In Our Time - Darwin: On the Origins of Charles Darwin

Episode Date: January 5, 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 tells the story of Darwin's early life in Shropshire and discusses the significance of the three years he spent at Cambridge, where his interests shifted from religion to natural science.Featuring contributions from Darwin biographer Jim Moore, geneticist at University College London Steve Jones, fellow of Christ's College Cambridge David Norman and assistant librarian at Christ's College Cambridge Colin Higgins.

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 four. I hope you enjoy the programme. In a four-part series, Melvin Bragg follows in Darwin's footsteps through the locations of his life trying to uncover the man behind the myth and get to grips with what his great and controversial idea really meant.

In program one, called on the origin of Charles Darwin, Melvin examines Darwin's early years, his unhappy childhood, his wayward time at Cambridge University, and his attempts to become a priest to see if they contain the seeds of the man who would become the genius of evolution. It's been called a most important idea in human history. Charles Darwin's argument that human life, indeed all life, can be explained as the result of evolution by means of natural sense. election. Darwin suggested that the greater array and complexity of life on earth was not created by

God fully formed, but evolved incrementally at the hands of unremitting, often violent and wasteful, yet relentless, meticulous forces. It's an idea that has radically changed our understanding of ourselves, that created the science of biology, and that more than anything else provided evidence for a case against God. Darwin's been fated as an intellectual. revolutionary, an iconic last of the highest order. But when you look at the story of Charles Darwin and how he came to this profound insight, you find a story that's subtler, more complex and more conflicted than that, which is why I'm standing here, in the pulpit of Great St. Mary's in Cambridge,

the university where in 1828 Darwin came to train to become a priest. That he left Cambridge a naturalist is one of the great turning points in the intellectual history of this country and indeed the world. I'm here with a biography of Charles Darwin, Jim Moore. It's tempting to think because of the ideas that came out of it, that at that time, at the time Darwin came up here, this was a hotbed of revolutionary thought. But as I understand it, the church was still dominating

and central to the intellectual life of the university. Yes, Cambridge was a gentle police state, you might say. You would have to go someplace else in the world today, perhaps Tehran, to discover the clergy in power, both religiously and in the civil realm. The university dominated the town. There were only 2,000 collegians. The town had about 16,000 inhabitants. These 2,000 collegians were the wealth, the lifeblood of all local business.

And the university stood as judge and jury over locals. The university had two members of parliament. The town had no members of parliament. You had to sign the 39 articles of the Church of England to graduate from this university. Half of the students here were intended to become priests of the Church of England. This was an ecclesiastical powerhouse. And this particular church that we're in now, Jim, Grant St. Mary's, did that have a special significance? This is an amazing space. Let me see if I can answer that question by describing how it worked.

The pews we see in front of us came after Darwin. The galleries on the left and the right, the north and south aisle, were present then. In the north and south galleries above sat the undergraduates. That's where Darwin would have sat, on long benches without backs on. them. And beneath them sat the MAs of the university, the graduates, all of them sitting parallel to the nave and looking right or left to see the chancel, which is behind us here. The center, the nave today, was vacant. They called it the pit, and in the center of the pit was a three-decker pulpit with a door at the bottom. And the clergyman would enter that door and go up the steps and appear almost miraculously at the top, like a jack in the box. from there preach the sermon.

What view of creation would you receive in this great church? Cambridge priests, theologians, naturalists, all believed that everything held together in this universe by the word of his power, by the word of God. If God took his hand off this world, it would all fly apart. Things were kept stable and fixed, and that included the forms of life. Right above our heads here,

there was an enormous, a grotesque oak box called the Doctor's Gallery with a throne in the center where the vice chancellor sat and where royalty sat when they were visiting the university and on either side of the vice chancellor sat the heads of houses, all of them clergymen. So this is

an auditorium, an arena. It's a real theater of power. And churchly power. Churchly power and civil power. Here the best sermons were preached in Cambridge. Here also trials took place presided over by the vice chancellor. In what sense was Darwin engaged in this?

Was he, let's put it simply, was he a true believer? He came to these place here full of clergy, would-be clergy. You've described it very dramatically. You've compared it with Tehran and so on. When he came up to Cambridge, did he go along with all that? Becoming a clergyman of the Church of England was a fairly easygoing thing in the age of Jane Austen. It was respectable occupation, perhaps second respectable to being a physician. So he came here with professional ambitions.

to train as a gentleman, first of all. He had no difficulty convincing himself that he could sign the 39 articles by the time he finished here in 1830. And he believed in the Trinity, and he believed in transubstantiation. Yes, Darwin, I think, saw no good reason to dissent from that at that time.

Still to go on at you a bit, not to go on at you, but to probe a bit for... Do you know from what you've discovered about him, in writing about him, do you know any personal or private qualms, difficulties, agonisings he might have had at that time. There is a secondhand remark recorded from his, after his first year at Cambridge, that he didn't feel moved by the Spirit of God to enter the church.

He didn't see it as a calling. That didn't prevent other people from entering the Church of England. Darwin was prepared to admit it. But in this place, in this great church, we're talking about a powerhouse of a medieval university. Black-gowned men, different varieties of gowns, but all black-gowned men. God was a father.

Men were the authorities. The church was the authority. The doctors, theologians, the heads of colleges assembled here up in this great doctor's gallery were all men. College fellows had to renounce marriage to retain their fellowship.

And the young women were kept at a distance officially. Of course, they were the college servants, weren't there? There's a massive maldistribution of power in Cambridge. Testosterone-fuelled men on the one hand, and young women very anxious to make a living in life. And that felt particularly in this sort of gathering when Darwin came to be the unchallenged fact of his university existence. Later in life he would refer to the fabric that falls if one species, one instinct be acquired, one species change. This is the fabric in this room, this structure of medieval power represented by Cambridge University. God in his world, God in his world,

controlling his creation, holding things stable and fixed. Darwin didn't know that quite at the time, but this is where he absorbed that vision of the fabric that would have to fall and be transformed. Well, Jim Moore and I have come out of the church now. We're going to move around Cambridge. You have a map of Darwin's Cambridge, which you're nobly unfurling.

This map was actually on sale here in the shops. At the beginning of Darwin's last year, in 1830, it's a highly accurate map. In the center, it's really quite a large map. You can see Cambridgetown. It's immersed in a sea of. fenland, really. And right at the center, we're right at the center now at great St. Mary's Church. It's ground zero, the prime meridian, and the streets going north to Huntington and south down to

London are all marked with milestones from the west door of St. Mary's Church. That's the center of power here, the Senate House, the old schools, the library, and Darwin had only to go half mile or less in any direction to get to the fens. In fact, the footpath went from the back of Darwin's College out towards what was called Maids Causeway, because that's the way the maids came in across the fends from Barnwell along the river where the gas works were. And the young men, Darwin included here at Christ, were particularly not to go beyond the end of the path at St Radigan's,

which led on to Mades Causeway and the girls. The proctors here at Cambridge were part of the job as a vice squad to keep single women from what was called streetwalking. Well, anti-wise squad, yes. So he's surrounded by what we can call, without being too fanciful, we can call his first great laboratory. It was his first great outdoor collecting site. It was not a highly diverse area.

He had to go further into the fans with some of his professors and students to get to those places were particularly watery. But quite enough. Darwin knew every square inch of this map. The mill pond in Cambridge still runs to the rhythms of university life. On warmer days than this, students sit out on the green, drinking and talking and perhaps occasionally discussing evolutionary theory.

but the mill pond is important for another reason. It is, or at least was 180 years ago, extremely good beetle hunting country. No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third, a new kind,

which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas, it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongues of it, I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one. We've been joined by Professor Steve Jones from University College London. Steve Jones, what was it about beetles that attracted Darwin so much? Well, at that time, I mean, biology was still a kind of advanced kind of stamp collecting. And if you're interested in stamp collecting, what you're most keen on a tiny and apparently

meaningless differences among apparently identical specimens. And beetles are famous then and now for being vastly diverse. The well-known comment by JBS Holden, the great Darwinian, what could he work out of the nature of God from the creation? God has an inordinate fondness for Beatles. Darwin would have loved that statement. So we're talking about serious classification. This young man who has often been written about as someone who wasted their time in Cambridge

was in fact laying the foundation. by what he'd do for the rest of his life? Yes, that's certainly true. He wasn't doing it through the degrees, though. No, I mean, like most students, he took no account whatsoever about what was going on in the lecture theatre, and he was probably very wise to do so.

Jim, why was this millpond such a fertile ground for beetle hunting? We have to understand that the mill pond stood at the junction of River Granta on one side here and River Cam on the left. This was an industrial artery, a hub of activity in Darwin's Cambridge. This was the farthest navigable point inland,

for barges. And the payoff for him was that these barges, at least the ones that transported reeds from the fens, were loaded with wildlife. And once the reeds had been emptied out to thatch houses, the beetles were left. I was very successful in collecting and invented two new methods.

I employed a labourer to scrape during the winter, moss off old trees and place it in a large bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the... of the barges, in which reeds are brought from the fens. And thus, I got some very rare species. No poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen's illustrations of British insects, the magic words, captured by C. Darwin, Esquire.

Would this seem to be a sort of truancy of what he was doing? I don't think so. I mean, they weren't really training to be priests. They were trained to be gents. That's the most important thing. And Darwin... Gentile's clothing, right? Exactly.

Darwin, who was pretty much a natural gentleman and pretty wealthy. This was really a bit of a finishing school from that point of view. And I think many of the people who were studying to be priests perhaps didn't take their ecclesiastical studies all that seriously. They knew they would pass. Nobody ever fails in the University of Cambridge. It's well known. Still true.

Their hobbies, actually, for many of them, became their life's work, not just for Darwin. Was there any sense, Jim Moore, that in pursuing these investigations, with Beatles, for instance, as intensively as he did, that he was relating it to or required to relate it to the theological atmosphere with which you were surrounded? I think the theological interpretation of Beatles went without saying for Darwin.

It was part of the air he breathed. These were God's creatures. God had made these creatures in their infinite diversity. At the creation, somehow we know not how, and so they have remained since then. Darwin got a lot of practice. in identifying habitats. Remember, this is a competitive field sport,

so he wants to be the first to find something, and he knows where to go to get it. You say competitive? Were there others? He wasn't a sole beetle collector. Were there others on the track as well? Oh, yes. Even some of the local clergymen, perhaps one or two of the professors,

undergraduates like Albert Way, who drew a wonderful cartoon of Darwin sitting on the back of a beetle, and it says, go it, Charlie, underneath. Darwin was notorious for his vigor. He discovered on one occasion that his servant had been secretly supplying a competitor named Babington. He was later known as Beatles Babington. He was the botany professor here.

But Darwin nearly threw him down the stairs over at Christ's call. He said, you won't do that again. You belong to me. To summarize then from this place, from this start, could this be called in any way a starting point, Steve Jones, that this is where Darwin began to pull together an interest which he had pursued, since childhood and just gave it more body, more weight of his attention. Are we standing here on an historic spot? Yes, I think here is really where Darwin became a professional.

Most biologists, myself included, have a guilty secret. They started as bird watchers. And Darwin started as a beetle watcher, and he liked shooting birds. And there's a big difference between being a bird watcher and being a nautologist, somebody who understands and studies and has theories about birds. And I think this was the beginning of the turning point for Darwin. He wasn't just a beetle collector. he started becoming an entomologist, an expert on insects.

And from that, it's a simple step to trying to make theories as to where insects had emerged from. He saw differences between species, differences between places, which must have begun to implant the idea of change. I think the fact that he worked on Beatles was itself priming the fuse, which finally exploded two or three decades later.

And I think those theories probably found the beginnings of their genesis, just about on this spot. And when he had his specimens, he'd wander up the road to his rooms here in Christ's College. He would later describe them as in Old Court, Middle Staircase, on right-hand, on going into court, up on flight, right-hand door, and capital rooms they were. And they are. Jim Moore and Steve Jones are with me, and we've been joined by David Norman,

reader in vertebrate paleobiology and fellow of this College, Christ's College, in which we found ourselves. So these rooms, David Norman, are very much, you would say, as Darwin knew them. They weren't, but they are now. We've got a lot of college records which show us what Darwin bought and how he furnished the room, because that was one of the obligations of undergraduates when they came to take up resident in college.

So we are going to reinstate the room as approximately it would have looked when Charles Darwin was an undergraduate here. Jim, well, the image we have of Darwin is of Darwin the old man. the grey hair, the jutting eyebrows, the godlike beard, the Simeon features, ridiculed by his opponents. It's hard to remember that he was also a young man. What sort of a young man was he? Oh, I think Darwin was very much like his contemporaries.

I've lived with him in my imagination for a very long time. He came up here to enjoy himself. He was with genial fellows. He paid his way, his father paid his way. He was what's called a pensioner. and he ran up bills, so he was always having to tap his father for more money. He brought a horse up one year

and had it stabled nearby and would ride out into the country. Eventually he brought a gun up with him and used to take aim and fire, but it wasn't loaded at the candles in his room. And if the aim was accurate, the little puff of air would blow out the candle. I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds. How well I remember killing my first snipe.

And my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands. This taste long continued. Let's go back towards the beginning of his life, Jim Moore. He was born in February 12th, in 1809 in Shrews. He was educated locally. What sort of childhood did he have?

Darwin was the second youngest in the family. He had an older brother, He had three older sisters. His mother died when he was nine years old, and he had a difficult childhood in many ways. He remembers times of being angry. He remembers times of being locked in rooms. He doesn't remember anything about his mother except the scene after she was gone.

Everything was kept bottled up. My mother died in July 1817, and it is odd that I can remember hardly anything about her, except a deathbed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work table. In the spring of this same year, I was sent to a day school in Shrewsbury, where I stayed a year. I've been told that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine,

and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. His father was by no means pleased with him and he was a young man. He accused him of being no good for anything, apart from rat-catching and chasing dogs and hunting. He was accused by his headmaster of being a boy unable to pay attention to anything, so the schooling wasn't... particularly happy. His father became domineering, his sisters pestered him to behave properly, he went on long solitary walks about which he didn't remember very much. He did enjoy collecting things. I tried to make up the names of plants and collected all sorts of things.

Shells, seals, franks, coins and minerals. The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me. Can we talk a little about his mother's side of his family, which is rather more radical than his fathers, wasn't it, Steve Jones? Yes, his mothers, they were a very inbred family and had been for many generations, as indeed were aristocratic families in general in those days, and his mother's family were linked to the Wedgwoods,

who were, as well as being, of course, important in the history of British industry in terms of pottery, were passionate anti-slavery activists and really very, very forward-looking in their attitudes and for a rich, a very rich, no-class family, they were remarkably, as we'd say today, I suppose, left-wing. On his father's side, David Norman, there was the great Erasmus Darwin in the background.

Was he made aware of that intellectual inheritance? It was undoubtedly aware of it. He knew of the writings of Erasmus Darwin that both the poetry and the sort of quasi-scientific work that he'd done. It was undoubtedly aware of the intellectual power of the lunar men, the way that had powered the Industrial Revolution, This is this group of intellectuals in the West Midlands really who met at each other's houses supposedly every month,

but they did contain in their number some people who achieved great things and great fame. Absolutely. And Erasmus being one of the leading lights of that particular society at the time. What they believed in, above all, these two families was freedom. The most important four-letter word to those families throughout the 19th century was free. That meant free trade, free enterprise, free religion, the freedom to think and to choose,

democracy with limits. These were people who supported the French Revolution and the American Revolution and the freedom of the slaves. It all comes together in an ideological package in Darwin's upbringing. So by the time he gets to Cambridge, his natural friends are Whig reformers.

Before he came here to Cambridge, he was enrolled in a medical school at Edinburgh. He didn't last very long there. What did he get out of it and why did he get out of it? I think he was horrified by the reality of medicine. It was part of the problem. And you've got to remember we're talking very early in modern medicine's time. I mean, medicine stopped, doctors stopped killing more people than they cured, only in about

1910. And we're talking about almost a century earlier. And Darwin saw some awful operations, one of which was upon a child, and he just ran from the room. He couldn't stand it. And he was extraordinarily badly taught. I mean, he was turned away from geology because the lectures were so awful. He records that one of the lectures began, gentlemen, the base of a mountain is at its bottom,

and the summit is at its top. And that's a really good way to introduce a geology lecture. I mean, Edinburgh is an experiment in geology. Edinburgh is the Galapagos of North Britain. How can you not believe in volcanism, in volcanoes, and look at Arthur's seat? And he came the following year down to Cambridge, where I think he fend immediately at home. The last key to this then, David Nomewis, did he ask to leave Edinburgh to come to Cambridge? Or did somebody say, you're not, it isn't working for you here, we'll send you to Cambridge?

Not quite as simple as that. Word got to him, probably through his father, probably through his sisters, that he was no longer regularly attending lectures. That, I think, resulted in, to some extent, a family showdown between Charles and his father. where his future was discussed. And between them in a very civilised way, I think, they decided that the most appropriate direction would be to get a BA degree in Cambridge and with that BA degree, then read Holy Orders

and become a cleric. That seemed very appealing to Charles Darwin at the time. He thought, hmm, that's for me. That's a worthwhile career. I can enjoy myself. spend a considerable amount of time watching nature, observing the miracle of nature, I can be well

paid, I'll be comfortable, that would appeal to his father for the near-do-well son, obviously, and therefore a career in Cambridge as an undergraduate beckoned. We're being let into the old lively Christ College where Darwin must have studied sometimes when you could turn himself

away from the fence. You can find traces of Darwin all over Cambridge and all over Christ College, but you can particularly find them here in the Christ's College Library, where they keep many of his letters, and books who's known to read, including William Herschel's astronomical writings, the poetry of John Milton, another Christ's college man, and the early novel Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. Colin Higgins is the assistant college librarian, and again, I'm with Darwin's biographer Jim Moore. Colin Higgins, can you take us through some of the things you've put on the table? Sure, perhaps the first thing

to look at would be the admission of Darwin to the college. When he came here, like every other student, he signed an admissions book. And we actually have three different books that record his entry into the college. Next to that, we have some newly discovered college accounts, which show what Darwin alongside the other students and the fellows of the college are paying for their meals, paying for coal, paying for their shoes to be shined, that kind of thing. How do you find out what he'd read at the time? How do you know about the poetry of John Milton, for instance? The Milton one we know about because he says it was the only book that he never left behind on his land journeys throughout South America.

We've recently purchased a miniature edition of Paradise Law, the kind of thing that he would have taken with him. It's absolutely tiny, and it's remarkable that... Anybody could read it. The text is so small. What's also interesting about this, none of the... the pages are cut, so whoever on this one never read it. We've lost it twice and we found it again.

We've now all decided that we all know where it is and we're not to touch it. These are his, aren't they? This is from a volume of entomology published by the book of Stephen's. We're looking at six beautifully drawn beetles. Darwin's the first one to discover those in the United Kingdom. So this is essentially the first place where Darwin gets

published, beside pictures of beetles because he's the first to find them. Above it, you see letters written by Darwin to his cousin William Darwin Fox, with two of those out on display there, illustrated with Beatles, which she was known to be collecting at that time. My dear Fox, I am dying by inches

from not having anybody to talk to about insects. My sister has made rough drawings of three of them. One is, I'm nearly sure, the same insect as horror of queens took in a willow tree and which Garland did not know. I think this is an admirable prize. The second is an extremely common insect. The third, a most beautiful leptura.

Very like the quadrophasiata. Only the body is of the same size throughout. I tell you all these particulars, as I'm anxious to know something about these. I'm constantly saying, I do wish Fox was here. His cousin, William Darwin Fox, was here for six months. They overlapped. And during that six months, they became friends,

and their friendship lasted their entire life. The core of our collection is 150 or so letters that he's written to his cousin. Which Jim Moore is devouring as we speak. If I can tease him away, Jim, if you can come over and join us and stop being quite as immersed in things you must have bred a thousand times already. Colin mentioned Darwin's cousin William Darwin Fox. Can you talk about his relationship with him? Was he rather a mentor to him at that time?

Darwin was sent here to Christ's College to be. under the example of his cousin William Darwin Fox. It wasn't the first cousin, slightly more distant. He came from Derbyshire, country gentleman's son, raised in a menagerie of animals in the countryside, and loved God's creation. It was a safe, conservative, evangelical-influenced young man

who was certainly destined for the Church of England. There was a tremendous male camaraderie, collecting beetles, sometimes going out to the countryside with horses and chasing. things and Fox ended up having an extremely large family once he married. Fox and Darwin began corresponding from the time that they were undergraduates, separated during the summer. This correspondence continued for the rest of his life until Fox died in 1880.

Almost all the letters are here at Christ's college, and they are absolutely indispensable for understanding the fine texture of Darwin's private personal life and his family life, his health, his emotional swings, his intentions to publish or not publish, his fears and his hopes. We've heard Steve Jones about his development almost under his own steam with the Beatles, collecting beetles, and going for books in the meadows and collecting and collecting. What about his intellectual developments? Now we're in his room. This is presumably where he did a great deal of his reading. What books would he be reading at the time?

Do we know that? I mean, according to college tradition, for instance, here Darwin's rooms were once occupied by William Paley. Did he fit into Darwin's reading, and how does he fit in anyway? He certainly read Paley's evidence as a creation, and he mentions this. And in some ways, Paley was a fascinating figure because he was a perfectly competent and more than competent biologist. He was a wonderful describer of the world.

He described plants and animals. He described intestinal system, often in painful detail. And his descriptions were all to work. one end. It wasn't this amazing the way you digest a lump of meat. Well, it is amazing, but then he took the next step. Wasn't this amazing? It must have been done by God.

And if you have that mindset, it makes perfect sense. It doesn't take you anywhere because it doesn't ask any questions. But he rationalises the accumulation of yet more facts. And I think that at that time, Darwin, as everybody else was, was a tripeleite. What

he saw around him was the work of God. And by doing natural history, he was in his own mind doing theology. The two things were really inseparable. From Paley, Darwin received first and foremost an ability to reason empirically and deductively. He said later in life that he could almost have repeated Paley's argument by heart. Later on he was so impressed with Paley

that he chose to read as extracurricular entertainment Paley's natural theology in which Paley established the principle that the design of living things proved the existence of a wise and beneficent creator. Did the word evolution ever come up while he was an undergraduate here? The word evolution at this time

was used habitually for a series of numbers or a curve evolving. It wasn't about species evolving. His grandfather had talked about the generation of species, not even the transmutation, the generation of nymphutation, the generation of new species from existing organic species. The word transmutation was in use, thanks to John Ray, a Cambridge clergyman and a naturalist,

who talked about the heresies of transmutation and spontaneous generation of life. Darwin would undoubtedly have picked up the notions of generation from his grandfather's book, Zoonomia, and the notion of transmutation from the experience in Edinburgh, where his zoology instructor Robert Grant was a follower of Lomero. Mark. Is there any sense of him being, Steve Jones, is there any sense of him being rather a racy character? Because we see this great man of granite

in the representations we have on him, and certainly in his work. But we have him hunting. We have him bringing horses up. Not up to this room, we hope, but still up to Cambridge. What else can we say about him that will enliven that period of his life?

Well, he admitted to go into the pub now and again, and he's drinking now and again, something which he didn't do much later in life, although he occasionally used to like a bit of brandy. I think in terms of the behaviour of the average modern undergraduate he was probably rather restrained that people who were training for the priesthood would be expected to be somewhat restrained

so he was a generally educated rather well-off young man of liberal tendency I don't think anybody when he came to Cambridge could possibly have imagined for a moment what he would become Christ's was fairly lax an easy-going sort of college compared to the discipline imposed by some other colleges. So I think the young Charles would have had

plenty of opportunities to enjoy himself. I mean, he became a member of what's called the glutton club because he enjoyed food and drink, albeit for a short period of time. So he was a warm-blooded, hot-blooded, maybe, young undergraduate and really enjoyed himself. Darwin found the lectures on offer uninspiring much of the time. He spent time in the pub.

He loved shooting and enjoying himself with a circle of friends. He didn't seem at all marked for greatness. But there's one place and one person from whom he learned a great deal. And typical of the man, it wasn't cloistered in the library, but out here, where I'm standing, on Co-Fen. This was Darwin's classroom, and his teacher was a man called John Stevens-Henslow,

so much so that Darwin became known as the man who walks with Henslow. And I'm on Co-Fen as the man who walks with Jim Moore and Steve Jones. Can you tell us briefly about John Stephen's? Hanslow, Jim. Henslow was 13 years older than Darwin. He wanted to do natural history. He obtained the chair of mineralogy at Cambridge, and then he went into holy orders.

He was deeply religious, and so orthodox that he told me one day, he should be grieved if a single word of the 39 articles were altered. His moral qualities were in every way admirable. He was free from every tinge of vanity or other petty feelings, and I never saw a man who thought so long. little about himself or his own concerns. His temper was imperturbably good, with the most winning and courteous manners. Yet, as I have seen, he could be roused by any bad action to the

warmest indignation and prompt action. He was a model for Darwin, a real paradigm of what an Anglican priest could be. The man was warm, he was highly moral, he was open to new ideas. He belonged to a network of fellow clergymen that would do Darwin's career a great deal of good. He was a Cambridge dawn. Darwin could begin to see himself like all of those things. His knowledge was great in botany, entomology, chemistry, mineralogy and geology. His strongest taste was to draw conclusions from long-continued my new observations. His judgment was excellent and his whole mind well-balanced.

But I do not suppose that anyone would say that he possessed much original. genius. Steve Jones, can you give us some idea of the sort of information that Henslow imparted to Darwin and why it's considered to be such a very important part of Darwin's education at this stage?

Henslow introduced him to plants, really. And plant biology plays quite a large part in Darwin's work, particularly his later work. Hensel also introduced into a science whose name hadn't been invented then, which is ecology. The notion that it is mortally.

life, stamp collecting or plant collecting, you need to know where they are, how they're related to each other, why some grow in certain places, why there are so many different kinds. And this common grazing as it's called is famous for having vast numbers of different plants upon it, because heavily

grazed landscapes tend to be very diverse. I mean, looking around, even on this rather chill day, you can see, I could see, what, at least half a dozen species of grass, plenty of, many, what, on that on that wall over there, probably eight to ten,

obvious different species of plant. And I think Darwin began to look for patterns. I think that's what Henslow began to do was to suggest there might be patterns in nature. And I think that this rather unprepossessing piece of green is an important part of Darwin's education. Henslow was, in his own time, quite progressive for introducing plants as, really, as living organisms

and not just as dried specimens to classify. He had students dissect plants and look how they reproduce. He believed that plants had a considerable scope for variation. They could change within limits, within the limits of the species, and Darwin learned that from him too. Darwin calls the nature of species the mystery of mysteries. And as usual, he was uncannily right.

It's still possible to go to week-long conferences where distinguished biologists tear each other's throats out about what is the nature of species, what is a species. I often think of them as being, as it were, republics of genes. Within a species, individuals can mate and exchange genes. Between species, they can't. But that doesn't always work. There are transitional forms.

That's one of the things that brought Darwin's idea of change to the form, the intermediates between species. And speciation is today's word, really, for the origin of species. What was the intellectual context to Henslow and Darwin at the time? Would there be ideas behind the looking at plants collecting, classifying of plans. What would they be? Well, I think, as was it true for all scientists, and that word hadn't been invented either,

really what they were doing, explicitly or implicitly, was just checking out what God had done. Newton really had that idea. The universe was a gigantic clock that had been put together by God, and Newton as somebody profoundly religious, much more so than dying was, I think, saw it as his duty to disentangle how that clock was made. And really, the logic,

behind all the natural history, all the human anatomy. The whole of biology was the logic of Paley, who had been a predecessor of Darwin, who saw in God's work, saw in the beauties of nature God's work. Can you tell us, Steve, before we come to an end, or rush for cover, as the Cambridge rain comes down very cold, can you briskly tell us, do you think that walking with hands load

and the tutorials he was getting, as it were, can you see even then, that there was a reaching out to what would be his great idea. Well, hindsight's a wonderful thing. And there's a whole community of scholars that spends their entire lives picking the lint out of Darwin's naval. And no doubt many of them will have seen the work on this patch of green as a direct predecessor of the origin of species.

I'm not quite sure that that's right. I mean, Darwin famously some years later, said, at last I have a theory to work with. And at that time he had no theory to work with. And what use of facts without a theory, he also suggested. So here he was really becoming technically adept. And that's a very important part for any biologists to know and understand and classify the plants and animals around them.

And there's a lot of technology in that. He was learning that. I think it took some years before the penny dropped, and that technology turned into genius. We've come to the end of this first programme. It's time to take stock of Darwin. where in front of the portrait they have of Darwin here in Christ's College, Cambridge.

In later life, Darwin said this portrait made him look like a very venerable, acute, melancholy old dog. We used to that image of him as an old man, but what about the young Darwin who left Christ's in 1831? Jim Moore. Darwin was educated here as a gentleman. He would be an adornment to society. In a country parish, he would hunt knowledgeable,

with the squire. He would share a Parsons' interest in the Beatles and the birds in the local neighborhood. He might even write a book about God's creatures. He could speak about geology because he'd rubbed shoulders with clerical geologists. He could speak about geometry because he read Euclid. He could quote Horace because he could read Greek and studied the classics. He had it all. He was not destined to become a great scientist. He was destined to become a parish naturalist. He was off to Wales to learn some geology and then he would come back and take his ordination examination and enter the Church of England. That's what he knew when he left Cambridge. David Norman, this trip to Wales, what did that add to his knowledge? It added practical geology.

He'd learned quite a lot of theory about how geology works by attending Adam Sedgwick's lectures. and he'd realised that he was deficient in field skills. How to observe, how to note down, how to do basic geological observation in the field. He needed a practitioner to show him how to do it. And John Henslow intervened and suggested that Charles Darwin accompany Adam Sedgwick on a field trip to North Wales. And that field trip was of a simple intent in a way because George Greenhoff had published a geological map of that part,

after the world, and Adam Sedgwick didn't believe it. And Adam Sedgut wanted to go to the rocky outcrops, look at the types of rocks that were exposed, and either prove that Greenough was right or wrong. It was simple as that. The walk across North Wales was, I think, a central moment in his life, a central moment in any scientist's life. The moment when you make your first, what you can define,

as your own discovery, which nobody else knows. And you could see that in Darwin's walk. He realised, looking at the Greenoughampton, map that actually it was wrong and he Darwin had shown it to be wrong. I think that was a most important moment when he got back to his grand house in Shrewsbury. There was a letter on the mat and opening that letter was the first step to proving that most of biology until then had been wrong. The letter was from John Stevens Henslow pulling strings for his favourite pupil. Henslow had recommended Darwin to become a gentleman's companion to warn Captain Robert Fitzroy.

Fitzroy was planning to survey the coastline of South America in a small ship that would become synonymous with the Darwin legend. It was called the Beagle. The voyage of the Beagle would make Darwin as a scientist and establish him in scientific society. Join us tomorrow as we embark with Darwin for that voyage and look at the extraordinary array of fossils, rocks and animals that he sent home, a collection that laid the foundations

for the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin, in our time, was presented by Melvin Bragg and produced by James Cook. The reader was John Pickard. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs 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 and insight from experts at NASA. That's the way it is in spaceflight. There are a lot of tough questions, and we could never fly a perfectly safe mission. The safest mission is just staying home in bed. From liftoff to splashdown, catch up with 13 minutes presents Artemis 2 from the BBC World Service. Listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcast. It just looks...