Selects: How Charles Darwin Worked

Charles Darwin wasn't the first or only scientist to grasp the theory of evolution through natural selection, but he became its father and icon. In this classic episode, learn about the man who reluctantly but bravely became the source of the divide between religion and science. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:03Speaker 02

  Hi, everyone. Chuck here on a Saturday to introduce this week's select episode, a curated best of. And this is all about old Chucky Darwin. It's called How Charles Darwin Worked. He's a great person, had a lot of great ideas, and it's pretty groundbreaking stuff. So I hope you guys enjoy listening to this one either for the first time or all over again.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Unless I forget Jerry's over there.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  She's over there.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  You know, we went like five years. I went five years of this podcast with just mentioning us, once in a while mentioning Jerry. But I mean, like, I can't imagine the podcast without Jerry, too.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Now, after?

• 2:03Speaker 03

  After five years, finally, I'm like, yeah, I guess she should stay on.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  She's earned her place.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. At least she keeps quiet.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  How you doing?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  I'm great. How are you?

• 2:15Speaker 03

  I'm good.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 2:16Speaker 03

  I'm like, low-key, calm. I'm fine.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  That's good. I'm a little smelly, which we've talked about off the air.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  I know. You keep talking about it, which makes the smell worse.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  What is it about someone's own special, sweet tang of a scent that they're drawn to?

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Like, you're drawn to your own tang?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Everyone, I think, like, secretly smells their own shoe and their own armpits when they get a little ripe.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Maybe we all, deep down, want to mate with ourselves.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Maybe so. That's not true, because I'm disgusted with myself.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I see you looking at your armpit, eyeing it like that. I know you want to do that thing.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've slipped out twice today just to smell them.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  There's a little on your nose.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Gross.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  So, Chuck, you're doing good. I'm doing good. We'll just assume Jerry's doing good. And we're all doing good because we're fairly fit. You know why? We're fit, because we're alive, and we are evolving as we speak.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  We are part of this huge, long, natural procession of change forced by scarcity, competition, the ravages of nature.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  And we, as humans, have climbed to the top of the food pyramid of the evolutionary chain and said, "We own this planet." That's why we're doing good today.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's one of my most favorite notions.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Evolution?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, natural selection. I think it's, like, one of the most beautiful things that we've been able to figure out.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Evolution gets all the spotlight. I'm a big natural selection fan myself, too.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  You know?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  So...

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Divergence? That stuff turns me on.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  That and your smell.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Intellectually.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Uh, so, let's, let's talk about this. You can't have evolution without natural selection. Again, even though evolution gets all the spotlight.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  At the very least, there's no evolution on Earth without natural selection.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  And the idea of natural selection, of evolution in general, the idea that God didn't create everything exactly the way we see it now, um, is a fairly recent notion, despite how tremendously widespread it is. You know, uh, Bill Nye, the science guy?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're talking about his debate?

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, he got in a debate with, uh, Ken Ham.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Just, just totally off the cuff, not planned at all. They just both happened to be in the same auditorium.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I watched the whole thing.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Did you? The whole two hours?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. I couldn't pull myself away from it.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  So, I'm guessing that you suspect Bill Nye won the debate?

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, are there winners and losers?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  So, don't be shy, there are.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Um, there's, uh, there is a British, uh, religious website that polled its, um, its guests.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Cause you know, people who go to websites are called guests. But, uh-

• 5:07Speaker 02

  In, in England, they are.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  And said, who won?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  And, um, I think ninety-two percent said Bill Nye won. And the reason why is because, in the comment section, it was revealed-

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  That most of these people said, "Yeah, we believe in God, but evolution is still real, and to deny evolution outright-

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  -is pretty silly."

• 5:28Speaker 02

  I think when you say things like dragons, you might lose people.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Did he say dragons? I didn't see it.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  He mentioned dragons?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's, some people, and like you said, religion and science coexist for a lot of religious folk.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  But, um, there are some that are very literal and strict and say that, you know, how to explain dinosaurs? Well, they may have been dragons.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  And, uh-

• 5:49Speaker 03

  I don't, that, uh, that doesn't explain anything, though.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Well, I think that dragons were in the Bible.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  If I'm getting this wrong, I'm gonna really get killed.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  We should pause here for a second.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Like, the point of this episode is not to stomp on anybody's beliefs.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  I think science can be just as dogmatic as religion.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  So, like, that's not what we're doing.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Like, if you believe in creationism, to each his own. Like, we're not gonna pound our beliefs into you, or, you know, vice versa.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  I've never understood that. Like, who cares?

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Right, it's proselytizing either way.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  You know? It's like, convert to my way of thinking.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Or else you are just so wrong, it's mind-boggling, you know?

• 6:35Speaker 03

  But that's not the point of this.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  I think we should just see away with that, cuz it's not what we're like. There's some people who don't always listen. Maybe this is their first episode. Welcome. We are not those kinda guys.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  No, and specifically with this episode, it's on Charles Darwin the man.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  And kinda what made him who he was, not, and we'll tackle, are we committing to go ahead and doing natural selection?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  I think we shall.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  To pair with this?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  As a matter of fact, we'll have this one come out on a Tuesday. We'll do natural selection on a Thursday.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Look at that. Alright, I agree. Let's do it.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Let there be light.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  But Darwin is a fascinating dude, though. So, he deserves his own show.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you can't really overstate the idea that he was, as Robert Lamb puts in his fine article. I have to say, one of his best.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  That Charles Darwin was the fulcrum by which, or on which, the entire sea change from a religious worldview to a scientific worldview took place. It was on this man's shoulders.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Even though, oddly enough, he wasn't the only person to come up with natural selection.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  No, and we'll get to that. He wasn't the first or the last, but it turns out he was the most thorough in his research.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Right, and had the most social breeding.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  And inbreeding.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Man, this is the ultimate tease.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  It is. So, let's get started, Chuck. Let's talk about Darwin. He, um, didn't, he wasn't born with a Bunsen burner and a flask in his hand.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  No, he was not. He was born, if anything, with a stethoscope in his hand because his father, Dr. Robert Waring-Darwin, had designs on little Chuck being a doctor, like him.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Because he was, you know, they had some dough, he was an English gentleman. They weren't poor by any means.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  No, apparently his grandfather amassed a vast fortune in China, and not the country, but the porcelain.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Interesting. So it'd be incorrect to say he had a Chinese fortune?

• 8:36Speaker 03

  He had a China fortune.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Okay. But little Chuck was not into anatomy. He was definitely not into surgery on humans. It freaked him out. I think he was a little queasy as a person.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  He was kind of fainting, it seems like.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he was, he was way into the natural sciences and was just fine with dissecting a frog.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  You know?

• 8:59Speaker 03

  He was cool with biology, as long as you weren't human, he'd cut you.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  That's right. So he was sent to several schools. First, when he was gonna be a doctor, to the Anglican Shrewsbury School, then to Edinburgh University, and finally, his dad was like, alright, you don't want to be a doctor, so the only other option for you is to be a man of religion.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, parson in the country.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm gonna send you to Christ College in Cambridge.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Which is, I mean, if you're gonna go be a country parson, you could do a lot worse.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  You know? The fighting Padres.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Is that what they are? Go Padres.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  So he was very well educated and had been exposed to all kinds of science, so he was, he was a very smart guy from early on.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  And way into natural science, like I said, but not into the religion thing as much. He was agnostic from a pretty early age.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Right, and he seemed like he was gonna follow the path that his father was laying out for him. I guess his father was...

• 9:59Speaker 02

  He was doing it anyway.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  He was very domineering.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  And Charles Darwin was a pretty great thinker, pretty all-around good guy, but he also was a bit of a pantywaist, it seems like. You know? He was like really, really affected by stress.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  He had a lot of psychosomatic symptoms from stress.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Pretty much throughout his whole life. Despite that, though, he... Took a very brave course in life and it started when he was 21. And he was on his way to becoming that country parson that his father had decided he would be. And he got an invitation to go on a tour of the islands off South America. Um, from a guy named Robert Fitzroy, who was 26 years old. He was an aristocrat and he liked Darwin. He said, hey, you're good at conversations.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  When I get bored, I suffer bouts of depression.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  I'm about to go on this boat called the HMS Beagle for God knows how long.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  So why don't you come along and we can chat and I won't get depressed. And Darwin said, you know what? Let's do this.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Which is a, that's a pretty bold move.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was, for someone who was a, would you say a panty waist?

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, panty waist.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  It's sort of surprising that he was up for that kind of adventure.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yes. A milk toast, you could also call him a milk toast, maybe. We'll call him that.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  All right. Uh, so this was in 1831, he boarded the HMS Beagle, which I, for some reason just cracks me up.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  You know, our buddy Joe from Forward Thinking just adopted a dog.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  That's part Beagle and his name's Darwin.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Because of that association.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I would imagine.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  That would have been.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  And Joe said he looks like Darwin head on.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Like Charles Darwin?

• 11:42Speaker 03

  He's got like bushy eyebrows.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  That's funny. Um, all right, so he boarded the HMS Beagle, uh, what'd you say, how old was he, 21?

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  And they took a five-year voyage around South America. Um, the purpose for Fitzroy was to chart the waters of South America, the coastlines and that kind of thing. But Chuck was like, I'm into natural stuff and species that I don't know. So what better thing to do than spend like most of my time, not on the boat, but on land?

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Just researching stuff.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  I'm sure he got pretty good at rowing.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  From the ship to shore.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Back and forth.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was basically, uh, Paul Bettany's character in Master and Commander.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Well, which is ironic, cause Paul Bettany played Charles Darwin.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Did he really?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  In, uh, that movie Creation.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I never saw that, but I know what you're talking about.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  That's funny, you had no idea, huh?

• 12:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  You stepped right into that one.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  I wonder if he recognized that.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's a good movie. That Creation, you should check it out. It's, um, details a lot of the struggles of his life that we're gonna go over here, and mainly is about his, uh, anxieties of what he was doing and his relationship to his Christian wife.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I'll bet that was kind of a sore spot.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Big time. We'll get to that now in a second.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  So, okay, so they head off to South America.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  There, uh, he's spending two-thirds of the voyage, of this five-year voyage, he spends on land. Uh, one of the most famous places he visited was the Galapagos, which are still around.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that apparently was really overstated. He was only, uh, what is still around? Is that a joke?

• 13:13Speaker 03

  The Galapagos, they're still around.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. I, I thought I was missing on something, cuz you looked at me like,

• 13:19Speaker 03

  No.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  You're missing a joke.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  No, that's this look.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Um, what was that one? Is your, you smell?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was my eyes are watering.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  So, the Galapagos apparently was a little overstated, it's significance-wise. Um, he was only there for about five weeks out of the five years, and historians think it's been overstated because it was so exotic, and people wanted to point to some like, kind of fantastical birthplace of all these ideas.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it, it stuck.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, for sure, and he, you know, collected all kinds of different specimens from the Galapagos, but it wasn't as big a deal.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Have you ever seen the size of the turtles there? Or the tortoises?

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Are they huge?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Dude, they're like the size of VW Beetles.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  They're enormous.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  And apparently, like, they'll hang out with you.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  What else are they gonna do? Run away?

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Slowly.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah, they have no choice.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  They have agency. They could be like, I don't wanna be here around you. I'm gonna go this way. They just, it wouldn't work very well.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Or very quickly.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  So where are we, man?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  We are, I was just poo-pooing the Galapagos.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  But what he did while he was gone was, he did a lot of great work and made a real name for himself and kind of came back a well-known scientist.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Because the whole time he's making all these findings, he's finding new species of animals that Europeans didn't even know existed.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Like entire types of animals. He's sending back specimens, which means he killed a lot of animals while he was on these islands.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Mailed them back to Europe, mailed back some of his findings. He's basically writing papers as he's doing this, this journey. So, back in the jolly old England, there, basically he becomes this celebrity.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he was, you know...

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Like before he even returned?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was looking at, he had the idea of natural selection, but it was, like we said, it was already out there.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  It was known as the mystery of mysteries, or transmutation, and he called his research at first, the transmutation notebooks. So...

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, he wasn't, you know, he was researching stuff that he had heard about.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  It was a working title.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  It was a working title, actually.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  What would later become On the Origin of the Species, of course.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he and another guy we'll talk about in a little bit, were also inspired, both were inspired by Thomas Malthus, who we've talked about, who came up with the idea of carrying capacity.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  And basically introduced the idea that scarcity and competition forces adaptation and change. And then Darwin and the guy, Alfred Wallace Russell, or Alfred Russell Wallace, both read this and said, "Well, wait a minute, I wonder if that adaptation and change that's forced by scarcity is what creates the change in species that we're seeing here."

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was definitely, the book was called Essay on Principle of Population, and that was like a super game changer, because it really gave him like the notion that by studying any species' death, you can kind of study its life.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it wasn't, it wasn't just biology that it gave rise to, it gave rise to economics largely.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  A lot of anthropology, a lot of ecology, like it was, like you say, a game changer.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Thomas Malthus. Go back and listen to our Population podcast.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Is that where he appears?

• 16:53Speaker 02

  I think he appears a few times, but that was a good one.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  It's an oldie, but a goodie. So like we said, he came back sort of a celebrity of sorts and he came back with a lot of information and settled in at the Down House in Kent. And this place was, he spent the next 40 years there studying his property essentially. Like he didn't need to go anywhere. He had plenty of nature there. Apparently there were 40 different species per square meter on his property. He had 10 kids and he used them as sort of a little laboratory experiment because three of them died and he was fascinated with why things and people survive and some don't.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  So it was all sort of part of his, it was just, everything was part of his laboratory essentially. He had people sending him samples from all over the world and there are some theories that if the postal service hadn't have been so good, he may have never been able to write Origin of the Species. Because he relied on people sending him stuff in due time.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, and also he was really big on corresponding, which kind of helped develop his, his ideas. Flesh them out even further. Was, he was huge on correspondence.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, he had an area on his property called the Sand Walk that he had built. It was basically just a loop path through the woods and he would just spend like countless hours just walking this path and thinking and looking at everything. Everything.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Nothing escaped his eye.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  One of his favorite subjects was earthworms. Remember our earthworm podcast?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  There was a quote from him in there where he said, It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures. He was down with earthworms.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Down with earthworms.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  And orchids very famously, too.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was, he was active. He wasn't just looking at things. He raised orchids. He was a beekeeper. He raised pigeons.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  And like, it was all just in the name of study.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Right. One of the things, though, we, um, he married his, uh, first cousin, his wife.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Um, and at the time, they didn't really know much about the troubles with inbreeding. And he was one of the people who discovered the troubles with inbreeding, and it apparently had a really big effect on him. Like, he felt kind of guilty and weird and wondered if maybe his kids' early deaths had to do with that.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Um, which has to be kind of startling.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  If you're the guy who discovers the problems with inbreeding, and you've inbred.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  You know?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  It's gotta be a little jarring.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Sure. Uh, Emma Wedgwood was his wife's maiden name, and one thing that happened when he married her was he got, uh, more money because she was also in the family fortune.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  So they were set up pretty nicely. Uh, and like I said, she was Christian, and she was amazing, though. Like, the creation movie really, like, it's a great love story despite the fact that they had, he was agnostic and she was Christian. She spent her life caring for him because he was a very sickly man.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Um, may have had some sort of viral disease his entire life.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Maybe, that he picked up in South America. We don't know.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  So he wasn't a pantywaist?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  No, he was a pantywaist on top of that.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  So, he was just fraught with anxiety, uh, and she cared for him and all the kids, and her life's worry was, are we gonna spend eternity together in the afterlife?

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  That was her big concern.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, which-

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Because he didn't buy that stuff.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  No, he, and he was, you know, religious-ish when he was younger, but as he grew older and the more he-

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, he wasn't atheist.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  No, the more he exposed himself to these ideas of evolution and natural selection, the less religious, the less he bought into it. Um, and it's funny that that divide first occurred in him, and then it just kind of grew out from him to- Create this divide throughout the world.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  He was the epicenter of that divide at first. If that crack in the world first appeared in him.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Isn't that interesting?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. He's the one to blame.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Pretty much. Or he was patient zero, one of the two. So he, he comes back to Down House. He gets married, settles down, doubles his fortune by marrying Emma. And, and is experimenting with orchids, earthworms, bees, his kids, all of this stuff. And he's also, at the same time, writing, he's expanding that notebook into what he's calling Natural Selection, another working title.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  And he is taking his sweet time with it. One of the reasons he's taking his sweet time with this is, one, he is being very diligent. He's making sure he's crossing all of his Ts, dotting his Is, making sure he's not looking at it wrong.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Making sure he's backing up everything.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  And the second connected reason to that first one is that he is really not looking forward to the storm.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  That this is going to create when he unleashes it on the public. He was well aware of it from the beginning.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Because there's a couple of things that are inherent in the theory of natural selection.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  I'm gonna add a third reason, my friend.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  If you're studying natural selection, evolution, it takes a long time.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  You can't study something for a week and detect changes.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  And like you said, he was thorough because he lived his life, basically in anxiety of not being accepted by these peers.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  And like, these are people, these are friends of his.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  So his procrastination was definitely fear-driven by his peers and by society at large.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And by the fact that it just takes a long time to study something like this.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  For instance, he left a area of his lawn unmowed for 20 years just to study what would happen. And out of like-

• 22:57Speaker 03

  That, that sounds like an excuse.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  No, man. Exactly.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  He's like, "I'm studying over there."

• 23:02Speaker 02

  But out of like the 20 different species he studied, 11 survived and nine died away. So boom, natural selection right there, just in a portion of his lawn.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Right, okay.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  But it took 20 years is the point.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Okay, so time, fear of his peers, fear of the public, and he had good reason to fear or be anxious because the world was a much different place than it is now. And he was well aware that what he was about to unleash on society

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  was going to create some big changes and some big problems. And we'll get into that right after this message.

• 23:48Josh Clark?

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• 23:58Speaker 02

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• 24:11Josh Clark?

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• 24:26Speaker 02

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• 24:49Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, redefining the fans' experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 25:18Josh Clark?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 25:24Speaker 05

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• 25:30Speaker 02

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• 25:33Speaker 05

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing. What the fans' experience is incredible.

• 25:40Josh Clark?

  It gave me a lot of pride. AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.

• 25:45Speaker 06

  Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  You know, you're never done decorating your home. You know what I mean?

• 25:54Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's a process. There's always something you could do or buy or update. The only question is, what's next? For us, our animals just wear out our rugs so quickly, it's usually a new rug.

• 26:05Josh Clark?

  Well, Chuck, whether you need a rug or whatever is next for you, you can go to Wayfair. It's the smart place to get it.

• 26:11Speaker 02

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• 26:23Josh Clark?

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• 27:02Speaker 03

  So Chuck, we're talking about Darwin. He's at his house, Down House.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  He's working on his manuscript. He's kind of procrastinating a little bit, and because it takes time, too. But he knows that he's about to unleash this complete change in paradigm.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  A poop storm.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Onto the world, exactly. And it's because the world was a much different place than it is today. Because Darwin hadn't talked about natural selection yet.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, religion, religious biology was biology.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  They didn't call it religious biology. That was just biology.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  So he was the first one to secularize it and make it just about the science.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, because before scientists thought like, well, God created this.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  And that is our starting point. Like, everything else, every other scientific explanation we have, has to trace back to creation.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Which is kind of, it can make science a little easier. But at the very, at the same time, it leaves you open to a huge problem when somebody comes along and can fill in all these other gaps.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Through a completely different explanation that doesn't use creationism. And that's what Darwin was doing with natural selection.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and add a fourth thing.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Man, you just keep them coming.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  There were two texts that were vital, and we talked about one of them, the Malthus Principle of Population. In 1844, there was a book written called The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. And it was published anonymously. For 40 years, no one knew who wrote it, because no one wanted to put their name on it.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Like, that's how radical it was. And it was slammed. Like, it was hugely popular. It was like a phenomenon. Like, everybody read it, and everybody slammed it. And it came out later. It was a guy named Robert Chambers. He was a Scottish journalist, but... What Darwin, it scared the crap out of Darwin.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  I'm sure, I'm sure Darwin was like, "Mother."

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz a lot, it was, "Mama." It was a lot of the same, uh, same ideas as he had, so what it did was, it caused him to basically rewrite his voluminous work and pare it down and armor it with sturdier armor over the next thirteen months.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Smart.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Very smart.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  I mean, you could say for him that that was a stroke of luck that that was published and he read it and saw what happened.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Dude, total stroke of luck. He might have been laughed out of existence.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  If he had have gotten there first.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  So, he, he goes back, redoubles his efforts, strengthens his argument.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Um, and again, he's combating not just the, I, the, the religious ideals of the time, but the religious ideals of science.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Like, most scientists at the time were deists, and deists believed that God created the universe, basically like a clockmaker makes a clock.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Wound it up and walked away, like, "See you later, good luck with everything," and then anything that happened as a result after that was the result of the machinations of this clock.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  And there was a, a, a theory that was fairly well accepted called, uh, catastraphism.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  And that basically sought to account fossils, cuz fossils were a big sticking point. Why were there clearly extinct animals that had lived before?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  There's fossils, we have them in our hands. Why do these kinda resemble the things that are alive today?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  That doesn't make any sense. Well, catastrophism, um, who, which was, uh, suggested by a guy named George Cuvier, and, uh, Cuvier said that catastrophism, which one?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  I like the second one, catastrophism.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Catastrophism.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Uh, it says that something happens, volcanoes, floods, pestilence, something very biblical.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Happens, and a species dies out in an area, and a new species comes in and fills it in. And maybe that species, just from living in proximity.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Was similar, uh, and they, uh, that, that explains why some are extinct and some are now here.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  I would also call that coincidences.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's another way to put it, that's another pronunciation.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  It wasn't like, super science-based.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Right, but this is these, like, these, this was a well-respected.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Scientist.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Um, and this was the prevailing thought at the time, that creationism and the natural sciences went hand in hand. Creationism was the basis for it, and Darwin is about to say, "You know that basis that everybody's built science on for the last several centuries?"

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  It's not, that's, that doesn't hold water.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  And then he went and threw up.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Again and again.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Apparently he threw up a lot.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, when his, uh, when On the Origin of the Species came out in 1859, he was at a spa, um, recovering from bouts of nausea.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  So, yeah, he was all throwing up.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  I feel bad for the guy.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  He was just racked with anxiety his entire life.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  But imagine that, imagine being racked with anxiety and still going through with it.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  It's pretty impressive.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  It is.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Uh, so, previous to its publication, another important thing happened, um, we mentioned earlier, Alfred Russell Wallace. He was a fellow Englishman and specimen collector, and he basically wrote almost exactly the same thing that Darwin had been working on. Sent it to Darwin, and, um, people urged them both to present their works at something called the Linnaean Society, uh, in 1858. They did so together as a team, but, um, it wasn't, it didn't kinda make much of a splash at the time. It wasn't till he officially published his work. That it, you know, made the splash.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Right, and Alfred, um, Alfred Russell Wallace actually was the impetus for him to publish, um, Origin of the Species.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  He, uh, he'd been sitting there dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating, um, not mowing his lawn.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  And, um, he got a letter from Wallace, like you said, a- and he realized, holy cow, Wallace has come up with the same thing.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  I've been working on this for 30 years. I- I'm, I'm not gonna, forget that, forget my anxiety, I'm just publishing this puppy.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  And, uh, he, he did, and it came out in 1859, um, and he was hailed as a villain and a genius.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  Depending on who you spoke to. And let's talk about the Origin of Species and what it says and what natural selection means, Chuck. Um, first of all, the official title of the book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  And that's why everybody calls it Origin of Species.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Because it's long and wordy.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 03

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• 34:45Speaker 03

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• 35:01Speaker 02

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• 35:25Josh Clark?

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• 37:38Speaker 03

  But what it basically says is that species adapt. They adapt due to population pressure.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  They adapt through competition with one another.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Between species, inside species. That when you see like slightly different traits, individual traits to be expected.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  But those individual traits can ultimately lead to a new species on a long enough timetable.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  If those traits make their, increase their chance of surviving to reproduction age.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  And enhance their ability to reproduce.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  Right?

• 38:20Speaker 02

  And if you, if you don't, if you aren't good at that, then you go bye bye.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Right. And this explains why some species are extinct, why the ones that are here today are the winners. And chillingly, that all of this is still going on.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  It's very, very slow, so we can't see it. It happens on a glacial time scale or geologic time scale. But it's still going on, and here's proof. The thing that he doesn't come out and state, but that wasn't lost on the Victorians, especially the religious Victorians, is that inherent in that argument.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  Is that man.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  The king of the world.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Is nothing more than an animal that evolved from who knows what.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, I bet, I bet he fretted over that so much because he believed it. But I think there are only two mentions of mankind in the entire work. But the implications were clear, like the public at large may not have been wise to it at first, but scientists were like, wait a minute. Are you saying that we came from, from apes?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  He's like, I'm at a spa recovering from nausea, I can't be reached.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying that upfront in plain English.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it caused, like you said, a poop storm.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I guess we should say Russell Wallace was a. He's been sort of lost to history as far as, you know, what most people know.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's sad.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  It is sad because he was a smart guy, but he wasn't, he had no standing like Darwin did. And that's kind of one of the reasons he was forgotten to history.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  Right. He, um, he was out in the field and he was, he seemed to be happiest out in the field after this, um, this theory was introduced. Um, he retreated back to the Malay Peninsula.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Uh, to, to collect, um, specimens.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he would sell them, which kind of degraded his standing, I think.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Right. Just, but he was using those funds to further fund more scientific exploration.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  You know, it's not like he was funding his opium habit or something like that.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  But the point is Darwin didn't need to sell it. So I think he was, people were like, well, this guy's collecting species and selling them. He's a merchant.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly. That's exactly right. And regardless of whether Wallace Russell was a, you know, a great scientist or, or not, it didn't matter. If you put these two men and their theories were exactly equal, but one was of higher social standing and greater wealth.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Well, that guy won.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  And that was Darwin.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Um, so Darwin became.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  He was the fittest.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  He, well, exactly.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Under Victorian aristocracy rules.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  But he became the, again, the rallying point, the fulcrum, the center of the universe in this new debate that he unleashed between creationism and evolution.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  That's still going on today. Literally, not today, but a couple of weeks ago. Right? So almost literally. Um, and he didn't like that at all. So what he said was, you know what? You guys talk this over. I'm going to go hit my, hit the spa.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  And, um,

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Throw up.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Do what you want with it.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  I'm going away.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  I've got a lawn to not mow.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  But lucky for him, he had a lot of supporters like right out of the gate.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, he had, he had both. He had, um, supporters, uh, scientists that I think some wanted.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Wanted to say this stuff all along, and now that they had such a like wonderful concise and well researched piece of work to back them up, they came out of the woodwork and like, yeah, see, this is great. But some people weren't, in fact, I think, oh, I can't remember the guy's name, someone he really respected and his wife really respected, basically slammed him and called it heresy. And that was really impactful, again, more anxiety, more throwing up.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  And there was a lot of name calling. There was a lot of political cartoons that were unflattering, and unflattering for the Victorian age. So basically, his head on a monkey or something like that.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  But while he had his detractors, he had his supporters. And there was one guy in particular named Thomas Huxley. And he was, I believe, the grandfather of Algeus Huxley.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Uh huh. And sometimes if you see Darwin's theory mentioned, you'll see the Darwin slash Huxley theory. Because Huxley basically was a religious man.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  And Darwin, I think firsthand, not just through the origin of the species, but through correspondence as well, convinced him like, no, dude, natural selection is actually right. And very ironically, just like Saul converting to Paul on the road to Damascus, Huxley converts from a religious fervent to a natural selection fervent.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  And he just takes it with religious zealotry and starts taking on anybody he can in debate, writing any article he can, and defending not just Darwin, but his his theory as well.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  And it came so much so that he came to be known as Darwin's Bulldog.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  And he actually coined the term agnostic.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. He was the one that coined that term to differentiate people like himself, who was, who were still believers in God.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  But also fervent believers in in natural selection as well.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Huh. That's pretty cool. So that wasn't the only thing he wrote. That was his life's work, for sure. But he wrote 11 more, published 11 more times before 1882. And then finally in 1973.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Which is pretty old for someone who was in such ill health his entire life.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  A heart attack finally got him.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  It's very sad.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  It is, but he lived a good, long, nauseated life.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  You know?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  That's a good point. So I guess we should talk a little bit about his legacy, right?

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  You did that kind of work, he passed away, you're gonna have a legacy.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Sure. They name a city in Australia after you.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Really?

• 44:20Speaker 03

  I believe it's Darwin, Australia. Please God, don't let it be New Zealand.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  You wanna look?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  No. Okay. I'm feeling like a gambling man today.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Gotcha. So his influence from then on and continues to be today.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Lamb calls it, rightfully so, a paradigm shift in science, society and literature. Like, it can't be understated. It was a game changer for kind of everything and the way things went. You were on one side or the other.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  It's like Mio Water. It changes everything. What's that? You haven't seen that ad?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Uh-uh.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  For like the little droplets of flavoring you can add to your water?

• 44:58Speaker 02

  I've seen that.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  So you haven't seen the ad where the guy's in the office talking and like as you, as they cut back and forth, everything keeps changing?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Uh-uh.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Because they're adding Mio. Oh, it's one of the better ads around. And you know me, I'm an ad aficionado.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  That's true. Well, one thing we can point to is that Herbert Spencer, he was a sociologist after Darwin, applied Darwinism to sociology in the form of social Darwinism, AKA survival of the fittest.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Which, it didn't bastardize it, but it definitely, he definitely used it for his own purposes to say that, you know what, the weak, we shouldn't even worry about the weak. If we wanna be a strong mankind, then let the weak die out.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  Well, you know, so this sociologist that came up with this idea of social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  That's a very Malthusian view of. Humanity and nature.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Because Malthus was basically saying like, look, man, we take care of the poor and everything.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  But if we do that, we're interfering with nature and we're gonna end up overburdening the population.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:14Speaker 03

  Because population's gonna grow geometrically and we're not gonna be able to support ourselves and society's gonna collapse.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  That was what Malthus was saying. This guy said, yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's weird that Darwin was in the middle of kind of both bookended by these two.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Two ideas.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  And I think it really just, you can kind of say like, it really just kind of, he was lacking a bit of evil. Where if he had been a little more evil, maybe he would've come up with social Darwinism himself.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Um, but he didn't. Herbert Spencer did. And it kind of took off like a rocket. This idea like, yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We don't need to pay taxes anymore.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  We don't need to tithe. We can just, you know, let the poor die in the streets. It's social Darwinism, survival of the fittest. We don't have to feel guilt for not taking care of these other people any longer. Survival of the fittest. They weren't meant to be. And basically, they replaced God's will with nature's will.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  In the, the, in explaining the cruelty of the world.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  You know?

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  And, um, like I said, it took off. It became what, what, uh, we call the eugenics movement very quickly.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, which was the idea that the government would actually get involved in weeding out, uh, the weaker, uh, parts of society.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you don't have to wait around for evolution to do this. We can speed it up by picking out the weakest and, and exterminating them.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Or at the very least, letting them exterminate themselves by only breeding, uh, you know, the, the boys from Brazil.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I finally saw half of that movie. I can't tell you how surprised I was to see, or surprised I was to see Steve Guttenberg.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  Oh, Gutz was one of the kids, wasn't he? He was like the first one. Yeah, yeah. God, I forgot about that. Oh, wait a minute. He was one of the kids from the experiment? No, he wasn't. He was like the journalist. Oh, was he? That's like blowing the cover off of this whole thing. I haven't seen it in a long time. Yeah. I know it was creepy, though. Yeah. So, yeah, possibly gave birth to eugenics. Which we should say, obviously, the Nazis loved. And they used that to rationalize the extermination of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, epileptics, the mentally handicapped, the blind, everybody. Guys who smelled like me? Yeah, he would have been in big trouble. Yeah. But prior to the Nazis doing this, the United States, Indiana, Georgia,

• 48:43Speaker 03

  all sorts of other states forced sterilization on people of similar stature. Yeah. And actually Adolf Hitler, well, Germany had its own sterilization program as well, but Adolf Hitler was apparently well aware of what was going on in America and was a pretty big fan of it. And if you don't believe me, go back and listen to our episode, "Is It Legal to Sterilize Addicts?" Oh, yeah. Because it's still going on today. That was a good one. Yeah. So what about this deathbed recant? Had you ever heard that? I have. Not true, apparently. So, he supposedly said on his deathbed, basically, I- I take it all back.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wish I hadn't have ever said this. Yeah. It's not true. You know, God is good. God's the one. And a woman from New England named Lady Hope claimed that she was there and took this confession. Yeah. And both his daughter and his son, who were both at his side while he died, said, "This lady was not at his deathbed. She never came to our house." Right. And she had absolutely no influence on our father's way of looking or judgment or opinions at all. He never recanted. To the end, he was an ardent supporter of natural selection. Yeah, that's a pretty good idea, though, if you're a creationist. Well, I mean, to make up that story?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Like, the father of evolution even changed his mind on his deathbed. If you look up today on the internet, like, I think Darwin Deathbed even will bring up, like, creationist website after creationist website that use it to support their claims.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  But it's bunk.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  It was debunked right afterward.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  And then Chuck, let me say one more thing about social Darwinism.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  This idea, although in a very cold, calculated sense, it might make sense.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  It doesn't appear in humanity's history. In fact, there's evidence from up to 500,000 years ago of severely disabled people, fossils, their fossils, their remains being found, where they could not possibly have lived to the age they lived to without being cared for by their community.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  So this idea that, you know, in a more primitive state, we just, you know, left people to die out in the weather because they couldn't keep up.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Doesn't hold water.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  Well, that's good to know.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. Very comforting that.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  So that means we were, innately have compassion as a species?

• 51:19Speaker 03

  I would guess that, yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  That's the way I like to look at it.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  I think it's one of the things that makes us human.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  But not just us.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Other species have compassion too.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Totes.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  So, um, maybe we should, uh, why don't you play us out with a little bit of Darwin, man?

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, the last paragraph of The Origin of the Species, to me, is one of the most beautiful things ever written, so I'm gonna read it.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank," and he's talking about his home in Kent.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  That patch of grass?

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, no, all of it. "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being growth with reproduction, inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduction, variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life," And from use and disuse, a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for

• 52:32Speaker 02

  life and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. That's where he's kind of skirting around things. And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Bravo.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Good stuff, Chuck. Not me.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Both of you. That was a great reading.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Chuck D.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  I felt like I was in our Halloween episode again.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 53:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was good, Chuck.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Don't thank me.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Chucks.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  I can just read.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  You got anything else?

• 53:27Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  I think that was a fine way to end this one. If you want to learn more about Charles Darwin, the man, and his ideas, you can type Darwin into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. It should bring up a whole bunch of articles, some of which we will record into podcasts.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, or that movie Creation is Really Good, or if you're into documentaries, there are tons of them. The BBC's got like a dozen.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, they love him there.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Well, since I said, "search bar," I probably did. It's time for listener mail.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Before the mail, there's a quick correction. In our Kent State episode, we said Mussolini had his brown shirts.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  There were the black shirts.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Duh.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  No biggie.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  It's the presence of all color, not the presence of some colors.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Brown is the new black, anyway.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Orange is. All right, I'm going to call this amputee, uh, amputee.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Like amputee, comma, amputee?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Uh, hey, guys. Been listening for a couple of years now and really enjoy it. As a 60-year-old woman who had her right leg amputated above the knee in 1969 due to cancer, I was especially interested in that podcast. Uh, first, I want to correct one offhand comment in which you stated that being an amputee probably becomes a focus of your life. Uh, not always. In my case, being an amputee did not become the focus. In fact, occasionally, friends, forget that I am an amputee now. I consider it a compliment. Um, as you said, life isn't over because a person becomes an amputee. I was married for 20 years, went to graduate school for my master's degree in counseling psychology, now have two wonderful grown children. Uh, worked from the age of 14 to 55 with time off for raising kids, and attended graduate school and have been able to travel quite a bit.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Uh, been lucky not to have experienced phantom pain. Uh, I have always had, and have been told by my doctors, will always have, phantom feeling, though.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  Weird. That is so weird.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  I know. Uh, it feels as though my amputated leg is present, but asleep. Uh, sort of a benign prickly feeling.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Uh, the feeling quickly faded into the background, and I only notice it now when I'm thinking about it. Uh, you may be interested also to know that the artificial leg I received in 1969 was literally a wooden leg.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  No way.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  From the knee down. Uh, I'm now on my fourth prost- uh, prosthesis.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Prosthesis? I thought she was gonna say, like, an old Bessie's still with me.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Knock, knock. Uh, I'm now on my fourth prosthesis, and they get better and better. My current leg is very high-tech and impressive.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  It can make coffee.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  That, that is from Denise, uh, Slat- Slatengren.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  From Arcata- Arcata, California.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Not Arcadia.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  That's Northern California.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  A-R-C-A-T-A.

• 56:14Speaker 03

  Thanks, Denise. You sound like a very well-adjusted person. Uh, and we appreciate you writing in, calling us out on that.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  And I hope you still have old Betty on the shelf somewhere, at least.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  It's Betsy Chuck.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Betsy?

• 56:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  I would keep it.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Just got it carved into the side.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  You know?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Um, thanks for writing in, and if, uh, any of you out there want to write in, share your story, we love hearing them. We're pretty much like the central clearinghouse for people's stories, so...

• 56:42Josh Clark?

  Bring them to us, we will disseminate them as best we can.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 56:46Josh Clark?

  You can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom with some good old country goodness and send it off to [email protected].

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 57:20Josh Clark?

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  Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of VivGart. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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