In Our Time - Darwin: Life After Origins

Episode Date: January 8, 2009

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 2009 and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, Melvyn Bragg presents a series about Darwin's life and work.Melvyn visits Darwin's home at Down House in Kent. Despite ill health and the demands of his family, Darwin continued researching and publishing until his death in April 1882.Featuring contributions from Darwin biographer Jim Moore, geneticist at University College London Steve Jones, Darwin expert Alison Pearn of the Darwin Correspondence Project and former garden curator at Down House Nick Biddle.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. The publication of On the Origin of Species in November 1859, written here in Darwin's study, caused quite a stir. The first print run of 1,250 copies was oversubscribed,

and the printer said to organise a second run this time of 3,000 copies. As Darwin's arguments became more generally known, two factions began to form, those four and those against an evolutionary principle that was able to explain the development of living things without divine intervention. While his friends and enemies battled it out,

Darwin characteristically kept his distance. When Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce clashed at the Oxford Union in June 1860, Darwin was in Richmond in a hydrotherapy pool, receiving treatment for his various ailments which included nausea, palpitation and fainting fits. But he was kept in the picture. Both Huxley and Darwin's friend Joseph Hooker sent him letters describing the debate in great detail.

Darwin read and re-read the accounts from his watery sickbed. As soon as he returned to the family home in Kent, downhouse, here, Darwin went back to work. He was an early riser and would usually go for a walk before breakfast. But the centre of his world was here. His study, where he began work at 8 o'clock every morning, surrounded by letters, bottles of chemicals, and family portraits on the wall over the fireplace. There's a keen sense of a personal space in here.

This was Darwin's room, his sanctuary. It's calm, shady, cluttered. His high back armchair and footrest are pulled up to the table. His privy is conveniently nearby, behind the screen. It's the study of a learned collector and a scholar. Jim Moore, you know, the biographer of Darwin, why do you think he needed Downhouse? Darwin came to live here at Downhouse in 1842

at a time when London was racked with turmoil. Downhouse represented the fulfillment of a vision that he had had for years. All of his professors at Cambridge enjoyed comfortable studies like this one. This is where he could work out and finally publish a theory that he knew was something very, very big. It was a place of safety.

It was a sanctuary. It was also a place to bring up a family with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. They had both grown up near the country or in the country in houses rather like downhouse here and rather like this study. So this was home in a very deep sense for Darwin. How did he get hold of this house, Steve Jones, your geneticist and biologist, but you've also written extensively about Darwin. How did he afford it?

It's a very roomy house, dining room, proper gardens and so on. Yes, I mean, only a banker could afford a house like this today. and people often tend to think of Darwin as this indigent, daring young man who went on the beetle and was paid a pitiful salary so to do. But that wasn't true at all. In those days, really to be a scientist, and the word scientists hadn't really been invented, to be a scientist, one needed a decent private income,

and he certainly had a decent private income, and as soon as he could, he moved out from that terrible, dank, dirty, dangerous part of London, known as Bloomsbury, he began to look at houses around the countryside and didn't take him long to find this. He didn't like the house at first sight. He called it dark and gloomy. But with the help of the healing power of cash,

he turned it into really a most delightful place to live. And this study, a most delightful place to work. You mentioned the word sanctuary, Jim Moore. Can you say a bit more to that point? This wonderful room we're in now, there are specimens on the round table behind you. Of course, there are books. There are photographs, as I mentioned.

There's an extremely attractively cluttered desk. Was there something more than just a place to work that he needed? You could almost say that Darwin came here incognito. This house was a parsonage. The incumbent of the parish lived in this house, and Darwin purchased it from him. It helped seal his identity, at least for himself, with that of a country parson. And after all, he had intended to become a country parson when he was at Cambridge. But he wasn't a country parson.

In some ways, he was quite the opposite because he knew that this terrible burden he carried of the belief in evolution, including humans in society in that evolutionary process, would open him to persecution if he let people know that he was working on that project. So in a sense, he looked like a parson. He wanted to be seen as a parson. He wasn't really a parson. But he could control access to himself here. That's the most important point.

He was far enough away from railway stations, scientific societies. Actually, outside this window behind you, he had a mirror installed. that he could see people coming up the drive. That's not paranoia. That's prudence in a man who was carrying the kind of burden that Darwin had evolution. Although we talk about this as a sanctuary, he didn't exclude himself from local life, as I understand as Steve Jones. He didn't mean isolation.

He was a magistrate. He acted as treasurer for down-friendly society and down-school. Was this tokenism, or was this because he was properly interested in a sort of country vicar way of getting involved in a society? I think in some ways he was the ultimate Victorian. I mean, he knew that that was his duty as a gent, and as a gent he did his duty, and he did it remarkably well. If you look, for example, at his role as a magistrate,

he was not a hangar and flogger, far from it. He was actually rather liberal. The Down Friendly Society, which was a sort of local national health service, I suppose, and unemployment benefits service, he ran and ran very carefully, and when it ran out of money, he actually helped it limp along. So it's odd that a man. man of such gentleness and liberality, it was odd that how quickly his theories were taken up

as a sort of alibi, political alibi, by people with exactly the opposite view, which really tells us actually when you're talking about science, the person who does it is actually rather irrelevant to the discoveries that are made. We have various objects in this room, Steve. Was this the centre of the laboratory? Was he, at least for ornament? Was he using them? Oh no, he was an experimental scientist. That's what people often forget. I mean, the origin of species, which is a wonderful work, is really a work of reportage.

It really brings together an awful lot of the information that he gathered using the Victorian Internet or the postal service, the huge number of letters he received. But at the same time, or a little later, he began to work and get his fingernails dirty, which is what scientists ought to do. If you're going to be a scientist, you want to be out there doing the job. And he most emphatically did.

All these bottles and that microscope and very primitive microscope you see over there allowed him to make observations, do experiments, and develop theories, which have an astonishingly modern air. Jim, come in. It's interesting. You should mention microscope. Just here on the window seat behind you, where he had that mirror installed,

just on those window seat behind you is where he did his dissections. And he set his microscope up here because this is a northeast exposure on the house. The light is perfect. He had a specially designed chair. It's around here somewhere on casters. There it is. And he could push himself from there over to these.

other tables and get everything done. He set up his dissecting blocks and he had his tweezers, and that's what he devoted his life to. I mentioned the routine in his life at his desk at 8 o'clock in the morning and so on. Can you give us some idea of the routine and of the rigidity of it? This study was a U-shaped place for Darwin. It was for him, and his wife ensured that. He could come here and work, and after doing the letters, he would go out to the corner of his property and walk for a mile or so. And then he would come back and he would do another bout of work and then he would break for lunch and then he would have a siesta, smoke a cigarette in later years, and perhaps he would then go out and have another constitutional. He never really stopped

working. Even when he was out walking around, he was noticing things, making notes on things. He was absolutely obsessive in all of that. It was part of Darwin's brilliance. And then in the evenings he would retire to the sitting room next door and they would play backgammon with his wife, listen to the piano. That's when he tried to relax. But even then in the middle of the night, he would think of something that he had said or done during the day, an experiment that hadn't gone right, and he would either get up and do something about it

or lose a night's sleep. He never let it alone. But the important thing about Downhouse and about this space in Downhouse is that he was liberated to do science the way he wanted to do it, sequestered from intrusions. If Darwin were to carry a lot of,

out investigations on the scale and depth we've described, it would help to have a laboratory close to home. And this is the space that's solved Darwin's problem. We've moved out of the house now, straight into the garden. This is where he conducted his botanical experiments on orchids, primroses and cowslips. It's also where he studied bees, pigeons and worms. It must be the most charming laboratory in the world. And down a gravel path is the kitchen garden and greenhouses, which are really the HQ of Darwin's botanical investigations. So take us there is Nick Biddle, who oversaw the project that restored these gardens to what they would have been when the Darwin's lived here.

Nick Biddle, when you were given the job to bring these gardens back to what they were, what were you specifically asked to do? The aim was to restore the gardens and grounds of Downhouse to their atmosphere and appearance during the last few years of Darwin's life here in order to illustrate. and interpret his life and work to the visiting public. It was also a family garden. I've described it as a laboratory, and it's a word we like to use about the garden

because it gives it an extra stratum of significance. But it's a garden where his family played, enjoyed themselves, and it looks very much like the garden of a small country house, and not at all, frankly, like a laboratory. I'm delighted to hear you say that, because so many historic houses that you visit are about the political power, the wealth, they illustrate the idea that the idea that,

the occupant had about themselves. And it's quite appropriate that Charles Darwin's garden has that atmosphere of a family garden because really, before he was a scientist, he was a father and a husband. So we had tennis here, we had Kroger here, we had a swing in the U-tree, we had a sandpit. Yeah, his life and his work were just totally enmeshed.

You can't really understand one without the other. And his family worked with him on all of his projects, really, from his autobiography to his study of insectivorous plants. This bit we're passing here. Would he have done experiments there on our right? Yes. He refers, for example, to the labelia fulgens in these flower beds at the back of the veranda. And the point he makes about those is that they have a device to ensure

that none of the pollen from any specific flower will go on the stigma of that specific flower. And this is really key because the role of insects in pollinating plants in order to ensure cross-fertilisation is really fundamental because that ensures that the very... which is part of the building blocks of natural selection is there because he was aware that constantly self-fertilising plants just wouldn't produce the variability, which is the raw material of evolution through natural selection.

And just outside the veranda are six flower beds which were always planted out by Emma because really it was Emma who looked after the garden and Darwin would potter about mooning about the garden as one of his gardeners described it. I see him mooning about the garden and I just think it would be better if he had to be better if he had something to do.

So Darwin's garden was both a place for the children to play and the research centre for his work, a place to study, measure and experiment with the natural world. Especially here in the kitchen garden. This is where Darwin did the majority of his plant experimentation. He called it his experimental bed, and it's just in front of us, Nick. Yeah, in the kitchen garden, when we started the restoration project here, the whole area was laid to grass.

But there's a fantastic record of what he did here. We were lucky enough to have a look at his gardener's catalogs with his annotations, his copy of Loudoun's Encyclopedia of Gardening. Because as well as looking at variation in the natural world, he was also interested in variation under domestication. So how variation occurs within cultivated forms, partly through the intervention of people breeding specifically for characteristics, but also how those characteristics can become lost again through variation. And he also is running the domestic life along with the scientific life, as well, as scientific, life. This was a vegetable garden vegetables for the family as well as I understand. And for cut flowers.

Yeah, there's also a bed of roses which are referred to in the correspondence. I mean, as he did with everything really, he integrated the whole life and work together. He makes a reference, for example, to a very late frost in May and the effect that it had on a row of beans and how most of them were completely wiped out. But there were just a very small number that were able to tolerate that degree of frost. And it was a, he really got quite excited about how that just small degree of variation

could be really critical in the survival of those particular individuals which would then enable them to pass on that successful characteristic. Steve Jones, this looks like a vegetable garden. It doesn't look like the laboratory that we've been referring it to. He managed to do remarkable things here. Can you give us a flavour of some of the experiments he carried out from this experiment bed in front of us,

this vegetable garden? This isn't just a vegetable garden, this is Bromley's Galapagos. There's an astonishing variety of brilliant things. that he did here. In fact he was getting very close to something which he no doubt thought about, but wouldn't mention to his wife, which was the origin of sex, which remains one of the central issues

of biology. The central question about sexes, why bother? I mean, it's so expensive. And he actually found that there was a second series of sexes. If you were a primrose, not only did you have to be a male and make with a female, you also have to pass the test, a second sexual test of being a long style,

finding a short style. And what he found was that short could only mate with long and long with short. We now know that's universal. In humans, too, we have many, many sexual tests we have to pass before, we're accepted by another mate. So once again, what seemed like trivial experiments,

perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, but I think he's had some foresight too, actually approached some of the most fundamental questions in biology. Another piece of work he did here, which in hindsight again is absolutely astounding, is to discover the first of all hormones. Who knows that Darwin discovered hormones?

He only just realized it, but he was interested in, why do plants when they're growing or shoot, why does it move towards the light? And he did a simple but brilliant experiment, wished to shine a light on the tip and further down from the tip. Only the tip gave a response, but the growth was further down. And so he suggested that some kind of molecular influence was passed from the tip further down the plant.

That was a hormone. The actual very first animal hormone wasn't found until 1903, which is many decades later. So on that grounds alone, Darwin deserves to be famous, and of course there's all the rest. We're also next to a greenhouse, which is next to the experimental bed. Given what we see of the state-of-the-art laboratories

and the effort that goes into them and the science that creates the laboratories, this would seem extraordinarily primitive. And yet he arrived at conclusions which have held. Yes. I mean, we're looking at his greenhouse now. Actually, it was a state-of-the-art greenhouse, in its day and was expensive, hot water and that kind of stuff. I think it proves that ideas are more important than equipment.

I mean, Darwin was an anatomist, both of plants and animals. Molecular biology is anatomy plus an enormous research grant. There's no difference. It's just cutting things not into nerves and muscles, but in individual letters of the DNA. So I think it's the ideas that matter rather than the technology. And Darwin had the ideas. Okay, let's go into this state-of-the-art greenhouse.

as then was. Can I start with you? Did you have to put this together and restore this greenhouse as well as it gone? The greenhouse was restored by English Heritage. When I joined the project, it was almost there. We did a little bit more work, just pulling it together. But essentially it's three sections.

Darwin had five sections, but there were three sections remaining, and that's what's been restored. So what most leaves out of you here, Steve? Well, this is a carnivorous plant section. And Darwin was slightly shocked to find that a plant ate an animal. Ruskin wrote eloquently,

this had ruined the study of botany for him, and it was disgusting. We shouldn't do that kind of thing. But Darwin was very curious about it. And he did a lot of clever experiments on sundews and venous fly traps and the like. Got material for all over the world, all the matter which he grew in here.

And he was astounded, and he said, and to some extent, terrified and frightened by the similarity between the behaviour of these plants, as they ate insects, and the behaviour of animals. And he found, for example, that the digestive enzyme of the Sunday

when it breaks down the insects needs to work, it needs to be in an acid environment just like the human stomach and he says again and again this is almost like an animal and many sort of historians of science have wondered about the parallel between his own stomach problems

and his interest in the gastric pastimes of the botanical world as a mere scientist and I'm not qualified to comment on that Jim, do you want to come out on this? Yes, these carnivorous plants and Darwin being carnivorous. Plants were little animals to him. If all the plants and animals which ever existed were suddenly to reappear, this is a very important point for Darwin.

There would be complete continuity from the first sensations all the way after the development of mind. He learned this early on when there was a great deal of question about whether marine invertebrates were plants or animals. and his very first Professor Dr. Robert Grant at Edinburgh University exposed him to this problem. The important point here is continuity and gradualism. Darwin's entire world works very slowly

without any gaps or any leaps or any jumps. Yes, that's been much argued about recently. There's much argument between what's known as evolution by jerks and evolution by creeps. I think in the end the creeps have won, you know, and I think standing around in this greenhouse, we prove that to be true. But Darwin's creeping was infinitesimal creeping,

and no one believes that the variations on which natural selection depend today were that small. And this is where Thomas Hoxley was closer to the modern view, that there were an intermediate level of variations which actually were the raw material of natural selection. I just got an impression from listening to you talk that this man was on constant alert for observation. Yes.

He made himself into a... Well, it's almost... How would you describe it? He never let up, did he? Whatever was going or growing, he was learning something from it or interfering with it in order to learn more. I think in the end, what you're saying is he was a scientist and a good scientist. He could never rest. He was unobsessive.

Thank you very much. Can we come back to you, Steve? You said he was trying to get at the origins of sex. I think that was a phrase you used earlier. There's a book that he published called The Descent of Man and Selection in relation to sex. Can you talk a bit more about that? Was that a driver?

Was that the way he saw his experience? as tending. That's a very important book, 1871. And in some ways, that's perhaps his second most important book. It's an oddly disjointed book, you know, it's neither a good editor. The daring section is the descent of man, and in the origin of species, he dared only say, light will be cast upon man and his origins. That caused enough of an uproar. But 12 years later, he wrote this book about human evolution. Jim, well, can you give your slant on what was going on now? The story goes that Darwin discovered a theory of natural selection and something called sexual selection much later.

And then he published his theory of natural selection in the origin of species in 1859. And when he saw that he was going to survive it, he decided to go public with the dissented man 12 years later. That story has to be reconsidered at a deep level. Darwin's theories were always about human beings in society. From the time he set eyes on Fuegians in South America, Whence have these people come?

Can they possibly be related to me? Are the races one or are they separately created species? Darwin didn't believe that the human races were separate species at all. He believed passionately in the equality of the races as human beings, and he was deeply opposed to slavery. So Darwin works out his theory of sexual selection in the 1850s to establish the mechanism by which the races diverged from a single stalk. and we know from his research project in his other letters

that he was working up all of the evidence for sexual selection as the cause of racial, human racial divergence, that suddenly he dropped when he wrote the origin of species. There are several reasons for that it would take too long to go into. So the origin comes out shorn of human beings, which was a safe thing to do, wasn't it? And he plans to add a chapter to his enormous book called Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.

and gradually the chapter he intends to add on human racial divergence gets bigger, typical Darwin, bigger and bigger, and by 67 or 68 he said it's going to be an essay. It'll be a small book, and it ends up being two volumes called The Descent of Man in Selection in relation to sex, two-thirds of which is his prize answer to the big problem of 19th century anthropology once the races have come, sexual selection.

The sad thing about the book is, actually, we didn't know anything about human evolution. at all. There was a one human fossil and what we now know to be a Neanderthal had been found. He didn't quite know what it was. We knew nothing about the enormous amount. We now know about the age of human beings, the

action of natural selection. And Darwin in the second part of that book explored much more deeply this question, the famous question of the peacock's tail. What use is a peacock's tail to a male peacock? None whatsoever. It's a pain in the backside in more than one sense. But for some reason

the females find that attractive so the tale gets bigger and bigger with the generations. He had an odd feeling that actually that was important in humans, that actually maybe that it was the reason, well, we've got black people in Africa and white people in Europe, that it had to do with sexual preference. The interesting observation now is that isn't really true. Biologists now can see in humans, as Darwin's had seen in pharaohs and animals,

what I think of as the healing power of lust, which is that humans will meet in almost any combination, irrespective of race. And it's a level of education that determines who we make with more than skin colour. So I think when it comes to selection, relation to sex in humans, he didn't get it right, but he had some very good ideas. When you think about the experiments Darwin did at Downhouse, when you also bear in mind that for much of the time it was in poor health, it's a remarkable body of scientific work. As we've said, Downhouse was a retreat for Darwin, but it was also open to the world. If you wanted to speak with Charles Darwin, you'd say,

simply wrote a letter, part of a vast Darwin-shaped correspondence through which the man in Downhouse talked back to the world. Alison Perrin is assistant director of the Darwin Correspondence Project. Alison, we're in Darwin's study again, and he wrote about how many letters? Well, we know of around 7,000 that he wrote that still survive, but he spoke at one time about writing 8 to 10 letters a day, so there may be more out there. How important was correspondence to Darwin's science? It was enormously important. He coordinated almost a research group around the world from this study.

It was a particular importance once domestication under variation had been published and he was working on what became descent of man in expression of emotions. Once he was really working in earnest on human origins, he needed then information from all over the world. and he used his existing friends in particular, Joseph Hooker, at Q, to tap into their networks of people around the world, particularly diplomats, missionaries. And Darwin knew that he was using correspondence to get information out of people.

He wrote to a naturalist John Geno Weir in 1868 at the end of a letter where he'd asked Jenner Weir for a lot of different information, a whole list of different questions. And right at the bottom he writes, if any man wants to gain a good opinion of his fellow men, he ought to do what I am doing, pester them with letters. You've used the phrase all over the world, Alison. Can you give us some idea of the geographical extent of the correspondence?

Anywhere the British Empire reached, plus the United States, South America, he had a lot of correspondence with a man called Fritz Muller in Brazil, who Darwin said was the Prince of Observers. Mueller supplied him with information about plants and plants. in particular plants in Brazil, and not only supplied him with information about plants, but also with seeds that Darwin was able to conduct his own experiments on. And then those same seeds Darwin caused to be sent to other parts of the world

so that he was running almost ecological experiments around the world. Is there any way of divining up this chorus, one, as Alison, couldn't you say, well, the majority of it was about getting seeds and specimens and observations, and then there was this part? Can you give us some idea of the range of it? Even a single letter may contain information on all sorts of different subjects. Darwin was always able to turn a source of information to account. So although he had talked with Fritz Muller in particular about botany,

and that was Mueller's primary interest, once Darwin was working on human origins, he wrote letters to Muller saying, and why you're about it? I'm sure it wouldn't cause you too much trouble if you would just observe the expressions on the native population. Give me information about the people that you see and not just plants. This idea of relating everything or bringing everything back to people

becomes a great theme, isn't it? He corresponded with Sir James Crichton Brown, I understand it, a Scottish psychiatrist, a pioneer in mental health. Darwin was interested in child development, and you'd write to memory of his own family who had children talking about the way the children developed and so on. Can you give us some idea of that? Yes, once again, very serendipitous in his sources of information.

So when anybody wrote, usually wrote, to Emma to say that a baby had been born. Darwin, in writing back with congratulations, he passes on a questionnaire that he had designed, asking people for information about human expressions of emotion. And this is a letter that Darwin wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, best known as of Darwin's Bulldog, really, the man who argued so passionately for origin of species. Mrs. Huxley had, I think, just recently heard a baby. And Darwin writes, give Mrs. Huckley the enclose. probably the questionnaire about expressing the emotions and ask her to look out for hints

when one of her children is struggling and just going to burst out crying. And then he carries on, the dear young lady near here plagued a very young child for my sake till it cried and saw the eyebrows for a second or two beautifully oblique just before the torrent of tears began. And the relationship of expressions of sorrow and fear

in young humans was something that Darwin was trying to relate to expressions of sorrow and fear in animals. In the early days, early years, if we can call them that, where he wasn't publishing or publishing very little, he was collecting specimens as well, wasn't he? He'd failed to bring a complete setback from his own tour, and he wrote to other people who've been on board saying, have you any finches, and I missed that out, and can you send me what you've got? Yes, he did, and there are actually still in the archive in Cambridge University Library, there are still bits and pieces of plants in amongst the letters. There's one rather lovely letter from a correspondent in New Zealand which still has stuck on it some squashed bees, which Gustavin was very interested in bees as pollinators,

and interested in competition among different species around the world and in the driving out of native populations and the effects that trying to transplant, for instance, native British plants to somewhere like New Zealand, if you didn't have the right pollinators, then what were the effects of that? so he was actually sent to squash bees. What sort of information did he provide in return?

It was an information barter, wasn't it? It was up to a point. The information actually flowed very much, the actual data flowed very much towards Darwin increasingly. Once he was, after origin was published, he was such a well-known man that people were very willing to help him. And they also knew about his precarious health,

so they tended not to want to bother him for anything in return. But what he did provide to the people, who gave him information was a kind of patronage. He was very significant in promoting their careers in other ways. He would encourage people to publish on their own account. He would suggest lines of inquiry, suggest experiments, suggest observations they might make that were undoubtedly going to be of use to him and his agenda. But at the same time, he was very skillful at getting people to do what he wanted by recognizing that he had to be very appreciative of the help that they gave him. In that sense, he was quite a clever politician, wasn't he?

He was. To say that he was a manipulator, I think, would give the wrong idea. But he certainly knew, he has to some extent an instinct, I think, for saying to people the things that will encourage them to help him and not discourage them. So apart from doing his own work out in the garden through this window and writing here where we are in his study, his correspondence must have taken him an awful lot of time

because these are often not short letters, they're detailed. So it's almost a third occupation, isn't it? Yes, very much so. Now, of course, being a Victorian gentleman, he had wife and daughters who could help him to actually write the letters. So some of the letters that we know are in Emma Darwin's hand or Henrietta Darwin's hand. Henrietta actually became a support for Darwin's work in many ways. She became one of the people, one of the few people to whom he gave the draft manuscript of dissent of man for comment, not just to act as his secretary, but actually to act as his sounding board. and she was away from home at the time when Darwin was writing Descent of Man, one of the books that he knew was going to be most controversial. And there are letters with Henrietta. Darwin sent to Henrietta the proofs of the manuscript, in fact, of the book

and asked her to comment on it. And she was clearly doing that, not just as from a stylistic point of view, she was named me a copy editor. She was commenting on the actual meat of the argument. And there are some hints that she did this for some of Darwin's friends and colleagues. too. Even Hooker, who was no sufferer of fools and not terribly fond of women sometimes, relied on Henrietta as a sounding board for his material, his writing. Did he get involved with people writing to him saying, you must be wrong? Your explanation is mistaken and evil and unacceptable. Did he

respond to letters like that? He didn't respond very often. He was a man who avoided open control. obviously wherever he could. There are some letters that are not so much angry or critical as sorrowful. So there were some of his correspondence who were worried about him and about the health of his eternal soul. In October 1881, Darwin published his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through The Action of Worms, the result of 40 years' work on and off, the book sold well. Even at this late stage of life, Darwin never lost his delight in the natural.

world, but the fits and seizures were getting worse. Jim Moore. And worse, and worse. And then finally, he stayed up late one night talking with his daughter, blew his nose loudly, and then with a slow, tired step, he mounted the stairs in pain. And at the top of the stairs is the master bedroom. It was a cold spring night, April 18, 1882. They must have a cold spring night. There was a cold spring night. There must have been a fire going here in this wonderful marble fireplace, and no doubt right next to the fireplace is where the bed was up against this wall. And just before midnight, there was a terrible attack, and he was convulsed with nausea. And Charles rang for Emma.

She came running, the servants came running, and it went on and on. And he said, I wish I could die, if only I could die. and then he remembered to say when his daughter arrived with her brother Francis he remembered to say I'm not the least afraid to die Henrietta was writing all of this down because she wanted a eyewitness account that her father did not repent of his views on his deathbed

somehow he made it through the night the children sat on the bed with him and rubbed his chest lightly and he called them Udeas and he referred to Emma as it's almost worthwhile to be sick to be nursed by you and then after breakfast he threw up again the doctor was called

and Emma tried to sleep and they called her again because the crisis had come by the middle of the afternoon and this time he couldn't relieve the pain by lying back in bed or sitting up and finally at the end the culmination of all of his heart attacks there was a great one

from which he never recovered and he lapsed into a coma. Emma sat next to him and held his head on her chest and rocked slowly as he passed away. Still in the bedroom where he died, as I understand it, Jim, different factions wanted to claim him and his legacy from that moment. Darwin wanted to be buried amongst his friends and neighbours. He lived here for 40 years.

The family assumed that he would be buried in the parish churchyard. And a coffin was made and was made, and was brought here to the house, a plain oak coffin, his body was laid out and it stayed here in the house, probably in this room. But in London, political forces were at work, in the scientific establishment, who wanted this body taken into the public domain,

where it could be seen to have the power that it had through Darwin's writings during his life. And to make a long story short, the corpse was smashed, and it was taken to Westminster Abbey, and it was buried according to the public, by the will of the intelligence of the nation. It was the new professional middle-class scientists,

people like Huxley and Hooker, his best friends and defenders, who paraded this body through the name of Westminster Abbey and laid it near the monument to Sir Isaac Newton at the north end of the choir screen. And around the graveside, the leaders of the government, the Liberal Party, and the opposition, and there was a huge gathering, of foreign dignitaries, and there was not a dissenting voice. It was very, very important to Darwin's contemporaries

that he should be honored in this way, because he had never been given a knighthood. So what do you make of the snatching of the corpse, Steve Jones? Well, the corpse has been snatched many times back and forth since then, and the body snatches are still out there on both left and right, on the atheistical side and the religious side, they're clawing upon Darwin's remains. and I think we tend to forget, to be frank,

that what's important isn't Darwin, it's Darwinism. And that's the thing which is alive. I mean, Darwin moulded away long ago. And I think Darwin himself actually would have been shocked at what happened to his corpse. He probably would be even more shocked at what happened to his reputation. But he'd been very, very happy as to what happened to his science. Can we ask two or three big questions at the end of this programme of each of you then?

What impact do you think that Darwin had on the history of things? thought. First Steve Jones. I think on the history of biology, he had an absolutely stupendous impact. He almost invented the science. He was the Newton of biology. And that's still true, and we still constantly, his name comes up in conversations as a shorthand for the whole constellation of different facts, which when we say Darwinism, we know what we mean. History of society is slightly older. He's turned out to be a sort of universal alibi for almost anything you like. Karl Marx was a keen Darwinist. He said that Darwin saw the working as

a bourgeois society among animals and plants. Hitler was a keen Darwinist too. So was Mrs. Thatcher. But what's quite remarkable is how, what basically is only a science has become part of social, political, religious, and artistic narrative. I have to say

as a mere scientist, I find that fairly baffling. Darwin's hailed as a revolutionary. He was even hailed as revolutionary in his own time, but the English do not bury revolutionaries in Westminster Abbey. Darwin's burial in Westminster Abbey was proof of his acceptability to the English establishment in his own lifetime, something he had never dreamt of when he was writing in his private notebooks, the fabric falls. The whole fabric of people's traditional creationist belief about the origin of life and God and man, Darwin believed,

would have to be transformed, but he was never an atheist. He was not the revolutionary he was proclaimed to be. Darwin precipitated and symbolized a palace coup in Great Britain in the 19th century. It was not a revolution from below, but the replacement of one set of largely clerical university-based religious experts on man

and God and nature, with another set who were themselves professional scientists who hailed Darwin and brought him to Westminster Abbey to be buried. Would you agree with that, Stan? I'm only a scientist. So I think that's probably true. I mean, science in those days was an aristocratic pastime. To be a scientist, you needed to be rich,

and you only have to stand in downhouse, so you realize that Darwin was rich. I think there's been a great proletarization of science since then. Scientists became first middle class, and we're rapidly slipping down towards the lower class. But in the end, what matters, it isn't who does the science, what class they belong to, who pays for the science,

is what the science is. And I think really the how, The hangigraphy of Darwin is the hagiography of a man. What we really need is some understanding of the importance of his science. Do you think there's one aspect of Darwin's work that was the key to his success in formulating and publishing these theories? I think the central thing which he stuck to from his youth was the enormous power of small means. Science does concern itself with trifles. Science is trifles. when you put the trifles together, perhaps rather unlike the law, you get something really big.

And I think he was the first person to prove that. Darwin's vision of nature was completely original. Some say it could only have been articulated in Britain in the 19th century, not in France, not in Germany, not in Britain and any other time. His vision of a struggling, progressive cosmos in which all life is related by common descent. We are all members of one family. We are all brothers and sisters. This was Darwin's vision, and uniquely so, in the 1830s.

And it's become ours. I think if we had Darwin's humanity that accompanied that vision, his love of life and his hatred of cruelty, it would be the completion of his work. In making these programs about Darwin, we've encountered exotic locations, radical thought, extraordinary industry, experiments out there in the garden through the window beside me.

But one of the things that strikes me most about Darwin is that the last book he published wasn't some grandeur's worldview, wasn't some Old Testament from the top of an intellectual mountain. Here was a book about earthworms. And here's part of the conclusion. It's a marvellous reflection

that the whole of the superficial mould over which any expanse has passed and will again pass every few years through the bodies of worms. The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions. But long before he existed, the land was in fact regularly ploughed and still continues to be thus ploughed by earthworms. It may be doubted where there are many other animals

which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organised creatures. And it's Darwin's observation, his humility, his work out there in the garden, and his realisation of the connectedness of things, which I think is one mark of his greatness. Darwin, in our time, was presented by Melvin Bragg. The producer was John Watkins.

There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk slash radio 4. The crew of NASA's Artemis 2 mission have successfully completed their voyage around the moon. This is what we've been waiting for for 50 years. Traveling further from the Earth than any human has ever gone before. And 13 minutes, the BBC Space Podcast, told the inside story with audio from the mission. We can see the inside. We're seeing more and more of the far side. And insight from experts at NASA.

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