The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (44 page)

Darwin became known at Cambridge as "the man who walks with Henslow." Their relationship was like the millions of other such relationships in the history of our species. Darwin benefited from Henslow's example and counsel and drew on his social connections, and repaid him with, among other things, subservience, arriving early for Henslow's lectures to help set up equipment.
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One is reminded of Jane Goodall's description of Goblin's social ascent: he was "respectful" of his mentor Figan, followed him around, watched what he did, and often groomed him.
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After earning Figan's acceptance and absorbing his wisdom, Goblin turned on him, displacing him as alpha male. But Goblin may have felt truly reverent until the moment when greater detachment was in order. And so it is with us: our gauging of people's worth — their professional caliber, their moral fiber, whatever — reflects partly the place they occupy in our social universe at the time. We are selectively blinded to those qualities that it would be inconvenient to acknowledge.

Darwin's worship of Henslow isn't the best example of this blindness, as Henslow was a widely admired man. But consider the captain
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of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy. When Darwin met FitzRoy for the interview that would decide whether he sailed with the Beagle, the situation was simple: here was a man of high status whose approval might eventually elevate Darwin's own status markedly. So it's not surprising that Darwin seems to have come prepared to "reverence"

FitzRoy. After the meeting, he wrote to his sister Susan: "[I]t is no use attempting to praise him as much as I feel inclined to do, for you would not believe me... ." He wrote in his diary that FitzRoy was "as perfect as nature can make him." To Henslow (who was the rung on Darwin's ladder that had led to the Beagle) he wrote, "Cap. FitzRoy is every thing that is delightful... ."

Years later, Darwin would describe FitzRoy as a man who "has the most consummate skill in looking at everything & every body in a perverted manner." But then, years later he could afford to. Now was no time to be scanning FitzRoy for flaws, or probing beneath the civil facade commonly mustered for first encounters. Now was 4 time for deference and amity, and their deployment proved a success. On the evening Darwin was writing his letters, FitzRoy was writing to a naval officer — "I like what I see and hear of him, much" — and requesting that Darwin be named the ship's naturalist. Darwin, in one of the calmer passages in his letter to Susan, had written, "I hope I am judging reasonably, & not through prejudice about Cap. Fitz." He was doing both; he was rationally pursuing long-term self-interest with the aid of short-term prejudice.

Toward the end of the Beagle's voyage, Darwin got his strongest early taste of professional esteem. He was (aptly enough) on Ascension Island when he got a letter from Susan relaying the interest aroused by his scientific observations, which had been read before the Geological Society of London. Most notably, Adam Sedgwick, the eminent Cambridge geologist, had said that some day Darwin would "have a great name among the Naturalists of Europe." It's not yet clear exactly which neurotransmitters are unleashed by status-raising news such as this (serotonin, we've seen, is one candidate), but Darwin described their effect clearly: "After reading this letter I clambered over the mountains of Ascension with a bounding step and made the volcanic rocks resound under my geological hammer!"
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In reply Darwin affirmed to Susan that he would now live by the creed "that a man who dares to waste one hour of time, has not discovered the value of life."
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Elevations of status may bring a reevaluation of one's social constellation. The relative positions of the stars have changed. People who used to be central are now peripheral; the focus must be shifted toward brighter bodies that once seemed beyond reach. Darwin was not the sort of person to perform this maneuver crudely; he never forgot the little people. Still, there are hints of a shifting social calculus while he was aboard the Beagle. His older cousin, William Fox, had introduced him to entomology (and to Henslow); at Cambridge Darwin had profited much from their ongoing exchange of insect lore and specimens. During that correspondence, while seeking guidance and data from Fox, Darwin had assumed his customary stance of abject submission. "I should not send this very shamefully stupid letter," he wrote, "only I am very anxious to get some crumbs of information about yourself & the insects." He sometimes reminded Fox of "how long I have been hoping in vain to receive a letter from my old master" and enjoined him to "remember I am your pupil... ."
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It is thus poignant when, six years later, as Darwin's researches aboard the Beagle signal his rise in stature, Fox senses a new asymmetry in their friendship. Suddenly it is he who apologizes for the "dullness" of his letter, he who stresses that "You are never a whole Day absent from my thoughts," he who begs for mail. "It is now so long since I saw your handwriting that I cannot tell you the pleasure it would give me. I feel however that your time is valuable & mine worth nothing, which makes a vast difference."
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This shifting balance of affection is a regular feature of friendships amid sharp changes in status, as the reciprocal-altruism contract is silently renegotiated. Such renegotiations may have been less common in the ancestral environment, where, to judge by hunter-gatherer societies, status hierarchies were less fluid after early adulthood than they are now.
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During the voyage, Henslow, Darwin's mentor, remained his main link to British science. The geological reports that had so impressed Sedgwick were extracts from letters to Henslow, which he had dutifully publicized. It was to Henslow that Darwin wrote near the voyage's end, asking him to lay the groundwork for membership in the Geological Society. And throughout, Darwin's letters left no doubt about his continuing allegiance to "my President & Master." Upon arriving in Shrewsbury after the Beagle docked, he wrote: "My dear Henslow, I do long to see you; you have been the kindest friend to me, that ever Man possessed."
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But Henslow's days as main mentor were numbered. On the Beagle, Darwin had (at Henslow's suggestion) read Principles of Geology, by Charles Lyell. Therein, Lyell championed the much-disputed theory, advanced earlier by James Hutton, that geological formations are mainly the product of gradual, ongoing wear and tear, as opposed to catastrophic events, such as floods. (The catastrophist version of natural history had found favor with the clergy, since it seemed to suggest divine interventions.) Darwin's work on the Beagle — his evidence, for example, that the coast of Chile had been rising imperceptibly since 1822 — tended to support the gradualist view, and he soon was calling himself a "zealous disciple" of Lyell.
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As John Bowlby notes, it's not surprising that Lyell should become Darwin's chief counselor and role model; "their partnership in advocating the same geological principles gave them a common cause that was lacking in Darwin's relationship with Henslow."
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Common causes, as we've seen, are a frequent sealer of friendships, apparently for Darwinian reasons. Once Darwin had endorsed Lyell's view of geology, both men's status would rise or fall with its fortunes.

Still, the bond of reciprocal altruism between Lyell and Darwin was more than mere "common cause." Each man brought his own assets to the table. Darwin brought mountains of fresh evidence for the views to which Lyell's reputation was inseverably attached. Lyell, in addition to providing a sturdy theoretical rack on which Darwin could array his researches, brought the guidance and social sponsorship for which mentors are known. Within weeks of the Beagle's
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return, Lyell was inviting Darwin to dinner, counseling him on the wise use of time, and assuring him that, as soon as a spot opened in the elite Athenaeum Club, he could fill it.
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Darwin, Lyell told a colleague, would make "a glorious addition to my society of geologists... ,"
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Though Darwin could at times be a detached and cynical student of human motivation, he seems to have been numb to the pragmatic nature of Lyell's interest. "Amongst the great scientific men, no one has been nearly so friendly & kind, as Lyell," he wrote to Fox a month after his return. "You cannot imagine how good-naturedly he entered into all my plans."
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What a nice man!

It is time for yet another reminder that self-serving behavior needn't involve conscious calculation. In the 1950s, social psychologists showed that we tend to like people we find we can influence. And we tend to like them even more if they have high status.
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It isn't necessary that we think, "If I can influence him, he could houseful, so I should nourish this friendship," or "His compliance will be especially useful if he has high status." Once again, natural selection seems to have done the "thinking."

Of course, people may supplement this "thinking" with their own thinking. There must have been some awareness within both Lyell and Darwin of the other man's utility. But they surely also felt, at the same time, a substratum of solid and innocent-feeling amity. It probably was, as Darwin wrote to Lyell, "the greatest pleasure to me to write or talk Geolog. with you." And Darwin was no doubt sincerely overwhelmed by the "most goodnatured manner" in which Lyell gave him guidance, "almost without being asked."
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Darwin was probably equally sincere when, several decades later, he complained that Lyell had been "very fond of society, especially of eminent men, and of persons high in rank; and this over-estimation of a man's position in the world, seemed to me his chief foible." But this was after Darwin, now world famous, had acquired some, shall we say, perspective. Earlier Darwin had been too dazzled by Lyell's own position in the world to pay much mind to his flaws.
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We've seen how Darwin spent the two decades after his return to England: discovering natural selection and then doing a series of tilings other than disclose it. We have also seen several theories about this delay. The Darwinian slant on Darwin's delay isn't really an alternative to existing theories so much as a backdrop for them. To begin with, evolutionary psychology silhouettes the two forces that wrenched Darwin, one attracting him toward publication, the other repelling him.

First is the inherent love of esteem, a love that Darwin had his share of. One route to esteem is to author a revolutionary theory.

But what if the theory fails to revolutionize? What if it's roundly dismissed — dismissed, indeed, as a threat to the very fabric of society? In that event (the sort of event Darwin was the type to dwell on) our evolutionary history weighs against publication. There's hardly been a genetic payoff, over the ages, for loudly espousing deeply unpopular views, especially when they antagonize the powers that be.

The human bent for saying things that please people was clear long before its evolutionary basis was. In a famous experiment from the 1950s, a surprisingly large number of people were willing to profess incorrect opinions — patently, obviously incorrect opinions — about the relative length of two lines if placed in a room with other people who professed them. Psychologists also found decades ago that they can strengthen or weaken a person's tendency to offer opinions by adjusting the rate at which a listener agrees. Another fifties-era experiment showed that a person's recollections vary according to the audience he is to share them with: show him a list of the pros and cons of raising teachers' salaries, and which ones make a lasting impression depends on whether he expects to address a teachers' or a taxpayers' group. The authors of this experiment wrote, "It is likely that a good deal of a person's mental activity consists, in whole or part, of imagined communication to audiences imagined or real, and that this may have a considerable effect on what he remembers and believes at any one point in time... ,"
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This jibes with a Darwinian angle on the human mind. Language evolved as a way of manipulating people to your advantage (your advantage in
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this case being popularity with an audience that holds firm opinions); cognition, the wellspring of language, is warped accordingly.

In light of all this, the question of Darwin's delay becomes less of a question. Darwin's famous bent for self-doubt in the face of disagreement (especially, it is said, disagreement from authority figures) is quintessentially human — unusual in degree, maybe, but not in kind. It isn't remarkable that he spent many years studying barnacles rather than unveil a theory widely considered heretical — heretical in a sense that is hard to grasp today, when the word heresy is almost always used with irony. Nor is it remarkable that Darwin, in the many years of the
Origin
's gestation, often felt anxious or even mildly depressed; natural selection "wants" us to feel uneasy when pondering actions that augur a massive loss of public esteem.

What's amazing, in a way, is that Darwin could be steadfast in his belief in evolution, given the pervasive hostility toward the idea. Leading the assault on Vestiges, Robert Chambers's 1844 evolutionist tract, had been Adam Sedgwick, the Cambridge geologist (and reverend) whose praise, relayed to Darwin at Ascension Island, had so thrilled him. Sedgwick's review of the Chambers book was candid about its own agenda. "The world cannot bear to be turned upside down; and we are ready to wage an internecine war with any violation of our modest principles and social manners." Not encouraging.

What was Darwin to do? The standard view is that he vacillated, like a laboratory rat eyeing food whose procurement will bring a shock. But there's also a minority view: during his celebrated barnacle detour, while failing to publish his theory about evolution, he was busy paving the way for its eventual reception. The strategy can be seen as three-pronged.