The 2009 Spring Research Festival Honors the
of the Birth of Charles Darwin

Our Spring Research Festival tradition is to choose something found in nature—plant or animal—that produces substances shown to have biochemical activity in fighting or preventing disease. In past years, we have featured the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar, Catharanthus roseus, the marine cone snail, Conus textilis, the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, the honeybee, Apis mellifera, the gila monster (Heloderma suspectum and H. horridum), and the Cancer Tree (Camptotheca acuminata). This year we part with tradition to honor Charles Darwin and his contributions to many scientific fields.

Charles Darwin and the Pathway to Evolutionary Medicine

This year, 2009, scientists of every stripe—biologists, anthropologists, chemists, physicists, geologists—are celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth. The year also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the book that rocked the scientific, political, and theological communities of Victorian England, and then the world.

A family of freethinkers, Darwin’s parents and grandparents were wealthy physicians and industrialists (his maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood of classic pottery fame), who were leading activists in progressive causes, especially the antislavery movement. In fact, in a recent book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, the authors suggest that it was the family hatred of slavery that led Darwin to suspect the scientific doctrine of the day, that the races were essentially different, was in error and the cause of rampant human suffering.*

Expected to take up the healing arts as had his father and paternal grandfather before him, Darwin began his studies in medicine at Edinburgh University, but found surgery distasteful. He turned to studying for the Anglican priesthood at Christ’s College, Cambridge, then abandoned that as well, neglecting his studies in favor of the natural sciences, his true passion. His father, frustrated at his son’s lack of dedication to what he considered appropriate pursuits, became convinced that an unpaid apprenticeship as a naturalist on board HMS Beagle would help focus the young man’s energy.

And focus energy it did. The Beagle’s five-year-long voyage was to be one of mapping and surveying along the South American coast. All along that coast and in the island archipelagos, the budding naturalist amassed thousands of specimens, both living and extinct, and kept copious notebooks. It is in these notebooks that Darwin, not yet 30 years old, sketches his tree of life, positing a common ancestor of all living beings. It is in his notebooks that he muses on how the islands of the Galapagos each had a different kind of mockingbird. In one passage, perhaps the first he commits to writing of his hypothesis that species change, he says, “If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks, the zoology of archipelagos will be well worth examining. For such facts would undermine the stability of species.”

Darwin would not publicize his now famous theory for another twenty-one years after the Beagle voyage. His work during the voyage, often sent home to family and colleagues in the form of letters, established him as an eminent geologist. Publication of his journal of the voyage, replete with his drawings and notes on finches, barnacles, beetles, and tortoises, made him famous as a popular author.

To be sure, Darwin was gathering further evidence over the course of those twenty-some years, but he also recognized the psychological impact his disclosure was bound to have, and hesitated to unleash the inevitable torrent of controversy. He confided to a naturalist friend in 1844, “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”

When Darwin at last did publish, it was because he recognized that another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had also been traveling, collecting and forming hypotheses similar to Darwin’s about species variation. Wallace’s observations, gleaned during his travels in the Amazon Basin and the Malay Archipelago, were not nearly so substantiated as Darwin’s; however, they were clearly contributing to the body of evidence that Darwin had spent two decades amassing. It was enough to spur Darwin into action.

Darwin arranged to have an essay he had written in 1844 and a manuscript Wallace had sent him read publicly in a lecture at the Linnaean Society in London during July of 1858, where the idea of evolution through natural selection hardly caused a hiccough. Darwin and Wallace then published jointly later that same summer, again without an eruption from naysayers. A year later, however, when the theory was formally published in the famous book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, the cataclysm began.

Like-minded scientists hailed Origin as a brilliant breakthrough. Detractors focused on gaps in the fossil record. Prominent politicians and clergy leapt to the attack because of the theory’s implications for the beginnings of humankind. Benjamin Disraeli, later Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister, dismissed “with indignation and abhorrence those newfangled theories.” In non-scientific circles, the clamor has scarce abated over the last 150 years.

When he published Origin, Darwin could not have heard of plate tectonics or the theory of continental drift. He puzzled over the riddle of similar species separated by thousands of miles of ocean—the ostrich in Africa, the emu in Australia, the rhea in South America. Yet in light of Darwin’s observation about natural selection and the now accepted phenomenon of continental drift, it becomes probable, or even apparent that the three flightless birds shared an ancestor some 250 million years ago before the continents separated.

In Origin, he said, “In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches.” The British naturalist who during his lifetime never heard the word “genetics” much less the acronym DNA, managed to derive from his meticulous observation and persistent curiosity, a unifying and logical explanation for diversity of life on the entire planet. Over the past century, as more evidence has come to light through ancient fossil records and through the most minute explorations into nanomedicine and the human genome, the new knowledge continues to overwhelmingly support the hypothesis Darwin first formed on the Beagle. Indeed, those “fields for far more important researches” continue to multiply on the strength of the evolutionary spiral.

As biologist Francisco Ayala, University of California at Irvine says, “Darwin didn’t know 99 percent of what we know.” But considering his insight about the evidence before him, and his foresight about its potential, perhaps, continues Ayala, “the one percent he did know was the most important part.”

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*Darwin and Abraham Lincoln are linked not only by their cause for social justice and the abolition of slavery; they also share the same birthday: February 12, 1809.

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There will be articles and celebrations of Darwin in publications and broadcasts of The National Geographic Society, The Smithsonian Institution, National Public Radio, and countless science journals and conferences throughout the year. As you plan your fair-weather day trips in the Washington-Baltimore region, check to see which museums are featuring exhibits on Darwin, his voyages and his works.