Selects: How Charles Darwin Worked

26:48Are you a boy or a girl? Oh my God. All the time. That's so funny. I know. So I'm always like, hi. I try to butch it up for kids, you know, so they're not confused. Yeah, but you're butching it up. It's basically like Doris Day. No, I turn into Bea Arthur. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

27:13Learning things with Chuck and Chuck Shining all the things Stuff you should know

27:25So Chuck, we're talking about Darwin. He's at his house, Down House. Yeah. He's working on his manuscript. He's kind of procrastinating a little bit and because it takes time too. But he knows that he's about to unleash this complete change in paradigm a poop storm onto the world exactly and it's because the world was a much different place than it is today because Darwin hadn't talked about natural selection yet yeah I mean religion religious biology was biology they didn't call it religious biology that was just biology so he was the first one to secularize it and make it just about the science.

28:09Yeah, because before, scientists thought, well, God created this, and that is our starting point. Everything else, every other scientific explanation we have has to trace back to creation, which can make science a little easier. But at the same time, it leaves you open to a huge problem when somebody comes along and can fill in all these other gaps through a completely different explanation that doesn't use creationism. And that's what Darwin was doing with natural selection. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and add a fourth thing. Man, you just keep them coming. There were two texts that were vital, and we talked about one of them, the Malthus Principle of Population.

28:55In 1844, there was a book written called The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. and it was published anonymously for 40 years. No one knew who wrote it because no one wanted to put their name on it. Yeah. Like that's how radical it was. And it was slammed. Like it was hugely popular. It was like a phenomenon. Like everybody read it and everybody slammed it. And it came out later. It was a guy named Robert Chambers. He was a Scottish journalist. But it scared the crap out of Darwin basically. I'm sure Darwin was like, mother. Yeah, because it was a lot of the same ideas as he had. So what it did was it caused him to basically rewrite his voluminous work and pare it down and armor it with sturdier armor over the next 13 months.

29:47Smart. Very smart. I mean, you could say for him that that was a stroke of luck, that that was published and he read it and saw what happened. Dude, total stroke of luck. He might have been laughed out of existence if he had gotten there first. So he goes back, redoubles his efforts, strengthens his argument. And again, he's combating not just the religious ideals of the time, but the religious ideals of science. Like most scientists at the time were deists. When deists believed that God created the universe, basically like a clockmaker makes a clock, wound it up and walked away. Like, see you later.

30:24Good luck with everything. and then anything that happened as a result after that was the result of the machinations of this clock. Yeah. And there was a theory that was fairly well accepted called catastrophism. Yes. And that basically sought to account fossils because fossils were a big sticking point. Why were there clearly extinct animals that had lived before? Yeah. There's fossils. We have them in our hands. why do these kind of resemble the things that are alive today? Yes. That doesn't make any sense. Well, catastrophism, which was suggested by a guy named George Cuvier, and Cuvier said that catastrophism, which one?

31:15I like the second one, catastrophism. Catastrophism. Yeah. It says that something happens, volcanoes, floods, pestilence, Something very biblical happens, and a species dies out in an area, and a new species comes in and fills it in, and maybe that species, just from living in proximity, was similar. And that explains why some are extinct and some are now here. I would also call that coincidencism. Yeah. That's another way to put it. That's another pronunciation. It wasn't like super science-based. Right, but this was a well-respected scientist. And this was the prevailing thought at the time, that creationism and the natural sciences went hand in hand.

32:02Creationism was the basis for it. And Darwin is about to say, you know that basis that everybody's built science on for the last several centuries? Yeah. It's not, that doesn't hold water. And then he went and threw up. Again and again. Apparently he threw up a lot. Yeah, when On the Origin of the Species came out in 1859, he was at a spa recovering from bouts of nausea. Yeah. So, yeah, he was all thrown up. I feel bad for the guy. Sure. He was just wracked with anxiety his entire life. But imagine that. Imagine being wracked with anxiety and still going through with it. It's pretty impressive.

32:38It is. So, previous to its publication, another important thing happened. We mentioned earlier Alfred Russell Wallace. He was a fellow Englishman and specimen collector, and he basically wrote almost exactly the same thing that Darwin had been working on. Sent it to Darwin, and people urged them both to present their works at something called the Linnaean Society in 1858. They did so together as a team, but it didn't make much of a splash at the time. It wasn't until he officially published his work that it made the splash. Right, and Alfred Russell Wallace actually was the impetus for him to publish Origin of the Species.

33:32He'd been sitting there dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating, not mowing as long. and he got a letter from Wallace, like you said, and he realized, holy cow, Wallace has come up with the same thing. I've been working on this for 30 years. I'm not going to forget that. Forget my anxiety. I'm just publishing this puppy. And he did, and it came out in 1859, and he was hailed as a villain and a genius. depending on who you spoke to. And let's talk about the origin of species and what it says and what natural selection means, Chuck. First of all, the official title of the book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

34:26Yeah. And that's why everybody calls it Origin of Species. Because it's long and wordy. Right. Yeah.

34:43Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time.

35:31Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:02the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.

36:37Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we've got some incredible guests like Kumail Nanjiani. Let's start with your cat. How is she? She is not with us anymore. Okay, great, great, great way to start. So this is a great beginning, and hopefully you'll be able to, I don't know, maybe you will cry. Amanda Seyfried. Life is so short. If you feel something like that, you have that fire in you for this experience. It's not for a guy. It's for the experience of being in love.

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37:51Learning things with Chuck and Chuck. Shining all the things. Stuff you should know.

38:02But what it basically says is that species adapt. They adapt due to population pressure. Yeah. They adapt through competition with one another. Right. Between species, inside species. That when you see like slightly different traits, individual traits are to be expected. Yeah. But those individual traits can ultimately lead to a new species on a long enough time table if those traits increase their chance of surviving to reproduction age and enhance their ability to reproduce. Yeah. Right? And if you aren't good at that, then you go bye-bye. Right. And this explains why some species are extinct, why the ones that are here today are the winners, and, chillingly, that all this is still going on.

38:59Yeah. It's very, very slow, so we can't see it. It happens on a glacial timescale or geologic timescale. But it's still going on, and here's proof. The thing that he doesn't come out and state, but that wasn't lost on the Victorians, especially the religious Victorians, is that inherent in that argument is that man, the king of the world, is nothing more than an animal that evolved from who knows what. Yeah, I bet he fretted over that so much because he believed it, but I think there are only two mentions of mankind in the entire work, but the implications were clear. The public at large may not have been wise to it at first, but scientists were like, wait a minute, are you saying that we came from apes?

39:46He's like, I'm at a spa recovering from nausea. I can't be reached. But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying that up front in plain English. Yeah, and it caused, like you said, a poop storm. Yeah, and I guess we should say Russell Wallace was, he's been sort of lost to history as far as what most people know. Yeah, it's sad. It is sad because he was a smart guy, but he had no standing like Darwin did. And that's kind of one of the reasons he was forgotten to history. Right. He was out in the field, and he seemed to be happiest out in the field after this theory was introduced.

40:27He retreated back to the Malay Peninsula to collect specimens. Yeah, but he would sell them, which kind of degraded his standing, I think. Right, but he was using those funds to further fund more scientific exploration. Right. It's not like he was funding his opium habit or something like that. But the point is, Darwin didn't need to sell it, so I think people were like, well, this guy's collecting species and selling them. He's a merchant. Right, exactly. That's exactly right. And regardless of whether Wallace Russell was a great scientist or not, it didn't matter. If you put these two men and their theories were exactly equal, but one was of higher social standing and greater wealth, well, that guy won.

41:08Sure. And that was Darwin. Yeah. So Darwin became— He was the fittest. Exactly. Yeah. under Victorian aristocracy rules. But he became, again, the rallying point, the fulcrum, the center of the universe in this new debate that he unleashed between creationism and evolution that's still going on today. Literally. Not today, but a couple weeks ago. So almost literally. And he didn't like that at all. So what he said was, you know what? You guys talk this over. I'm going to go hit the spa and do what you want with it. I'm going away. I've got a lawn to not mow. But lucky for him, he had a lot of supporters right out of the gate.

41:54Yeah, he had both. He had supporters, scientists that I think some wanted to say this stuff all along and now that they had such a wonderful, concise, and well-researched piece of work to back them up they came out of the woodwork and like yeah see this is great but some people weren't uh in fact i think oh i can't remember the guy's name someone he really respected and his wife really respected basically slammed him and called it heresy and that was really impactful again more anxiety well yeah more throwing up and there was a lot of name calling there was a lot of political cartoons that were unflattering, and unflattering for the Victorian age, so basically his head on a monkey or something like that.

42:44But while he had his detractors, he had his supporters, and there was one guy in particular named Thomas Huxley, and he was, I believe, the grandfather of Algeus Huxley. Oh, yeah? Uh-huh. And sometimes if you see Darwin's theory mentioned, you'll see the Darwin-slash-Huxley theory. because Huxley basically was a religious man. Yeah. And Darwin, I think firsthand, not just through the origin of the species, but through the correspondence as well, convinced him like, no, dude, natural selection is actually right. And very ironically, just like Saul converting to Paul on the road to Damascus, Huxley converts from a religious fervent to a natural selection fervent.

43:32Yeah. And he just takes it with religious zealotry and starts taking on anybody he can in debate, writing any article he can, and defending not just Darwin but his theory as well. And it came so much so that he came to be known as Darwin's bulldog. And he actually coined the term agnostic. Oh, really? Yeah, he was the one that coined that term to differentiate people like himself who were still believers in God, but also fervent believers in natural selection as well. Huh. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So that wasn't the only thing he wrote. That was his life's work for sure. But he wrote 11 more, published 11 more times before 1882.

44:16And then finally in 1973, which is pretty old for someone who was in such ill health his entire life. Sure. Heart attack finally got him. Yeah. Very sad. It is, but he lived a good, long, nauseated life. You know? That's a good point. So I guess we should talk a little bit about his legacy, right? Yeah. You do that kind of work, you pass away, you're going to have a legacy. Sure. They name a city in Australia after you. Really? I believe it's Darwin, Australia. Please, God, don't let it be New Zealand. You want to look? No. Okay. I'm feeling like a gambling man today. Gotcha. So his influence from then on and continues to be today, Lamb calls it, rightfully so, a paradigm shift in science, society and literature.

45:06It can't be understated. It was a game changer for kind of everything and the way things went. You were on one side or the other. It's like Mio water. It changes everything. What's that? You haven't seen the ad? Uh-uh. For like the little droplets of flavoring you can add to your water? I've seen that. So you haven't seen the ad where the guy's in the office talking, and as they cut back and forth, everything keeps changing because they're adding Mule. Oh, it's one of the better ads around. And you know me. I'm an ad aficionado. That's true. Well, one thing we can point to is that Herbert Spencer, he was a sociologist after Darwin, applied Darwinism to sociology in the form of social Darwinism, a.k.a.

45:54survival of the fittest. Right. Which, it didn't bastardize it, but he definitely used it for his own purposes to say that, you know what, the weak, we shouldn't even worry about the weak. If we want to be a strong mankind, then let the weak die out. Well, you know, so this sociologist that came up with this idea of social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, that's a very Malthusian view of humanity and nature. Because Malthus was basically saying like, look, man, we take care of the poor and everything. But if we do that, we're interfering with nature and we're going to end up overburdening the population.

46:39because population is going to grow geometrically and we're not going to be able to support ourselves and society is going to collapse. That was what Malthus was saying. This guy said, yeah. Yeah, it's weird that Darwin was in the middle of both bookended by these two ideas. And I think it really just, you can kind of say, he was lacking a bit of evil. Where if he had been a little more evil, maybe he would have come up with social Darwinism himself. But he didn't. Herbert Spencer did. And it kind of took off like a rocket. This idea like, yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We don't need to pay taxes anymore.

47:15Right. We don't need to tithe. We can just, you know, let the poor die in the streets. It's social Darwinism, survival of the fittest. We don't have to feel guilt for not taking care of these other people any longer. It's survival of the fittest. They weren't meant to be. And basically, they replaced God's will with nature's will. Yeah. in explaining the cruelty of the world. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And like I said, it took off. It became what we call the eugenics movement very quickly. Yeah, which was the idea that the government would actually get involved in weeding out the weaker parts of society.

47:57Yeah, because you don't have to wait around for evolution to do this. We can speed it up by picking out the weakest and exterminating them. Or, at the very least, letting them exterminate themselves by only breeding the boys from Brazil. Yeah, I finally saw half of that movie. I can't tell you how surprised I was to see Steve Guttenberg. Oh, Gutz was one of the kids, wasn't he? He was like the first one. Yeah, yeah. God, I forgot about that. Oh, wait a minute. He was one of the kids from The Experiment? No, he wasn't. He was like the journalist. Oh, was he? It's like blowing the cover off of this whole thing.

48:35I haven't seen it in a long time. Yeah. I know it was creepy, though. Yeah. So, yeah, possibly gave birth to eugenics. Which we should say, obviously, the Nazis loved, and they used that to rationalize the extermination of the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, epileptics, the mentally handicapped, the blind, everybody. Guys who smelled like me. Yeah. You would have been in big trouble. Yeah. But prior to the Nazis doing this, the United States, Indiana, Georgia, all sorts of other states forced sterilization on people of similar stature. Yeah. And actually, Adolf Hitler, well, Germany had its own sterilization program as well, but Adolf Hitler was apparently well aware of what was going on in America and was a pretty big fan of it.

49:29And if you don't believe me, go back and listen to our episode, Is It Legal to Sterilize Addicts? Oh, yeah. Because it's still going on today. That was a good one. Yeah. So what about this deathbed recant? Have you ever heard that? I have. Not true, apparently. So he supposedly said on his deathbed, basically, I... I take it all back. Yeah, I wish I hadn't have ever said this. Yeah. It's not true. You know, God is good. God's the one. And a woman from New England named Lady Hope claimed that she was there and took this confession. Yeah. And both his daughter and his son, who were both at his side while he died, said this lady was not at his deathbed.

50:15She never came to our house. Right. And she had absolutely no influence on our father's way of looking or judgment or opinions at all. He never recanted. And to the end, he was an ardent supporter of natural selection. Yeah, that's a pretty good idea, though, if you're a creationist. Well, I mean, to make up that story. Yeah. Like, the father of evolution even changed his mind on his deathbed. If you look up today on the internet, like, I think Darwin Deathbed even will bring up, like, creationist website after creationist website. They use it to support their claims. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. But it's bunk.

50:53It was debunked right afterward. Yeah. And then, Chuck, let me say one more thing about social Darwinism. Okay. This idea, although in a very cold, calculated sense, it might make sense, it doesn't appear in humanity's history. In fact, there's evidence from up to 500 ,000 years ago of severely disabled people, fossils, their fossils, their remains being found, where they could not possibly have lived to the age they lived to without being cared for by their community. Wow. So this idea that, you know, in a more primitive state, we just, you know, left people to die out in the weather because they couldn't keep up.

51:35Yeah. Doesn't hold water. Well, that's good to know. Yeah, it is. Very comforting. So that means we innately have compassion as a species? I would guess that, yeah. That's the way I like to look at it. I think it's one of the things that makes us human. Agreed. But not just us. No. Other species have compassion, too. Totes. So maybe we should, why don't you play us out with a little bit of Darwin, man? Yeah, the last paragraph of The Origin of the Species to me is one of the most beautiful things ever written. So I'm going to read it. Okay. It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank. And he's talking about his home in Kent.

52:15That patch of grass? Yeah. Well, now all of it. It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws taken in the largest sense being growth with reproduction Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life And from use and disuse A ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life And as a consequence to natural selection Entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms Thus from the war of nature from famine and death the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals directly follows.

53:14There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. That's where he's kind of skirting around things. And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. Bravo. Good stuff, Chuck. Not me. Both of you. That was a great reading. Chuck D. I felt like I was in our Halloween episode again. Oh, yeah? Yeah, that was good, Chuck. Don't thank me. Chucks. I can just read. You got anything else?

53:52I got nothing else. I think that was a fine way to end this one. If you want to learn more about Charles Darwin, the man, and his ideas, you can type Darwin into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. It should bring up a whole bunch of articles, some of which we will record into podcasts. Yeah, or that movie creation is really good, or if you're into documentaries, there are tons of them. The BBC's got like a dozen. Oh, yeah, they love him there. Sure. Well, since I said search bar, I probably did. It's time for Listener Man.

54:27Before the mail, there's a quick correction. In our Kent State episode, we said Mussolini had his brown shirts. Yeah. They were the black shirts. Duh. No biggie. It's the presence of all color, not the presence of some colors. Brown is the new black anyway. Is that right? Orange is. All right. I'm going to call this amputee. Amputee. Like amputee, amputee? Mm-hmm. Okay. Hey, guys. Been listening for a couple years now and really enjoy it. As a 60-year-old woman who had her right leg amputated above the knee in 1969 due to cancer, I was especially interested in that podcast. First, I want to correct one offhand comment in which you stated that being an amputee probably becomes the focus of your life.

55:12Not always. In my case, being an amputee did not become the focus. In fact, occasionally friends forget that I am an amputee now. I consider it a compliment. As you said, life isn't over because a person becomes an amputee. I was married for 20 years, went to graduate school for my master's degree in counseling psychology, and have two wonderful grown children. I worked from the age of 14 to 55 with time off for raising kids. and attended graduate school and have been able to travel quite a bit. I've been lucky not to have experienced phantom pain. I have always had, and have been told by my doctors will always have, phantom feeling, though.

55:48That is so weird. I know. It feels as though my amputated leg is present, but asleep. Sort of a benign prickly feeling. The feeling quickly faded into the background, and I only notice it now when I'm thinking about it. You may be interested also to know that the artificial leg I received in 1915 1969 was literally a wooden leg from the knee down. I'm now on my fourth prosthesis. I thought she was going to say, like, an old bestie still with me. Knock, knock. I'm now on my fourth prosthesis, and they get better and better. My current leg is very high-tech and impressive. It can make coffee. That is from Denise Slatengren.

56:31Awesome. From Arcata, California. Nice. Not Arcadia. That's Northern California. A-R-C-A-T-A. Thanks, Denise. You sound like a very well-adjusted person. And we appreciate you writing in and calling us out on that. And I hope you still have old Betty on the shelf somewhere at least. It's Betsy, Chuck. Betsy. Yeah. I would keep it. She's got it carved into the side. Nice. You know? Yeah. Thanks for writing in. And if any of you out there want to write in, share your story, we love hearing them. We're pretty much like the central clearinghouse for people's stories. So bring them to us. We will disseminate them as best we can.

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58:39Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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