Was Charles Darwin lucky in love?

A couple of weeks back was Valentine’s day, a day when the typical animal scientists walk past restaurants and wonder why they’re so busy. But was one of the most influential scientists of all time, Charles Darwin, as prolific in love as he was at coming up with world changing theories? Author of ‘Beyond Primates: essays on Darwin and evolution’, Rebecca Coffey.

Rebecca - Well, I think he was very successful in love. He was gobsmacked by love. In fact, when he got back from his five year voyage throughout the southern hemisphere on the HMS Beagle. On that voyage, they had gone throughout most of the southern hemisphere to some quite cold and some quite warm climates. Every time they hit a port, he would get off and take an amazing adventure. And when he came back, he began to visit with a young woman named Emma Wedgwood. He was gobsmacked by love for her. He was terribly nervous about his own appearance because evidently he had a kind of flabby nose that the captain didn't like at all. And in fact had almost refused to let him be the scientist on board because the captain was an adherent of a fake science called physiognomy, in which you thought you could decipher character and temperament traits from the shape of certain aspects of a person's face. But Darwin walked away from that feeling terribly self-conscious of his nose. He courted Emma Wedgwood. He proposed to her because in those days, you couldn't court a woman without proposing. And she accepted. But there was one huge problem with the fact that he had fallen in love with Emma, and it was that she was his first cousin, and he should have known better than to do that because he was the scientist who had written about the fact that inbreeding caused problems for animals and that great apes avoided it entirely, went to great lengths to avoid it entirely. So what made him think that it was okay for him to do that?

Will - As you say, the irony really should not have been lost on him. Did it have any effect?

Rebecca - Well, it did. Now let me, in his defence, say that both he and Emma were from long lines of interbreeding <laugh>, as were most aristocrats in that day. Because British aristocrats wanted to protect land holdings. Charles Darwin should have avoided it. We can't really say that cause made an effect. In the case of the Darwin's, they had 10 children, three of them died young. The rest of them always seemed very frail to their parents. And in fact, of the surviving Darwin children, three or four of them couldn't procreate, which indicates that their genetic line by that point was critically weak.

Will - They did manage to have children. And how was the state of the relationship between the two of them? Because it seems like Darwin was perhaps a little bit apprehensive of marrying her in the first place.

Rebecca - Right. He didn't feel that he was well established enough in life. He thought that he was ugly. He had lots of ideas about how he wanted to spend his time and having a wife didn't fit into them at all. And he made two lists. One was called marry and one was called not marry. For marriage, he says - 'children, constant companions and friends in old age, it's better than a dog.' Anyhow, 'someone to take care of the house, charms of music and female chit chat.' To not marry, 'freedom to go wherever one likes conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives, loss of time, no fatness and idleness.' So he had very severe qualms about getting married in the first place. But he did it because he was lonely. He thought he was ugly. She was level headed pretty enough, an excellent pianist who had studied under Chopin briefly, and she really liked the guy and they were happy for the rest of their lives.

Will - There is truly hope for us all then, isn't there? But is there anything to the idea that Darwin's work and outlook changed after this marriage had happened?

Rebecca - Well, Darwin was a very precise observational scientist, his descriptions of the organisms that he collected, thousands of living and dead plants and animals in his five year journey through the southern hemisphere, his descriptions were impeccable. So he was very reliable and astute as an observer. Darwin worked at home and while he worked at home, three of his children sickened and died. Imagine the sadness in a home when three of the children die. Imagine the children's love of the mother and father and the father and mother's love of the children. So Darwin worked at home in an intense atmosphere of love. Now since then, lots of research has been done showing that emotion influences memories as they're experienced and as they are recalled. So Darwin writing from deep within a sea of love and appreciation for how critical love is to life began to describe love in animals, even in insects. He said it is certain that animals love each other. Even today, some scientists will back up that point of view. Most scientists are much more clinical about the whole thing, saying that love, certainly romantic love, requires a human to have a sense of imagination and be able to form hope for the future. That it's more than a physiological response, that it depends on a certain cognitive ability to see beyond the moment and the physical impulse and into the future. Darwin didn't seem to think so. He thought animals loved each other. He described their love dances, their love ardour. And in that way, he seemed to have made a fundamental scientific error of confusing his own impulses with those of the species that he was studying. Yes, those are mistakes, but Darwin is one of the stars of science in the world. And so on the veneer of his reputation, these are not more than slight scratches. The man was brilliant and his contributions will last forever.