In what sense was Charles Darwin a genius?
How was it that this simple, modest, and lovable gentleman created such a noise in the world? What had he done but connect observations with other observations in ways others had foreseen but never in such persuasive detail?
“It’s dogged as does it,” Charles would say, convincingly humble in his self-estimation of talent and intellect. There could be no doubting his energy, patience, and perseverance. Without those qualities, whatever genius he possessed, little would have become of his theory.
Charles’s success in persuading both the scientific community and the reading public came as much as anything else from his calculated strategy of overwhelming the skeptic with wave after wave of facts – amazing stories about animals and plants in nearby and far-away places, populated by familiar and strange people.
This “overwhelm” strategy was the source and sustenance of his daily effort to collect and assemble “facts” from all over the world – facts relevant to all the ramifications of his theory, which he had worked out by 1839, just three years after returning from his round-the-world voyage, even as he asked Emma Wedgwood to marry him, just as 18-year-old Victoria acceded to the throne.
Charles spent the next twenty years marshalling evidence from a bewildering variety of lines of inquiry. Finally, his close scientific friends Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell persuaded Charles to write and publish On the Origin of Species in 1859, and only then because Alfred Russel Wallace threatened to beat him to the punch.
His theory was structured around three driving insights, all of which broke new intellectual ground and have been shown to be durable and essentially accurate to our present day.
First, he saw that individuals within a species may differ almost as much as they as a species differ from other similar species. So much so that it is difficult to distinguish a species from a sub-species or “variety.” A species is not fixed but pliable. It can change over time and from place to place. The key observation was that species spontaneously generate variety in the anatomy, physiology, and behavior of their offspring.
Second, Charles’s most fundamental and novel insight was to see the parallel between species change in nature and the human-managed development of breeds of domesticated animals and cultivated plants. He studied the practices of artificial selection by breeders of animals and plants and proposed that natural species change by the same kind of selection process.
From the variety spontaneously generated within a species, breeders select healthy individuals with traits the breeders deem desirable and allow them to mate and produce offspring, which are more likely than not to have these desirable traits. Over many generations, this artificial selection pushes the species toward an ideal the breeder aims to achieve – larger size, more consistent color, more manageable behavior, for example.
In nature, by contrast, selection of individuals to mate and have offspring is driven by something other than human intelligence and intervention. It is natural selection, not artificial selection.
Charles gained the third insight, in part, from reading Thomas Malthus’s book showing the geometric growth of the human population in contrast to the arithmetic increase of food supply. This discrepancy leads to competition for food and other limited resources – competition that creates winners and losers, the latter dying or failing to have children, thereby reducing the population well below its potential to grow geometrically. Charles immediately saw the parallel with the observed tendency and capacity of each species to produce far more offspring than typically survive to reproductive age. In contrast to the rosy view of nature as peaceful as an English garden, Charles saw a “struggle for existence” in the natural world, much like the human world.
From the variation among individuals of a species, there emerge some variants which are favored by current circumstances of food, predators, and other limiting factors. These factors can change over time and place to place, so that the variant favored here and now is likely to be different from the variant favored there and then. The variant, or variety, favored by this natural selection changes as the circumstances change. Thus, the species changes. Over time, it may change so much that it becomes another species altogether.
Charles Darwin’s insights built on geologist Charles Lyell’s revelation of the vast time over which small, ordinary changes can transform whole landscapes. Why not organic beings as well? Charles proposed they changed very slowly through a series of small events. And the earth was thought by geologists to be old enough to allow such a slow and gradual process to effect dramatic change in species over time.
After Charles and Emma married and started a family, then moved from London to Down House in Kent, he became sickly and reclusive. Even so, Charles also became the hub of a worldwide letter-writing network, acquiring and exchanging stories, facts, and specimens with a huge variety of scientists, amateur naturalists, and experts in all types of plant and animal husbandry. He also collected about him an impressive group of scientific friends, most especially Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asa Gray, and Thomas Huxley. Emma marveled at the evident admiration and affection these men felt for each other. She saw how important this inner circle of scientific friends was to Charles’ work and happiness. It was equally clear how much they were drawn to Charles as the leading light of the group. His genius was evident in their high regard for his thinking and writing as well as his friendship.
The genius of Charles Darwin was not only in seeing connections within a chaotic world of observations but also in his talent for communication and friendship, which he employed very effectively to build a distinguished coalition of support for his insights.