A short history of nearly everything

politely but was conspicuously unmoved, even though the breeding of plants was a matter of great practical interest to many of the members.

When Mendel’s report was published, he eagerly sent a copy to the great Swiss botanist Karl-Wilhelm von Nageli, whose support was more or less vital for the theory’s prospects. Unfortunately, Nageli failed to perceive the importance of what Mendel had found. He suggested that Mendel try breeding hawkweed. Mendel obediently did as Nageli suggested, but quickly realized that hawkweed had none of the requisite features for studying heritability. It was evident to him that Nageli had not read the paper closely, or possibly at all. Frustrated, Mendel retired from investigating heritability and spent the rest of his life growing outstanding vegetables and studying bees, mice, and sunspots, among much else. Eventually he was made abbot.

Mendel’s findings weren’t quite as widely ignored as is sometimes suggested. His study received a glowing entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica-then a more leading record of scientific thought than now-and was cited repeatedly in an important paper by the German Wilhelm Olbers Focke. Indeed, it was because Mendel’s ideas never entirely sank below the waterline of scientific thought that they were so easily recovered when the world was ready for them.

Together, without realizing it, Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of life sciences in the twentieth century. Darwin saw that all living things are connected, that ultimately they “trace their ancestry to a single, common source,” while Mendel’s work provided the mechanism to explain how that could happen. The two men could easily have helped each other. Mendel owned a German edition of the Origin of Species, which he is known to have read, so he must have realized the applicability of his work to Darwin’s, yet he appears to have made no effort to get in touch. And Darwin for his part is known to have studied Focke’s influential paper with its repeated references to Mendel’s work, but didn’t connect them to his own studies.

The one thing everyone thinks featured in Darwin’s argument, that humans are descended from apes, didn’t feature at all except as one passing allusion. Even so, it took no great leap of imagination to see the implications for human development in Darwin’s theories, and it became an immediate talking point.

The showdown came on Saturday, June 30, 1860, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford. Huxley had been urged to attend by Robert Chambers, author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, though he was still unaware of Chambers’s connection to that contentious tome. Darwin, as ever, was absent. The meeting was held at the Oxford Zoological Museum. More than a thousand people crowded into the chamber; hundreds more were turned away. People knew that something big was going to happen, though they had first to wait while a slumber-inducing speaker named John William Draper of New York University bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductory remarks on “The Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin.”

Finally, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to speak. Wilberforce had been briefed (or so it is generally assumed) by the ardent anti-Darwinian Richard Owen, who had been a guest in his home the night before. As nearly always with events that end in uproar, accounts vary widely on what exactly transpired. In the most popular version, Wilberforce, when properly in flow, turned to Huxley with a dry smile and demanded of him whether he claimed attachment to the apes by way of his grandmother or grandfather. The remark was doubtless intended as a quip, but it came across as an icy challenge. According to his own account, Huxley turned to his neighbor and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands,” then rose with a certain relish.

Others, however, recalled a Huxley trembling with fury and indignation. At all events, Huxley declared that he would rather claim kinship to an ape than to someone who used his eminence to propound uninformed twaddle in what was supposed to be a serious scientific forum. Such a riposte was a scandalous impertinence, as well as an insult to Wilberforce’s office, and the proceedings instantly collapsed in tumult. A Lady Brewster fainted. Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s companion on the Beagle twenty-five years before, wandered through the hall with a Bible held aloft, shouting, “The Book, the Book.” (He was at the conference to present a paper on storms in his capacity as head of the newly created Meteorological Department.) Interestingly, each side afterward claimed to have routed the other.

Darwin did eventually make his belief in our kinship with the apes explicit in The Descent of Man in 1871. The conclusion was a bold one since nothing in the fossil record supported such a notion. The only known early human remains of that time were the famous Neandertal bones from Germany and a few uncertain fragments of jawbones, and many respected authorities refused to believe even in their antiquity. The Descent of Man was altogether a more controversial book, but by the time of its appearance the world had grown less excitable and its arguments caused much less of a stir.

For the most part, however, Darwin passed his twilight years with other projects, most of which touched only tangentially on questions of natural selection. He spent amazingly long periods picking through bird droppings, scrutinizing the contents in an attempt to understand how seeds spread between continents, and spent years more studying the behavior of worms. One of his experiments was to play the piano to them, not to amuse them but to study the effects on them of sound and vibration. He was the first to realize how vitally important worms are to soil fertility. “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world,” he wrote in his masterwork on the subject, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881), which was actually more popular than On the Origin of Species had ever been. Among his other books were On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862), Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which sold almost 5,300 copies on its first day, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876)-a subject that came improbably close to Mendel’s own work, without attaining anything like the same insights-and his last book, The Power of Movement in Plants. Finally, but not least, he devoted much effort to studying the consequences of inbreeding-a matter of private interest to him. Having married his own cousin, Darwin glumly suspected that certain physical and mental frailties among his children arose from a lack of diversity in his family tree.

Darwin was often honored in his lifetime, but never for On the Origin of Species or Descent of Man. When the Royal Society bestowed on him the prestigious Copley Medal it was for his geology, zoology, and botany, not evolutionary theories, and the Linnaean Society was similarly pleased to honor Darwin without embracing his radical notions. He was never knighted, though he was buried in Westminster Abbey-next to Newton. He died at Down in April 1882. Mendel died two years later.

Darwin’s theory didn’t really gain widespread acceptance until the 1930s and 1940s, with the advance of a refined theory called, with a certain hauteur, the Modern Synthesis, combining Darwin’s ideas with those of Mendel and others. For Mendel, appreciation was also posthumous, though it came somewhat sooner. In 1900, three scientists working separately in Europe rediscovered Mendel’s work more or less simultaneously. It was only because one of them, a Dutchman named Hugo de Vries, seemed set to claim Mendel’s insights as his own that a rival made it noisily clear that the credit really lay with the forgotten monk.

The world was almost ready, but not quite, to begin to understand how we got here-how we made each other. It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn’t actually tell you where babies came from.

And these, you may recall, were men who thought science was nearly at an end.

26 THE STUFF OF LIFE

IF YOUR TWO parents hadn’t bonded just when they did-possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond-you wouldn’t be here. And if their parents hadn’t bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn’t be here either. And if their parents hadn’t done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn’t be here.

Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on