Darwin on Man

Darwin on Man (1974), is an edition of Charles Darwin’s early notebooks, annotated by Paul Barrett and with an introduction by the American cognitive scientist Howard Gruber. The notebooks, previously unpublished and known to scholars as the “M and N notebooks,” contain the great Victorian scientist’s thoughts and jottings from his 30th year, when he first formulated the theory of natural selection. Gruber’s introduction, entitled “A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity,” attempts to trace Darwin’s thought processes, as recorded in the notebooks, and formulate a general theory of scientific discovery. The New York Times declared that Barrett and Gruber’s volume “seal[s] the coffin of Darwin's detractors” by conclusively demonstrating that the biologist—historically portrayed as a plodding assembler of facts—was, in reality. an imaginative pioneer comparable to Newton or Einstein.

Gruber’s introduction to the volume makes two central arguments about human creativity. The first is that great discoveries and inventions do not arrive in sudden “eureka” moments, despite the popular stories about Archimedes’s bath and Newton’s apple orchard. The second is that great ideas are not the product of “genius,” some special, irreducible quality. Instead, great discoveries come about through processes that are at least theoretically accessible to all human beings: hard work, imaginative speculation, and deductive reasoning.

Gruber begins with the event which has often been described as Darwin’s “eureka” moment. It happened on September 28, 1838, after the young scientist had read the work of the demographer Thomas Malthus, in his own words “for amusement.” Malthus expressed in particularly dramatic terms the negative role of natural selection. His theory of population argued that populations tend to increase until scarcity eliminates the poorest and weakest members of society. Darwin had long been familiar with the idea, but Malthus’s dramatic language jogged his imagination, and Darwin conceived the idea that natural selection could be a creative force.



From here Gruber moves back through Darwin’s notebooks to show that this apparently sudden moment of insight was, in reality, the culmination of a long process of thought, speculation, and revision. More than a year earlier, Darwin had started his first notebook on “transmutation.” In the meantime, he had developed and abandoned at least two alternative theories. Gruber attempts to construct one of these theories, a “monad theory” in which elementary life forms come into being with fixed lifespans and die all at once. Gruber demonstrates that in developing these theories, far from working with some unique form of genius, Darwin drew on thought processes familiar to us all—albeit developed to a high degree and diligently applied.

Gruber argues that Darwin’s creative process was not only slow but laborious and conscious. He notes that when Darwin finally lighted upon the theory of natural selection, the scientist did not record in his notebook any particular sense of triumph or excitement: he experienced his discovery as the product of hard, long, and ongoing work, not as a sudden realization.

Gruber and Barrett give the “M and N notebooks” the title “The Notebooks on Man, Mind, and Materialism,” noting also Darwin’s own description of them as “full of Metaphysics on Morals.” Early on, the notebooks reveal Darwin’s conviction that there is some form of evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals (undermining the idea that Darwin developed this idea only under external pressure).



The notebooks also demonstrate that the young man—often accused by his detractors of lacking humanistic feeling—in fact, had a profound appreciation for the arts and philosophy. His notes show him reading and commenting on authors from Plato, Locke, Hume, and Burke to Montaigne, Lessing, and the epic poet Edmund Spenser. Darwin’s notes on Spenser’s descriptions of rage appear to foreshadow the biologist’s own later writings on the physiology of emotion. Elsewhere, Darwin compares his own imaginative relationship with nature to that of the poet Wordsworth: “I, a geologist, have ill‐defined notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface, etc. truly poetical. (V. Wordsworth about sciences being sufficiently habitual to become poetical.) The botanist might so view plants and trees…I am sure I remember my pleasure in Kensington Gardens has often been greatly excited by looking at trees as great compound animals united by wonderful and mysterious manner…There is much imagination in every view.”

After his discovery of natural selection, the notebooks show Darwin reconsidering all of human behavior in its light, from bold philosophical questions such as the nature of beauty to the report of a “Shrewsbury gentleman, unnatural union with turkey cock.”

The notebooks also shed light on the depth of Darwin’s materialism, suggesting that it was his skepticism about the possibility of a non-material mind or soul which made him fear to publish his ideas. While several contemporary theories of evolution existed, all of them regarded human consciousness as special, non-material, and inexplicable. Darwin’s theory sought to explain consciousness in terms of natural forces and processes, and it was this materialism that he was reluctant to reveal to the public. At one moment, he warns himself “to avoid stating how far, I believe, in Materialism, say only that emotions, Instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because the brain of child resembles parent stock.”



However, the notebooks leave little room for doubt about how far Darwin believed in materialism: “Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. — The mind is a function of body.”