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Osanto University Press

An Explorer First Edition

Science. Biography. Nature. Moral Evolution.

Cover by John Mason.

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Copyright © 2014 David Loye

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ISBN: 978-0-9799941-2-8

“A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.”

— Charles Darwin, Autobiography, p.54

CONTENTS

REFLECTIONS AND RESOURCES

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY

PROLOGUE

DARWIN IN LOVE

This is a book about the love of a great scientist for everything that makes life on our threatened planet more precious with each passing year.

My plunge into Darwin’s love story came late one night in the midst of an attempt by a small band of us in love with life on this planet to head off what all too soon has become the environmental, social, political, economic, and spiritual devastation of our time.

It was 1984, with Russia and the U.S. faced off against each other with enough atomic bombs to devastate the earth. I was involved with a multinational group of scientists involved in advanced evolution studies at the time. As tension mounted toward the explosion point, a handful of us were flown in to a secret meeting of concerned scientists in Budapest.

Alive with spy movie overtones, from both sides we had been brought together behind the Iron Curtain to consider an awesome and inspiring mission. The challenge — our convener, the eminent general evolution theorist Ervin Laszlo explained — was to see if we could help stave off nuclear annihilation by ending the fixation on the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mindset then driving the Cold War. Our goal was an update for evolution theory stressing cooperation to gain the better life.

The venture grew to include scientists in the U.K., Italy, Finland, Germany, France, and the U.S., as well as — very much in secret — from our then fierce opponents Russia, Hungary, and China. But despite all the build up we seemed to be getting nowhere. Unable to sleep, I decided to take a new look at Darwin. What had he actually believed and written about human evolution?

I had an electronic copy of The Descent of Man — the book in which he specifically tells us he will now move on from the world of plants and animals, which Origin of Species earlier probed, to what happens at our human level of emergence.

Intrigued with the idea of a fresh new look at Darwin, I told myself I’d pursue it in the morning. But still I couldn’t sleep. At last in desperation I decided to get up, find the Descent of Man disk, and fire up the computer.

First into the slot for FIND went what automatically comes to mind if you ask practically anyone what is Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Survival of the fittest. Of course.

This would surely take a bit of time but in a split second scan of over 700 pages my search stopped only twice. And in one of those two places Darwin was actually apologizing for ever using the term “survival of the fittest”!

Could it be that Darwin himself didn’t believe “survival of the fittest” was the be-all and end-all for evolution?

Why not try a polar opposite? So into the slot I typed the word LOVE—and sat there astounded as the count showed he’d written 95 times about love!

Only twice for “survival of the fittest” but 95 times about love!

And only a single reference to love in the index routinely used in all editions, in all languages, over 140 years!

What was going on here?

Next morning, on printing a bit of text at all 95 stop points, I found myself confronted with the amazement I bring together here in Part II: The Parables of Love. Ranging from the tale of the pushy bullfinch, the endearing bower birds, and the polygamous black-cocks to the embrace of joyful chimpanzees, were all the little stories Darwin tells us about the love and sex life of everything from crickets to the roaring and romping of alligators

Not only were all his little stories delightful but of great scientific interest.

On sorting all 95 into little clumps that seemed to go together, I saw these little stories not only provide vital data for his theories. They fairly sparkle with Darwin’s gift for story telling that brings to life what so often lies flat or cold in the pages of science books today.

I also discovered that many of his little stories were immensely funny. It was almost as if, without meaning to, Darwin was performing as a wry, dead pan comedian over 100 years ahead of his time.

I decided to gather the clumps into short chapters and see what I had—and so found something truly striking, really new, and shocking beyond expression in the end.

This was not the Darwin of the photos. This was not the gloomy old bearded fellow with mournful eyes hanging in sacks of flesh beneath the portentous brow.

Nor was this simply a collection of amusing animal stories—though it could be enjoyed as that and no more, if one wished.

Nor was this in any way what one might stretch to support the banner of “survival of the fittest” or “selfish genes” above all.

This was Darwin in Love, not as a mere sidelight to more important things, but as a matter of immense importance both personally and scientifically to him and, with increasing urgency, to every one of us today.

I saw then I had to write this book about the rest of the story and provide at least a glimpse at the powerful conclusion for his theory ignored and denied us for so many long, lonely years.

Here was the magnificent thrust of the story that in tracing both the personal and the evolutionary track from its grounding in sex to its culmination in “the moral sense” drove Darwin to actually complete his theory with the upward thrust of both sex and love in evolution.

In Part I, I tell the love story of Darwin himself: as a lusty teen-ager, as the eager eye on the famous voyage of the Beagle, in the deep grounding of his love and marriage to Emma, in the passionate love of their children and their remarkably lively and loving life together as a family.

Part II revels in the delight of all his stories of the sex and love life, from smallest to largest, of the wonderful world of animals.

Part III tells of the expansion of this love story into its deepest and widest meaning for the future for our own children, grand-children, and on and on upon this earth.

For I found that not only did Darwin write 95 times of love, in contrast to twice for “survival of the fittest.” He wrote only 12 times about selfishness—which he called “a base principle” accounting for “the low morality of savages.” But there now, undeniable, is the fact he wrote 92 times about moral sensitivity as the force most surely and powerfully advancing human evolution!

All in all, this is a first look at the story — and a glimpse of the lost capstone for his theory — that not only was “too hot for science to handle” for over 100 years.

In many ways this book is the first chapter in the story of the loss that in this century now faces us with extinction rather than fulfillment — but also a clear, sure path to a better world.

Had I thought all this out carefully in advance, I’m sure I would have known that to get all this into one short book would have been impossible. But not knowing it was impossible, on impulse I went ahead and did it.

So that is this book. I hope you enjoy it!

Part I:

The Discovery of Love

ONE

FANNY OWEN

If anyone could qualify as an expert on the sexual aspect of love, it was Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus. A doctor known for his uncanny diagnostic ability and a freethinking progressive, he foreshadowed his grandson’s passion for solving the mystery of evolution with his own book on the subject Zoonomia.

Erasmus’ other passion, however, became the traditional family scandal. It was not just the good doctor’s voluminous production of love poetry. (“Ah, who unmoved that radiant brow descrys, sweet pouting lips, and blue voluptuous eyes?”). It was his joyful record in pursuit of the women of his time.

After being left a widower with five children at age 39, Erasmus embarked merrily on a decade of affairs that left him with two more children, this time illegitimate by a governess. This venture culminated with his marriage to a beautiful patient with whom he had been having still another affair. To the household now including his five legitimate and two illegitimate children, she brought her own departed husband’s illegitimate child.

Grandson Charles was a much different sort of person. Not only was he born into what became the Victorian Age, with a standard for keeping up appearances whatever the underlying reality might be. He was also destined to become an unquestionable international symbol for staid and sober fidelity.

Before he became the mournfully hollow-eyed oldster of the usual photos, however, his eye was lively and his heart sought the ‘teens path to the wonderland of love.

Her name was Fanny. Fanny Owen.

Charles was eighteen, Fanny was twenty. The Owen sisters, Fanny and Sarah, lived not too far from the Darwin home. They had been close to Charles’ sisters Caroline, Catherine, Susan, and Marianne since childhood. At the time Charles was very much into riding and shooting and everything else that went into the sporting life for the sons of Shropshire squires. And so it was that his rides increasingly began to take him over to the Owen manor, Woodhouse, to see Fanny and Sarah.

They were “full of fun and nonsense,” of an age when many boys flocked to them. But soon young Charles seems to have moved beyond the others in their interests and affections. He, it seems, had entered that special category for the dallying young woman, looking ahead to that day she would no doubt marry, of being definitely eligible. For a while it was a game of playful pursuit for all three, Charles attracted to both sisters, and both to him. But then it became Fanny who most intrigued and then wholly entranced him.

Petite, a natural charmer, and goodlooking enough to be considered the stereotypical raven-haired beauty, Fanny Owen was also notably feisty and independent-minded. Where other girls might stick to their painting or knitting, Fanny liked to shoot billiards and ride in the hunt with the boys.

One day Charles and Fanny rode off into the forest together and so began the many ups and downs of the great early passion of his life.

The standard biographies dutifully note that, as a first tentative choice of profession, Charles went off to medical school in far off Edinburgh. The drama customarily stressed for this episode is that this was done to please his autocratic father, a notable doctor of the time. It was the pressure of this parental expectation that kept him there against his will, it’s stressed, for as he couldn’t stand the sight of blood he seems to have recognized early on he could never be a successful surgeon. But from the perspective of his passion for Fanny we can see now that, although this was generally a minor matter for biographies hastening to get on to more important things, it was in fact a major matter for the actuality of life for Charles in those days.

Here he was in Edinburgh grubbing through his studies, there she was back home doing goodness knew what between the brief bits of time given to her letters to him.

Medical school became an interminable stretch as he worried about all the other eligible young suitors riding freely to and from Woodhouse to see Fanny.

The day came when he could no longer stand it. When Fanny found out from a letter of his to his sister Sarah that he was dropping out of medical school to try for the ministry, he feared he had lost her. Medical school, after all, promised far more income and prestige as a doctor. For Fanny the ministry would clearly pose the risk of becoming known as “the poor parson’s wife.” She signaled, however, that all was not lost, and so began several frustrating years of soaring expectations and dashed hopes.

“I have not been riding near so much as I wish,” she wrote him while he was still away in school in chilly, clammy Edinburgh. He got home long enough to take off with her again to the woods.

It was strawberry season and discretely back home at Woodhouse “they got down on hands and knees, then lower still, and before long were stretched out ‘full length’ beside each other, ‘grazing’ the luscious fruit, behaving like beasts.” Then it was off again to Cambridge, now to pursue the ministry. Then it was back again for a glorious but lone week of galloping through the woods and playing billiards.

“I shall … forget all my fine strokes,” she wrote him afterward —ostensibly of billiards, but by now there rippled between them a private language of innuendo at which she excelled.

Later there came the visit from which he returned with his lips so inflamed from kissing he had to take small doses of arsenic for relief—with the swelling and pain lasting for weeks thereafter. But it was downhill now. And the reason was not that Charles had a rival. For Fanny was losing out to a greater passion.

Her own perception of the way things were headed came out in a letter after one long silence during which he failed to receive any letter from her.

“Why did you not come home this Xmas?” she demanded. “I suppose some dear little Beetles … kept you away.”

It was true. Foreshadowing the future of the scientist working long into the night, while a wife might sit drumming her fingers on the table below, he had indeed left her for “the dear little Beetles.”

On the surface, beetling was a trivial matter, a touch for biographies of the beloved eccentricity to make the sober Briton come to life. But in the actuality of Charles’ life at the time it had become a significant obsession.

His cousin William Fox, a fellow beetle obsessional, who did thereafter become an Anglican Church of England minister, was a similarly avid collector. They had become great pals and impassioned correspondents. Constantly beetling together, or separately by letter comparing catches and preserving techniques, they bought ever more exquisite display cabinets for their haul.

To most of us a beetle may be the familiar squiggly thing we prefer to avoid, but so diligent and voracious were the two they collected hundreds not just of much the same but altogether different species.

But to even the beetle the young Darwin was to prove unfaithful. Ever more surely foreshadowing the future there was growing within him a passion for practically everything, which in any form, little or big, young or old, fast or slow, beckoned to him with the wondrous mystery of all the forms that life took.

“I am positively in love with him,” he wrote of his latest amour during this time. “Beetles, partridges & everything else, are as nothing to me.”

His new love was a horse.

TWO

THE SECRET VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE

And so, at age twenty two, saying goodbye to England and dreams of young romance as well as its other specimens of scientific wonder, he set out on the voyage of the Beagle that was to radically change both his own and our world.

If we’ve read or seen on television anything of Darwin, it is the familiar story of the budding young naturalist circling the earth on a ship commissioned for one purpose, which wound up more greatly serving another.

The official purpose of the Beagle and its cranky captain Fitzroy was to survey the harbors for information useful to the British Navy—the Empire was then still intact, with a worldwide need to stand at the ready to discretely lean on the recalcitrant nation, or attack or defend. But through Darwin’s rambles ashore the sturdy little armed vessel provided an avid home-bound readership for his letters with tales of hundreds of new plants, animals, fossils, cities, countries, and the majestic vistas the artists of the time reveled in.

If we are able to see Darwin from a new perspective, however— particularly if one is of a romantic bent—it becomes apparent that the book he wrote describing the voyage is one great long love song to the wonders of this earth.

In what is really one of the greatest travel books ever written, on landing in Bahia he exults in “the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.”

He is overwhelmed by the “elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage.” In the wilds of Patagonia, he marvels over eruptions of lava “on the grandest scale” at a height of “three thousand feet above the level of the sea.” He feels sure that if he had the space “I could prove that South America was formerly here cut off by a strait, joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, like that of Magellan.”

He is entranced—as I was at his age, seeing it for the first time in the Navy during World War II—by the sight of the “huge rounded masses of naked rock rising out of the most luxuriant vegetation” of Mount Corcovado near Rio de Janiero, and how the clouds “rolling in from seaward, formed a bank just beneath the highest point.”

As he was young then, unmarried, confined to sea for many months, tucked in among the phosphorescent insects, saline incrustations, and prehistoric Megatherium fossils that he trumpets in the highlights for each chapter, is what is also naturally on his mind while ashore.

Traveling with the ferocious General Rosas and his army in Argentina, his eye first strays to “the young women or chinas, some of whom deserve to be called even beautiful.”

“Their hair was coarse, but bright and black; and they wore it in two plaits hanging down to the waist. They had a high colour, and eyes that glistened with brilliancy. Their legs, feet, and arms were small and elegantly formed. Their ankles, and sometimes their wrists, were ornamented by broad bracelets of blue beads.”

Elsewhere on the ride, he notes “the excellent taste displayed by the women in their dresses.“ But soon begins the conflict of the young Englishman’s expectations with what for other cultures constitutes proper dress or beauty. Of some Indian women he encounters he complains their “only garment consists of a mantle made of guanaco skin, with the wool outside. This they wear just thrown over their shoulders, leaving their persons as often exposed as covered.” Their skin is “of a dirty copper-red colour.”

The fabled island of Tahiti no doubt in advance conjured up expectations of luscious, bare-breasted, undulating women in hula skirts, but on finally getting ashore he is quickly disenchanted.

“The women are tattooed in the same manner as the men, and very commonly on their fingers. One unbecoming fashion is now almost universal: namely, shaving the hair from the upper part of the head, in a circular form, so as to leave only an outer ring. The missionaries have tried to persuade the people to change this habit; but it is the fashion, and that is a sufficient answer at Tahiti, as well as at Paris.”

Among the men, he finds that “the custom of wearing a white or scarlet flower in the back of the head, or through a small hole in each ear, is pretty.” Likewise for a “crown of woven cocoa-nut leaves … also worn as a shade for the eyes.” But the women “appear to be in greater want of some becoming costume even than the men.”

He finds the custom of nose rubbing instead of kissing of great interest, although somewhat disconcerting.