The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [17]
It was past time, he thought, for science to open its mind.
2
A SPIRIT OF UNBELIEF
WHEN CHARLES DARWIN published his famous (or infamous) book On the Origin of Species in 1859, the tensions between Victorian science and religion became undeniable, obvious for all to see.
The Darwinian idea of evolution, that species take shape slowly—ruthlessly sculpted by natural selection, random mutations, and environmental pressures—was a difficult proposition for most Victorians to embrace. Even scientists hesitated at first to choose “survival of the fittest,” as it came to be called, over the Genesis creation story. There were geologists who flatly refused to accept what the fossils they found said about the age of Earth; science textbooks of the time routinely acknowledged a Creator. Mid-nineteenth-century British society was, at least on the surface, invested in a scriptural version of how the world came to be. After all, the queen was also official head of the Anglican Church.
The few people who suggested otherwise, before Darwin brought the argument fully into the open, tended to publish their works anonymously. One author who proposed that the universe might have developed according to natural laws, without divine intervention, insisted that his name remain anonymous until his death. Even so, the bishop of Oxford used his book as the foundation for a sermon condemning mid-nineteenth-century science and what he called its “mocking spirit of unbelief,” adding that the author, whoever he might be, was obviously no gentleman.
Everyone—even those who no longer insisted on a literal reading of biblical accounts of creation—could see an either/or dilemma taking shape. Choose science or faith; choose the Bible or Origin. Rightly or wrongly, there came a perception of a widening rift between incompatible, mutually exclusive realities.
IN 1858, BOTH Darwin and his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace were presented to the British scientific community as coauthors of the theory of natural selection.
Coauthors, yes. Coequals, no.
Darwin was lead author. He’d been developing and documenting his theory for more than twenty years, testing it on friends, anticipating hostility, waiting to reveal it until he could counter every-potential argument. His confidants had feared that Darwin would never quite be done, that he would polish his points into the infinite future. So Wallace was the catalyst, the spark, the innovative thinker whose independent realization of natural selection flushed the wary Darwin out of hiding.
It spoke much for the theory that two such different minds could independently realize its power. Darwin turned fifty in the year he published On the Origin of Species. His background was affluent, upper class. Cambridge educated, he had served as naturalist on a sea voyage to South America and around the world. With the natural treasures he collected at stops such as the Galapagos Islands, he had returned to his English country home to classify barnacles, ponder the adaptive variety of beaks among the finches of the Galapagos, and painstakingly document his findings as he worked out his daring theory of evolution. Darwin’s nature—reclusive and self-critical-made him reluctant to engage in a public fight. Until the moment he received Wallace’s paper, Darwin was still debating the right moment to make his stand.
Wallace was thirty-five when he was declared a coauthor of the theory of evolution. He was tall, thin, energetic, with bright blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses. From the middle class and largely self-educated, Wallace had become intrigued by plant species and their habitats while working in his brother’s surveying business. Leaving that work, he helped to organize