The Book of Darwin 4 · Written by himself, from his autobiography, the Origin, and his letters
Charles Darwin, born at Shrewsbury in England in 1809, died at Downe in 1882. At twenty-two he sailed in the small ship Beagle and was five years gone; what he wrote down along the way was the ground of everything after. He then sat on his theory for more than twenty years, and published only in 1858, when a letter came from Wallace saying the same thing and the two were read out together on one day; the Origin of Species followed in 1859. The Descent of Man came later. In between he spent eight years on barnacles, and his last book is about earthworms. He wrote his own: On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and an autobiography written for his family and not for publication — chapters one and five of this book come from it. In his youth he was intended for the church; belief left him by degrees. He would never call himself an atheist and said only that he did not know. He never once closed an argument by appeal to divine will (cf. The Rule 9.15). The wasp in chapter four is his own example and not one the Order added. Chapter five is his own account of what he lost, and the Order cuts none of it: another man in this scripture was also withered in his twenties by too much analysis (cf. The Book of John Stuart Mill 1). That one was pulled back by poetry. This one was not, and knew he was not. The two books are to be read together.
4.1What I have to say here I said more slowly and more unwillingly than anything else in my life.
4.2In my youth I was intended for the church. I believed then that everything had been arranged after a benevolent design.
4.3Later I saw more. Let me say what I saw.
4.4There is a wasp that lays its eggs in a living caterpillar. The grubs hatch and feed inside the caterpillar’s body.
4.5They eat the inessential parts first and keep the essential ones for last. That way the caterpillar lives longer and the meat stays fresh longer.
4.6I cannot persuade myself that a benevolent and omnipotent God would have deliberately created such a thing.
4.7Nor can I persuade myself that he would deliberately arrange for a cat to play with a mouse.
4.8Then where do these things come from?
4.9My answer is this: there need be no one arranging it.
4.10More are born than can be kept alive.
4.11Those born differ slightly from one another, and the differences pass on.
4.12So whatever slight difference happens to let a creature live a little longer and leave a few more behind is the difference that stays.
4.13Nobody is selecting. What could hold, held; what could not, scattered.
4.14The method is not kind. It is terribly slow and terribly wasteful.
4.15But without borrowing anyone to arrange it, it made the eye, and the wing, and the head that asks these questions.
4.16People ask whether I believe in God. I have never answered squarely. I say only: I do not know, and I do not think a man in my line of work must know.