Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World

12. Dining with Darwin

149 Dining with Darwin The Reluctant Tourist Biologists like to have a sense of connection with places or events associated with Darwin. That comes mainly from reading Voyage of the Beagle, which along with the great Darwin biography industry has given us an amazing sense of intimacy with him, a sort of feeling of kinship. I feel it, too, and I have enjoyed my contacts with Darwin’s traces even though I’ve never tried to follow his Beagle travels. The first Darwin site I saw happened to be the place where he spent most of his post-Beagle life and where he wrote Origin of Species. That was Down House in Kent, about sixteen miles south of London, which Beth and I visited in September 1974. Our trip there was long before Darwin’s popularity peaked again. Down House was empty of visitors, so we could look around the garden in solitude and stroll the famous sandwalk where Darwin walked for exercise and to think. As we were alone in the place, the custodian opened the cord blocking casual entry into Darwin’s study and showed us around, a treat that may be harder to come by now. The room was preserved pretty much as it had been in Darwin’s time. We stood in front of his desk, his mantel, and his bookcases. I put my hand on his desk. This was the room he wrote in. You might imagine that you could speak to him there, but you can’t reach across time except in imagination. Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. The book led to immediate controversy. The first major scientific skirmish over it came seven months later, in the legendary Oxford debate of 1860, which made Oxford another site of importance to the history of evolution, despite twelve 150 Finding Evolution, Founding Evo-Devo the fact that Darwin himself was not present. Although there was no transcript kept of the meeting, the event has often been described as a clash between Bishop Wilberforce and two of Darwin’s prominent supporters , botanist Joseph Hooker and morphologist Thomas Huxley. It is there that Huxley famously responded to a gibe by Wilberforce who asked him if “it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey.” Huxley is reported to have responded, “IfthenthequestionisputtomewhetherIwouldratherhaveamiserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed ofgreatmeansofinfluenceandyetemploysthesefacultiesandthatinfluence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” Women were supposed to have fainted at Huxley’s rude comment to the worthy bishop, but I think basically most attendees must have had a jolly time of it.Huxley,forhispart,waspromotedtothestatusof“Darwin’sbulldog.” Robert FitzRoy, the former captain of the Beagle, stood up to thrust his BibleupoverhisheadandurgepeopletoheedthewordofGod.Darwin’s captain and shipmate never forgave him. The study of ancient life had come to Oxford before Darwin in the person of Professor William Buckland. The first fossils ever collected of dinosaurs are at Oxford, including those of the giant meat eater Megalosaurus , the first dinosaur ever described–by Buckland. These first dinosaurs were known only from incomplete remains and thus were fancifullyrestoredaselephant -sizedlizardsbytheartistWaterhouseHawkins for the 1851 Great Exhibition (essentially the first world’s fair). His giant replicas, carefully arranged in geological order, still bask in a sunlit park in the London suburb of Sydenham, at the site of the Crystal Palace, which housed the fair. That structure has long since burned down, but I can attest that the monsters still haunt the park. The Iguanodon model is so large that Hawkins once hosted a banquet for scientists in the shell of the half completed body. Dinosaurs played a role in Richard Owen’s opposition to Darwin. Owen noted that dinosaurs were much more highly developed than living reptiles. He argued that if dinosaurs were as advanced as modern mammals, they were hardly consistent with a progressive evolution from that era to the modern world. Dining with Darwin 151 Oxford also owns William Smith’s original, giant hand-drawn and color-coded map of the geology of Great Britain. The map had been in thepossessionofSmith’snephew,JohnPhillips,Darwin’scontemporary and the Oxford professor of geology who named the Paleozoic, Mesozoic , and Cenozoic eras of life on Earth, terms still used today. Smith had drawn the world’s first-ever geological map of a...