Hi everyone.
Chuck here on a Saturday to introduce this week's select episode, a curated best of, and this is all about old Chucky Darwin. It's called How Charles Darwin Worked. He's a great person, had a lot of great ideas, and it's pretty groundbreaking stuff. So I hope you guys enjoyed listening to this one, either for the first time or all over again. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant. So this is stuff you should know. That's right, unless I forget. Jerry's over there.
She's over there.
You know, we went like five years. I went five years of this podcast with just mentioning us once in a while mentioning Jerry. But I mean, like, I can't imagine the podcast without Jerry too. Now after five years, finally, I'm like, I guess she should stay on.
She's earned her place.
Yeah, at least she keeps quiet.
That's right.
How you doing.
I'm great.
How are you I'm good? Yeah, I'm like low key calm, I'm fine.
That's good. I'm a little smelly, which we talked about.
I know, but you keep talking about it, which makes the smell worse.
What is it about someone's own special sweet tang of a scent that they're.
Drawn to like you're drawn to your own tang? Yeah?
Man, everyone I think like secretly smells their own shoe and their own armpits when they get a little ripe.
Maybe we all deep down want to mate with ourselves.
Maybe so that's not true because I'm disgusted with myself.
Yeah, but I see you looking at your armpit, eyeing it like that. I know what two on do to that thing.
Yeah. I've slipped out twice to day just to smell them.
There's a little on your notes.
Gross.
Uh so, Chuck, you're doing good. I'm doing good. We'll just assume Jerry's doing good. And we're all doing good because we're fairly fit. You know why we're fit, Because we're alive. We are evolving as we speak. We are part of this huge, long, natural procession of change forced by scarcity, competition, the ravages of nature, and we as humans have climbed to the top of the food pyramid of the evolutionary chain and said we own this planet. That's why we're doing good today.
Yeah, it's one of my most favorite notions.
Evolution.
Yeah, natural selection.
I think it's like one of the most beautiful things that we've been able to figure out.
Yeah, evolution gets all the spot like. I'm a big natural selection fan myself too.
Yeah, you know.
Oh yeah, so divergence. That stuff turns me on that and your smell intellectually.
So let's talk about this. You can't have evolution without natural selection again, even though evolution gets all the spotlight. Yeah, at the very least, there's no evolution on Earth without natural selection, right, And the idea of natural selection of evolution in general, the idea that God didn't create everything exactly the way we see it now is a fairly recent notion, despite how tremendously widespread it is. You know Bill Nye, the science guy.
Yeah, are you talking about his debate?
Yeah, he got in a debate with ken Ham, just totally off the cuff, not planned at all. They just both happened to be in the same auditorium. I watched the whole thing, did you the whole two hours?
Yeah? Man, I couldn't pull myself away from it.
So I'm guessing that you suspect Bill Nye won the debate.
Well, I mean, are there winners and losers.
So don't be shy. There are. Okay, there is a British religious website that pulled its its guests. Yeah, because you know, people who go to websites are called guests.
But in England there and said who won?
And I think ninety two percent said Bill Nye won? And the reason why is because in the comment section it was revealed that most of these people said, yeah, we believe in God, but evolution is still real and to deny evolution outright is pretty silly.
I think when you say things like dragons, you might lose people.
Did he say dragons? I didn't see it. Yeah, he mentioned dragons.
Well, I mean that's some people. And like you said, religion and science co exist for a lot of religious folk. Oh yeah, but there are some that are very literal and strict in say that you know how to explain dinosaurs while they may have been.
Dragons, gotcha, And I don't. That doesn't explain anything. Then, well, I think the dragons are in the Bible. Oh yeah.
If I'm getting this wrong, I'm going to really get killed.
We should pause you for a second. Yeah, Like the point of this episode is not to stomp on anybody's beliefs.
No.
I think science can be just as dogmatic as religion. Sure, so, like that's not what we're doing. No, Like, if you believe in creationism, to each his own, Like, we're not gonna pound our beliefs into you or you know, vice versa. I've never understood that, Like who cares? Just right, it's postuletizing either way. Yeah, you know, it's like convert to my way of thinking, yeah, or else you are just so wrong it's mind boggling. Yeah, but that's not the point of this. No. I think we should just see
away with that because that's not what we're Like. There's some people who don't always listen, maybe this is their first episode. Welcome. We are not those kind of guys.
No, And specifically with this episode, it's on Charles Darwin the man right and kind of what made him who he was not? And we'll tackle are we committing to go ahead and doing natural selection?
I think we shall to pair with this. As a matter of fact, we'll have this one come on on a Tuesday. We'll do natural selection on a Thursday.
At that, all right, I agree, let's do it.
Let there be like.
But Darwin was a fascinating dude though, so yeah, which his own show.
Yeah, because you can't really overstate the idea that he was, As Robert Lamb puts in this fine article, I have to say one of his best. I agreed that Charles Darwin was the fulcrum by which, or on which the entire sea change from a religious worldview to a scientific worldview took place. It was on this man's shoulders.
Yeah.
Even though oddly enough, he wasn't the only person to come up with natural selection.
No, and we'll get to that. He wasn't the first or the last.
But it turns out he was the most thorough in his research.
Right, and had the most social breeding.
Yeah.
And inbreeding.
Yeah, man, this is the ultimate ease.
It is. So let's get started, Chuck, Let's talk about Darwin. He didn't. He wasn't born with a Bunsen burner in a flask in his hand.
No, he was not.
He was born, if anything, with a stethoscope in his hand. Because his father, doctor Robert Waring Darwin, had designs on little Chuck being a doctor like him, right, because he was you know, they had some dough that he was an English gentleman. They weren't poor by any means.
No, Apparently his grandfather a massed of vast fortune in China, and not the country, but the porcelain.
Oh really yeah, interesting, So it'd be incorrect to say he had a Chinese fortune.
He had a China fortune, okay.
But little Chuck was not into anatomy. He was definitely not into surgery on humans. It freaked him out. I think he was a little queasy as a person.
It seems like.
Yeah, but he was way into the natural sciences and was just fine with dissecting a frog.
Yeah, you know, he was cool with biology. As long as you weren't human, he'd cut you, that's right.
So he was sent to several schools, first when he was going to be a doctor, to the Anglican Shrewsbury School, then to Edinburgh University, and finally his dad was like, all right, you don't want to be a doctor, so the only other option for you is to be a man of religion.
Yeah, parson in the country.
Yeah, so I'm going to send you to christ College in Cambridge.
Which is I mean, if you're going to go be a country parson. You could do a lot worse, agreed. You know, the fighting padres.
Is that there go padres.
So he was very well educated and had been exposed to all kinds of science, so he was he was a very smart guy from early on, and way into natural science, like I said, but not into the religion thing as much. He was agnostic from a pretty early age.
Right, and he seemed like he was going to follow the path that his father was laying out for him, I guess it. Anyway, he was very domineering. Yeah, and Charles Darwin was a pretty great thinker, pretty all around good guy. But he also was a bit of a panting waste. It seems like, you know, he was like really really affected by stress. Site. He had a lot of psychosomatic symptoms from stress pretty much throughout his whole life. Despite that, though, he took a very brave course in life.
And it started when he was twenty one and he was on his way to becoming that country parson that his father had decided he would be, and he got an invitation to go on a tour of the islands off South America from a guy named Robert Fitzroy who was twenty six years old. He was an aristocrat and he liked Darwin. He said, hey, you're good at conversations. When I get bored, I suffer abouts of depression. I'm about to go on this boat called the HIMS Beagle
for god knows how long. So why don't you come along and we can chat and I won't get depressed. And Darwin said, you know what, what, let's do this. That's right, which is a that's a pretty bold move.
Yeah, he was for someone who was a would you say, a panty waste, Yeah, panty waste.
It's sort of surprising that he was up for that kind of adventure.
Yes, a milk toast. You could also call him a milk toast. Maybe we'll call him that, all right. Uh So this was an eighteen thirty one.
He boarded the HMS Beagle, which I, for some reason just cracks me up.
You know, our buddy Joe from Forward Thinking just adopted a dog. It's part beagle and his name's Darwin. Huh because of that association, I would imagine, Yeah, that would And Joe said he looks like Darwin head on, like bushy eyebrows.
That's funny, all right. So he boarded the HMS Beagle. What'd you say, how old was he?
Twenty one?
Yeah, and they.
Took a five year voyage around South America. The purpose for Fitzroy was to chart the waters of South America, the coastlines and that kind of thing. But Chuck was like, I'm into natural stuff and species that I don't know, So what better thing to do than spend like most of my time not on the boat but on land just researching stuff.
I'm sure he got pretty good at rowing. Oh yeah, from the ship too, shore back and forth. Yeah. He was basically Paul Bettany's character and master and commander.
Well, which is ironic because Paul Bettany play Charles Darwin. Did he really in that movie Creation?
Oh yeah, I never saw that, but I know what you're talking about.
That's funny. You'd had no idea.
Huh No, you stepped right into that one. I wonder if he recognized that.
I don't know.
It's a good movie, that Creation, You should check it out. Details a lot of the struggles of his life that we're going to go over here, and mainly is about his anxieties of what he was doing in his relationship to his Christian wife.
Oh yeah, I'll bet that was kind of a sore spot big time. We'll get to that now in a second. So okay, So they head off to South America. Yes, he's spending two thirds of the voyage. Of this five year voyage, he spends on land. One of the most famous places he visited was the Galapagos, which are still around.
Yeah, and that apparently was really overstated. He was only, uh, what it's still around?
Is that a joke?
The Galapagos they're still around?
Okay. I thought I was missing on something because you looked at me like you're missing a joke.
No, that's this look.
Oh okay, what was that one? Is you smell?
Yeah? That was my eyes of water.
So the Galapagos apparently was a little overstated significance wise. He was only there for about five weeks out of the five years, and historians think it's been overstated because it was so exotic and people wanted to point to some like kind of fantastical birthplace of all these ideas.
Yeah, I mean it stuck.
Yeah, I mean for sure, and he you know, collected all kinds of different specimens from the Galapagos, but it wasn't as big a deal.
Have you ever seen the size of the turtles there are? The tortoises are the huge, dude, They're like the size of VWBO. They're enormous, crazy and apparently like they'll hang out with you.
What else are they going to do? Run away slowly?
Okay? Yeah, they have no choice, they have agency. They could be like I don't want to be here around you, I'm going to go this way. They just it wouldn't work very well or very quickly. Yeah, okay, so where are we? Man? We are?
I was just poopooing the Galapagos. Yeah.
But what he did while he was gone was he did a lot of great work and made a real name for himself and kind of came back a well known scientist.
Scientist because the whole time he's making all these findings, he's finding new species of animals that like Europeans didn't even know existed, Like entire types of animals. He's sending back specimens, which means he killed a lot of animals while he was on these islands. Yeah, mailed them back to Europe, mailed back some of his findings. He's basically writing papers as he's doing this this journey, so back in the jolly Old England there basically becomes this celebrity. Yeah,
and he was, you know, like before he even returned. Yeah, he was.
Looking at he had the idea of natural selection, but it was, like we said, it was already out there. It was known as the Mystery of Mysteries or transmutation. And he called his his research at first the Transmutation Notebooks.
So is that right?
Yeah, he wasn't, you know, He's researching stuff that he had heard about.
It was a working title.
It was a working title actually what would later become On the Origin of the Species, of course.
Yeah, And he and another guy will talk about a little bit, were also inspired. Both were inspired by Thomas Malthus, who we've talked about, who came up with the idea of caring capacity and basically introduced the idea that scarcity
and competition forces adaptation and change. And then Darwin and the guy Alfred Wallace Russell or Alfred Russell Wallace both read this and said, well, wait a minute, I wonder if that adaptation and change that's forced by scarcity is what creates the change in species that we're seeing here.
Yeah, that was definitely the book was called Essay on Principle of Population and that was like a super game changer because it really gave him like the notion that by studying any species death you can kind of study its life.
Yeah, and it was it wasn't just biology that it gave rise to. It gave rise to economics largely. Yeah, a lot of anthropology, a lot of ecology. Like it was, like you say, a game changer.
Thomas mouthis, go back and listen to our population podcast.
Is that where he appears.
I think he appears a few times, But that was a good one. Yeah, it's an oldie, but a goodie. So, like we said, he came back sort of a celebrity of sorts, and he came back with a lot of information and settled in at the Downhouse in Kent, and this place was he spent the next forty years there studying his property essentially, like he didn't need to go anywhere. He had plenty of nature there. Apparently there were forty different species per square meter on his property.
He had ten kids and he.
Used them as sort of a little laboratory experiment because three of them died. And he was fascinated with why things and people survive and some don't. So it was all sort of part of his It was just everything was part of his laboratory.
Essentially.
He had people sending him samples from all over the world, and there are some theories that if the postal service hadn't have been so good, he may have never been able to write Origin of the species because he relied on people sending him stuff in due time.
Oh yeah, and also he was really big on corresponding, which to help develop his his ideas, flesh him out even further. Was he was huge on correspondence.
Yeah.
He had an area on his property called the Sandwalk that he had built. It was basically just a loop path through the woods and he would just spend like countless hours just walking this path and thinking and looking at everything.
Everything right, nothing escaped his eyes. One of his favorite subjects was earthworms. Remember our Earthworm podcast. Yeah, there was a quote from him in there where he said, it may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures. So he was down with earthworms, down with earth worms and orchids very famously too.
Yeah, he was he was active. He wasn't just looking at things.
He raised orchids, He was a beekeeper, he raised pigeons, and.
Like it was all just in the name of study, right.
One of the things though, he married his first cousin, his wife. Yeah, and at the time they didn't really know much about the troubles with inbreeding, and he was one of the people who discovered the troubles with inbreeding, and it apparently had a really big effect on him, Like he felt kind of guilty and weird and wondered
if maybe his kid's early deaths had to do with that. Yeah, which has to be kind of startling if you're the guy who discovers the problems with inbreeding and you've imbred, Yeah, you know, Yeah, it's got to be a little jarring.
Sure.
Emma Wedgwood was his wife's maid name. And one thing that happened when he married her was he got more money because she was also in the family fortune. Right, So they were set up pretty nicely. And like I said, she was Christian and she was amazing though, like the Creation movie really like it's a great love story despite the fact that they had he was Agnostic and she was Christian. She spent her life caring for him because he was a very sickly man. Yeah, may have had
some sort of viral disease. His entire life is maybe that he picked up in South America.
So he wasn't a pennywys.
No, he was a penny waste on top of that kid.
So he was just fraught with anxiety, and she cared for him and all the kids, and her life's worry was are we going to spend eternity together in the afterlife?
Yeah, that was her big concern. Yeah. Which he didn't buy that stuff.
No, And he was, you know, religious ish when he was younger, but as he grew older and the lord and atheist. No, the more he exposed himself to these ideas of evolution and natural selection, the less religious, the less he bought into it. And it's funny that that divide first occurred in him and then it just kind of grew out from him to create this divide throughout the world. Yeah, he was the epicenter of that. It first, that crack in the world first appeared in him. Yeah,
isn't that interesting? Yeah, for sure, he's the one to blame pretty much, or he was a patient zero one of the two. So he comes back to downhouse, he gets married, settles down doubles his fortune by marrying Emma, and is experimenting with orchids, earthworms, bees, his kids, all this stuff. And he's also at the same time writing. He's expanding that notebook into what he's calling natural selection, another working title, and he is taking his sweet time
with it. One of the reasons he's taking his sweet time with this is one he is being very diligent. He's making sure he's crossing all of his te's, dotting his eyes, making sure he's not looking at it wrong, making sure he's backing up everything. And the second connected reason to that first one is that he is really not looking forward to the storm yea that this is going to create when he unleashes it on the public.
He was well aware of it from the beginning. Yeah, because there's a couple of things that are inherent in the theory of natural selection.
I'm going to add a third reason, my friend.
Oh okay, if you're studying natural selection, evolution takes a long time. Well, oh yeah, you can't study something for a week and detect changes. And like you said, he was thorough because he lived his life basically an anxiety of not being accepted by these peers, right, and like these were people, these were friends of his.
So his procrastination was definitely fear driven by his peers and by society at large.
And by the fact that it just takes a long time to study something like this, right right. For instance, he left an area of his lawn unmowed for twenty years just to study what would happen.
And out of like that sounds like an excuse now, exactly.
There, But out of like the twenty different species he studied, eleven survived and nine died away. So boom, natural selection right there, just in a portion of his lawn, right, Okay, But it took twenty years as the point.
Okay, so time, fear of his peers, fear of the public. And he had good reason to fear or be anxious because the world was a much different place than it is now, and he was well aware that what he was about to unleash on society was going to create some big changes and some big problems. And we'll get into that right after this message. And so, Chuck, we're talking about Darwin. He's at his house downhouse he's working
on his manuscript. He's kind of procrastinating a little bit, and because it takes time to but he knows that he's about to unleash this complete change in paradigm, a poopstorm 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, right, They didn't call it religious biology, that was just biology.
Yeah.
So he was the first one to secularize it and make it just about the science.
Yeah, because before scientists thought like, well, God created this and that is our starting point. Like everything else, every other scientific explanation we have has to trace back to creation, which is kind of It can make science a little 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 darn was doing with natural selection.
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead, and not a fourth thing, man.
You just keep them coming.
There were two texts that were vital, and we talked about one of them, The mouthus principle of population.
In eighteen forty four, there was a book written.
Called The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and it was published anonymously for forty years. No one kne 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 what Darwitz scared the crow out of Darwin there was like mother, Yeah, because it was mom. It was a
lot of the same 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 thirteen months.
Smart, 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, Yeah, if he had have gotten there first.
So he goes back, redoubles his efforts strengthens his argument. Yeah, and again he's combating not just the religious ideals of the time, but the religious ideals of science. Yeah, 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, good luck with everything, And then anything that happened as a result after that was the result of
the mechinations of this clock. 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 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 I like the second one catastrophism.
Catastrophism 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 they that that explains why some are extinct and some are now here.
I would also call that coincidences.
Yeah, that's another way to put it. That's another pronunciation.
It wasn't like super science based.
Right, but this is these like these. 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. Creationism was the basis for it. And Darwin is about to say, you know, the basis that everybody's built science on for the last several centuries. Yeah, it's not that's that doesn't hold water. And then he went and threw up again and again apparently a lot. Yeah.
When his when on the Origin of the species came out in eighteen fifty nine, he was at a spa recovering from knowledge. Yeah, so, yeah, he was off throwing up.
I felt bad for the guy. Sure, he was just racked with anxiety his entire life.
But imagine that. Imagine being racked with anxiety and still going through it.
It's pretty impressive. It 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 lenae In Society in eighteen fifty eight. They did so together as a team. But it wasn't it didn't kind
of make much of a splash at the time. It wasn't until he officially published his work that it, you know, made the splash, right.
And Alfred Alfred Russell Wallace actually was the impetus for him to publish Origin of the Species. He'd been sitting there dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating, not mygage long, yeah, 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 thirty years. I'm not gonna forget that, forget my anxiety. I'm just
publishing this puppy. And he did, and it came out in eighteen fifty nine, and he was hailed as a villain and a genius, depending on who you spoke to. And let's talk about the origin of the 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. Yeah, and that's why everybody calls the original species because it's long and wordy, right, But what it basically says is that species adapt. They adapt due to population pressure. They adapt through competition with one another between species inside species that when you see like slightly different traits, individual traits
are to be expected. But those individual traits can ultimately lead to a new species on a long enough time table if those traits make their increase their chance of surviving to reproduction, age and enhance their ability to reproduce.
Yeah, right, And if you don't, 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 of this is still going on, it's very very slow, so we can't see it happens on a glacial timescale or geologic time scale. But it's still going on. And here's proof. The thing that he doesn't come out in 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 I bet he fretted over that so much because he believed it. But I think there are only two mentions of man kind in the entire work, But the implications were clear, Like 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 from apes?
He's like, I'm at a spa recovering from nausea. I can't be.
But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying that upfront 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 you know what most people know.
Yeah, it's sad.
It is sad because he was a smart guy, but he wasn't He had no standing, like Darwin did, and that's kind of one of the reasons he was forgotten to history.
Right. He he was out in the field, and he was he seemed to be happiest out in the field. After this this theory was introduced, he retreated back to the Melee Peninsula. Yeah, to collect specimens.
Yeah, but he would sell them, which kind of degraded his standing, I think.
Right, just but he was using those funds to further fund more scientific exploration, you know, It's not like he was funding his opium habit or no.
But the point is Darwin didn't need to sell it, so I think he was. 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 you know, 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, sure, and that was Darwin. So Darwin became
the fittest he will, exactly under Victorian aristocracy rules. But he became the again, the rallying point, the fulcrumb, the center of the universe and this new debate that he unleashed between creationism and evolution that's still going on today literally not today, but a couple of weeks ago, right, so almost literally, And he didn't like that at all. So what he said was, you know what, you guys talked this over. I'm gonna go hit the spa, yeah,
and do what you want with it. Right, I'm going away. I've got alan to not mow. But lucky for him, he had a lot of supporters, like right out of the gate.
Yeah, he had both.
He had supporters scientists that I think some wanted 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. 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 in called it heresy, and
that was really impactful. Again more anxiety, oh 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.
Right.
But 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 Aljuis Huxley. Uh huh. And sometimes you'll if you see Darwin's theory mentioned, you'll see the Darwin slash Huxley theory because Huxley basically
was a religious man yea. 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. Yeah, and he just takes it with religious zelotry and starts taking on anybody he can in debate, writing any article he can, and defending not just Darwin but his his theory as well.
Yeah.
And it came so much so that he came to be known as Darwin's bulldog.
Yeah.
And he actually coined the term agnostic. Oh really, Yeah, he was the one that coined that term to differentiate people like himself who was 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 eleven more, published eleven more times before eighteen eighty two, and then finally in nineteen seventy three, 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 nausea did life. You know.
It'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 gonna have a legacy.
Sure, they name a city in Australia after you. Really, I believe it's Darwin, Australia. Please, guy, 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, Like it can't be understated. It was a game changer for kind of everything and the way things went. You're on one side or the other.
It's like meo water, it changes everything. What's that You haven't seen the ad?
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 guys in the office talking and like as you as they cut back and forth, everything keeps changing because they're adding meal. 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 aka survival of the fittest right, which it didn't bastardize it, but it definitely he definitely used it for his own purposes to say that, you know what, the week, we shouldn't even worry about the week. 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. Yeah, that's a very Malthusian view of humanity and nature. Yeah, because Malthus was basically saying, like, look, man, we take care of the poor and every thing, but if we do that, we're interfering with nature and we're going to end up overburdening the population because population is going to grow geometrically and we're not going to be able to support ourselves,
and society's going to collapse. That was what Malthus was saying. This guy said, yeah.
Yeah, it's weird that Darwin was in the middle of kind of both bookended by these two two ideas, and.
I think it really just you can kind of say, like it really just kind of 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, 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. The survival of the fittest. They weren't meant to be, and basically they replaced God's will with nature's will.
Yeah.
In the 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.
Yeah, because you don't have to wait around for evolution to do this. We can speed it up by picking out the weakest and and exterminating them.
Or at the very least letting them exterminate themselves by only breeding.
You know, the the Boys from Brazil.
Yeah, I finally saw half of that movie. I can't tell you how surprised I was. Surprised I was to see Steve Gutenberg.
Oh Goods was one of the kids, wouldn'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. He was like the journalist. It's like blowing the cover off of this whole thing.
I haven't seen him a long time. Yeah, I know. It's creepy though. 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. But prior to the Nazis doing this, the United States, Indiana, Georgia, all sorts of other states forced sterilization on people of the similar stature, 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. And 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. Yeah. So what about this deathbed recan have you ever heard that?
I have? Not? True?
Apparently, so he supposedly said on his deathbed basically.
I take it all back.
Yeah, I wish I hadn't ever said this. It's not true. You know, God is 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, and both his daughter and his son, who were both at his side while he died, said this lady was not at his deathbed. She 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
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, 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, but it's bunk.
It was debunked right afterward. Yeah, and then chuck, let me say when we're 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 five hundred thousand years ago of severely disabled people fossils, their fossil 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. Yeah, it doesn't hold water.
Well, that's good to know.
Yeah, it is very comforting that.
So that means we were innately have compassion as a species.
I would guess that. Yeah, that's what 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 to tots, 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 gonna read it.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, and he's talking about his home in.
Kent, that 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 elab sperately 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 is 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. There 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, the 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. D I felt like I was in our Halloween episode again. Oh yeah, yeah it was good, Chuck. Don't think me, Chucks, I can just read you got anything else?
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 dot 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 before the mail. There's a quick correction.
In our Kent stateisode, we said Mussolini had his brown shirts.
Yeah there 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?
Orangees.
All right, I'm gonna call this amputee amputee.
Like ampute comma ampute.
Okay, hey, guys, been listening for a couple of years now and really enjoy it. As a sixty year old woman who had to right leg amputated above the knee in nineteen sixty nine due to cancer, I was especially interested in that podcast. First, I want to correct one offhand comment which you stated that being an amputee probably becomes the focus of your life, not 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 is an over because a person becomes an amputee. I was married for twenty years, went to graduate school from my master's degree in counseling psychology, two wonderful grown children.
I worked from the age of fourteen to fifty five.
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 phano pain. I have always had and have been told by my doctors, will always have phantom feeling.
Though it feels 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 nineteen sixty nine was literally a wooden leg from the knee down. I am now on my fourth prosthesis prosthestid.
I thought she's going to say, like an old Bessie still with me.
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 Slatyengren awesome from Arcada Arcata, California.
Nice not Arcadia, that's northern California, a rc A t A. Thanks Denise. You sound like a very well adjusted person and we appreciate you writing 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, just 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
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