BOOK OF THE DAY: DAVID McCONNELLreviews The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagleby Charles Darwin, Vintage Classics 933pp, £8.99
MANY READERS will have been tempted to buy wonderful books written to mark Charles Darwin's publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Now is the chance to buy and read "the book that changed the world", republished with Darwin's first book, The Voyage of the Beagle, and with an introduction by poet Ruth Padel, his great-great- granddaughter.
Darwin, born on this day in 1809, knew evolution by natural selection was his greatest idea and he wanted everyone to understand it. The charming Voyage of the Beagleshould encourage readers to turn to The Origin. The theory of evolution proposes that life evolved from non-living systems (about three billion years ago as we know now), that man is related by descent to all other living creatures (true – to bacteria and viruses, as well as plants and animals), that life exists on other planets (a good guess), and that the brain and mind are the products of biological evolution (true).
How did Darwin accelerate us towards these conclusions and inferences, throwing sand into science, theology and philosophy? Today, evolution is the fundamental theory of biology.
In 1831 Francis Beaufort of the admiralty, an Irishman, introduced Darwin, aged 22, who had just graduated in arts from Cambridge university, to Robert FitzRoy, aged 26. Beaufort had appointed FitzRoy as captain of the 90ft survey ship HMS Beagle. He had agreed that FitzRoy could bring a naturalist and a gentleman as a companion on what turned out to be a five-year voyage surveying around the world.
What a chance for such a young man, a gifted observer of people, landscape and nature. He was well read in science, sceptical, inquisitive and thoughtful, a diarist and correspondent, and an avid collector. He spent three years on land, crossed the Andes, where he found seashells at 14,000ft, and climbed high on to the volcanic ridges of Tahiti.
He drank the urine of a giant tortoise to see if it was potable – it was. He returned to England and never travelled abroad again.
The Voyageis based on his daily records, and we can see his theory of evolution emerge. In September 1835, he muses in the Galapagos on "that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on earth". The diversity of people impressed him as much as plants and animals.
Horrified by misery, he was sure of everyone’s humanness, but not humanity. “The varieties of man seem to act on each other as different species of animals – the stronger always extirpating the weaker,” he wrote in 1836.
His mind was racing. How are Indians of South America, Maoris, Aborigines and Europeans related? It was the same question for the finches of the Galapagos.
Evolution, then called transmutation, was a pervasive interest from 1837, and the role of natural selection was clinched when he was reading Thomas Malthus in 1838.
Fearing reactions from scientists and clerics (often one and the same), Darwin kept his theory secret before being forced into publication in 1859.
In The Origin, Darwin summarises how man has artificially selected for “improvements” in domesticated species for thousands of years, and argues that nature has been doing the same for aeons.
The theory was widely accepted after Darwinism was united with Mendelian genetics in the 1930s by JBS Haldane, Sewell Wright and RA Fisher. But none of them went round the world on a barque and none could write quite like Darwin.
David McConnell is professor of genetics at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics in Trinity College Dublin. He will give the Darwin Day Lecture in the Davis Theatre at TCD at 7.30pm today