Charles Darwin: The Student, the Naturalist and the Family Man

Charles Robert Darwin was born 200 years ago. He is best known for his theory of the evolution of life by natural selection, which challenged the religious view of his time of God being the Creator of everything.
This website asks the questions:

• Did Darwin really show that we came from animals?
  
  
• Was Darwin's theory good for the world or bad for it?
  
  
• Was Darwin's influence exaggerated?
  
  
• Is the theory still just a theory, or has it now been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt by scientific method?
  His influence has been considerable, but his importance has been exaggerated greatly by his supporters.

• Some supporters have taken his theory as justification for enormous and violent changes to the world, (see THE GRIM AND VIOLENT HARVEST OF HUMANISM). Yet others have encouraged a moral vacuum, by removing the necessity for a Creator and much of the West has experienced social breakdown that, exactly as forecast by Darwin's contemporaries, has been catastrophic (MORAL VACUUM, and IS IT FAIR TO BLAME DARWIN FOR HIS FOLLOWERS' ACTIONS?)
  
  
• Is the theory confirmed? Has life been found to have begun naturally, or did it arise supernaturally? Are small mutational changes confirmed by the fossil record to be the mechanism for the evolution of all species out bacteria? The honest answer is no more than when Darwin made his proposal -DARWINISM - AS UNPROVEN AS EVER.

FAMILY BACKGROUND - EVERY FAMILY HAS ITS DARK SIDE

Charles Darwin, born in 1709, was the second and youngest son, the fifth child, in a family of 6 children of Robert Darwin married to Susanna Wedgwood. Robert Darwin was a doctor in Shrewsbury to wealthy members of the town and had invested his family income wisely. He was a large man and stopped weighing himself when he reached 24 stone.

Robert Darwin was one of 14 children of a somewhat profligate doctor, Erasmus Darwin who had children by 3 women. One of these he did not marry, another of them was married when he began an affair with her. His first wife died of cirrhosis of the liver brought on by alcohol abuse, along with a large overdose of morphine administered by Erasmus. Erasmus was a Freemason and a botanist and advanced a theory of evolution, in a book called "Zoonomia", some time before Jean-Baptiste Lamarck or, much later, his grandson, Charles. He died before Charles was born.

A friend of Erasmus Darwin was Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter. When Josiah's business partner died, Erasmus helped him with the business and as a result a long term friendship between the families began. Robert Darwin married Josiah's daughter, Susanna Wedgwood. Later Charles Darwin was to marry his cousin Emma Wedgwood, the daughter of his mother's brother, Josiah II.

EDUCATION 5-18 years

Charles Darwin's mother died when he was 8 years old. He started his education at a school run by a Unitarian minister, because his mother was a Unitarian and his father as a boy had attended the Unitarian chapel. But Robert had been christened in the Church of England and later attended the local church. From 18-25 Charles attended Shrewsbury School, and was a boarder, despite living less than a mile from it.

He recalls in his autobiography how he used to visit his home in the evening and pray to God to help him run quickly back to school by lock-up. He attributed his speed more to prayer than ability. When he left school he felt his teachers would have considered that he was a lower than average achiever. His father remarked "you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family". But outside his classical school education Charles had found a growing interest in wildlife and, thanks to his elder brother's home laboratory, chemistry - so much so that Charles acquired the nickname "gas".

At 16 years of age Charles's father took him from school and sent him to Edinburgh University to learn medicine. But he soon worked out that the property his father would leave him meant he need never be a doctor, so his efforts were not great. However he met a number of people who fed his interest in natural sciences. He also came across Lamarck's evolution theory, along with his grandfather's Zoonomia, with which he was "disappointed; the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given."

DARWIN THE CLERGYMAN, OR THE CHRISTIAN NATURALIST?

After two years at Edinburgh, much of which was spent holidaying, shooting and fishing at the Wedgwood's estate, at Maer, Staffordshire, his father decided Charles should go to Cambridge, with a view to becoming a clergyman. He considered carefully whether he believed the doctrines of the Church of England and decided "as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted".

Darwin later reflected that his time at Cambridge had been as wasted as his school and Edinburgh years, with too much time spent hunting, shooting and drinking. But, apart from beginning his important beetle collection, he also spent considerable time with a number of deeply religious men, who were also the finest scientists. One was Professor John Stevens Henslow. Another was Mr Blenslow, a Fenland vicar, who later described the fish on the "Beagle" voyage. These and others impressed Darwin, not only with their science but also with their care for the poor and other unfortunate people.

Before leaving Cambridge Darwin went, at Henslow's suggestion, on a geology field trip to North Wales with the famous, and also very religious, Professor Adam Sedgwick, who found Darwin to be an easily distracted student, but taught him some important principles of rock study and collection.

Henslow's next direction of Darwin was to suggest he took up the unpaid post of Naturalist on the survey ship "Beagle", due to sail round South America under the captaincy of Robert Fitzroy, later to be Admiral and Governor of New Zealand. Fitzroy, like Darwin at the time, was a deeply religious man, and offered to share his cabin with him. Darwin's father was persuaded to fund his son's trip, the cost of which vastly exceeded Darwin's usual allowance.

NEW GEOLOGY AND DOUBTS OVER FAITH

On this 5 year trip, beginning in December 1831, Darwin became famous for the care with which he studied and reported his findings in his Journal, in both biology and geology. He took Charles Lyell's first volume of "Principles of Geology" in which Lyell proposed rocks were not all formed catastrophically under Noah's Flood and successive cataclysms, as had been assumed by most geologists of his day, but had taken long periods of time. Darwin gradually assumed this position himself during the course of the voyage. He published his Journal and Remarks 1832-5 in 1838, initially as one volume of Captain Fitzroy's account of the voyage.

Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood on January 29th 1839. Emma was the youngest of seven children of Josiah II. Born in 1808, Emma and her sister Fanny had known Charles and his family all their lives and had helped persuade Robert Darwin to sponsor his son's trip on the "Beagle". She had turned down several offers of marriage before Charles proposed to her when they were both 30.

Emma continued all her life as a devout but non-conformist Christian. Almost as soon as they were married Charles developed an illness that he needed her help to nurse him through. She was a crucial factor is his scientific achievements as she humoured and helped him endure bouts of illness for the rest of his life. She bore him 10 children, some of whom developed eminent careers, like Sir George Darwin, as a scientist.

Emma had nursed her mother and her elder sister before her marriage, and after it she had to nurse several of their children, three of whom died as children. Emma and Charles had difficult times in their marriage due to the conflict between Emma's Christian beliefs and Charles's theory of evolution. This was compounded during the painful sickness and eventual death of their oldest and Charles's favourite daughter, Anne, of Scarlet Fever in 1851. Her death brought on what had been growing for some time - a final departure from the orthodox Christian view of God by Charles, who took on Thomas Huxley's newly coined word "agnostic" to describe himself.

This extreme disappointment with God undoubtedly contributed Darwin's loss of his ealier faith, but he was still hesitant to publish his book, which he kept in manuscript form for many years knowing that his wife would be upset at its main suggestion, that creation did not require God any more than a remote instigator of life. Indeed she was, later. However, when it appeard Alfred Wallace was going to publish work containing similar ideas, Darwin went ahead and completed his text for publication.

DARWIN'S PUBLICATIONS

His publication of Origin of Species in 1859 caused some, but not overwhelming, interest and far from instant approval and conviction. Most of the ideas about gradualism had been widely discussed for some time.
The expression Natural Selection was taken from Scottish arboriculturalist Patrick Matthew who coined the phrase "the natural law of selection" in a book published in 1831, before the Beagle sailed. Darwin acknowledged this fact in his Historical Sketch.

Nor did he coin the expression "survival of the fittest" which came from Herbert Spencer. Spencer had written pamphlets in the 1850's arguing for gradualist evolution as opposed to Biblical teaching, and coined the phrase in 1864, which was quickly adopted by Wallace and Darwin.

Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, had proposed a classification system that assumed considerable variation and adaptation within each "genus" - Linnaeus's term for the original kinds God had made.
The greatest research scientists of Darwin's day - like Pasteur who showed that life could not spontaneously generate, and Mendel, the geneticist - found the theory irrelevant.

Darwin's theory went beyond science; in proposing his theory for the development of life, he was aware of skepticism over beginning his theory without God. So in the last paragraph of his The Origin of Species he wrote "there is grandeur in the view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one..."  Was Darwin being deceitful, to mollify the eminent Christian scientists of his day? Later he certainly mused that he thought life could have emerged from some warm little pond of chemicals somewhere.

In all Darwin wrote 14 books as well as many papers and monologues. Among the books was The Descent of Man, 1871, in which he proposed that humans were no different from other forms of life. In his The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872, he claimed that human emotional behaviour also reflected our evolutionary past. Darwin's theory is more than one book. The totality of his thinking in several publications has been his legacy, to be developed by others.

DARWIN'S ILLNESSES

Darwin's serious and lifelong illnesses have been studied and discussed for a century.

At least three books and many scholarly articles written about them, but the details are not widely known, perhaps because his weaknesses and difficulties are not felt to be in keeping with his status as a scientific hero. We therefore include academic references to these matters here.

Darwin's illnesses began when he was about 6 years old and became very severe from about age 28. "Darwin himself was an invalid from the age of 30" concludes Darwin scholar Michael Ruse (2003, p1523).

"Much of Darwin's daily life was lived on a rack which consisted of fluctuating degrees of pain" wrote Ralph Colp (1977, p97). His symptoms included severe depression, insomnia, hysterical crying, dying sensations, shaking, fainting spells, muscle twitches, shortness or breath, trembling, nausea, vomiting, headaches, cardiac palpitations, ringing in ears (possibly tinnitus), painful flatulence, and gastric upsets, severe anxiety and various visual hallucinations - all of which commonly have psychological origins.. (Barloon and Noyes, 1997; Picover, 1998, p290; Bean 1978,p573, Pasnau, 1990).

Some speculate that part of Darwin's mental problems were due to his nagging fear that he had devoted his "life to a fantasy" - and to a "dangerous one" at that (Desmond and Moore, 1991, p477).

Others, including Darwin's own wife, Emma, argued that his mental problems stemmed from guilt over his life's goal to refute the argument of God from design (Bean, 1978, p574; p28; Pasnau, 1990, p121).

In 1875 Darwin wrote to fellow scientist Robert Hooker "You ask about my book, and all I can say is that I am ready to commit suicide: I thought it was decently written, but I find so much wants rewriting….I begin to think that every one who publishes a book is a fool" (quoted in Colp, 1977, p 228).

In describing his own condition Darwin wrote: "I am forced to live... very quietly and am able to see scarcely anybody and cannot talk long with my nearest relations" (Bowlby, 1990, p240). Darwin once complained that speaking for "only a few minutes" to the Linnaean Society "brought on 24 hours vomiting" (Darwin, 1994, p98-9).

Darwin appears to have been a very troubled man, displaying symptoms of agoraphobia and psychoneurosis. He is to be admired for persisting with work during so much of his painful life. Perhaps the greater heroine is his wife Emma, who nursed him so faithfully, despite the conflict that his proposals had on her faith. Darwin relied on her continually through all his married life.

REFLECTIONS ON DARWIN'S LIFE

In so many ways Charles Darwin showed himself in sad rebellion against his Maker, in whom he believed with such certainty for his early life. Nearing his death in 1882 a rumour circulated that an evangelist Lady Hope spoke to him and heard him renounce his earlier theory in the words "ah, I was young then". He had also asked to have the window opened so that he could hear the children in the nearby school singing hymns. This story is not confirmed by the family. His daughters maintained he did not convert to Christianity (Lady Hope never said he did), but said his last words were directed to Emma by saying "remember what a good wife you have been". Emma said that Darwin's last words were to her when he said "I am not in the least afraid to die".

Darwin is universally described as a gentle person, with a deep sense of concern for his fellow men. His family were well known supporters of the abolition of the slave trade. Perhaps this is why the theory he supported was named after him - and still bears his name. He was a man of integrity and humility, unlike many of his admirers and followers. It was much less honourable people who latched onto the idea of the "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection" and developed their own evil schemes. The GRIM AND VIOLENT HARVEST OF HUMANISM, following.

THE GRIM AND VIOLENT HARVEST OF HUMANISM

Adolph Hitler (whose Aryan supremacy idea was built on Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest) and Stalin (who had also been a theology student in earlier life, but became an atheist after reading Origin of Species) were two of Darwin's admirers who valued human life least. And although Darwin never visited China, his theory did and helped develop Chinese Marxism and Mao Zedong.

Mao Zedong was profoundly influenced by Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species, Mao recalls in his autobiography, he had read as a student.   As Adnan Oktar  writes  "When conflict, which is one of the most important components of communism, joined forces with Darwinist thought, which regards human beings as a species of animal, the result was the deaths of millions of people and the ruining of many more lives. That is why the policies of Mao and his followers were not changed by the sufferings they caused their people, whom they regarded as just a herd of animals."  http://www.eastturkestan.net/china02.html .  One of the slogans of the founder of Red China at that time was "The basis of Chinese socialism rests on Darwin and the theory of evolution." M. Mehnert, Kampf um Mao's Erbe, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977

These three dictators, and Pol Pot, who introduced Stalin and Mao's brand of communism into Cambodia, persuaded their followers to exterminate some 140 million people. The wars and massacres they caused made the 20th century  the most bloody of all centuries in human history.  Is it fair to blame Darwin?

MORAL VACUUM

Many other 20th century leaders were also influenced by Darwin's thinking. Persuading much of the West to view humans as naked apes, they did much to create a moral vacuum and stimulate the break down of family life.

Free sex with anyone was a 19th and early 20th century humanist aim, and sexual anarchy in the West has produced serious social disorders. Widespread promiscuity has resulted in record numbers of sexually transmitted diseases with their consequential infertility; record numbers of social abortions with both the physical and emotional damage done to the mothers; record numbers of co-habiting couples with much faster break-ups than marriages; record divorces, including far higher numbers from previously co-habiting than from first married couples; record numbers of single parents; record numbers of disfunctional families and a consequential higher prison population; record numbers of victims of violent crime. These have all been part of this sad harvest.

Eugenics, the improvement of human hereditary traits by human intervention, were also a consequence. So there is pressure to kill seriously sick or injured, or old and weak people who seem beyond a useful life, and to kill babies, or leave them to die, before birth if possible, that seem to be seriously damaged beyond certain ability.

It would be unfair to lay the blame for all these evils at the door of Darwin. But he was naïve. His mentor and keen Christian, Prof Adam Sedgwick, who had been Darwin's geology teacher, warned Darwin and his contemporaries of the grave consequences of his theory. Sedgwick was horrified to read The Origin of Species and predicted that if Darwin's teachings were accepted, humanity "would suffer a damage that might brutalise it and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has sunk since written records tell us of its history" (Clark, Darwin Before and After, Paternoster, 1950).

IS IT FAIR TO BLAME DARWIN FOR HIS FOLLOWERS' ACTIONS?

Some may ask - should we blame Darwin for the excesses of his followers? The test of a person's legacy can often lie in its usefulness to the world. George Stevenson is credited with the steam engine, and Alexander Graham Bell with the telephone; their foundational work has led others to bring huge benefits to the world that could not have happened without the first discoveries; Should we blame them for rail disasters and frightening telephone calls? Of course not.

Alfred Nobel's legacy was dynamite and gelignite. Nobel was so shocked by the erroneous publication in 1888 of a premature obituary of himself by a French newspaper, condemning him for his invention of dynamite, that it is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death.[1] The obituary stated Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead") and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." Thus Nobel left $4m in 1896 to endow the prizes that bear his name (to the utter dismay of his family who forcefully contested the will).

But Darwin's legacy was an idea.  His idea was that a biological mechanism existed that meant God was not necessary. After the genesis of life from non-life he proposed that life evolved by producing small beneficial mutations which were selected through the fittest surviving, until finally man appeared. The accolades Darwin continues to receive today are largely for saying science, and man generally, does not need God. His idea has not brought benefits to mankind that would not have come without the theory. What it did do was to rob man of the fear of God. This was not a benefit. Many of his followers took the idea that humans are merely naked apes as an excuse for promiscuous selfish behaviour; and other more evil people to the genocides mentioned above.

THE GRIM AND VIOLENT HARVEST OF HUMANISM.

Darwin may not deserve blame for all the consequences of his theory. He became the front man and was credited with an idea that Victorian society was ready for. The concept of evolution had been around since Anaximander and Epicurus and contemporary scientists were now also thinking in these terms. Ultimately, the question is whether Darwin's theory is true.

EVOLUTION EVERYWHERE, BUT DARWINISM - AS UNPROVEN AS EVER

The Darwinian proposal is wrong; not because there is no evolution, on the contrary evolution is everywhere, from galaxies to bacteria; but because evolution is driven by far more than mutation and natural selection.

It is clear that small changes occurred between the generations. Milk and meat production increase by breeding from the best animals. More significantly perhaps, cattle grow three inch (75mm) longer coats of hair when they are outdoors in the winter, than they will grow indoors. At species level, we look at animals and plants and it is clear that some are like others. Finches appear to be related to each other. Likewise all dogs are related, and are probably related to wolves; so are all pigeons related to each other. Darwin observed all of these. He used Patrick Matthew's expression Natural Selection to describe the weeding out of the unfit; but it did not and still does not explain diversity. Richard Dawkins has said in one of his TV series "the force that drives evolution on is natural selection". This is of course untrue. Natural selection can only select; it does not produce the variation from which to select.

The big question is do these changes come by slight successive chance mutations or by the activation of a pre-existing programme in the DNA? Did God put the potential to evolve within a small number of creatures? Or did we all arrive by slow steps from bacteria? When mating occurs and two strands of DNA come together, there is an astonishing correcting mechanism that comes into play. Genomes can call on a variety of damage-detection and repair mechanisms, including base excision repair, nucleotide excision repair, mismatch repair, non-homologous end-joining and homologous recombination. These themselves point to pre-existing design.

Sometimes the result is a mistake as genes are broken, deleted, shifted, realigned, inserted or repeated. Occasionally mutations are temporarily helpful to survival, like sickle-cell anaemia resisting malaria, or flightless cormorants surviving on the Galapagos Islands because there are no predators. But most point mutations are not helpful. For example, on our farm we had a lamb born with no back end; its skin was sealed behind its ribs. My brother once had a calf born with five feet, one of them between its shoulders; I saw it a few years later and the foot had not grown. A friend of mine had a calf born with hair underneath its skin, which was on the outside; it did not live long. 90% of female twin calves from both-sex twins are freemartins, with no uterus. All these are examples of point mutations, or mistakes.

DNA now appears to be far more complex than it did even five years ago. "Junk" DNA of a few years ago is now seen to have "indescribable complexity". And the problem for Darwinians seems to be, not the lack of evolution but the abundance and speed of it; not just in small steps, like cattle hair growing longer, or finch beaks changing shape, but in huge leaps. So that for example leaf and stick insects, the Phasmatodea appear first in the fossil record (in the Triassic) without wings, then acquire wings.  The acquisition of wings and being able to use them is not an event for small steps; nor is there evidence that it happened that way. Phasmatodea must have had the potential for wings and flying at their origin - evidence for pre-existent genes being switched on or off.
It has been pointed out that this is the case for "... most major groups of organisms. They appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus - full blown and raring to go, in contradiction to Darwin's depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless infinitesimally minute variations." Jeffrey Schwartz, 1999. Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species, p. 3.

The theory that we came from animals; and that all living things have evolved from a simple life form without divine intervention, the philosophy Darwin encouraged, remains in all the following areas, as much an unproven theory as ever:

• The proposal that a (simple?) prokaryotic cell came from a warm pond of chemicals has become no less plausible than it was 150 years ago. The complexity of the cell, consisting of 100 billion atoms, and the process of multiplication is now known to be hugely intricate, needing at least 500 proteins and 500,000 nucleotides on the genome and living, moving parts, in order to function and reproduce.
  
  
• The sudden appearance of mutually unrelated, complex organisms, known as 'The Cambrian Explosion' and well known to Darwin. They have no evolutionary links to single celled life.
  
  
• Sexual reproduction developing from asexual remains as much a problem as ever.
  
  
• That apes look a bit like humans has always been of appeal to Darwinists. But are they related? Mice look like shrews and phascogales (pouched mice), but these three types of mammals are classified in three different Orders. Similarly the large number of differences between apes and man warrants the conclusion that they, too, are in different Orders.
  See Ape to Man
  
  
• The fossil record has never explained the arrival of life on Earth. Billions of years of Earth history would mean forming less than a hair's breadth of rock per year - but direct evidence contradicts this. Not all rock is cataclysmic either, as Young Earth Creationists want us to believe. The empirical evidence from examining the whole geological record metre by metre requires not much more than 100,000 years for its formation, but not one year, nor 4.5 billion years. Radioisotope dates can have other interpretations. See http://www.earthhistory.org.uk/  for a third view of the geological record.

CHRISTIAN DARWINISTS - MAKING AN IMPLAUSIBLE THEORY PLAUSIBLE?

A large number of Christians have gone along with Darwinism, not necessarily because they are convinced by the data; but because they think other scientists are convinced; they then say God did the impossible bits to make the theory plausible. The evidence is weak however, in every discipline.

THE DARWIN EXHIBITION AND ITS ERRORS

The Darwin Exhibition, created in America and due to be on show at London's Natural History Museum from February 2009, has Six Errors, according to Hiram Caton;

(1) Publication of the Origin was not a sudden ("revolutionary") interruption of Victorian society's confident
belief in the traditional theological world-view.

(2) The Origin did not "revolutionize" the biological sciences by removing the creationist premise or introducing new principles.

(3) The Origin did not revolutionize Victorian public opinion. The public considered Darwin and Spencer to be teaching the same lesson, known today as "Social Darwinism", which, though fashionable, never achieved dominance.

(4) Many biologists expressed significant disagreements with Darwin's principles.

(5) Darwin made little or no contribution to the renovation of theology. His public statements on Providence were inconsistent and the liberal reform of theology was well advanced by 1850.

(6) The so-called "Darwinian revolution" was, at the public opinion level, the fashion of laissez-faire economic beliefs backed by Darwin and Spencer's inclusion of the living world in the economic paradigm.

DARWIN'S RELIGIOUS UNCERTAINTIES

CONCLUSION: CREATION OR EVOLUTION?

Some admirers of Charles Darwin argue that his main achievement was to show than man was descended from the animal world. While that thought is widely accepted, it has not been proved by scientific data. Many scientists think the Darwinian paradigm is wrong; not because there is no evolution, on the contrary evolution is everywhere, from galaxies to bacteria; but because evolution is driven by far more than mutation and natural selection.

The ultimate question that everyone asks is "Did life arise naturally or supernaturally?"  The famous atheist thinker Anthony Flew became a believer in God when he concluded that it was more likely that God existed without a cause, rather than the universe.

People may always be divided on their view of God and whether to believe in a Creator. As long as only atomic or genetic evidence is used, science will not provide that answer. The God of Christians, Jews and other faiths is bigger and beyond the known laws of physics, biology and chemistry; because they believe that God (who is metaphysical - beyond the physical) made those laws and supernaturally stretched out the heavens, perhaps then leaving it to evolve. He chooses to be beyond detection or manipulation by His creatures. Yet laws of nature imply fixity for which a law-maker is needed and natural energy requires an energy maker. The genetic information in every cell requires an intelligent programmer to put it there. Functioning DNA is far more than four often-repeated amino acids. It appears to be a language that we can read but that God can quite possibly speak. Physical life needs a life-giver.  God is spiritually discerned and can be addressed by every human being in prayer. In the Bible God has revealed Himself to all who will to search and contemplate the history and story recorded there. The agnostic's (or atheist's) prayer need only be as simple as: "God, if you are there, please make yourself known to me. Please help me to understand you".

For further information see what really happened?

References:

Barloon, Thomas and Russell Noyes, Jr. 1997. "Charles Darwin and Panic Disorder." JAMA 277(2): 138-141.

Bean, W.B. 1978. "The Illness of Charles Darwin." The American Journal of medicine 65(4):572-4

Bowlby, John. 1990. Charles Darwin: A New Life. NY: Norton.

Colp, Ralph Jr. 1977. To be an Invalid: The illness of Charles Darwin. Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Darwin, Charles. 1994. The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Cambridge University. Vol. 9.

Desmond, Adrian and James Moore. 1991. Darwin: The life of a tormented evolutionist. NY: Warner.

Pasnau, R.O. 1990. "Darwin's Illness: A Biopsychosocial Perspective." Psychosomatics 31(2):121-8

Picover, Clifford A. 1998. Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen. NY: Quill William Morrow.