[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich. And this is not the regular Radiolab.

JAD: No, this is Radiolab, the podcast. Meaning, would you like to explain?

ROBERT: Yes, it's Radiolab in between our regular season shows. So this is gonna be a little shorter, probably, than the regular shows and a little less produced, but a lot of fun because it's birthday time.

[cheers]

ROBERT: I want to say happy birthday, of course, to Charles Darwin, or Chuck Darwin, as I sometimes like to call him.

JAD: [sighs] More Charles Darwin birthday ...

ROBERT: Just be quiet and listen to me for just a second. I want to say that a lot of people when they think about Charles Darwin, think about a brilliant, brilliant man who, 150 or so years ago, woke up some morning and thought, "Wow, I have a wonderful, deep insight into the nature of how life changes."

JAD: Well, it was wonderful, and it was deep. It was one of the deepest ever.

ROBERT: Yes, but it wasn't instant. And that's the first thing we ought to say about Charles Darwin, is that he did not have an "Excelsior!" idea. He had a notion which gradually formed into an idea which then required an enormous amount of hard, hard work. And to begin, I'd like to play you a story I did a number of years ago with David Quammen, who is one of the best scholars about Darwin that I know. He's actually a professional journalist, but we call him a scholar.

JAD: [laughs] We're suddenly living in a world where scholars and journalists are on par.

ROBERT: Well, why not? You know? Because David works very hard, but he doesn't even work as close to as hard as Chuck Darwin, as I like to call him. So let's listen to this story, which is Darwin working out a theory.

ROBERT: 150 years ago when people asked, "How come you can go to Australia and there are kangaroos hopping, hopping around everywhere, but you go to places that look almost exactly the same, say, grasslands in Africa, and there are no kangaroos. Now, why is that? Why don't the same kinds of places have the same kinds of animals?" Well, 150 years ago, there was an answer. It was a simple one, says science writer David Quammen.

DAVID QUAMMEN: God has made kangaroos and put them in Australia.

ROBERT: So God did it. He decided.

DAVID QUAMMEN: That was what God wanted to do. God created every species individually and put them down wherever they are. Actually, I call that 'special creation plus special delivery.'

ROBERT: So that was the explanation even among some of the most learned people around. But then, says Quammen ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Darwin came along and said, "Wait a minute. I don't think that's the explanation. I think these things all evolved from common ancestors."

ROBERT: So the reason you find kangaroos only in Australia and New Guinea, he said, it's not God's doing, it's because the earliest kangaroo ancestors evolved there and then they spread out. But they couldn't get across the water that surrounds Australia. They went about as far as they could go. Every plant, every animal that you see, Darwin proposed, got where it is today on its own.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Animals and plants must disperse. They must be capable of dispersing in order to explain what we see on the planet by way of evolution.

ROBERT: So it was critical to Darwin's theory to show how living things got to where they are today. And this can get kind of tricky. For example, cabbages. You can find cabbage plants on islands near Antarctica. Now how would a cabbage get there?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Well, either God put it there or it got there on its own.

ROBERT: Yeah, but how does a cabbage seed cross an ocean on its own?

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah, how?

ROBERT: Well, it turns out that Darwin obsessed about this question—vegetable voyaging. For years, he concocted experiments, and experiments that were so delightful and so unlike what you'd imagine.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Exactly, exactly. You remember the old TV show Watch Mr. Wizard?

ROBERT: Yeah!

DAVID QUAMMEN: That was Darwin. That was Charles Darwin.

ROBERT: Here's a perfect example. Darwin wondered how might a radish travel? Well, he imagined that a radish might accidentally get swept to sea on a windy day. But now the question: do radishes float? Well, Darwin had his butler, Mr. Parslow, pour salt water, kind of like ocean water, into a tub. And into that tub they popped radishes and carrots and rhubarb and celery.

ROBERT: Mr Parslow, he was one of these proper English butlers.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Absolutely, yeah.

ROBERT: I guess there weren't too many other butlers in the vicinity who were having to do this sort of thing.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Probably not, no.

ROBERT: But Mr. Parslow also dropped in seeds.

DAVID QUAMMEN: He tried cabbage seeds, radish seeds, pepper, cress, as in watercress.

ROBERT: And then they watched to see what floated for how long. Then they'd remove the wet seeds, and they'd plant them to see if they would still grow. Some did better than others. With radish seeds ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: He got 42 days worth of floating.

ROBERT: And with cress ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: 42 days plus a wonderful quantity of mucus, Darwin said, if I recall correctly.

ROBERT: [laughs] So it's stinky, but it's getting there.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah. "A slimy mess that still travels the oceans." And that's typical of Darwin, that he would not say 'a disgusting or a gross quantity of mucus.' He would say 'a wonderful quantity of mucus,' because everything about the natural world was wondrous to this guy.

ROBERT: Okay, so that's 42 days for the radish, 42 days for the cress. How much now for dried asparagus seed?

DAVID QUAMMEN: 85 days they stayed afloat.

ROBERT: 85 days.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And then he took them out and planted the seeds and they germinated.

ROBERT: So let's do the math—Darwin did. If an asparagus seed can float for 85 continuous days, and an ocean current moves roughly 38 miles a day, let's multiply 85 times 38. That means an asparagus can sail 3,230 miles across the sea. That's—that's like Magellan. Asparagus is king.

DAVID QUAMMEN: [laughs] Well, at least among those Darwin looked at. Yeah.

ROBERT: So yes, ocean-crossing vegetables are possible. But Darwin didn't stop there. One day, his eight-year-old son Francis said to him, "You know, dad, dead birds float kind of like ships." And his father said, "Yeah?"

DAVID QUAMMEN: He seems to have been a terrific father.

ROBERT: So Francis said, "Well, why don't we feed a bird some seeds? So the seeds get inside the bird, and then, you know, shoot the bird. And then pop it in the tub, the corpse, and let it float for a while."

DAVID QUAMMEN: So he suggested that. And Darwin said, "You bet, Francis. That's a great idea."

ROBERT: Then after a month or whatever, they opened up the dead carcass, and they pulled out the seeds inside, and they planted them.

DAVID QUAMMEN: And found that those seeds also germinated.

ROBERT: Thereby establishing the principle that seeds can either float on their own or they can hitch a ride.

DAVID QUAMMEN: As passengers inside a bird, as passengers attach to the foot of a bird.

ROBERT: Which then led Darwin back to animals and to the last science article he ever published, in which he proposed the possibility of flying clams. Now at this point, Darwin wasn't so well.

DAVID QUAMMEN: He's suffering from degenerative heart disease, but he's still working. He's still very much alive mentally.

ROBERT: And one day, he gets a letter from a shoe salesman, a young guy named Walter Crick. The way the story goes, you imagine Crick out in the woods collecting beetles, when he just happened to see it was a water beetle. And when he got down and looked real close ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: And attached to one of the legs was a little clam, a little freshwater clam.

ROBERT: A very little clam.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah, very little. Small enough that the beetle scarcely noticed it.

ROBERT: And Crick thought, "Hmm."

DAVID QUAMMEN: "That's kind of curious."

ROBERT: So he wrote Darwin and he said, "You know, I think you might be interested in this." And sure enough, Darwin wrote right back, and he asked him all kinds of questions that Crick couldn't answer because after all, he was—he was in the shoe business.

DAVID QUAMMEN: So he did something better than, you know, fake it. He sent the beetle with the shell attached to Darwin. He mailed it.

ROBERT: He just popped it into an envelope?

DAVID QUAMMEN: He popped it into an envelope.

ROBERT: Was the clam still attached to the beetle?

DAVID QUAMMEN: It was. It was.

ROBERT: So he said, okay, "Well, you take a look for yourself."

DAVID QUAMMEN: Yeah.

ROBERT: So a day or two later, the beetle and the clam did arrive at Darwin's house in an envelope. But they were separated now. And the beetle ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: The beetle was dying by the time that he got it.

ROBERT: Wasn't feeling very well.

DAVID QUAMMEN: It wasn't feeling very well.

ROBERT: But right away, Darwin could see a possibility here.

DAVID QUAMMEN: This is very interesting! This goes back to the whole subject of dispersal, of how creatures can travel from one place to another.

ROBERT: Maybe this little clam can fly from place to place.

DAVID QUAMMEN: Uh-huh. Right. Because this beetle is a swimming beetle, but it can also fly.

ROBERT: So maybe clams can fly from pond to pond hitchhiking on a beetle. Darwin couldn't prove this because he felt kind of badly watching that little beetle he had suffer.

DAVID QUAMMEN: So this is why I mention it at the end of my book, because it's such a wonderful example of the kind of fellow this guy Charles Darwin was. He writes back to W.D. Crick and says, "Dear Mister Crick ..."

ROBERT: "As the wretched beetle is still feebly alive," he wrote, "I put it in a bottle with chopped laurel leaves." Now he knew that those leaves give off a gas that would very gently help this beetle die.

DAVID QUAMMEN: In one of the very last acts of his life, he decided that he needed to put this beetle out of its misery. And then a few weeks after that, Darwin died himself.

ROBERT: There is a postscript to this story. It turns out that years and years later, the shoe salesman, Walter Crick, had some grandchildren. And one of Walter's grandsons just happens to be ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: Francis Crick.

ROBERT: The Francis Crick.

DAVID QUAMMEN: The Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with James Watson.

ROBERT: So perhaps the greatest champion of evolution in the 20th century, who deciphered the structure and the code of DNA both, that guy's grandpa ...

DAVID QUAMMEN: His grandpa was a pen pal sharing beetle specimens with Darwin.

ROBERT: And how strange and wonderful is that? And it is kind of strange, don't you think?

JAD: That you ended the piece with "How strange is that?"

ROBERT: No, no. Not that I ended the piece that way, but that it's very strange.

JAD: You who always sweat the ending and torture me on the endings. You end it with, "How strange is that?"

ROBERT: Well, here's why. Because think about science, the way it's done today.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You have to finish high school. You have to get good grades. You have to take the SATs. You have to get into college. You have to be a major in science.

JAD: You have to go do a PhD.

ROBERT: And get the GREs and the publisher reviews.

JAD: No, it's very specialized now.

ROBERT: And look at that. Look at their science. This is Charles Darwin with a butler and the tubs.

JAD: I like that part of it. It's very optimistic in a way.

ROBERT: And very homespun, you know?

JAD: But here's what I don't get. He comes up with this idea in, like, 1830-something, right?

ROBERT: Yes. He's a young man when he figures out maybe species evolve in this peculiar way.

JAD: Right. So he's got the idea in 1838, and he's a young dude. And then it's only, like, 20-something years later that he finally ...

ROBERT: 21.

JAD: 21 years later that he finally actually comes out with it.

ROBERT: And publishes it.

JAD: So what happened in the gap? Was he tested?

ROBERT: Well, that's one of the great questions is: why did Charles Darwin wait so long to announce the idea?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: One version of that is that he just wanted to do what you just heard him do. He wanted to be sure.

JAD: Ha! Data.

ROBERT: He wanted to test and evidence and evidence and so forth. The other reason is actually a more romantic and interesting and also sad reason, because it tells you that from the beginning, this idea had deep problems with its audience. In this case, Charles Darwin's audience was a precious audience. It was the woman he fell in love with.

JAD: What was her name?

ROBERT: I don't think I should tell you because I think you're going to learn it from Deborah Heiligman, who is an author of a new book called Charles and mmm ...

JAD: Emma?

ROBERT: [laughs] Anyway, Deborah sat down with me. We were talking, and she tells me, "Let's see, let's go back to when Charles was in his mid-'20s. Here we go."

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Okay. I'm 28, I got this promising career, this great theory I'm thinking about.

ROBERT: And now he has to make his next big decision: should he get married or not.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Right.

ROBERT: So what does he do?

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Well, he makes a list of pros and cons.

ROBERT: Is it called "Pro marriage or con marriage?"

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: It's called "Marry, Not Marry. This is the Question."

ROBERT: [laughs] Let's hear the 'not marry' things.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Fighting with her. Like, that could be a problem.

ROBERT: He wrote down quarreling?

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Quarreling, yeah. And he did—you know, he loved children, and so he really thought about having children. But he also worried about again, the time it would take to raise children, and the expense and also the anxiety.

ROBERT: Meanwhile, what was on the pro side? If I do marry, what do you get?

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: He was looking for somebody who would sit on the sofa with him and, you know, make nice and, you know, whatever. But I think when he made that ...

ROBERT: Cook and make music, and play some kind of game.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Yes, right.

ROBERT: They did play. What did they play? They played ...

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Charles and Emma played backgammon.

ROBERT: Backgammon.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: But now we gave away that it was Emma.

ROBERT: Sorry. Okay. Sorry. So there they are. We're wondering which way to go.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: But there was one big question that he did not put on his list.

ROBERT: What was that?

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: God.

ROBERT: Why God?

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: He really was beginning to think that he was having problems with God and with religion in general. And he knew very often that if the man was a skeptic, a religious skeptic, and the woman was a believer, things went along fine until there was some problem, somebody got sick, somebody died, and then the woman was miserable because the husband wasn't a believer.

ROBERT: And if the husband isn't a believer, Jad, then that person's probably gonna go to hell for not having faith in God. So when you go on to your eternal rest, you're in hell and your wife is in heaven. And so that's a long time to be apart.

JAD: So you want to stay with them here and there.

ROBERT: Yeah. Darwin falls in love, as it happens, with one of these religious girls, Emma. And he falls really in love with her, but she says to him, "Uh oh. I don't know. I want to live with you forever in heaven."

JAD: And she's a believer.

ROBERT: Yeah. So during their courtship, they talk about this. He shares his doubts about the existence of God. She shares her hope that he will come out, come to faith, but she does agree to marry him.

JAD: In spite of that?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: And she—you know, when he's there, she's all happy because he's so Charles, and she loves him and he's great. And then he goes away. I can so relate to this. And then she starts to worry because he's not there to sort of distract her with his wonderfulness. She worries about his not having faith or losing his faith. I mean, to me, it's never clear exactly what he's thinking exactly. I mean, I don't think it was clear to him. He was struggling with it, let's put it that way.

ROBERT: Right.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: She probably knew she wasn't gonna really change his mind, but she just knew that prayer was really helpful to her. And she saw him in pain, emotional pain, and she thought if he would just pray, maybe he would feel better. But she didn't want to really say that to him. So she wrote it down and said—sometimes it's easier to write something down. And she wrote him, I think, three letters during their time together, maybe four. He kept those letters with him all the time. And he wrote—he just had a feeling he would die first. And he wanted her to know after he was gone that he really took her concerns seriously.

ROBERT: He also, on the letter itself, wrote at some later point.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Right.

ROBERT: "When I'm dead, know that many times I have kissed and cried over this."

ROBERT: So they were—they had an arrangement. He grieved for her, she grieved for him. And they were—they had very different ideas about what death meant, until something happened in their lives. It has a kind of feeling of real deep tragedy about it.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Who's Annie?

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Annie was their second child, their oldest daughter, and really the apple of their eye. She was a wonderful little girl. And Charles Darwin later said she was his favorite, which I always have mixed feelings about, because I don't think a parent should have favorites, but there you go.

ROBERT: Do you know why she was his favorite?

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: She was spirited. She was kind. She was musical like Emma, but she was orderly like Charles. Emma was a slob. Annie was very attentive and connected to both of her parents. But some scarlet fever had run through the household. It seemed, in retrospect, like Annie never got quite better. After about a week of that, right around Easter, by the way, Annie just got worse and worse, and she finally died. He and Emma said to each other in letters right then, "We just have to stay close to each other." Emma wrote to him, "You are my prime treasure and always have been."

ROBERT: This is one of those moments where for a lot of couples, you can kind of go ...

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: You could break up. And considering what death meant to each of them and how different the different meanings they took, it's pretty amazing to me that I think it brought them even closer. But ...

ROBERT: But the sense along the way is that the reason that Charles Darwin hung onto his idea and didn't publish—one of the reasons—is that he was worried that Emma would have been upset. And there's a reason, right, for him to feel that way, because she so much more or less intimated that.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Well, the thing that's great about Emma was that you asked me before, I think, what—how they changed after Annie's death. I think they became a little bit more—I think they saw each other's point of view just a little bit more. I think. I think Charles saw, "Oh, would be probably really nice if I believed in an afterlife, because then I could see Annie again, and that would be lovely." And I think probably as Emma watched Charles working, and probably as she struggled with what was the sense of Annie's death, you know, maybe there was no sense. Maybe it was just one of those things that happens. I believe that they actually started to come together more than go apart in the way they were thinking.

ROBERT: Neither surrendered their point of view.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: Neither surrendered. But I think that they were really able to see the other person's point of view, which is really what all we need, right? And so Emma, who was never much interested in science, by the way, but she was always his first reader and his best reader. So whenever he was sending something out for publication, she always read it. Back in 1842, he had first shown her and her alone this sketch of his species theories just in case he should die.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

DEBORAH HEILIGMAN: And he wrote her a letter saying, "In case I should die, I'm entrusting you to publish this." Well, you know, she was the one who was so worried he was killing God, and yet he trusted her. And he knew he could trust her. And so Emma read it in manuscript. And she didn't object to anything. She didn't object to anything that would, you know, maybe have sort of personally offended her about God. In fact, she cleaned it up, cleaned up his language because he wasn't good with commas and—you know, and he had spelling mistakes. And so she cleaned it up and made his arguments stronger for him.

JAD: So wow. So emotionally, she traveled a great distance.

ROBERT: She did.

JAD: But here's my question: if he can do so much work to convince the scientists, his colleagues, that this is a theory that is true, and if he can, you know, through a sort of personal loss and time and understanding, convince his wife through love, really, that it's true, why can't he convince the rest of us?

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I mean, Ike—Ike, our producer here to our right, just handed me a paper which says there was a gallup poll of 1,018 Americans. Less than four out of ten say they quote, "Believe in the theory of evolution." That's less than 40 percent of them.

ROBERT: Yeah. And it's been that way, by the way, for decades. You know, for decades, Darwin has never had a majority. No.

JAD: So why?

ROBERT: Well, there are probably two simple reasons. One is that people don't like thinking of themselves as beasts or animals. And Darwin insisted. He always insisted, we are not closer to the angels. We are not separate. We are not different. We are beasts.

JAD: Well, couldn't you at least say, to sort of counter that argument, "Okay, we're beasts, but we're turbocharged beasts. We're like special beasts?"

ROBERT: You can say that, but that's not the only problem.

JAD: What's number two?

ROBERT: The second one, I think, has to do with everybody's desire for—well, let me just introduce you to Adam Gopnik, who has written another book about Charles Darwin.

JAD: He's written more than ...

ROBERT: No, another one in our series of mini books that we have here. We have the Quammen book, we have the Heiligman book and we now have the Gopnik book. But I sat down with Adam and we talked about what is the problem really with Darwin's theory.

ADAM GOPNIK: Now nobody understood in the 19th century better than Charles Darwin that death is the great reaper out of life. He didn't believe in immortality, and he believed in what he called 'the wedge of death.' He understood that that's how species proceed. That's the nature of life is to involve a great deal of death. But that realization, of course, provided him absolutely no comfort for the loss of his own child. Knowledge about the common experience gave him no ease in his core experience. And that, I think, Robert, is the deepest reason why we have trouble with Darwinism, because we look to big ideas to take common experience and give us comfort about our core experience. And no matter how we try and pull it apart, no matter how we try and search it, Darwinism won't do that for us. We can't say, "I read Darwin and now I feel better about my own life."

ROBERT: That's because actually it makes you feel kind of worse. Because if you ask how'd I get here? There's an explanation in Darwin's writing for that. But if you ask the—what everybody asks, if he goes, why? What's it for? How does it end? What's the point? Then the answer is a very unsatisfying one, is: don't know or don't speak to that, or there is none. There is none. That's hard.

ADAM GOPNIK: There is none is very hard for people to take. I think, too, that it's—you know, I do think that there's a tragic grandeur in Darwin's view of life, but it doesn't make me feel sad. It makes me feel there is meaning there to be had. Darwin's love, Charles's love for Emma, Charles love for Annie, still speak to us a hundred years later. We're moved by them, we're stirred by them. We see pictures of our own life and our own loves in them. Human life isn't meaningless because it ends. And one of the great changes in the human spirit that Darwin ushers in, Darwin heralds, is a belief that the future is as important as our past, and that our real afterlife lies in our children and in the afterlife of our ideas and values more than it lies in the inheritance of our ancestors.

ROBERT: And the now is part of a river.

ADAM GOPNIK: Yes. That we're in a long river of time, a long river of life. And after all, you know, it's one of the things we try and teach our children. What—when we talk about giving our kids a moral education, that's all we mean. We mean we want them to be aware that they are not unique consciousnesses which are little dictators of reality. We want them to be aware that they are fishermen and fisherwomen standing along the long stream of life, where many, many, many have stood before, where their place is unique but not specially privileged. That's what we mean.

ROBERT: And even if they look down at the grass and at the fish, that those are cousins.

ADAM GOPNIK: That those are cousins, that those are distant great great grandparents. That, I think, has the virtue of being a genuinely and profoundly inspiring view of how we got here and what we're doing here, and also has the not small advantage of being true.

ROBERT: Well, not everybody would agree with Adam that this is true. But that's Adam's view.

JAD: I would.

ROBERT: Yeah, I know you would. Adam Gopnik wrote Angels and Ages. It's a short book about Darwin, Lincoln and modern life.

JAD: Oh, he put them together?

ROBERT: Yes, he put—because they were born on the exact same day.

JAD: Same birthday. Okay.

ROBERT: And Deb Heiligman, she wrote Charles and Emma, and David Quammen wrote The Reluctant Mister Darwin.

JAD: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. I was about to say I'm Robert Krulwich, but I'm not Robert Krulwich. Thank goodness. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll see you in two weeks.

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