Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan Read Free Book Online Page B

foreskin. Queen bees and drones do no work, and have not for geological ages; yet worker bees whose parents are queens and drones (and never other workers) do not seem to be growing more indolent, generation after generation; instead, they are proverbially industrious. 6 Domestic and farm animals have their tails docked, their ears clipped, or their flanks branded for generations, but the newborn show no signs of these mutilations. Chinese women had their feet cruelly bound and deformed for centuries, but infant girls obstinately persisted in being born with normal appendages. 7 Despite such counterexamples, Charles would take seriously, for his entire life, the notion of Lamarck and his grandfather Erasmus that acquired characteristics could be inherited.
    The mechanism by which discrete hereditary units, the genes, are reshuffled and passed on to the next generation, the way in which those genes are randomly altered, their molecular nature, and their wonderful ability to encode long chemical messages and replicate those messages precisely—all this was wholly unknown to Darwin. To attempt an understanding of the evolution of life when heredity was still an almost complete mystery would require either an exceptionally foolish or an exceptionally able scientist.
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    Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin had long entertained the hope that someday their children would formalize through marriage the bonds of affection that already united their two families. Of the two, only Erasmus lived to see it happen. His son, Robert, a generous but moody physician, a great big, fat man, a silhouette out of Dickens, who alternately comforted and terrified the patients of his far-flung practice, married Susannah Wedgwood. She was widely admired for her “gentle, sympathising nature” and the active role she took in herhusband’s scientific interests. Susannah suffered an agonizing death from a gastrointestinal affliction out of sight but within earshot of her eight-year-old son, Charles. Writing near the end of his own life, he could recall nothing about his mother “except her death-bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work-table.”
    In this autobiographical memoir, conceived as a gift for his children and grandchildren, and written “as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life,” Charles Darwin admitted “that in many ways I was a naughty boy … I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement.” He boasted to another boy that he “could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable.” Even at that tender age he had begun to speculate on the variability of plants. His life-long absorption in the natural world was under way. He became a passionate collector of the bits and pieces of Nature that form the gritty detritus in the pockets of children everywhere. He was particularly mad for beetles, but his sister convinced him that it would be immoral to take a beetle’s life merely for collecting. Dutifully, he confined himself to gathering up only the recently deceased. He watched the birds and recorded his observations of their behavior. “In my simplicity,” he later wrote, “I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.”
    At the age of nine he was sent to study at Dr. Butler’s day school. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind,” Darwin later wrote. Butler believed that school was no place for curiosity or excitement about learning. For that, Charles looked to a well-thumbed copy of
Wonders of the World
, and to the members of his family who patiently answered his many questions. As an old man he could still recall the delight he felt when an uncle had explained to him how the barometer works. His older brother, Erasmus—named after their