Darwin's Grandpa and the Art of Sex Appeal

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next generation. Darwin called it natural selection, and it explained a lot, but not everything. Look around in nature and you'll see plenty of things that don't seem to help with survival. The peacock's tail, for example, with its long, brightly colored feathers. Surely having to lug around such cumbersome plumage must make it harder for peacocks to survive. Wouldn't a peacock with a lighter, shorter tail be better able to run away from predators? And yet evolution had produced

the peacock's tail. How every time Darwin saw a peacock, it painfully reminded him that he hadn't fully worked out the details of his theory. And in the English countryside in the eighteen sixties, Charles Darwin must have seen peacocks rather often. They were popular with a landed gentry. Charles was a country gentleman himself. Where could Darwin turn for inspiration to solve his peacock problem, Perhaps to the writings of others. It's Charles whose name we associate with evolution today,

but many earlier thinkers had speculated along similar lines. Chief among them was Darwin's own grandfather, the larger than life Erasmus Darwin, who had died before Charles was born, was enormously fat, gross, and corpulent, said one unkind obituarist. His features were coarse, He was rather clumsy and slovenly, and frequently walked with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. What he lacked in conventional standards for good looks, though, Erasmus,

made up for in charm. He attracted two beautiful wives and fathered fourteen children, two of them with a third woman. Between the marriages, Erasmus made his living as a doctor, dabbled as an inventor, and one fame as a poet and a writer, including on evolution. Would it be too bold to imagine, wrote Erasmus, that all warm blooded animals have arisen from one living filament. That's impressive for the

seventeen hundreds, long before anyone conceived of DNA. As it happens, there was one particular aspect of Charles Darwin's grandfather's life that might have helped Charles figure out the peacock's tail. But this is a story about how answers aren't always found in the most obvious places to look. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Josiah Wedgwood was born in seventeen thirty in the village of Burslem in the English Midlands. The region was known for pottery from

its low called clay soils. Josiah's father was a potter, but not a successful one. His wares were low priced and low quality. His profit margin's slim. While other branches of the Wedgewood family had done well for themselves, Josiah's side were the poor relations. Josiah was the youngest child of eleven. Five of his older siblings died of smallpox. Those who lived went to work in the family workshop as soon as they were able. First, they shoveled clay

into a kind of mill. The horse walked in circles, turning a shaft that pummeled the clay with metal blades until it was ready to throw onto the potter's wheel, if in a glaze and bake in the brick oven. It was hard physical work. As a boy, or Josiah two got smallpox. It seemed for a while that he wasn't going to make it. He lay in bed, weak and delirious, his body covered in pustules. At last, the fever broke, the skin scabbed over, but part of Josiah

never really recovered from the illness, his right knee. He hobbled back to the workshop and tried to find ways he could make himself useful while sitting down, resting his leg on a stool. It wasn't easy, but times were changing. Some other local potters were starting to experiment with new techniques and ingredients to make new designs and colored glazes, bowls that looked like tortoise shell teapots shaped like a couliflower or pineapple. Josiah found a job he could manage

despite his painful leg. He discovered that he loved to experiment a new shade of green, a vibrant orange, yellow, a more visually pleasing pineapple teapot. By the age of thirty, sire had set up on his own. Every evening after work, he'd sit in his kitchen and mix together some new combination of metals and minerals, salts, and enamels to glaze his wares. He carefully recorded the results in a leather bound notebook. Experiment number four six. This seems to separate

parties run thin like water. That is a good color, says one entry. Experiment number four eight much the same, but less of the exuded watery part. Every experiment was systematic. Very one ingredient hold the other's constant and see how it changed the outcome. Experiment number four nine rather better. Josiah was trying to solve a problem that frustrated every potter at the time. When they tried to make white

colored wares, they always had a browny yellow tinge. And then experiment number four one one a good white glaze. Josiah's new white plates were like nothing else on the market. He could print on them verses and pictures. Business began to boom. Josiah hired new workers, he expanded into a second workshop, and he finally felt successful enough to propose to the love of his life. Sally was his cousin

from the wealthy branch of the Wedgwood family. They had been smitten with each other for years, but Sally's father, a successful banker, had always been sniffy about his only daughter marrying a potter. He wanted Josiah to make him financial guarantees. Exasperated, Josiah told a friend, I have gone through a long series of bargain making, of settlements, reversions, provisions, et cetera, et cetera. It was mortifying, he said, to

have to negotiate marriage like just another business deal. If it were up to him and Sally, they could settle the whole affair in three lines and so many minutes. Sally put her foot down. She was nearly thirty, she'd never wanted anyone else, and her father relented. Josiah was soon gushing in another letter to his friend they were two married lovers, as happy as this world can make them. Sali joined Josiah in the kitchen every night, mixing chemicals,

glazing pots, and filling notebooks. He'd taught her his code. She helped him make more fashionable products that caught the attention of high society. One hundred and fifty miles away in London, an order came in that Josiah could barely have dreamed of a tea service for the Queen of England, Queen Charlotte, the wife of mad King George the Third. Josiah's business could hardly be going better. His right leg, though, was giving him more and more trouble on a badly

rutted road, had fallen from his horse. The pain was constant now, and his trusted doctor said there was only one thing for it. That leg would have to come off. The doctor Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was born in seventeen thirty one, a year after Josiah. His career as a doctor got off to a shaky start. His first patient, a man who'd been stabbed in a drunken brawl, died. He got no other patients. After a couple of months, he gave up and moved forty miles to another town

to try for a fresh start. This time, his first patient was a young man from a wealthy family whose doctor had told them that his illness was incurable. In desperation, the young man's mother called on the new doctor in town and asked for a second opinion. Was there nothing Erasmus could do? In truth, there wasn't much choice of treatments In the seventeen hundreds. Erasmus later wrote down his prescriptions for a range of conditions. For anorexia, for instance,

opium half a grain twice a day. For impotence, a grain of opium before bed epilepsy, opium a grain every half hour, gallstones, tetanus, you guessed it. History doesn't record what Erasmus gave the young man whose doctor had given up on him. Perhaps it was opium, but whether or not Erasmus had anything to do with it. The patient made a miraculous recovery, and his family recommended Erasmus to everyone.

Soon Erasmus was making friends among the great and the good of the Industrial Revolution, treating their illnesses and sending them ideas for inventions. Some didn't work out, like the horizontal windmill. Others did, like a clever new steering mechanism for carriages. He didn't bother to patent it. He just wanted to make his own journeys safer. Erasmus had to travel a lot to see his patients, and the roads were terrible. His idea for the steering mechanism was good

enough to last over a century later. It was the standard in the early car industry. In his early thirties, Erasmus heard from an up and coming potter from the other side of the county, Josiah Wedgwood, was lobbying to raise from them for a canal. It was hard to get his fragile goods to distant cities on the potholed roads. Josiah explained, no matter how much straw he packed them in, something always got smashed. Erasmus was well respected, would he support the campaign?

their little daughter, Susannah. The surgeon readed his sore cautionary tales. Will be back after the break. You're listening to a cautionary tale about Charles Darwin and how he struggled to understand how the peacock's tail could have evolved when it seemed so obviously to hinder survival. We'll come back to Charles and his peacock problem later on. But I promised that Charles might have better understood the peacock's tail if only he'd paid more attention to his own grandfather's life.

So let's get back to that life where we left it. Erasmus Darwin anxiously watched over his friend Josiah Wedgwood. Josiah was off his head on opium, his right leg a stu ump wrapped in bandages. Ever, the hard nosed businessman Josiah would have been happy to know his employees were getting on.

The request was specific a complete set of tea things with a gold ground and raised flowers upon it in green. Josiah knew how to do green glazes, but gold. He had some gold leaf sent up from London and tried to work out how to burn it onto his smooth ivory white plates. He was mortified to find it does not look so well as I expected. He consulted books with ArKade knowledge that might help or might not. Mix the gold leaf with virgin honey, add resin asphaltaman lead, boil,

straying through a flannel. Night after night, Josiah depleted his stocks of gold until at last he was happy. He sent off the tea set and waited nervously. Then he received an invitation to Buckingham Palace. Josiah traveled to London, dressed up in his best scarlet waistcoat and blue velvet jacket, and treated himself to a brand new wig that the palace. Queen Charlotte told Josiah how much all her guests had been impressed with her new tea service. She wanted to

give Josiah a title potter to her majesty. It was an honor and a marketing godsend. Josiah promptly paid for announcements in the newspapers. He also left the palace with Charlotte's blessing to make more of the same design and market them. As queenswear orders flooded in, Josiah took on a business partner and drew up plans for a big new factory. It is really amazing, Josiah mused to his partner, how rapidly the use of queenswear has spread almost over

the whole globe, and how universally it is liked. Then Josiah asked himself, why how much of this general estimation is owing to the mode of its introduction and how much to its real utility and beauty. We should be a good deal interested in the answer to that question, he said, because if a royal or noble introduction be as necessary as real elegance and beauty, then the manufacturer should bestow as much pains and expense on the former as the latter. Josiah now had an open door into

London's high society. That's what happens when you're potter. To her Majesty, he sought out the aristocratic trendsetters.

rest of the universe. But the new canal that Josiah had lobbed for was finally being built, and just like in Pompeii, some unexpected things were being excavated. Josiah was fascinated to be shown a prodigious rib with the backbone of a monstrous sized fish. It had to be the whale that swallowed Jonah. The canal diggers said other long buried remains were even more mysterious. Josiah thought Erasmus might

be interested, so he sent them off. Erasmus had no idea what he was looking at, so he made a joke of it. The bone seems to be the third vertebra of a camel, he wrote back. The horn must have been that of a Patagonian ox, But beneath the jokes. Erasmus was intrigued. These long dead creatures that once roamed the English midlands were unlike anything alive today. How did species change through the ages? Erasmus began to think, but also decided to keep his thoughts to himself. Everyone thought

that God created species just as they were. If he openly doubted that he'd scandalized the devout among his patients, he couldn't afford to risk the income. Erasmus had a growing family to support, and his wife was becoming more and more unwell, with violent pains in her side and fits of delirium. Nothing Erasmus tried any help except the opium to ease the pain, until one day the dear partner of all the cares and pleasures of my life ceased to be ill, Erasmus wrote, and I felt myself

alone in the world. When Erasmus became a widower, his youngest son, Robert, was just four years old. Josiah Wedgwood's new Pompeii themed vases were a huge success. Vass for the mantlepieces, vazis as candle holders, vases for potpourri. They exceed the ancients, said one impressed aristocrat in beauty and variety. But success brought problems. Josiah was investing so much to expand production, his cash flow became stretched.

stores are selling cheaper lookalikes. Here's how Josiah described the process. The great people have had their vases in their palaces long enough for them to be seen and admired by the middling class of people, He wrote to his business partner. The middling people would probably buy quantities of them at a reduced price. Josiah's marketing strategy fit perfectly with what

he had discovered from his accounting exercise. It cost a lot to figure out how to make something new, but then he could easily churn out replicas that would eventually cause the item to fall out of fashion.

a noble introduction. When he made a new flower pot. For example, he suggested to his partner, suppose you present the Duchess of Devonshire with a set and beg leave to call them Devonshire flower pots. The Duchess of Devonshire was quite the social trendsetter, much like her great great great grand niece, Princess Diana Wedgwood's Devonshire flower pots flew off the shelves. Make something new, charge a high price, sell cheaper copies to the mass market, rinse and repeat.

Josiah became very rich. Erasmus brought in a teenage governess to look after his children when his wife died. Before long, it had two more daughters with her. Then he fell madly in love with the young wife of an elderly aristocratic patient. He bombarded her with love poems. Understandably, perhaps the old husband decided to get himself a different doctor, but he died anyway. Erasmus married his widow, who'd inherited

a sizeable income. They had seven more children together and folded the two young daughters of the governess into their blended family. Erasmus's new wife encouraged him to publish his thoughts about evolution, among other things. He was growing older. He didn't need to worry so much about money anymore, and if his writings caused a scandal, who cares? Cautionary tales will be back after the break. As Josiah Wedgwood became richer and more famous, his experiments became more ambitious.

I want to astonish the world, he wrote to his business partner, for I hate piddling, you know.

Josiah launched a product that became a best seller, a medallion depicting a black African slave in chains inscribed with the words words am I not a man and a brother? Josiah gave the prophets to the cause of abolishing slavery. The medallion, said one campaigner, had an effect equal to that of the best written pamphlet. Erasmus meanwhile, transformed almost overnight from an obscure provincial doctor into one of the most famous writers in the land. His first publication was

a poem, The Loves of the Plants. In rhyming couplets, Erasmus combined an explanation of sexual reproduction in plant species with riskuae allusions to human relationships. The poem is all flushed cheeks and seductive smiles, while the footnotes read like popular science. It sounds like it shouldn't work, but apparently it did. The most del poem on earth, said one famous critic. The author is a great poet. The follow up poem was an even bigger success, and even more unlikely.

In a single poem with eighty thousand words of explanatory footnotes. Erasmus deals with everything from astronomy to geology to the workings of steam engines, an artistic interpretation of his friend Josiah's Latest VARs, and a polemic against his country's role in the slave trade, inspired by Josiah's medallion the poor fettered Slave on bended knee from Britain's sons imploring to be free. By now Erasmus's daughters with the Governess were grown up, Erasmus started a school for girls and put

them in charge. He wrote a plan for the conduct of female education, ahead of its time, for the seventeen nineties, when any kind of education for girls was a niche idea. Some of his other books haven't aged as well, such as his textbook on medicine, which took nearly eight hundred pages to leave the strong impression that whatever your ailment, you may as well try opium. He finally published his thoughts on evolution too.

to cite Erasmus in his own work. He seems to have been embarrassed by Erasmus's libertine lifestyle and unashamed enjoyment of sex. Charles Darwin was a product of his era, the Victorian era, prudish and straight laced. In our present state of society, wrote Charles, it may seem a strange fact that my grandfather's practice as a physician should not

have suffered by his openly bringing up illegitimate children. As for the popular acclaim for Erasmus's racy poems, while that was quite incomprehensible to Charles, Just like Erasmus, Charles dithered for years before publishing his ideas on evolution, fearful of the backlash they might cause. Remember Charles's great insight about natural selection. Creatures that survive would pass on their characteristics

to the next generation. But the peacock's cumbersome tale seem to hinder survival not help it, so how had it evolved? The answer, Charles realized, starts with the insight that survival isn't enough to pass on your characteristics to the next generation. You need not only to survive, but to attract a mate. In his private writing, Charles began to work out another strand to his theory, sexual selection. If p hens chose to mate with peacocks with the most magnificent tales, then

magnificent tales will be passed on to their offspring. Charles was thinking along the right line, but when it came to going public with his theory, Charles knew he had a problem. In prudish, patriarchal Victorian society, nobody would want to believe that sex was a powerful force in shaping nature, even worse, female choice about who to have sex with. Today, that idea is uncontroversial, but as Eveline Richards argues in her book Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, to

male Victorian scientists, it was almost unthinkable. That's why the sight of a peacock made Charles feel so sick. He knew he'd need some brilliantly persuasive arguments to have his idea taken seriously, but he failed to find them. When Charles eventually published his theory of sexual selection, it was ridiculed, widely ignored, and quickly forgotten. For one hundred years, it

languished in intellectual obscurity. Perhaps Charles could have made a more convincing case if he had had access to insights from modern biology. One intellectual breakthrough came in the nineteen seventies the handicap principle. To Charles and his critics, it seemed like an obvious weakness in his theory that lugging around a massive tale surely makes survival harder. The handicap principle turns that objection on its head. It says, the

peacock's tail evolved precisely because it hinders survival. The peacock is showing off to pea hens. Look how fit and strong I am. I can grow this magnificent tale and still outrun any predators. Josiah Wedgwood would have understood this idea instinctively because it so closely mirrors another idea he anticipated, conspicuous consumption. Remember how Josiah defined his target market for his expensive new vases, that sort of customers who could

afford to pay for anything they like. Josiah knew some of his customers wanted to say something much like the peacock. Look how wealthy I am. I can buy Wedgwood's latest vas and still afford to live in luxury. If only this analogy had occurred to Charles Darwin, he might have been less sickened by the peacock's tail. He might have realized that hindering survival could be a powerful feature of his sexual selection theory, not a troublesome bug. But that

wasn't the only insight Charles was lacking. When Charles published his theory, his critics scorned the implication that pea hens must have a human likability to appreciate beauty. It seemed like a stretch, and biologists now say sexual selection can work without it.

to its real utility and beauty. Josiah knew that people might buy queenswear even if they themselves didn't find it beautiful, simply to boost their own status by associating themselves with the queen biologists. Now I'll see sexual selection as being about signals. Peacocks, for example, signaling their genetic fitness through their tail in much the same way we humans send signals about ourselves with our purchasing decisions. We signal our wealth,

our taste, our understanding of the latest trends, even our virtue. Josiah, with his anti slavery medallion, understood that too. I told you that Charles Darwin might have found the answer to the peacock puzzle in the life of his grandfather. But I didn't mean Erasmus Darwin. I meant his other grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. In the winter of seventeen ninety four, Josiah

became ill. His friend Erasmus prescribed everything he could think of, but nothing could work because Josiah had cancer of the jaw. He died aged sixty four. The following year. His daughter Susanna married Erasmus's son Robert. Susannah Wedgwood and Robert Darwin had six children, including a boy called Charles. While Charles grew up to share one grandfather's fascination with evolution, he

didn't share the other grandfather's fascination with pottery. We are degenerate descendants of old Josiah w. Charles wrote to a friend, for we have not a bit of pretty where in the house, pretty where you can almost hear the condescension. Yet, perhaps if Charles had studied his grandfather's pretty ware business, the peacock's tail might not have puzzled him so much. He might have noticed that peacock's showing off their tales

are much like Josiah's customers showing off their vases. The clues were right there in Charles's family history, just not where it thought to look. This episode relied on biographies such as Josiah Wedgwood, Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment by Brian Dolan and Tristram Hunts The Radical Potter. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. The show is produced by Alice Fines, with Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music for the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script. Cautionary Tales features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show would have impossible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded

at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It doesn't really make a difference to us and if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus