, Portsmouth where he eventually built up a more successful practice of his own (he gave a fictionalised account of his Plymouth experience in The Stark Munro Letters, published in 1895).
Throughout this period, he continued to write and among his early short stories were two inspired by his maritime adventures: ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’, a ghost story set on a whaler, and ‘J Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’, a version of the Mary Celeste mystery. Around this time he also began writing a novel, The Firm of Girdlestone. This was eventually published in 1890. The previous year the historical romance, Micah Clarke, became his first full-length novel to get into print.
Conan Doyle completed his studies and graduated as an MD from the University of Edinburgh in 1885. On 6 August that year he married Louise Hawkins who was the sister of one of his Southsea patients. Conan Doyle had already developed an interest in mediums by this time and through his wife, he mixed socially with people who took part in séances. The world of spiritualism would become increasingly important to him and was one he would try to reconcile with the world of science.
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series began with ‘A Study in Scarlet’, which was published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual (Conan Doyle had sold the rights to Ward Lock for £25 the previous year, a decision he would later regret, feeling he had been exploited by the publisher). It was described by the Glasgow Herald as the annual’s ‘pièce de résistance’. Its sequel, ‘The Sign of the Four’, was commissioned and published by Lippincott’s Magazine in February 1890 (Oscar Wilde was commissioned to write ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ at the same meeting). In his Holmes’ stories, Conan Doyle applied the knowledge he had gathered from his medical studies of how a case was built up by the logical accumulation of evidence. The character of Holmes was partly based on that of Dr Joseph Bell, one of his lecturers at Edinburgh, who had impressed his students with his deductive reasoning.
At this stage, Conan Doyle still intended to continue working in medicine. On a trip to Berlin in 1890 he had met Malcolm Morris, a Harley Street doctor, who advised him to leave Southsea and set himself up as an eye specialist in London. The career move was unsuccessful, but fortunately the Holmes stories were taken up by the newly founded Strand Magazine and quickly became a hit with readers (the first to appear there was ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’), allowing Conan Doyle to increase his author’s fees and become a full-time writer.
Conan Doyle’s first love remained historical fiction and he worried that his detective stories would come to overshadow his more serious literary work. He wrote to his mother Mary in November 1891: ‘I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.’ To that end, in ‘The Final Problem’ (published December 1893), he plunged Holmes and his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, seemingly to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle’s liberation was short-lived, however, and he was forced to bring Holmes back by popular demand with ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ in 1901. He negotiated a generous fee of £100 per 1,000 words from the Strand for his work. From this he paid a percentage to the journalist Bertram Robinson who had first told him the legend of a terrifying dog at loose on Dartmoor and had provided some local background for the story. Conan Doyle continued to produce Holmes’ stories in the coming years, concluding with the collection published as The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1927. The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories was published the following year.
During a visit to Egypt for Louise’s health in 1895, fighting broke out between the Dervishes and the British, and Conan Doyle cabled The Westminster Gazette, offering his services as a war correspondent. With the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, he enthusiastically volunteered to serve as a doctor at the hospital set up by his friend John Langman in Cape Town. More than 300,000 copies of his pamphlet The War in South Africa: its cause and conduct were sold in Britain, and it was also made widely available abroad to counter anti-British propaganda. Conan Doyle’s patriotism made him a public figure, his fame going far beyond what he had achieved with his fiction, and he was rewarded, to his apparent embarrassment, with a knighthood in 1902.
Conan Doyle had moved from London to Haselmere in Surrey in 1893. By now he had two children, a daughter Mary Louise, born in 1889 and a son, Kingsley, born in 1892. His wife had contracted tuberculosis soon after their son’s birth and remained an invalid for the remainder of her life, finally succumbing to the disease on 4 July 1906. The following year, Conan Doyle married Jean Leckie, with whom he had had an unconsummated love affair for over ten years (one of the many causes he adopted was that of reforming British divorce laws). They moved to Windlesham in Crowborough, Sussex and had three children. It was here he wrote The Lost World, which was published in 1912.
During the First World War Conan Doyle served as a private in the Crowborough Company of the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment, and as a military correspondent and historian (his six-volumeThe British Campaign in France and Flanders was published in 1920). His eldest son, having been injured while serving as a captain at the front, died of influenza in 1918. Conan Doyle found some degree of solace from this death, and those of other close family members, through spiritualism;although he had long lost his religious faith, he still believed in an after life. Throughout the 1920s, his time was dominated by his commitment to evangelising worldwide on behalf of the spiritualist movement, leading to publications that included The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921), The History of Spiritualism (1926) and Pheneas Speaks: direct spirit communications in the family circle (1927). The Coming of the Fairies (1922) was his account of the story of two little girls from Cottingley, Yorkshire, who had made photographs of fairies (a hoax which had taken him in completely). This along with his spiritualism led to criticism in the press of his credulity.
Conan Doyle died at his home on 7 July 1930 following a heart attack. He was originally buried in the rose garden at Windlesham, but was later interred with his second wife in Minstead churchyard in the New Forest.
In his biography of Conan Doyle, Andrew Lycett writes:
At the time the obituaries were respectful. But there was a sense that his day had past. As the bright young things of the jazz age struggled with economic depression, they were not greatly interested in a man who had become obsessed with another world.
His reputation as an author was not helped by the activities of enthusiasts such as the Baker Street Irregulars who lived in a fantasy world in which Dr Watson actually wrote the Holmes stories and Conan Doyle was just his literary agent! However, Conan Doyle’s skill as a storyteller can not be in doubt, whether this be in historical, detective or science fiction, and he remains one of the world’s most popular authors.
The Lost World
I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy
The Lost World (1912) is an exciting tale of heroism and skulduggery involving bad-tempered scientists, unrequited love, hidden diamonds and dinosaurs. The plot hinges upon the irascible character of Professor Challenger who goes to South America to verify some of the observations made by other naturalists. He discovers that prehistoric creatures, long thought to be extinct, still exist on the continent. He later returns to the ‘lost world’ to gather the evidence that will convince his sceptical colleagues back home in London of his amazing find. He is accompanied by a small party comprising reporter Edward Malone, adventurer Lord John Roxton and rival academic Professor Summerlee. The explorers reach an isolated plateau where they encounter pterodactyls and other Jurassic monsters. They are also caught up in a war between a primitive tribe of Indians and a fierce race of ape-men.
The Lost World was serialised in The Strand from April 1912, illustrated with photographs of Conan Doyle and his friends in the guise of the explorers, and was published in book form in October that year. The ‘lost world’ is a subgenre of science fiction covering those stories in which the protagonists come across a fascinating – and usually dangerous – place previously untouched by Westerners. The discovery often follows a perilous journey that has been prompted by a mysterious map or an intriguing rumour, and the more hackneyed stories feature fearful and superstitious native peoples and stiff-upper-lipped white heroes. Early lost world stories include Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1863) H Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1924). Less typically, in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), it is the travellers who are shown to be ignorant savages rather than the ‘lost’ people, and in Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935) and Douglas V Duff’s Jack Harding’s Quest (1939), the inhabitants demonstrate superior scientific knowledge.
Lost world stories have proved popular with filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequel The Lost World, both based on novels by Michael Crichton. Conan Doyle’s own novel was first released in a film version in 1925 starring Wallace Beery and Bessie Love. The dinosaurs were created using the same stop-motion animation that was later used in King Kong. Before the film’s release, Conan Doyle had shown a clip from one of the animated sequences at a gathering of magicians in New York that included Harry Houdini. Many in the audience were convinced they were watching an apparition of actual dinosaurs cavorting in a primeval swamp!
Conan Doyle’s name has also been linked to a much more elaborate hoax, the fossilised remains of Piltdown Man which were discovered not far from Crowborough around the time The Lost World was being serialised. This creature was thought to provide the missing evolutionary link between apes and humans. It would be 40 years before the fossil was discovered to be a fake. Although Conan Doyle did know the man who uncovered the find, Charles Dawson, sending him a letter of congratulation, he is unlikely to have been involved with what has been called ‘the science fraud of the century’.
With The Lost World, Conan Doyle was deliberately setting out to write ‘a sort of wild boy’s book’, as he described it to his friend Roger Casement, a change of pace from his previous fiction. He was fascinated by the field of exploration and complained jokingly at a Royal Societies Club luncheon that with the world’s far-flung places already mapped ‘the question is where the romance-writer is to turn when he wants to draw a vague and not too clearly-defined region’ (this sentiment is echoed by Malone’s editor in the book).
The Amazon basin still retained its mysteries, however. At a Royal Geographical Society talk in 1911, Conan Doyle met Colonel Percy Fawcett, who had charted the South American interior. During their conversation, he quizzed him about the topography of the Ricardo Franco hills, which later provided some of the inspiration for his descriptions of the plateau in The Lost World. Fawcett eventually disappeared without trace in 1925, supposedly searching for a legendary ‘lost’ white civilisation in Brazil. Conan Doyle must also have read the work of the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had undertaken an extensive expedition to the Amazon in the mid-nineteenth century, accompanied by Henry Walter Bates, as it is the findings of these two explorers that Challenger is putting to the test in his own South American journey.
Conan Doyle was equally fascinated by dinosaurs. He enjoyed fossil-hunting and discovered several fossilised iguanodon footprints in a quarry close to his home (the travellers come across a family of these creatures in the book). One of his principle sources for information on dinosaurs was Sir Edwin Ray Lankester’s Extinct Animals (1905), which Challenger refers to in order to identify Maple White’s drawing. Lankester, who had been keeper of Natural History at the British Museum, was proud to be associated with the novel and was an admirer of Conan Doyle’s work, despite his vigorous opposition to spiritualism.
The belligerent Edinburgh-educated Challenger was partly based on Conan Doyle’s own personality, and partly on that of William Rutherford, his former professor of physiology, an eccentric, heavily bearded man with a booming voice. Challenger went on to star in further stories, of which the best is probably The Poison Belt, published the following year and seen by some as an attack on the complacency that was leading Europe to war. Challenger ranks alongside Sherlock Holmes as one of the great characters of British fiction.
Discussion Questions
These questions are designed to help guide discussion in reading groups, but can also be of value to the individual reader. There are no right or wrong answers; only your opinions. In addition, there is a chapter by chapter summary of the book with further questions available to download as a Word document from the website.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on 12 February 1809. His father, Robert, was the town’s leading doctor. His paternal grandfather was the physician-philosopher Erasmus Darwin. His mother Susanna was the daughter of the master potter Josiah Wedgwood. Erasmus and Josiah had been founding members of the Lunar Society, a gathering of some of the most influential intellectuals and industrialists in Britain in the late eighteenth century.
As a boy, Darwin enjoyed collecting birds’ eggs and interesting rocks, fishing, shooting, going for solitary walks, stealing fruit and, according to his autobiography, telling ‘deliberate falsehoods… for the sake of causing excitement’. He was taken out of school by his father in June 1825 because of his poor grades and in October was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine. However, Darwin had little interest in the subject; he found the lectures boring and the surgery demonstrations horrific. He was more interested in the study of nature and one of the things he valued most about being in Edinburgh was the time he could spend at the Natural History Museum there.
Darwin abandoned his medical course in April 1827 and the following January took a place at Christ’s College, Cambridge with the intention of becoming a clergyman. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘During the three years which I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned, as completely as at Edinburgh and at school.’ He ‘got into a sporting set, including some dissipated low-minded young men’, collected beetles and was a member of the Glutton Club, which was devoted to eating ‘birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate’. He also attended lectures given by the Rev John Stevens Henslow, Professor of Botany, which reinforced his interest in natural history.
Darwin received his degree in April 1831. Henslow, who had become his mentor, introduced him to the eminent geologist Professor Adam Sedgwick whom Darwin accompanied on a walking tour in North Wales that summer. Darwin had previously attended geology lectures at Edinburgh and had found the subject dull, but now, with Sedgwick’s help, he became fascinated by it. His knowledge of geology would later help him develop his theories about the earth and the species that live upon it.
At the end of August Darwin received a letter from Henslow telling him of an offer to join a survey of South America as a volunteer ‘gentleman-naturalist’. The survey was being conducted from the ship HMS Beagle under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy. Having overcome his father’s opposition – Robert thought his son should be settling down to work at his age, not gallivanting on unpaid voyages – Darwin set sail from Plymouth on 27 December 1831. He did not return to England until October 1836 when the ship docked at Falmouth, having circumnavigated the southern hemisphere; Darwin had suffered seasickness throughout much of journey. Darwin would later write:
The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career... I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind...
It was during the course of the voyage that Darwin gradually developed an understanding of the processes by which the world was continually changing and how the life forms upon it were likewise continually changing – physically and behaviourally – in order to survive. The processes had been going on for millions of years and would keep unfolding slowly until the end of time. Darwin’s understanding was partly based on his comparison of what he had read in other people’s books with his own direct observations of the world around him, and partly through the development of ideas of his own.
Darwin termed the mechanism by which living things adapted to the changing environment ‘natural selection’ – later referred to as ‘evolution’ – and this knowledge provided the basis for his landmark book On the Origin of Species published in 1859. Natural selection refers to the preservation of useful traits through successive generations, for example, a particular shape of bird beak that suits the availability of insects or a particular thickness of animal coat that suits the climate. There is no human or higher power manipulating the outcome. It happens naturally; birds with the right kind of beak or animals with the right kind of fur are more likely to survive, to inter-breed and to pass on their particular genes than others. In the nineteenth century, it was highly controversial to suggest that species could change without divine intervention: most people believed everything in life was meticulously planned by God. Consequently, for over 20 years Darwin kept his thoughts to himself as he was aware of the harm they might do to his reputation. He wanted to be absolutely sure of his evidence before presenting his case.
In the meantime, Darwin married his first-cousin Emma Wedgwood on 29 January 1839. Their first of ten children, William Erasmus, was born in December. Darwin was not the typical Victorian father, being close to his children and rarely chastising them. His son Francis wrote: ‘He kept up his delightful, affectionate manner towards us all his life.’ Because of his health problems – partly the result of tropical fevers suffered during the Beagle voyage – Darwin became increasingly reclusive. He and his family left the noise and bustle of London in September 1841 to settle into their new country home at Down House in Kent where Darwin remained for the rest of his life.
Darwin was kept busy classifying his collections, exchanging correspondence with colleagues, going for daily contemplative walks, writing books and taking various cures for his ailments. As part of his research into how species might change over time, he became an enthusiastic breeder of pigeons. His son George wrote: ‘I remember that from time to time there was a pigeon fancying party; the guests struck me as being rather a queer set.’ Darwin became convinced that all varieties of pigeons – wild or domestic – had descended from the rock-pigeon, either through natural or artificial selection. Similarly, he believed that humans and modern-day apes were not different in kind, but only in degree, as they shared a distant, common ancestor.
In April 1856, Darwin invited a small group of friends to Down House for a special meeting in which he put forward his ideas on natural selection. Around this time, the geologist Charles Lyell, another of Darwin’s colleagues, recommended that he read a paper on the origins of new species by the naturalist-explorer Alfred Russel Wallace who was on an extensive expedition in the Malay archipelago (this is the same Wallace who is referred to in The Lost World). Lyell urged Darwin to write up and publish his own theories on the subject.
Darwin began drafting what was then called ‘Species Sketch’ and would later become the book On the Origin of Species, on 14 May 1856. He corresponded with Wallace, still out in the Far East, and on 18 June 1858 received another of Wallace’s papers, this one setting out an outline of the transformation of species based on the principle of natural selection. To prevent Darwin’s own work being overtaken by that of Wallace, Lyell and Hooker arranged for a paper jointly credited to ‘Messrs C Darwin and A Wallace’ to be read at the meeting of the distinguished Linnean Society in London on 1 July. It was entitled ‘On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection’.
On the Origin of Species was published by John Murray on 22 November and all 1,250 copies sold out that day (the John Murray Archive is in Edinburgh). A second edition quickly went into production. Darwin continued his writing and researches for the remainder of his life, including conducting detailed studies of orchids, climbing plants, variation in domestic animals, the processes of sexual selection, expressions of emotions, insectivorous plants, and the earth-moving efforts of worms. He also published books on barnacles, coral reefs and volcanic islands.
After a series of seizures, he died on the afternoon of 19 April 1882 at Down House. He had expected to be buried quietly alongside two of his children in the local churchyard but, following the intervention of members of the scientific community, he was given a state funeral with internment at Westminster Abbey on 26 April.
The previous year, Darwin had added a section to his autobiography, which he had written in 1876 as a personal memoir for his children and grandchildren. This included the following words of self reflection:
... my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most important have been – the love of science – unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject – industry in observing and collecting facts – and a fair share of invention as well as of common sense. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.
Fossils and Dinosaurs
Much of Darwin’s theory of evolution was based upon what he had learned from his study of fossils discovered during the Beagle voyage. Fossils can provide invaluable evidence of how the earth has changed over time and how plant and animal life has evolved from its earliest beginnings. They are particularly useful when comparisons can be made between extinct and closely related living species (for example, ammonites and the nautilus, the glyptodont and the armadillo), which is what Darwin had been able to do. Palaeontologists (people who study fossil flora and fauna in order to understand ancient life) need to be both geologists, able to establish the ages of the rocks in which the fossils are found, and biologists, able to work out how the fossilised organisms once lived.
The most common fossil finds are body fossils. These are the remains of the hard parts of long-dead organisms, such as bones, teeth, claws and shells. The likelihood of an organism being fossilised is increased if the body is buried soon after death, as this helps prevent damage to the remains from exposure to the effects of air, the weather or scavengers. It is for this reason that about 90 per cent of finds are in locations that were previously under water and where the remains had quickly been covered by sediment. The soft tissues in the organism decompose while the hard parts are slowly infiltrated by waterborne minerals. The weight of accumulated layers of mud and sand, along with the passage of time, turn the mineralised remains into a fossil. Trace fossils – such as droppings, footprints, eggs or tooth marks – record examples of animal activity. The oldest known fossils are of bacteria-like cells dating back over 3,500 million years.
There are records of fossil finds in Ancient Greece and Rome, though few at that time seem to have recognised their significance. In the seventeenth century, the Danish geologist Neils Stensen was among the first to establish that fossils were the buried remains of ancient animals and, in the 1750s, the discoveries of mastodon and mammoth bones in the USA brought the realisation that species could become extinct. Extinction was a contentious subject at this time as it suggested a flaw in what the majority still considered to be a divinely conceived creation. Some Biblical geologists – those who believed in the literal truth of the Bible – explained this by saying there had been several creations and extinctions, and that the book of Genesis only dealt with the most recent one.
One of the richest locations in Britain for fossil finds is the 95-mile long Jurassic Coast Natural World Heritage Site which runs from Orcombe Rocks, Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset. This was the hunting ground of the most famous female collector of the nineteenth century, Mary Anning, who, from an early age, had helped her impoverished father collect fossil curios from the beach and cliffs at Lyme Regis to sell to tourists. These included gigantic pointed teeth, like those of an enormous crocodile, and fragments of backbones, as well as ammonites and belemnites. In 1812, Anning uncovered the first complete skeleton in Britain of an ichthyosaur, a five-metre long marine reptile that resembled a large dolphin. She also found Britain’s first complete plesiosaur skeleton (a long-necked fish-eating aquatic reptile), and the first pterosaur (a winged lizard).
The fossil finds that elicit the greatest interest among the general public are those of the dinosaurs, which dominated the earth from around 200 million years ago until their extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago (humans first appeared on earth long after this, around three millions years ago). The first fossilised dinosaur remains identified in Britain were discovered by the physician and geologist Gideon Algernon Mantell in a quarry at Cuckfield, Sussex, in the early 1820s. These were the teeth and bones of a gigantic plant-eating reptile comparable to a modern-day iguana, hence the name Mantell coined in 1825 to describe it, ‘iguanodon’ or ‘iguana tooth’. This was the second dinosaur find to be officially named. The first was the megalosaurus (‘big reptile’), a name given in 1824 by the geologist William Buckland to a collection of large bones acquired by the Ashmolean Museum from quarries in Stonesfield, Oxfordshire.
The name ‘dinosaur’ first appeared in print in 1842 in the published version of Richard Owen’s ‘Report on British Fossil Reptiles’ which had been presented at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1841. Owen had once been a close colleague of Darwin and had been entrusted with Darwin’s fossil mammals from the Beagle voyage, but he became one of Darwin’s fiercest critics following the publication of On the Origin of Species, a reaction Darwin attributed to professional jealousy. The word ‘dinosaur’ was derived from the Greek, meaning ‘terrible or fearfully great lizard’. It was used by Owen to describe what he had identified as a distinct species of large, advanced, extinct reptiles.
Owen’s work thrilled the general public, as well as attracting the attention of the scientific community, and he was generally recognised as Britain’s leading authority on palaeontological classification. He had the ability to deduce the appearance of an animal on the basis of a single fragment of bone. One of his most impressive feats of deduction was based on a six-inch section of marrow bone originating from New Zealand that was given to him by a sailor in 1839. Owen decided the fragment must belong to a large, extinct flightless bird. He was proved right when he received a box containing a collection of bones from a New Zealand missionary in 1843 from which he could partially reconstruct a skeleton. The bird became known as the moa or dinornis.
Owen’s moa prediction was brought to the attention of Prince Albert, who, contemporary reports say, led the rush of society people eager to see the remains. Owen served on the committee that planned the Great Exhibition of 1851, a project that had been largely instigated through the prince consort’s efforts. When it was decided that the Crystal Palace complex should be relocated to a permanent site at Sydenham after the exhibition closed, Owen was invited to design a prehistoric park to be erected in the grounds. The dinosaurs were built out of reinforced concrete by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins from Owen’s designs. As a publicity stunt, a celebratory dinner for 21 distinguished guests was held on New Year’s Eve 1853 inside a life-size reconstruction of an iguanodon. When Owen’s ‘Mausoleum to the Memory of a Ruined World’ was officially opened on 10 June 1854, the dinosaur sculptures were a sensation and proved a major attraction. It was exhilarating to think such creatures had once walked upon the earth.
In 1863, a lizard-bird fossil was discovered in Solenhofen, Germany, and Owen arranged to buy it for the British Museum, naming it Archaeopteryx; it has proved to be one of the most important fossils ever found. For Darwin and his supporters, this fossil provided the evidence of a transitional stage between species – a missing link from the dinosaurs to modern birds – that supported Darwin’s theory of evolution. Owen himself seems to have been unaware of the significance of the find, and might have been less keen to give it publicity if he had. Although he was not against the principle of evolution, he was firmly against Darwin’s interpretation of it, convinced that there was a divinely ordained limit to the degree by which a species could adapt and change. Fossil hunting had proved to be a dangerous business, as it could reveal knowledge that shook such long-held beliefs.
Evolution and Science Fiction
With its stories of strange evolutionary mutations and its speculations on future forms of species, British science fiction has for much of its history been driven by the same questions that were raised in Darwin’s work: Where did we come from? Where are we going? What will we have changed into when we get there?
Although some trace the origins of science fiction as far back as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), it was in the nineteenth century that the genre began to really take shape, developing in a period when science was making dramatic advances, challenging long-established beliefs. The book most frequently cited as the first true science fiction novel is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which shows the terrifying consequence of taking scientific discovery to extremes and marks one of the earliest fictional appearances of the irresponsible scientist. However, it was not until English translations of the works of Jules Verne were published from the 1860s onwards that the genre really took off.
It was H G Wells who did most to establish “home-grown” science fiction – or, as it was referred to at the time, ‘scientific romance’ – as part of the literary landscape. Wells’ work reflected the emotional and intellectual upheaval brought by the startling new knowledge of how the world worked and what lay ahead for humankind. Despite the efforts of Charles Lyell and other modern geologists, until the mid-nineteenth century most people were still convinced that the earth had been formed around 4000BC, having calculated back through the ages of the prophets to the time of Genesis. Breakthroughs in geological research and in evolutionary theory undermined this confidence. Now came the astounding news that the earth was in fact millions of years old. What was more unnerving, it was a place of continuous environmental, behavioural and biological change in which decay and death, rather than glory, were the inevitable end result: it was hard to reconcile ‘evolution’ with that much loved Victorian concept, ‘progress’. Once humanity had reached the end of its particular branch on the tree of life, another species would supplant it.
One of Wells’ most popular novels, The Time Machine (1895), moves forwards and backwards through time, revealing different evolutionary stages. In 802,701 AD, the time traveller encounters a world inhabited by the refined, beautiful, surface-living Eloi and the reverted, subterranean Morlocks. The shock is that it is not the physically perfect Eloi who are in the ascendant, as convention might suggest. Their evolutionary path has turned them into simplistic, ineffectual creatures with the sensibility of sheep, providing a passive food supply for the bestial Morlocks. In the book’s final sections the traveller moves 30 million years into the future. It was a commonly held belief that by this time the sun would be much cooler as it would have burned off most of its energy. Wells presents the reader with an austere vision of a silent, cold earth where the only living things appear to be the lichens on the rocks and the strange creatures that the traveller sees dragging themselves out of the ocean and on to the shore, marking the start of another evolutionary cycle. Like Conan Doyle, Wells was a friend of Edwin Ray Lankester who advised him on what the potential stages of evolutionary degeneration might be like. Lankester and Wells later collaborated on the book Outline of History (1920).
Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) shows the cruel nature of evolutionary competition in the form of the superior alien invader attempting to destroy or colonise inferior beings. Over many generations, limbs and organs that have proved of little use to the Martians have shrunk or been lost, while those that are of most value have become bigger or multiplied in number. The Martians have big heads and shrivelled arms as on their planet brains are more important than brawn. The Martians are in nearly all respects more advanced than humans, but their fatal flaw is that they have not evolved to a level where they can withstand earth’s infectious diseases. In the final pages Wells seems sympathetic to the keening of the last dying Martian, the death being presented as a tragedy. It is interesting to note that as a student Wells had attended lectures by Darwin’s friend and colleague T H Huxley whose speculative essay ‘The Man of the Year Million’ suggested that humanity may evolve towards something not unlike Wells’ descriptions of the Martians. Although The Lost World is essentially a light-hearted book, like War of the Worlds it does show the potential cruelty of natural law, this time in the conflict between the ape-men and the Indians, and can also be read in terms of imperialism, with the ape-men comparable to native peoples being exterminated by colonialists.
Wells presented his readers with a godless universe spinning towards its inevitable end. By contrast, the philosopher Olaf Stapledon, one of the great British science fiction writers of the interwar years, offered a more spiritual journey, although the potential outcome for humans might be considered equally bleak. For his 1930 novel Last and First Men: a story of the near and far future, Stapledon drew up detailed plans for the projected history of humankind up to the point of extinction. The book moves from the present day to two billion years into the future, describing 18 distinct human species, evolving through a cycle of ascents and falls. One of the species incorporates Martian genes into their bodies to produce descendants that have huge heads and telepathic powers. This raises the question of whether humans might be able to control or direct their own evolution and thus disrupt the process of natural selection by artificial means. Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937) also provides a detailed projection of man’s future evolutionary forms, going on a mental voyage into the upper most reaches of the cosmos in search of the ultimate ruler, who is revealed as a kind of blind, indifferent watchmaker tinkering with events.
Arthur C Clarke was one of the many authors who acknowledged the influence of Stapledon upon their own writing. In his work Clarke used aliens as benign forces intervening at critical moments along the evolutionary path. In Childhood’s End (1954), for example, the aliens trigger humankind into a bold evolutionary leap and the last of the old-style humans watch as the new, superior beings ascend to the stars. 2001: a space odyssey (1968), developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick’s film from an earlier short story, is an account of the shaping of human evolution by an outside force from the remote past to the distant future. Like the work of Stapledon, this journey can be seen as a spiritual quest although Clarke in interview said he did not believe in ‘mystical nonsense’. It also hints at intelligent design; a logical, self-contained entity at work in the universe – the ‘Overmind’ of Childhood’s End. Further examples of speculations on what humans might evolve into can be found in the fiction of Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Charles Stross and Justina Robson, among others. By contrast, in The Lost World, Conan Doyle is looking back to where his present-day “civilised” human beings have come from: the cave-dwelling Indians and before them the brutal ape-men.
John Wyndham began writing science fiction in the 1930s but made his commercial breakthrough with The Day of the Triffids (1951). In this novel the reader is presented with an imaginative take on the theory of natural selection by which those species best suited to the surrounding environment can survive and thrive, while others die out (in evolutionary theory life is an endless competition, temporarily won by the ‘fittest’ of the moment). A meteor storm has rendered most inhabitants of earth blind. The triffids, genetically modified carnivorous plants that have been farmed for their valuable oil, are now in the ascendant. Prior to the disaster, the hero, Bill Masen, worked for a triffid-oil company where his colleague Walter had observed signs of intelligence in the plants. Walter thinks it is significant that a high proportion of triffid victims have been stung across the eyes. He says:
Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that – our position becomes inferior to theirs because they are adapted to a sightless existence, and we are not.
In the overall scheme of things, Bill believes that ‘It’s an unnatural thought that one type of creature should dominate perpetually’ and that ‘life has to be dynamic and not static’. However, he will not let humanity go the way of the dinosaur without a fight and the book follows his struggle for survival against the odds.
Like Wells and Wyndham before him, the novelist John Christopher described in his fiction how a once comfortable, familiar environment can become strange and threatening. He placed ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and focused on how successfully they – and the wider society – adapted to the change. His protagonists must make difficult moral decisions, and draw on previously unused skills and mental resources, in order to survive. In The Death of Grass (1956), for example, a viral strain kills off much of the planet’s vegetation, and anarchy soon sweeps a world faced with starvation. The narrator takes his family from London to the North of England in the hope of finding safety on his brother’s isolated farm. Christopher was writing during the Cold War period, when the world seemed to be on the brink of a terrible cataclysm. Who knew what lay beyond this man-made apocalypse and who would be the fittest to survive?
Resources
For a comprehensive bibliography of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle visit http://www.sirarthurconandoyle.com/index.htm
Among the biographies of Conan Doyle consulted in writing this guide were Michael Coren’s Conan Doyle (1995) and Andrew Lycett’s Conan Doyle: the man who created Sherlock Holmes (2007).
Among places to visit associated with Conan Doyle and his work are the Sherlock Holmes statue, Picardy Place, Edinburgh; the Conan Doyle exhibition at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; the Conan Doyle pub, York Place, Edinburgh; the Conan Doyle statue, Crowborough; the Sherlock Holmes Museum, London; and Conan Doyle’s grave, Minstead. A map of Edinburgh locations linked to Conan Doyle is available from Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust.
For a comprehensive bibliography of the works of Charles Darwin visit http://darwin-online.org.uk
Among the biographies of Darwin consulted in writing this guide were Francis Darwin’s The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin including an Autobiographical Chapter (1887), Julian Huxley and H B D Kettlewell’s Charles Darwin and His World (1965), and Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: the power of place (2002).
Among the places to visit associated with Darwin and his work are St Chad’s Church and the Darwin statue, Shrewsbury; Christ’s College, Cambridge; Down House, Kent; the John Murray Archive, Edinburgh; and Westminster Abbey, London.
Conan Doyle and Darwin are included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is available from most library services.
A more detailed list of resource material and suggestions for places to visit is available on the Lost World Read 2009 website at www.lostworldread.com.
CREDITS
‘Evolution and Science Fiction’ was inspired by the opening episode of the BBC series The Martians and Us, broadcast on 13 November 2006. Our thanks to Andy Sawyer from the University of Liverpool Library, Special Collections, for his comments on the first draft.
Guide text copyright: Melanie Kelly © 2008
Source: http://www.lostworldread.com/downloads/lost_world_readers_guide.doc
Web site to visit: http://www.lostworldread.com
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