[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm pleased to welcome to the program author and professor Robert Sheddinger to discuss his new book, Darwin's Bluff, the mystery of the book Darwin never finished. Dr. Schedinger is the Wilford A. Johnson Chair of Biblical Studies and professor of religion at Luther College in Iowa. He holds a phd in religious studies from Temple University and is the author of several books, most recently the Mystery of evolutionary Mechanisms, darwinian biology's grand narrative of triumph, and the subversion of religion. Robert, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Thank you. It's nice to be with you.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Well, let's take a minute to set the stage for today's conversation. Tucked away in Charles Darwin's surviving papers is a manuscript of almost 300,000 words that he never completed. It was his sequel to the Origin of Species. It was the book he had promised would finally supply solid empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection, evidence he admitted was absent from the origin, which he repeatedly described as a mere abstract. Darwin soon abandoned his sequel, though he never revealed that decision to those who awaited its appearance. The mystery of why Darwin didn't finish his sequel has never been satisfactorily resolved.
Dr. Schedinger's new book, Darwin's Bluff, is a fascinating piece of historical detective work, drawing on Darwin's letters, private notebooks, and the unfinished manuscript itself to piece together the puzzle and reveal an embarrassing truth. Darwin never finished his sequel because in the end, he couldn't deliver the promised goods. His book, begun in earnest, devolved into a bluff.
So across two episodes, we're going to unpack some of the insights of this new book. In today's episode, we'll start unraveling the mythology of Charles Darwin, and we'll look at the importance of comprehensively engaging with Darwin's correspondence in order to gain real insight into Charles Darwin the man. In another episode, we'll peel back more layers of Darwin the myth, and we'll dive into the mystery of the big book on species that he never finished or published. Robert, you start your book by asking, does the world really need another book about Charles Darwin? And your simple answer is, yes, we do. Tell us why.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Well, there are so many books written about Charles Darwin. I mean, there's a library's worth, and no one can read all of it. But I know in my own reading and studying the life of Charles Darwin that I recognized, that know, we're usually writing about Darwin from the perspective of what I call the darwinian mythology, that Darwin's origin of species solved the problem of the origin of species, essentially, and that he was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. And I realized that in doing so, they would cite the correspondence. But I kept seeing the same letters over and over again that were being cited. And it seemed to be such a small subset of all the correspondence that he had written that I thought it would be interesting to go back and take a more comprehensive look at the correspondence and see if it sort of supported the mythological Darwin. And I found out that it didn't. So I figured there's need for another book that deals with the correspondence in a more comprehensive way than many biographers have.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Okay, so you found it to be a worthwhile enterprise. Well, Darwin's bluff is not just another biography of Charles Darwin. You have a very careful focus in this book. Can you tell us about that?
[00:03:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, one of the things I found when I started reading the correspondence is that when Darwin published the Origin of Species, he sent presentation copies to many of his scientific collaborators with letters, or he had his publisher send the books, but he sent letters ahead, letting them know that the book was coming. And in every one of these letters, he told his correspondents, please read this as a mere abstract of my theory. It's not the complete theory. It doesn't have all the evidence and all the authorities and footnotes and everything that it should have. It's a mere abstract. And that idea of the origin as just an abstract given, I mean, despite how long it is, that Darwin viewed it as just an abstract of his theory was something that I just didn't see treated in most of the literature about Darwin, where the Ardrina species is seen as his great masterwork. And yet he was telling everybody, don't read it as my final word on species. It's just an abstract, and I got a bigger book coming. Just wait for it.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Okay? Yeah. Well, across his lifetime, Darwin wrote more than 15,000 letters. I mean, that's just a whopping number. And of course, in our age of video calls and social media and instant messages, that sort of doesn't ring true to us, or at least we can't fathom it. Handwritten letter writing is a dying art now, but in the 19th century, it was the main way to personally communicate beyond face to face interactions. So why did you turn to Darwin's correspondence, in particular, to help you write this book?
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Well, I realized that biographies are all written from the perspective that the biographer knows how Darwin's life would turn out that he would become one of the most famous scientists of all time. And even Darwin's own autobiography, that he really didn't write for publication, but got published after his death, even that he could write from late in life, kind of knowing how things turned out. But I realized that the correspondence would give us more of a real time understanding of what made Darwin tick at different points along his life. Because when he was writing a letter, say, in 1850, to Joseph Hooker, one of his scientific collaborators, he couldn't know in 1850 that in 1859 he would publish the origin of species and that he would go on to become world famous. So I figured that the letters gave us more insight into Darwin's thinking at different points in his life, uninfluenced by sort of the later mythology or the way Darwin's life eventually turned out.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Okay. And I know that Darwin's correspondence is available online now to anyone who wants to search and browse. In fact, I made use of it recently as I started researching some of Darwin's contemporaries. Did you access his letters online, or did you use the multi volume collection published by Cambridge University Press?
[00:06:49] Speaker A: No, I used the books from Cambridge. I just sort of accidentally, one day in my library, realized that they had started collecting the Cambridge correspondence back in the 1980s, and they had volumes one through nine, and then volume eleven, they skipped ten for some reason, and then they stopped collecting after that. But that gave me the volumes up through 1863. And I just decided, just for fun, to just take one of those volumes out, take volume one out and just start reading it one day. And I just sort of became fascinated by just sort of going back and becoming part of Darwin's life and just reading the letters, and not just the scientific ones, but the personal ones, the ones that talk about his family life and everything. And I just became fascinated, as I said to my daughter one time, I'm reading Darwin's mail, and I just became fascinated by the whole cultural context of Victorian England and Darwin's life there. So I just started reading through all those volumes because I wanted to do so comprehensively. I didn't want to just pick out certain letters to read. I wanted to read everything and then see what letters provided some insight that I thought was different than the way Darwin is usually portrayed.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Well, what a window of insight you were given. You write that given the opportunity, Darwin is quite capable of dismantling his own mythology. So you quote liberally from his correspondence in your book. You also made the decision not to alter his grammar or spelling or sentence structure at all. Why is it important for readers to hear Darwin in his own voice?
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that's something that I really wanted to capture in this book, is to make sure that people really did hear Darwin, because so many biographies, people speak for Darwin and they summarize maybe what's in a letter. They might cite a letter here and there, but they're mostly speaking for Darwin. And I thought it was important for people to hear Darwin speak in the way I heard Darwin speak as I read through the correspondence in a comprehensive way. To hear Darwin is to really appreciate the rhetorical tropes and things that he used in his letters and the way in which he tried to portray himself in certain ways that I'm not sure were always exactly accurate to the way things really were. But he was a master rhetorician, I think, in the letters, and so I wanted people to be able to hear that.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, before you get to the mystery of the book Darwin never finished, in your book, here you have several chapters sorting out the man from the myth, which I thought were very illuminating. One thing I found very interesting was your exploration of, as you say, the rhetorical strategies Darwin often used in his correspondence to manage his public Persona, if you will. And it starts with knowing the nature of Darwin's relationship with his father. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that might have influenced his pursuits as an adult?
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I recognized early on that the correspondence is really devoid of letters directly between Charles and his father.
When his father wanted to get a message to Charles, it usually came via a letter from one of his sisters, particularly his older sisters, Susan and Caroline. And so it gave me some insight there that there was a certain aloofness, I think, in the relationship between Darwin and his father and in Darwin's own autobiography, written late in his life. He even remembered this quote from his father when he was young, saying that all you care about is shooting and horse riding and rat catching, and you'll be a disgrace to yourself and to the family. And I think there's ample evidence that Darwin really kind of idolized his father, but was really kind of afraid of his father and was motivated by a desire to prove him wrong, that he would not be a disgrace to himself.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: And to the family, something we definitely see coming out as he moves through his adult life, in his pursuits. And, of course, he lost his mother at age eight, tragically as well.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: So this was the parental figure he was trying to impress and satisfy. Well, one of the rhetorical strategies Darwin used was the constant sharing of his health issues. With correspondents, there's no doubt that the man suffered physically and certainly he was surrounded with suffering. His whole family at times were suffering at different times. But the question is, what exactly was causing the ill health and whether he was using the issue as a crutch. Tell us a bit more about that.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Yeah, well, there's been a lot written about and a lot of theories about his illness, some saying that he picked up some kind of a parasite in South America during the Beagle voyage, chegus disease and things like that. But I think Ralph Kolp, who is a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, I think has written the most comprehensive literature on Darwin's health and thinks that much of it, probably, most of it, would be explained by stress and anxiety throughout his life, that his symptoms probably were due know him. Trying to prove himself, trying to prove himself to his father and having this opportunity to sail around the world on the Beagle and then coming back and wanting to try to establish himself as a legitimate member of the british scientific elite, even though he didn't have any educational background in science.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. And I think this insight that you're bringing out here is just a crucial thing to understand about Charles Darwin as you go on and evaluate his major work. What other rhetorical strategies did you see Darwin employ? I know you mentioned others.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, one that he does quite a bit is to always downplay the significance of his own work in order to try to prevent criticisms. He tries to beat his critics to the punch by saying, yes, I know that there's all kinds of problems with my theory, and so you don't have to tell me that there's problems, because I know that there are. So this is one of the ways that he, I think, tried to forestall criticisms by humbling himself and being open about self criticism.
There's a lot of self flagellation in Darren's correspondence.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
Being a Brit myself, I recognize that that is built into the british people, the humility and the self criticism, sometimes to a fault. But I think I agree with you that Darwin sort of went beyond traditional modesty and sort of used it as a rhetorical strategy, if you will, anticipating negative reactions and trying to get out from under what he knew might be coming. Well, early in your book, you also dedicate a chapter to Darwin's first love, Geology. Why is it helpful to understand this part of Darwin's life, and how does it relate to his later work on species and variation?
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Well, I think it's important to recognize the level to which Darwin's species theory that he used Charles Lyell's uniformitarian geology as a foundation on which to build his species theory.
Charles Lyell had famously argued that the geological features of the earth were formed over long periods of time by sort of the mundane processes of erosion, wind and water erosion, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, things we see occurring today, just occurring over long periods of time, rather than a major cataclysm like a global flood or something like that. And Darwin was clearly taken with that uniformitarian geology idea and spent much of his time on the Beagle voyage looking for evidence to support it, which got him to be very close friends with Charles Lyle after returning. And so his species theory is very much based on that. He was looking for a cause now in action that could cause, over long periods of time, organic change among living organisms. But the only thing he could come up with was artificial selection of breeders. And so that became sort of the cause now in operation that sort of paralleled the geological causes that Lyel thought had shaped the earth.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Okay, now, in your chapter on his geology, you do relate the chapter in his life where he proposed an idea about the parallel roads of Glenroy in Scotland, and he turned out to be wrong. And yet this was somehow instructive to how he would later go on and have a lot of confidence in his species theory. Can you tell us about the connection there? Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: Well, in terms of the parallel roads of Glenroy, he was convinced early on that he was right, that these were caused by the workings of the sea, the ocean, as the land was slowly raised up, he believed in uplift and that the sea would create these parallel lines at Glenroy. But then it became clear that there were no marine fossils in the sediments there at Glenroy. That would suggest that Glenroy was at one time under the ocean. And Darwin knew what that meant, because when he was in South America and he went up into the Andes and he found marine fossils at 14,000ft, and he knew that that meant that the top of the Andes was once below sea level. His inability to find marine fossils at Glenroy should have tipped him off that his sea beach theory was wrong. But he wanted to be right. He wanted to have something that he could hang his hat on to say, I'm a real geologist. And so he sort of ignored or tried to explain away. He even uses the term in a letter to Charles Lyell. I think I can explain away the problems with my theory. Not explain them, but explain them away. He even says that. And so I think that tells us a lot about his later species work that he was masterful at trying to explain away things that simply didn't fit. He wanted theory to be right, and when contrary evidence came to the fore, he noted it, but then tried to explain it away or discount it as not important or not invalidating his theory.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So desperate was he to be accepted by the scientific men of his time, including his hero, Charles Lyell. Well, when Darwin seized on artificial selection as a metaphor for his mechanism of natural selection, he failed to appreciate a fatal flaw in his thinking, one that you unpack a little bit. What was that fatal flaw?
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Yeah. So artificial selection, as I said, was the only cause now in action with the ability to create organic change. So he had to seize on it. The problem is that artificial selection is directional. Breeders have an idea already in mind of what the final product is that they want to create what kind of a variety they're trying to create, and so they can select in each generation with that future goal in mind. Natural selection, in Darwin's view, has no future goal. It's simply a word to describe differential reproduction, and there's no future goal. So artificial selection simply does not work very well as an analogy for natural selection. And yet he put it central to his species work.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Right. And you can tell he knew that it was an issue, but it's not something he really addressed too much or he thought it would just shake out in the end. It's interesting that he doesn't really tackle it head on.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: No, he doesn't. And Alfred Russell Wallace, you know, criticized him on this point. He knew that artificial selection was not a good analogy for natural selection. But if Darwin had given up artificial selection, then he would have lost his analogy to Lyle's uniformitarian geology, which was so important to him, because there is no other cause that we can identify in action today that creates organic change other than selective breeding.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Right. That's all he had as a possible mechanism. Well, you write another early chapter on Darwin the experimenter. Fascinating stuff. I mean, he dove into a host of experiments that he hoped would prove the general principles he had already shaped in his mind. Crossing domestic animals, he was conducting seed dispersal experiments, collecting lots of plants, even getting his young relatives to collect plants in a rather unscientific manner, just to know a large group of specimens together. What do these activities, these experiments, tell us about Darwin the man?
[00:20:05] Speaker A: Well, I think they show a very amateur side to his scientific work.
He wasn't educated in scientific discipline and he had come up with his species theory, at least an outline, probably by 1838, and it had written up a short sketch in 1842 and a longer sketch in 1844. So he already knew he already had the theory, but he wanted to try to find evidence after the fact. He wasn't led to the theory by a lot of evidence. He wanted to backfill with evidence. So he started doing all these experiments to try to explain different aspects of his theory. How did plants disperse from continents to oceanic islands? And so he did all these seed dispersal experiments, and then when he got into botanical concerns, he was doing all these experiments with plants, and yet he was using sort of untrained teenagers, his sons and his niece, who didn't have scientific background or training, and he couldn't really be certain that they were following appropriate methodologies in their collecting work for him. He wouldn't go out in the field and collect for himself because he was basically a hermit by this point in his life. So he was employing his neighbors, his sons, his nieces, and anybody who would go out into the field and collect for him. But he had very exacting standards, and in one letter, his niece even writes to him about how difficult it is. He was trying to get collections of purple looserife, which is kind of an invasive weed that grows in dense networks, and he wanted the samples to be from separate plants, but it's hard to identify separate plants when they grow together in such dense webs. And his niece even mentions how difficult it was trying to identify that. So he didn't use trained botanists. He used anybody who would go out in the field without any sense that the results might be problematic. So very kind of amateurish status in his experimental work.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: And you do point out that he was independently wealthy. He didn't have to hold a job down. He was able to manage well with the family inheritance, and he could have afforded scientifically trained assistance.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: So that is an interesting point. And he sort of was putting the cart before the horse, wasn't he? Had this grand idea, this theory, this unifying principle, and then he thought through the difficulties and then went and looked for data that could quell the critics or satisfy in his mind. Is that good science, or should it be the other way around?
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Well, normally, you think science is based on the inductive method. You generate data and then you try to come up with general principles to explain the data. And Darwin was stung by criticisms that his work was not particularly inductive. He wanted it to be seen that way. Yet he even admitted in one place that he came to his ideas more by instinct than by evidence. And then tried to backfill with evidence. Afterwards, he went with gut instinct about the way things work and then went out and tried to find evidence to support that. So it's not really the normal scientific method right now.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: You do take pains to point out, too, though, that this is not a book bashing Darwin or denigrating him. You do find a lot to admire in the man. You just want to get past the correct.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: You know, I'm fascinated by Darwin as a person, but the thing is, he's a person, and all people have weaknesses and foibles, and we're not perfect. And I wanted to try to present that more human Darwin. He's still a very fascinating figure, and I'd love to get in a time machine and go back to downhouse in the 1850s and meet him.
So I have a lot of appreciation for him. But I also wanted to try to dismantle sort of the mythological status that he's developed in the modern.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that is something we can all be thankful for with your new book. Well, at one point, you described Darwin as a very insecure amateur naturalist, desperate to make a mark in science, but acutely aware of his limitations. You also note that he cultivated a scientific Persona to justify his position in elite victorian scientific society. In other words, he had a point to prove to his dad and to the world that he wouldn't be a disgrace to his family. And knowing all this about Darwin can help us more honestly engage with his theories and more appropriately weigh the significance of his achievements as well as his mistakes. Well, in a follow up episode, we're going to continue to separate the man from the myth. We'll jump into the mystery of the big follow up to on the origin of species that was planned and announced but never materialized. So, Robert, for now, thank you very much for your time in this first portion of our conversation.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: You can get a copy of Dr. Schedinger's book, darwin's
[email protected]. Slash bluff. That's discovery bluff for idthefuture. I'm andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
