Why Charles Darwin Delayed For Decades Before Publishing His Bold Ideas On Evolution

Eighteenth-century observational scientist Charles Darwin wasn’t the first scientist to suggest that something akin to evolution was more responsible for life on Earth than were a few waves of God’s hands. But he was the first to back up his claims with trunk upon trunk of physical evidence. Did he wait twenty-one years to present his arguments to the world because he feared being called a heretic by the Church of England, which taught that the Biblical account of a six-day creation by God of Earth was fact? For decades, many scholars have answered questions like that with a “Yes! Maybe so!” 

But maybe not. 

The Evolution of Darwin’s Ideas on Evolution

In 1820, a 22-year-old Darwin embarked on a five-year trip around the world. During those years, he collected animal and plant specimens and fossils from the coast of South America and from the Galapagos Islands, the Cape of Good Hope, Australia, and several islands of the South Pacific, as well. Except for his visit to the Cape of Good Hope at the frozen, southern-most tip of the continent, Darwin didn’t visit Africa. This meant that in all of his land travels he may have seen plenty of monkeys, but he saw no great apes at all. 

Almost two years after Darwin returned to London, he saw a great ape for the first time. She was an orangutan. About three years old, she was the only orang at the London Zoological Gardens a/k/a Regent’s Park Zoo.

The zoo was having a terrible time importing orangutans and keeping them alive. In 1833 it had acquired its first living orangutan. A male, it died after three days. The zoo then built a heated house for giraffes and outfitted it with a cage for orangutans, and in 1837 housed a young female there. Her name was Lady Jane, usually shortened to Jenny. This was the orangutan Darwin observed. She was eventually joined by a second orangutan, Tommy, who died after about six months at the zoo. In an April 1, 1838 letter to his sister Susan, Darwin expressed his fascination with Jenny.

“I saw also the Ourang-outang in great perfection: the keeper showed her an apple, but would not give it her, whereupon she threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child.— She then looked very sulky & after two or three fits of pashion], the keeper said, “Jenny if you will stop bawling & be a good girl, I will give you the apple.— She certainly understood every word of this, &, though like a child, she had great work to stop whining, she at last succeeded, & then got the apple, with which she jumped into an arm chair & began eating it, with the most contented countenance imaginable.”

Darwin stayed with Jenny for several hours that first day and visited into the autumn, observing and even interacting with both Jenny and Tommy. Each orang was clothed in gender-appropriate human clothes. Both had been taught to pour and drink tea.

Fascinated with their human-like antics, Darwin incorporated his observations of their behaviors and emotional displays into journal notes, which were jotted quickly and, so, became rife with spelling and grammatical errors. On one such note, most of the ink is grey. One word, however, is written in red pencil or crayon. It is “Man.” (“Man” in red was also written on notes that were actually about humans.) This particular note said:

“Does not like being tickled under the arms. Tried to strike me & showed teeth, when I tried to plague her, with showing her food & not giving it her.

Both were astonished beyond measure at looking glass, looked at it every way, sideways, & with most steady surprise. — after some time stuck out lips, like kissing, to glass, & then the two did when they were first put together. — at last put hand behind glass at various distances, looked over it, rubbed front of glass, made faces at it — examined whole glass — put face quite close & pressed it — at last half refused to look at it — startled & seemed almost frightened, & evidently became cross because it could not understand puzzle. — Put body in all kinds of positions when approaching glass to examine it. 

As was made clear in another note, watching Jenny and Tommy was showing Darwin that the Church of England’s teachings about the Biblical six days of Creation and the origin of humankind reflected myth, not fact.  

“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals.” 

Darwin also wrote:

“Let man visit Ourang-outang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see its intelligence when spoken, as if it understood every word said —see its affection to those it knows, —see its passion & rage, sulkiness & very extreme of despair; let him look at savage, roasting his parent, naked, artless, not improving, yet improvable and then let him dare to boast of his proud preeminence.”

The luck of the London Zoo with orangutans eventually improved, though not by much. After Jenny and Tommy died, a second “Jenny” (this one may actually have been male) lived about three years and was visited by Queen Victoria and King Albert. She thrilled at Jenny’s tea-drinking and recognized her as “frightful & painfully and disagreeably human.”

The Long Pause before Publication

After meeting Jenny, Darwin waited roughly twenty-one years before he published his ideas about evolution, and he waited yet another twelve years or so to publish his ideas about the descent of the human species from apes.

Finally, in 1859’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Darwin proposed that all of the complex plants and animals of the modern world evolved from much simpler, pre-historic progenitors. They did so by “natural selection, a concept by which he meant accidental changes in chemistry, biology, or morphology that helped some organisms survive environmental pressures long enough to procreate. Then, in 1871, he published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In it, he applied his theory of evolution to the human species and boldly proposed that humans and modern apes share a common ancestor.

People laughed, but not everyone did. The New York Times called Origin “one of the most important contributions ever made to philosophic science.” 

In the nearly 140 years since Darwin’s death, many scholars and biographers have marveled at how long it took Darwin to announce the theories that he’d been muddling over. Some have suggested that he delayed publishing for fear of being accused of heresy by the Church of England. As aristocrats, Darwin his wife Emma would have had many devout Church members in their social group. Indeed, Emma herself was a believer, and so Charles’ devotion to her has occasionally been cited as perhaps the largest motivator of his foot-dragging.

Yet Emma was delightfully open-minded. She even copyedited Charles’ books. (His spelling was atrocious.) Historian of science John van Wyhe has argued convincingly against the idea that Darwin delayed publishing because he feared backlash. Wyhe argues mostly from an absence of evidence about fear. He doesn’t make claims about life events or emotional paroxysm that may have steared Darwin however temporarily from his publishing path. 

In the years leading up to the publication of Origin, the father of evolutionary science published fourteen books, laying out much of the evidence that would one day bolster his Origin claims. If van Wyhe is right, scholars have been “whistling Dixie” for the past decades about Darwin’s trepidations. There may have been no huge emotional roadblocks at all in Darwin’s way. Having been bitten as a very young man during his around-the-world tour by a bug that bequeathed him a lifetime of chronic fever, heart disease, and gastrointestinal complaints, Darwin was often ill in bed. Surely that slowed his writing. 

But also he was a very careful scientist. 

Writing fourteen books would have taken anyone an awful lot of time. Maybe “sorry; busy” was all that delayed Darwin in revealing to the world the intellectual treasures to be discovered by any reader in his two most priceless books.

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