Darwin’s mystery illness
by Russell Grigg
Charles Darwin suffered extreme ill-health for most of his working life. The New
Encyclopaedia Britannica says, ‘Some of the symptoms—painful
flatulence, vomiting, insomnia, palpitations—appeared in force as soon as
he began his first transmutation notebook, in 1837. [This is the year after he returned
to England from his five-year voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle.] Although he
was exposed to insects in South America and could possibly have caught Chagas’
or some other tropical disease, a careful analysis of the attacks in the context
of his activities points to psychogenic origins.’1 (Psychogenic means originating in the mind or in
mental condition.) Other symptoms included ‘nausea, headache … sensitive
stomach, spells of faintness, twitching muscles, spinning head, spots before the
eyes.’2 Today we would
call this an anxiety-caused psychoneurosis.3
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So then, what caused this condition of extreme stress in Darwin? What was he so
worried about? And how is it relevant to us today?
Rejection of religious influences
Charles’s thinking and writing on the subject of evolution and natural selection
caused him to reject all the religious influences in his life. One of these was
William Paley.
In his early twenties Charles was willing to become an Anglican clergyman. As part
of his theological studies at Cambridge he read William Paley’s book Natural
Theology,4 which begins
with the famous ‘watch’ argument for creation (a watch requires a watchmaker
and so design requires a Designer), about which Charles said, ‘I do not think
I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology.
I could almost formerly have said it by heart.’5
Another religious influence was his wife Emma, whom he married in 1839, and who
used to read the Bible to their children.
As Charles developed his theory of natural selection, these influences diminished.
His son Francis recalled him as saying, ‘I never gave up Christianity until
I was forty years of age.’6
And the death of his eldest daughter Annie from fever at this period of his life
hammered the final nail in the coffin of his Christianity.
More than all this however, Darwin knew that his theory was sheer atheistic materialism—a
bombshell which when released on Victorian society would undermine people’s
faith in God, the Bible, and the Church. In effect, he was shaking his fist at Almighty
God. Professor Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge, the foremost geologist of his day and
a creationist, recognized this as soon as he read the Origin, about 1861.
He wrote, ‘From first to last it is a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked
and served up…And why is this done? For no other reason, I am sure, except
to make us independent of a Creator.’7
Darwin’s chief proponent was the most prominent unbeliever, hater of religion,
and arch-enemy of the Church of his day—Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s
bulldog’. Sir Julian Huxley, Thomas’s grandson, who gave the keynote
address at the centenary celebration of the publishing of the Origin, held
in Chicago in 1959, said, ‘Darwin’s real achievement was to remove the
whole idea of God as the creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion.’
8,9
Psychologically there can be little doubt that Charles Darwin suffered from feelings
of guilt. These undoubtedly arose from his desire to escape from God and from the
force of Paley’s arguments about design in his Natural Theology.
That is, Darwin’s theory of natural selection was his attempt to explain design
without the need for an intelligent Designer. Professor Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard
University concurs; he believes that ‘Darwin constructed the theory of natural
selection in large measure as a direct refutation of the argument from design’.10,11
However, there is more to it than that. Natural selection to Darwin was not something
progressive, as many modern writers portray it, much less a process that God used
to create, as theistic evolutionists proclaim it; rather it was something which
was utterly planless and purposeless—Gould refers to it as ‘the naturalism
of purposelessness’.12
Darwin knew that this was an idea which could and would destroy the faith of millions
of believers—and he was the one who was about to unleash it on an unsuspecting
world. But what if he was wrong? How could he accept the responsibility for what
it would do to others? It is little wonder that he ‘broke out in boils’
(see below), referred to the Origin as ‘my accursed book’13 and seems to have thought
of himself as a ‘Devil’s Chaplain’.14
Publication of On the Origin of Species
The result was that Darwin put off publishing his work for 20 years. It was only
the fact that in June 1858 he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace (a naturalist
working in the Malay Archipelago) with a manuscript that perfectly summarized the
theory of natural selection which Charles had for so long been contemplating that
finally galvanized him into action. As a result, he abandoned his plans to write
a multi-volume epic and instead produced a single-volume ‘Abstract’,
as he described it several times in the Introduction. This ‘Abstract’
was published on November 24, 1859, with the title, On the Origin of Species.15
There was considerable trauma associated with this. In the year leading up to publication
he was rarely able to write for more than 20 minutes at a time without stomach pains,
and he finished the proofs on October 1, 1859, in between fits of vomiting.
Ten days before the proofs were bound he wrote to his friend J.D. Hooker, ‘I
have been very bad lately; having had an awful "crisis" one leg swelled
like elephantiasis—eyes almost closed up—covered with a rash & fiery
Boils: but they tell me it will surely do me much good.—it was like living
in Hell.’16,17 His modern biographers talk of his ‘self-doubt,
his nagging, gnawing fear that "I … have devoted my life to a phantasy"’.18
He was too sick to be on hand in London when the first copies were sold, or to attend
the debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce held at Oxford on
June 30, 1860, or to attend the Royal Society of London meeting that awarded him
its Copley Medal in November 1864. 19,20 The same year he wrote
to Hooker, ‘I shd [sic] suppose few human beings had vomited so often
during the last 5 months.’ 21
What Darwin did not know
We now know that if Darwin could have foreseen coming scientific developments, he
would have had good reason to be concerned that his theory might one day be proved
wrong.
In particular, Gregor Mendel had not yet established and published his work on the
laws of heredity and genetics, which said that the characteristics of offspring
are passed on from parents according to precise mathematical ratios and do not derive
from chance random processes in what Darwin called ‘blending inheritance’.
James Joule, R.J.E. Clausius, and Lord Kelvin were only just developing the concepts
of thermodynamics, the first law of which states that energy can neither be created
nor destroyed (so the present universe could not have created itself), and the second
law of which says that the universe is proceeding in a downward degenerating direction
of increasing disorganization (so things overall do not of themselves become more
organized with time).
Louis Pasteur was just beginning his famous experiments which showed that life (even
microbial life) comes from life, not from non-life.
The mathematical laws of probability, which show that the odds of life’s occurring
by chance are effectively zero, had not yet been applied to the theory of evolution.
Molecular biology, with its revelation that the cell is so enormously complex that
it could not possibly have been formed by chance, had not yet commenced.
The fossil record had not yet been investigated sufficiently for palaeontologists
to be able to say, as they now do, that chains of intermediate ‘links’
do not exist.
Any one of these concepts or laws, if known to Charles Darwin at the time he was
writing his Origin (1856–59), would have been enough to torpedo his
ideas; taken all together they kill the theory of evolution stone dead!
Relevance today
Today all these counters to the theory of evolution are known and, as such, form
a compelling case against evolution. In short, they indicate that evolution could
not have taken place, while the fossil record shows that evolution did
not take place. The incredible thing is that otherwise rational scientists continue
to cling to the concept of evolution, modifying it in any way they can to get around
the proofs against it, regardless of the destructive moral and social effects that
evolutionary theory has on society. As Michael Denton says, ‘… today
it is perhaps the Darwinian view of nature more than any other that is responsible
for the agnostic and sceptical outlook of the twentieth century.’22 Darwin did well to be anxious about the long-term
effects of his theory!
But why has this happened? Why has the theory become so much more important than
the evidence necessary to sustain it?
Answer: Because of what the alternative involves. If the biblical
account of creation is true, then there will be a Day of Judgment, for God the Creator
has said that He has ‘appointed a day in which He will
judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained [namely
Jesus]; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that
He raised Him from the dead’ (Acts 17:31).
Related articles
References and notes
- The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1992, Vol. 16,
p. 980. Return to Text.
- Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution,
Chatto and Windus, London, 1959, pp. 108–9. Return to
Text.
- Sir George Pickering, the renowned English clinical researcher
and Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, described in Chambers Biographical
Dictionary as ‘a key figure in medical education in Britain from
the 1950s’, wrote concerning Darwin, ‘The case for a psychoneurosis
is first that the symptoms suggest it, and, taken in their entirety, they fit nothing
else. Second, there is no evidence that any physical signs were ever found as they
should have been after forty years of organic disease, and Darwin consulted the
best physicians of his day….Third, the circumstances precipitating the attacks
are right. Fourth, the illness got better towards the end of his life, which is
quite unlike organic disease. Lastly, no other diagnosis that has been proposed,
or that I can think of, fits all the facts.’—George Pickering, Creative
Malady, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, 1974, p. 142.
Return to Text.
- William Paley, The Works of William Paley, Vol. 4,
‘Natural Theology’, William Baynes and Son, London, 1825, p. 1ff. Return to Text.
- Cited from William R. Fix, The Bone Peddlers, Macmillan,
New York, 1984, p. 178. Return to Text.
- Cited from Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin,
Michael Joseph Ltd, London, 1991, p. 658. Return to Text.
- Cited from Ronald Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin,
Random House, New York, 1984, p. 139. Return to Text.
- Cited from Ref. 5, p. 213. Return to Text.
- English psychiatrist Dr Rankine Good links Darwin’s
health symptoms with his feelings of resentment towards his tyrannical father and
says, ‘Thus, if Darwin did not slay his father in the flesh, then he certainly
slew the Heavenly Father in the realm of natural history.’ Cited from Ralph
Colp, To Be An Invalid, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 123.
Return to Text.
- Transcript of a talk given by Prof. Stephen Gould on June
6, 1990, at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, entitled ‘The Darwinian
Revolution of Thought’. See Carl Wieland, ‘Darwin’s real message:
have you missed it?’, Creation magazine, Vol. 14 No. 4,
(September–November 1992), pp. 16–18. See also Darwin’s comments
on ‘design in Nature, as given by Paley’ in Life and Letters of Charles
Darwin, Edited by Francis Darwin, D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1911,
Vol. 1, pp. 278–79. Return to Text.
- It is true that in the second edition of the Origin
(1860) Darwin added ‘by the Creator’ after the word ‘breathed’
in the last sentence of his book, which read in the first edition, ‘There
is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed into a few forms or into one…’. However, as this concept is
totally foreign to the entire ethos of the Origin, the addition would appear
to have been ‘a sop to mollify the Christian community’—Ian Taylor,
In the Minds of Men, TFE Publishing, Toronto, 1984, p. 463, n.9.
Return to Text.
- Ref. 10. Return to Text.
- Ref. 6, p. 475. Return to Text.
- Ref. 6, p. 449. Return to Text.
- The full title of the first five editions was On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life. In the sixth edition Darwin dropped the word
‘On’. We shall refer to it as the Origin.
Return to Text.
- Cited from Ref. 6, p. 476. Return to
Text.
- These symptoms suggest a physical cause, but it is well known
that extreme psychological stress makes physical illness more likely.
Return to Text.
- Cited from Ref. 6. p.477. Return to Text.
- Sir George Pickering wrote, ‘The symptoms of psychoneurosis
are the patient’s own answer to his otherwise intolerable conflict.’—Ref.
3, p. 33. Return to Text.
- In further support of this thesis it should be noted that,
‘Throughout the next decades Darwin’s maladies waxed and waned. But
during the last decade of his life, when he concentrated on botanical research and
no longer speculated about evolution, he experienced the best health since his years
at Cambridge.’—Ref. 1, p. 980. Return to Text.
- Cited from Ref. 9, p. 77. Return to Text.
- Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler
and Adler, Maryland, 1986, p. 358. Return to Text.
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