The Man Who Questioned His Own Instrument

I. The end of a long life

In the spring of 1876, at sixty-seven, Charles Darwin sat down to write a short account of his life for his children and grandchildren. He did not mean it for the public. It was published five years after his death, in 1887, by his son Francis, with passages about religion cut at the family’s request. The full text was not restored until his granddaughter Nora Barlow published it in 1958.

What he wrote is not a victory lap. The man who had changed how every educated person on earth understood living things spent much of those pages looking at the instrument he had used to do it, which was his own mind, and reporting what it had cost him.

He wrote that up to the age of thirty or beyond, poetry had given him great pleasure: Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. As a schoolboy he had delighted in Shakespeare’s history plays. Pictures and music had moved him. Then:

And the sentence that matters most for this book:

He went further. If he had his life to live again, he said, he would make a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week, so that the lost part might have been kept active by use. “The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

This is not a confession of error in the theory. Darwin never retracted natural selection, and the story that he recanted on his deathbed, told by a Lady Hope decades later, was denied by his children and has no support. What he questioned was something nearer to him than the theory. He questioned what the method had done to the man who used it.

II. The horrid doubt

The second question went deeper still, because it turned his own theory back on the mind that produced it.

On 3 July 1881, less than a year before his death, he wrote to William Graham, who had sent him a book on the creed of science:

Read it slowly. If the mind was shaped by selection for survival, then nothing in the theory guarantees that the mind was shaped for truth. The instrument that saw evolution is itself a product of evolution. Darwin did not resolve this. He did not try to. He left it standing in a private letter, a question he could not answer and would not pretend to.

In the Autobiography he gave the same doubt its religious form. He had come, slowly, to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation; the change was so gradual he felt no distress. On the question of a first cause, he wrote that “the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” The word was Huxley’s, coined in 1869. Darwin took it up as an honest description of where his questioning had left him.

III. What he kept doing

The questioning did not stop him working. His last book, published in October 1881, was about earthworms: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits. He had been watching them for forty years. He measured how fast they buried stones on his own land at Down House. He played the bassoon and the piano to them to see if they heard (they did not), and breathed on them to see if they noticed (they did).

The book sold faster than the Origin had in its first years. It argued that the slowest, least regarded creatures, acting in uncountable small motions over long time, had shaped the very surface of the land. It is the book of a man who still trusted patient looking, even while doubting whether the looker could be trusted.

That is the posture this volume needs. Not despair at the doubt, and not a pretense that the doubt is settled. The work continues with the question kept in view.

IV. Why begin here

This book is one person’s testimony about why Socratic questioning has to run through every discipline of scientific inquiry. It begins with Darwin because he showed, near the end of a career no one could call a failure, three things that 20th-century training largely taught us to leave out.

Against that loss stands a pillar this book already owns, set down in her standing minimums:

Darwin’s account is a receiver going out of tune — not poetry taken away, but the capacity for the note allowed to fall unused, because the frame he was handed said the grinding had to be paid for. The pillar says there was no such debt to pay.

Second, the instrument belongs inside the question. The horrid doubt is the earliest clear statement in modern science that the observer cannot be set outside the account. The physicists who came after him would meet the same problem from the other end, in the measurement of the very small. That is where this book goes next.

Third, a true theory still leaves the theorist unfinished. Darwin was right about descent with modification, and he still ended his life asking what he had lost and whether his convictions were worth anything. Being right did not close the inquiry. It opened a harder one.

This is why the chapter reads as a tragedy. Darwin is magnificent in teaching us how to think, and even he could not stretch far enough. Many human lives read much the same, without any of the scientific success to show for it.

V. The training I received

Many human lives read much the same, without any of the incredible scientific success. Darwin is a magnificent individual in teaching us how to think. But even he could not stretch far enough. What is it that is allowing me to stretch in this way? What has divided and conquered us as human beings? Wrong thinking. How do we correct wrong thinking? Right thinking.

I feel his pain deeply from the inside out. It is the pain of all humans who feel cheated in the end. I encounter this sadness frequently in fellow human beings — so many express it without understanding where it comes from. There is a reason, and I fight it in every passing nanosecond.

The sadness is real and its source is almost never visible. Most people who feel cheated at the end have no word for what was taken from them, because the training that takes it keeps no record of the taking. It registers as age, or bad luck, or the way things are. Darwin’s value as a witness is not that he suffered more than other people. It is that he could name the mechanism — a mind become a machine for grinding facts into laws — and so pointed at a cause instead of only an effect. A sadness with a named source stops being fate and becomes something a person can push against.

In my own life I began by reading all the books in the library, becoming disenchanted with school from my first days in a classroom. This feeling only lessened as I encountered real science for the first time in college. I was in my late teens then as I encountered real science & real mathematics for the very first time. Had read all the books in the library but had not yet been inducted into a real scientific method.

During college, although I became trained in the scientific method, I was taught to do so in a very narrow spectrum. This narrow spectrum puts us in small room without an adequate perspective. For I am convinced now we cannot see the universe or ourselves at all without this perspective.

And this perspective cannot even be attained by a wider perspective, one which considers all science. What is required is becoming fully human, with the poetry, music, literature and philosophy being read back in.

Seemed impossible from my previous perspective, because it was impossible. Attempting to raise six great human beings while being cut off from these perspectives, to create a magnificent marriage, to build a life in science while being contained in a narrow creative and intellectual perspective is just that - impossible

It is now at an advanced age that I can see it all clearly, and of course that is how it goes. We begin to think clearly once life affords us the space and energy to do so. At the same time, we have a perfect perch from which to observe all the ways we were not perfect, or even fully human, in the ways we now recommend.

That is the tragedy from which Darwin viewed the world in advanced age. And being Darwin’s tragedy, the man who more so than any of the rest of us, became the scientific method. It is not the scientific method which Darwin mourned but the lack of a scientific method.

What is different now? Our coming of age as human beings, not needing to find an operator, or magician, or anything other than what we are. What we, in the sense of being part of a system, a system which in and of itself holds the master keys to our dilemma.

Darwin saw this and then lost touch with it as age caught up with him, age which also led him to ask the questions which we now ask.

What a piece of work is humankind, how noble in reason, in form and bearing so like a god?

This is the question!

VI. The thread forward

Darwin’s grinding machine and his horrid doubt are the same problem seen from two sides. One is what the method does to the mind. The other is whether the mind can trust what the method gives it. The quantum pioneers would meet the second in the laboratory, where the act of measuring could no longer be kept out of what was measured. Kuhn would meet the first in the history of science, where the questions a field allows itself are set by the training of the people in it. Shakespeare had met both centuries earlier, in characters who could not see what their own certainty was doing to them.

The chapter closes on the method that answers the operator, the magician, the someone in charge:

The check does not arrive from above either mind. It arrives from the running of both, which is why the verdict can stay with the people doing the work.

Darwin, at the end, could no longer read Shakespeare. This book begins by reading him back in.