April 8, 2014 • 49 mins
Charles Darwin wasn't the first or only scientist to grasp the theory of evolution through natural selection, but he became its father and icon. Learn about the man who reluctantly but bravely became the source of the divide between religion and science.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to stuff you should know, Friendhouse Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles W Chuck Bryan. So this is stuff you should know.
That's right, unless I forget. Jerry's over there. She's over there.
(00:21):
You know, we went like five years, I went five
years of this podcast. Were just mentioning us once in
a while, mentioning Jerry. But I mean, like, I can't
imagine the podcast without Jerry too. Now, after after five years,
finally I'm like, yeah, I guess she should stay young.
She's earned her place. Yeah, at least she keeps quiet.
That's right. How you doing, I'm great. How are you?
(00:46):
I'm good. Yeah, I'm like low key calm, I'm fine,
that's good. I'm a little smelly, which we talked about.
I know, but I'm talking about it, which makes the
smell worse. What is it? What is it about someone's
own special sweet tang of assent that they're drawn to,
like you're drawn to your own tang? Yeah? Man, everyone
I think like secretly smells their own shoe and their
(01:08):
own armpits when they get a little ripe. And maybe
we all deep down one to mate with ourselves. Maybe,
so that's not true because I'm disgusted with myself. Yeah,
but I see you looking at your armpit eye and
it like that. I know if you I do that thing. Yeah,
I've slipped out twice today just to smell them. There's
a little on your nose. Uh So, Chuck, you're doing good.
(01:30):
I'm doing good. We'll just assume Jerry's doing good. Um,
and we're all doing good because we're fairly fit. You
know why we're fit because we're alive. We're evolving as
we speak. We are part of this huge, long, natural
procession of change forced by scarcity, competition, the ravages of nature,
(01:54):
and we as humans have climbed to the top of
the food pyramid of the evolutionary chain and said we
own this planet. That's why we're doing good today. It's
one of my most favorite notions evolution. Yeah, natural selection.
I think it's like one of the most beautiful things
that we've been able to figure out. Yeah, evolution gets
(02:16):
all the spotlight. I'm a big natural selection fan myself too,
you know, so divergent that stuff turns me on. That
and your smell intellectually. Uh So, let's let's talk about this.
You can't have evolution without natural selection again, even though
evolution gets all the spotlight, at the very least, there's
(02:37):
no evolution on Earth without natural selection, and the idea
of natural selection of evolution in general, the idea that
God didn't create everything exactly the way we see it now,
um is a fairly recent notion, despite how tremendously widespread
(02:58):
it is. You know Bill Nye, the science guy you're
talking about this debate, Yeah, he got in a debate
with Ken hamp just just totally off the cuff, not
planned at all. They just both happened to be in
the same auditorium. I watched the whole thing, did you
the whole two hours? I couldn't pull myself away from it.
So I'm guessing that you suspect Bill ni won the debate. Well,
(03:21):
I mean, are there winners and losers, So don't be shy.
There are, um there's there's a British uh religious website
that pulled it's um it's guests because you know, people
who go to websites are called guests. But in England
there and said who won? And um, I think ninety
(03:42):
two said Bill ny one and The reason why is
because in the comments section, it was revealed that most
of these people said, yeah, we believe in God, but
evolution is still real. And to deny evolution outright is
pretty silly. I think when you say things like dragons,
you might lose people. Did he say dragons that didn't
(04:04):
see it? Yeah, he mentioned dragons. Well, I mean that's
some people. And like you said, religion and science co
exists for a lot of religious folk. But um, there
are some that are very literal and strict and say
that you know, how to explain dinosaurs while they may
have been dragons, and I don't that that doesn't explain
anything that well, I think that just changes in the Bible.
(04:26):
Oh yeah, if if I'm getting this wrong and I
really get killed, we should pausitive for a second. Um, Like,
the point of this episode is not to stomp on
anybody's beliefs. No, I think science can be just as
dogmatic as religion. Um, so like that's not what we're
doing now. Like, if you believe in creationism, to each
(04:48):
his own, Like, we're not gonna pound our beliefs into
you or you know, vice versa. I've never understood that,
Like who cares just either way, you know, it's like
to my way of thinking, or else you are just
so wrong it's mind boggling. Um, well, that's not the
point of this. I think we should just c o
(05:09):
a with that, because that's not what we're like. There's
some people who don't always listen. Maybe this is their
first episode. Welcome. Uh, we are not those kind of guys, know,
And specifically with this episode, it's on Charles Darwin the
man and kind of what made him who he was not?
And we'll tackle are we committing to go ahead and
doing natural selection? As a matter of fact, we'll have
(05:30):
this one come out on a Tuesday. We'll do natural
selection on a Thursday. Look at that? All right? I agree,
let's do it. Let there be like, but h Darwin
is a fascinating dude though, Yeah, yeah, because you can't
really overstate the idea that he was. As Robert lam
puts in his fine article, I have to say one
(05:51):
of his best um that Charles Darwin was the fulcrum
by which or on which the entire he change from
a religious worldview to a scientific worldview took place. It
was on this man's shoulders, even though oddly enough. He
wasn't the only person to come up with natural selection now,
(06:12):
and we'll get to that. He wasn't the first or
the last. Uh. But it turns out he was the
most thorough in his research right and had the most
social breeding and in breeding. Yeah. Man, this is the
ultimate tease. It is. So let's get started, Chuck. Let's
talk about Darwin He Um didn't He wasn't born with
(06:32):
a Bunsen burner in a flask in his hand. No,
he was not. Uh. He was born, if anything, with
a stethoscope in his hand. Because his father, doctor Robert
Wearing Darwin Um, had designs on little Chuck being a
doctor like him, because he was you know, they had
(06:52):
some dough that he was an English gentleman. They weren't
poor by any means. No. Apparently his grandfather a massive,
vast fortune in China, and not the country, but the
porcelain interesting, So would be incorrect to say he had
a Chinese fortune. He had a China fortune, okay, Uh.
But little Chuck was not into anatomy. He was definitely
(07:13):
not into surgery on humans. It freaked him out. I
think he was a little queasy as a person. It
seems like, yeah, but he was. He was way into
the natural sciences and was just fine with dissecting a frog. Yeah.
You know, he was cool with biology. As long as
you weren't human, he'd cut you, that's right. Uh. So
(07:35):
he was sent to several schools um first when he
was going to be a doctor, to the Anglican Shrewsbury School,
then to Edinburgh University, and finally his dad was like,
all right, you don't want to be a doctor or
so the only other option for you is to be
a man of religion parson in the country. Yeah, so
I'm gonna send you to christ College in Cambridge, which
is I mean, if you're gonna go be a country parson,
(07:57):
you could do a lot worse. I agreed. You know,
the fighting padres is over there, padres um. So he
was very well educated, uh and had been exposed to
all kinds of science, so he was. He was a
very smart guy from early on, um, and way into
natural science, like I said, but not into the religion
(08:20):
thing as much. He was agnostic from a pretty early age, right,
and he seemed like he was going to follow the
path that his father was laying out for him. I
guess he was very domineering and Charles Darwin was a
pretty great thinker, pretty all around good guy. But he
also was a bit of a pantywaist. It seems like,
(08:41):
you know, he was like really really affected by stress. Yeah. Sight,
he had a lot of psycho somatic symptoms from stress
pretty much throughout his whole life. Despite that, though, he
took a very brave course in life. And it started
when he was twenty one and he was on his
way to becoming that country parson that his father had
(09:04):
decided he would be. And he got an invitation to
go on a tour of the islands off South America
UM from a guy named Robert Fitzroy who was twenty
six years old. He was an aristocrat and he liked Darwin.
He said, hey, you're good at conversations. When I get bored,
I suffer about to depression. I'm about to go on
(09:25):
this boat called the h MS Beagle for god knows
how long, So why don't you come along and uh,
we can chat and I won't get depressed. And Darwin said,
you know what, let's do this. That's right, which is
a that's a pretty bold move. Yeah, he's he was
for someone who was would you say, pennyways, Yeah, Pennyways.
It's sort of surprising that he was up for that
kind of adventure. Yes, a milk toast. You could also
(09:49):
call him a milk toast. Maybe call him that. All right? Uh,
so this was one He boarded the HMS Beagle, which
I for some reason just cracks me up. You know,
our buddy go from forward thinking just adopted a dog
part beagle, and his name is Darwin. Huh because of
that association, I would imagine, And Joe said, he looks
(10:10):
like Darwin head on ibrow. That's funny. Um. All right,
so he board at the HMS Beagle. What did you say?
How old was he? Twenty one? And they took a
five year voyage around South America. Um. The purpose for
fitz Roy was to chart the waters of South America
and the coastlines and that kind of thing. But Chuck
(10:31):
was like, I'm into natural stuff and species that I
don't know, So what better thing to do than spend
like most of my time not on the boat but
on land just researching stuff. I'm sure he got pretty
good at rowing from the ship too short back and forth. Yeah,
he's basically Paul Bettany's character and master and commander Well,
(10:54):
which is ironic because Paul Bettany played Charles Darwin. Did
he really in that movie Creation? Oh yeah, I never
saw that, but I know what you're talking about. That's funny.
You had no idea. Huh. No, he stepped right into
that one. I wonder if he recognized that. I don't know.
It's a good movie, that Creation. You should check it out.
It's um details a lot of the struggles of his
life that we're gonna go over here, and mainly is
(11:14):
about his uh anxieties of what he was doing in
his relationship to his Christian wife. Oh yeah, I'll bet
that was kind of a sore spot big time. We'll
get to that though in a second. So okay, So
they head off to South America. There he's spending two
thirds of the voyage. Of this five year voyage, he
spends on land. Uh. One of the most famous places
(11:36):
he visited was the Galapa Ghost which are still around. Yeah,
and that apparently was really overstated. He was only, uh,
what is still around? Is that a joke? The Galapa
Ghost They're still around? Okay. I thought I was missing
on something because you looked at me like you're missing
a joke. That's this look Okay, um what was that one?
As you smell that was my either water. So the
(12:00):
Glapaos apparently it was a little overstated it's significance wise. Um,
he was only there for about five weeks out of
the five years, and historians think it's been overstated because
it was so exotic and people wanted to point to
some like kind of fantastical birthplace of all these ideas
I mean stuck, yeah, I mean for sure, and he
(12:23):
you know, collected all kinds of different specimens from the Glapicos,
but it wasn't as big a deal. Have you ever
seen the size of the turtles there or the tortoises?
Are the huge, dude, They're like the size of VW. Beatles.
They're enormous and apparently like they'll hang out with you.
What else are they gonna do? Run away slowly? Okay? Yeah,
(12:44):
they have no choice, they have agency. They could be
like I don't want to be here around you, I'm
gonna go this way. They just it wouldn't work very
well or very quickly. Yeah. Okay, so where are we? Man?
We are? I was just poopooing the Galapagos. Yeah. Um,
but what he did while he was gone was he
did a lot of great work and made a real
(13:04):
name for himself and kind of came back a well
known scientist. Scientists because the whole time he's making all
these findings, he's finding new species of animals that like
Europeans didn't even know existed, like entire types of animals. Um,
he's sending back specimens, which means he killed a lot
of animals while he was on these islands, mailed them
back to Europe, mailed back some of his findings. He's
(13:27):
basically writing papers as he's doing this, this journey, so
back in the jolly old England there um basically becomes
his celebrity. Yeah. And he was, you know, like before
he even returned. Yeah, he was looking at he had
the idea of natural selection, but it was, like we said,
it was already out there. It was known as the
(13:49):
mystery of Mysteries or transmutation. And he called his his
research at first the Transmutation Notebooks, so that yeah, he
wasn't you know, his reach searching stuff that he had
heard about. It was a working title. What was the
working title actually? Um, what would later become on the
origin of the species of course. Yeah, and uh, he
(14:10):
and another guy will talk about a little bit. We're
also UM inspired. Both were inspired by Thomas Malthus, who
we've talked about, who came up with the idea of
carrying capacity and basically introduced the idea that scarcity and
competition forces adaptation and change. And then uh, Darwin and
the guy Um, Alfred Wallace Russell or Alfred Russell Wallace
(14:34):
UM both read this and said, well, wait, man, I
wonder if that adaptation and change that's forced by scarcity
is what creates the change and species that we're seeing here. Yeah,
that was definitely UM. The book was called Essay on
Principle of Population and that was like a super game
changer because it really gave him, like the the notion
(14:56):
that by studying our any species death, you can kind
of study its life. Yeah. And it wasn't it wasn't
just biology that it gave rise to. It gave rise
to um economics, largely, a lot of anthropology, a lot
of ecology. Like it was, like you say, a game changer.
(15:18):
Thomas Malthis go back and listen to our population podcast.
Is that where he appears I think he appears a
few times, but that was a good one. Yeah, it's
an oldie, but a goodie. Um. So, like we said,
he came back sort of a celebrity of sorts, and
he came back with a lot of information, uh, and
settled in at the down House in Kent, and this
(15:41):
place was He spent the next forty years there studying
his property essentially, like he didn't need to go anywhere.
He had plenty of nature there. Apparently there were forty
different species per square meter on his property. Uh. He
had ten kids and he used them as sort of
a a little laboratory experiment because three of them died
(16:03):
and he was fascinated with why things and people survive
and some don't. So it was all sort of part
of his Uh. It was just everything was part of
his laboratory. Essentially. He had people sending him samples from
all over the world, and there are some theories that
if the postal service hadn't have been so good, he
may have never been able to write the origin of
(16:25):
the species because he relied on people sending him stuff
in due time. Oh yeah, and also he was really
big on corresponding, which kind of helped develop his UM,
his ideas, flesh him out even further. Was he was
huge on correspondence. Yeah. He had a UM area on
his property called the Sandwalk that he had built. It
(16:46):
was basically just a loop path through the woods and
he would just spend like countless hours just walking this
path and thinking and looking at everything everything right, nothing design.
One of his favorite UM subjects was earthworms. Remember our
Earthworm podcast. There was a quote from him in there
(17:09):
UM where he said, it may be doubted whether there
are many other animals which have played so important a
part in the history of the world as these lowly
organized creatures. So he was down with earthworms, downs and
orchids very famously too. Yeah, he was. He was active.
He wasn't just looking at things. He raised orchids. He
was a beekeeper, he raised pigeons and like it was
(17:30):
all just in the name of study. Right. One of
the things though, we um He married his first cousin,
his wife um and at the time they didn't really
know much about the troubles with inbreeding, and he was
one of the people who discovered the troubles with inbreeding,
and it apparently had a really big effect on him.
(17:51):
Like he felt kind of guilty and weird and wondered
if maybe his kids early deaths had to do with that. Yeah, um,
which has to be kind of startling if you're the
guy who discovers the problems with inbreeding and you've inbred,
you know, Yeah, it's gotta be a little jarring. Sure. Uh.
(18:13):
Emma Wedgewood was his wife's maiden name, And one thing
that happened when he married her was he got more
money because she was also in the family fortune. So
they were set up pretty nicely. Uh. And like I said,
she was Christian and she was amazing though, like the
Creation movie really like it's a great love story. Despite
(18:33):
the fact that they had he was Agnostic and she
was Christian. She spent her life caring for him because
he was a very sickly man. Um may have had
some sort of viral diseases entire life, maybe that he
picked up in South America. Now he was a pennywaise
on top of that, so he was just fraught with anxiety. Uh.
(18:55):
And she cared for him and all the kids, and
her life's worry was are we going to spend it
turn nity together in the afterlife? Yeah, that was her
big concern, Yeah, which is he didn't buy that stuff. No,
he and he was you know, religious ish when he
was younger, but as he grew older and no, the
more he exposed himself to these ideas of evolution and
(19:18):
natural selection, the less religious, the less he bought into it. Um.
And it's funny that that divide first occurred in him
and then it just kind of grew out from him
to create this divide throughout the world. He was the
epicenter of that divide. It first, if that crack in
the world first appeared in him. Yeah, isn't that interesting? Yeah,
(19:41):
for sure. Um, he's the one to blame pretty much.
Or he was a patient zero, one of the two. Um.
So he he comes back to down House, he gets married,
settles down doubles his fortune by marrying Emma. Um and
and his experimenting with orchids, earthworms. F he's his kids,
all this stuff. Um. And he's also at the same
(20:04):
time writing he's expanding that notebook into what he's calling
a natural selection another working title. And um, he is
taking his sweet time with it. One of the reasons
he's taking his sweet time with this is one he
is being very diligent. He's making sure he's crossing all
of his teams, dotting his eyes, making sure he's not
(20:25):
looking at it wrong, making sure he's backing up everything.
And the second connected reason to that first one is
that he is really not looking forward to the storm
that this is going to create when he unleashes it
on the public. He was well aware of it from
the beginning, because there's a couple of things that are
(20:46):
inherent in the theory of natural selection. I'm going to
add a third reason, my friend, if you're studying natural selection,
evolution takes a long time, well, yeah, you can't study
something for a week and detect change is And like
you said, he was thorough because he lived his life, uh,
basically an anxiety of not being accepted by these peers
(21:09):
and like these are people, these are friends of his.
So his procrastination is definitely fear driven by his peers
and by society at large, and by the fact that
it just takes a long time to study something like this. Right.
For instance, he left a area of his lawn unmode
for twenty years just to study what would happen and
out of that sounds like an excuse exactly, but out
(21:34):
of like the twenty different species he studied, eleven survived
and nine died away. So boom, natural selection right there,
just in a portion of his lawn. Okay, but it
took twenty years, is the point. Okay. So the time
fear of his peers, fear of the public, and he
had good reason to fear um or be anxious, because
the world was a much different place than it is now,
(21:56):
and he was well aware that what he was about
to unleash on society was going to create some big
changes in some big problems. And uh, we'll get into
that right after this message. So chuck, um, we're talking
about Darwin. He's at his house down house. Um, he's
working on his manuscript. He's kind of procrastinating a little bit,
(22:18):
and because it takes time to um, but he knows
that he's about to unleash this complete change in paradigm,
a poop storm, onto the world exactly. And Um, it's
because the world was a much different place than it
is today. Because Darwin hadn't talked about natural selection yet. Yeah,
(22:42):
I mean, religion, religious biology was biology. They didn't call
it religious biology, that was just biology. Yeah. So he
was the first one to secularize it and make it
just about the science. Um. Yeah, because before scientists thought like, well,
God created this and that is our starting point. Like
(23:02):
everything else, every other scientific explanation we have has to
trace back to creation, which is kind of It can
make science a little easier, um, but at the very
at the same time, it leaves you open to a
huge problem when somebody comes along and can fill in
all these other gaps through a completely different explanation that
(23:26):
doesn't use creationism. And that's what Darn was doing with
natural selection. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and at a
fourth thing. Man, you just keep them coming. Uh. There
were two texts that were vital, and we talked about
one of them, the mouths uh principle of population. In
four there was a book written called The Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation and it was published anonymously
(23:48):
for forty years. No one kne who wrote it because
no one wanted to put their name on it. Like
that's how radical it was. And it was slammed like
it was hugely popular. It was like a phenomenon, like
everybody read it and everybody slammed it. And uh, it
came out later it was a guy named Robert Chambers.
He was a Scottish journalist. But what Darwit scared the
(24:11):
crap out of Darwin was like, yeah, because a lot
it was, Mama, there's a lot of the same same
ideas as he had. So what it did was it
caused him to basically rewrite his voluminous work and pare
it down the armor it with sturdier armor over the
next thirteen months. It's smart, very smart. I mean you
(24:34):
could say for him that that was a stroke of
luck that that was published and he read it and
saw what happened to total stroke of luck. He might
have been laughed out of existence if he had gotten
there first. So he he goes back, redoubles his efforts,
strengthens his argument um, and again he's combatting not just
the i the religious ideals of the time, but the
(24:55):
religious ideals of science. Yeah, like most scientists at the
time were aist when Dais believed that God created the
universe basically like a clockmaker makes a clock, wounded up
and walked away like see you later, good luck with everything.
And then anything that happened as a result after that
was the results of the mechanations of this clock and
(25:17):
there was a theory that was fairly well accepted called catastrophism, Yes,
and that basically sought to account fossils, because fossils were
a big sticking point. Why were there clearly extinct animals
that had lived before there's fossils, we have them in
(25:38):
our hands. Why do these kind of resemble the things
that are alive today. That doesn't make any sense. Well,
catastrophism um who which was suggested by a guy named
George Cuvier, And Cuvier said that catastrophism, which one I
(26:00):
like the second one catastrophism. Catastrophism, uh says that something happens, volcanoes, floods, pestilence,
something very biblical happens, and a species dies out in
an area and a new species comes in and fills
it in, and maybe that species just from living in
proximity was similar. Uh. And they that that explains why
(26:23):
some are extinct and some are now here. I would
also call that coincidences. M. Yeah, it's another way to
put it as another pronunciation. But it wasn't like super
science based, right, but this is these like these, This
was a well respected scientists, um, and this was the
prevailing thought at the time that creationism and the natural
(26:45):
scientists went hand in hand. Creationism was the basis for it,
and Darwin is about to say, you know that basis
that everybody's built science on for the last several centuries.
It's not that's that doesn't hold water. And then he
went through up again and again apparently throw a lot. Yeah,
when his when on the Origin of the Species came
(27:06):
out in eighteen fifty nine, he was at a spa
um recovering from bouts of KNOWLEDGEA so, yeah, he was
all thrown up. I feel bad for the guy. Sure,
he was just racked with anxiety his entire life, but
imagine that. Imagine being racked with anxiety and still going
to it. It's pretty impressive. Uh So. Previous to its publication,
(27:26):
another important thing happened. Um we mentioned earlier Alfred Russell Wallace.
He was a fellow Englishman and specimen collector, and he
basically wrote almost exactly the same thing that Darwin had
been working on, sent it to Darwin, and um people
(27:49):
urged them both to present their works at something called
the Linnaean Society in eight They did so together as
a team. But um, it wasn't it didn't kinda make
much of a splash at the time. It wasn't until
he officially published his work that you know made the splash, right.
And Alfred Um, Alfred Russell Wallace actually was the impetus
(28:12):
for him to publish Um Origin of the Species. He
he'd been sitting there dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating. Um.
Not long and um. He got a letter from Wallace,
like you said, and he realized, holy cow, Wallace has
come up with the same thing. I've been working on
this for thirty years. I'm I'm not gonna forget that.
(28:36):
Forgive my anxiety. I'm just publishing this puppy. And uh.
He he did, and it came out in eighteen fifty nine. Um,
and he was hailed as a villain and a genius,
depending on who you spoke to. And let's talk about
the Origin of Species and what it says and what
(28:58):
natural selection means, Chuck Um. First of all, the official
title of the book is on the Origin of Species
by means of natural selection or the preservation of favorite racism,
the Struggle for life. And that's why everybody calls the
Origin of Species. Because it's long and wordy, but what
it basically says is that um species adapt. They adapt
(29:25):
due to population pressure, they adapt through competition with one
another between species inside species. UM that when you see
like slightly different traits, individual traits to be expected, but
those individual traits can ultimately lead to a new species
on a long enough time table if those traits make
(29:49):
their their increase their chance of surviving to reproduction age,
and enhance their ability to reproduce. Yeah right, and if
you if don't, if you aren't good at that, then
you go bye bye. Right, And this explains why some
species are extinct, why the ones that are here today
are the winners. And chillingly that all this is still
(30:12):
going on. It's very very slow, so we can't see
it happens on a glacial time scale, our geologic time scale,
but it's still going on. And here's proof. The thing
that he doesn't come out in state, But that wasn't
lost on the Victorians, especially the religious victorians, is that
inherent in that argument is that man, the king of
(30:36):
the world, is nothing more than an animal that evolved
from who knows what. Yeah he I bet, I bet
He threaded over that so much because he believed it,
but I think there are only two mentions of mankind
in the entire work, but the implications were clear, Like
the public at large may not have been wise to
it at first, but scientists were like, wait a minute,
(30:57):
are you saying that we came from apes? He's like,
I'm at a spa recovering from I can't be reached. Um.
But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying
that upfront in plain English. Yeah, and it caused like
he said, a poop storm. Yeah, And I guess we
should say Russell Wallace was he's been sort of lost
(31:20):
to history as far as you know what most people know. Um. Yeah,
it's sad. It is sad because he was a smart guy,
but he wasn't. He had no standing, um like Darwin did.
And that's kind of one of the reasons he was
forgotten to history, right he Um, he was out in
the field. He was he seemed to be happiest out
in the field. After this um this theory was introduced. Um,
(31:41):
he retreated back to the Melee Peninsula to collect um specimens. Yeah,
but he would sell them, which kind of degraded his standing,
I think, right, just but he was using those funds
to further fund more scientific exploration. You know, it's not
like he was funding his opium habit or not. But
the point is Darwin didn't need to sell it, so
(32:02):
I think he was. People were like, well, this guy's
collecting species and selling them. He's a merchant, right, exactly,
That's exactly right. And regardless of whether Wallace um Russell
was a you know, a great scientist or not, it
didn't matter. If you put these two men and their
theories were exactly equal, but one was of higher social
standing and greater wealth, well that guy won, and that
(32:23):
was Darwin. Um. So Darwin became he will, exactly under
Victorian aristocracy rules, but he became the again, the rallying point,
the fulcrum, the center of the universe in this new
debate that he unleashed between creationism and evolution that's still
going on today literally not today, but a couple of
(32:46):
weeks ago, right, so almost literally. Um, And he didn't
like that at all. So what he said was, you
know what, you guys talked this over, I'm gonna go
hit and hit the spa and throw up do what
you want with it, right, I'm going away. I've got
a lawn to not moo. But lucky for him, he
(33:06):
had a lot of supporters, like right out of the game, yeah,
he had he had both. He had um supporters scientists
that I think some wanted I wanted to say this
stuff all along, and now that they had such a
like wonderful, concise and well researched piece of work to
back them up, they came out of the woodwork and like, yeah,
(33:27):
see this is great. But some people weren't. In fact,
I think I can't remember the guy's name. Someone he
really respected and his wife really respected, basically slammed him
in called it heresy, and that was really impactful. Again
more anxiety, well yeah, more throwing up. And there was
a lot of name calling. There was a lot of
(33:48):
political cartoons that were unflattering, um, and unflattering for the
Victorian Nates so basically his head on a monkey or
something like that. Um. But he while he had his detractors,
he had his supporters. And there was one guy in
particular named Thomas Huxley, and he was I believe the
grandfather of Algius Huxley. Uh huh and um. Sometimes you'll
(34:11):
if you see Darwin's theory mentioned, you'll see the Darwin
slash Huxley theory. Because Huxley UM basically was a religious man,
and Darwin, I think firsthand, not just through the origin
the species, but through the correspondence as well, convinced him
(34:32):
like no, dude, natural selection is actually right, and very ironically,
just like uh, Saul converting to Paul on the Road
to Damascus, Huxley converts from a religious fervent to a
natural selection and he just takes it with religious selotry
(34:52):
and starts taking on anybody he can in debate, writing
any article he can and defending not just darw and
but his theory as well. And it came so much
so that he came to be known as Darwin's bulldog.
And he actually coined the term agnostic. Oh really, Yeah,
he was the one that coined that term to differentiate
people like himself who was who were still believers in
(35:15):
God but also fervent believers in UM in natural selection
as well. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So that wasn't the
only thing he wrote that was his life's work, for sure,
But he wrote UM eleven more, published eleven more times
before two uh, and then finally in nineteen seventy three,
which is pretty old for someone who was in such
(35:36):
ill health as entire life. Heart heart attack finally got him. Yeah,
it's very sad, it is. But he lived a good, long,
nauseated life. You know. That's a good point. So I
guess we should talk a little bit about his legacy, right, Yeah,
you did that kind of work. He pass away, you're
gonna have a legacy. They name a city in Australia
(35:57):
after you. Really, I believe it's dar in Australia. Please, guy,
don't let it be New Zealand. Do you want to look? No? Okay,
I'm I'm I'm feeling like a gambling man today got you?
Uh So his influence um from then on and continues
to be today. Uh Lamb calls it rightfully, so a
(36:17):
paradigm shift in science, society and literature. Like it can't
be understated. It was a game changer for kind of
everything and the way things went. You're on one side
or the other. It's like meo water, it changes everything.
What's that you haven't seen the ad for? Like the
little droplets of flavoring you can add to your water.
(36:38):
I've seen that. So you haven't seen the ad where
the guys in the office talking and like as you
as they cut back and forth, everything keeps changing because
they're adding meal. Oh it's one of the better adds around.
And you know me, I'm an ad aficionado. That's true. Well,
one thing we can um point to is that, uh,
Herbert Spencer, he was a sociologist after Darwin applied Darwinism
(37:03):
to sociology in the form of social Darwinism a k A.
Survival of the fittest, which it didn't bastardize it, but
it definitely he definitely used it for his own purposes
to say that, uh, you know what, the week, we
shouldn't even worry about the week. If we want to
be a strong mankind, then let the week die out. Well,
(37:27):
you know, so, um, this sociologist that came up with
this idea of social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, that's a very
Mauthusian view of humanity and um nature, because Mauthis was
basically saying, like, look, man, we take care of the
poor and everything, but if we do that, we're interfering
(37:48):
with nature and we're gonna end up over burdening the
population because population is gonna grow geometrically and we're not
going to be able to support ourselves and society is
going to collapse. Yeah, that was what Mauthis was saying.
This guy said, yeah, Yeah, it's weird that Darwin was
in the middle of kind of both book ended by
(38:08):
these two. And I think it really just you can
kind of say, like it really just kind of he
was lacking a bit of evil, where if he had
been a little more evil maybe he would have come
up with social Darwinism himself. Um, but he didn't. Herbert
Spencer did, and it kind of took off like a rocket,
this idea like yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute,
wait a minute, we don't need to pay taxes anymore,
(38:29):
we don't need to tithe. We can just you know,
let the poor die in the streets. It's social Darwinism,
survival of the fittest. We don't have to feel guilt
for not taking care of these other people any longer.
The survival of this they weren't meant to be. And
basically they replaced God's will with nature's will in there
(38:50):
the in explaining the cruelty of the world, you know,
and um, like I said, it took off. It became
what what uh we call the eugenics movement very quickly. Yeah,
which was the idea that the government would actually get
involved in weeding out the weaker uh parts of society. Yeah,
(39:12):
because you don't have to wait around for revolution to
do this. We can speed it up by picking out
the weakest and and exterminating them, or at the very
least letting them exterminate themselves by only breeding. Uh. You know,
the the Boys from Brazil. Yeah, I finally saw half
of that movie. I can't tell you how surprised I
(39:33):
was there. Surprised I was to see Steve Guttenberg. Oh
Goods was one of the kids, wouldn't he He was
like the first one. Yeah, yeah, godd I forgot about that.
Oh wait a minute, he was one of the kids
from the experiment. No, he wasn't. He was like the journalist.
It's like blowing the cover off of this whole thing.
I haven't seen him a long time. Yeah, I know.
It's creepy though. So Yeah. Possibly gave birth to eugenics,
(39:56):
which we should say obviously, Um, the Nazis loved, and
they used that to rationalize the extermination of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, epileptics,
the mentally handicapped, the blind, everybody, Um, guys who smelled
like me. Yeah, it would have been in big trouble. Um.
But prior to the Nazis doing this, Uh, the United States, Indiana, Georgia,
(40:23):
all sorts of other states forced sterilization on uh people
of similar stature. Um. And actually Adolf Hitler, Well, Germany
had its own sterilization program as well. But Adolf Hitler
was apparently well aware of what was going on in
America and um was a pretty big fan of it.
(40:43):
And if, um, you don't believe me, go back and
listen to our episode. Um, is it legal to sterilize addicts?
Because it's still going on today? Yeah? So what about
this deathbed recan have you ever heard that? I have?
Not true? Apparently so, he supposedly said on his deathbed, basically,
(41:05):
I take it all back. Yeah, I wish I hadn't
e ever said this. It's not true. You know, God
is God is good. God's the one. And a woman
from New England named Lady Hope claimed that she was
there and took this confession and his both his daughter
and his son, who were both at his side while
(41:27):
he died. He said, this lady was not at his deathbed.
She never came to our house. Uh, and she had
absolutely no influence on our father's way of looking or
judgment or opinions at all. He never recanted to the end.
He was an ardent supporter of natural selection. Yeah, that's
a pretty good idea, though, if you're a creationist, well,
(41:48):
I mean to make up that story. The father of
evolution even changed his mind on his deathbed. If you
look up today on the internet, like, um, I think
darwin deathbed even will bring up like creationist website after
creationist website that use it to support their claims. Oh really,
but it's bunk. It's it was debunked right afterwards. And chuck,
(42:10):
let me say one more thing about social Darwinism. Um.
This idea, although in a very cold calculated sense it
might make sense, it doesn't appear in humanity's history. In fact,
there's evidence UM from up to five thousand years ago
of severely disabled people fossils, their fossils, their remains being
(42:34):
found UM where they could not possibly have lived to
the age they lived to without being cared for by
their community. So this idea that you know, in a
more primitive state. We just you know, left people to
to die out in the weather because they couldn't keep up.
It doesn't hold water. Yeah, it's very comforting that. So
(42:54):
that means we were innately have compassion as a species.
I would guess that. Yeah, that's what I like. I
think it's one of the things that makes us human, agreed,
But not just us. No other species have compassion, So um,
maybe we should. Uh, why don't you play us out
with a little bit of Darwin Man. Yeah, the last
(43:16):
paragraph of the Origin of the Species, to me, is
one of the most beautiful things I ever written, So
I'm gonna read it. It is interesting to contemplate an
entangled bank, and he's talking about his home in Kent
that pats of grass. Well, now all of it. Uh,
It is interesting to contemplate and entangled bank clothed with
many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
(43:39):
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through
the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,
so different from each other and dependent on each other
in so complex of manner, have all been produced by
laws acting around us. These laws taken in the largest sense,
being growth with reproduction inheritance, which is almost implied by
(44:00):
reproduction variability, from the indirect and direct action of the
external conditions of life, and from use and disuse. A
ratio of increase so high is to lead to a
struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection,
entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms. Thus,
from the war of nature, from famine and death, the
(44:22):
most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely
the production of the higher animals, directly follows Uh. There
is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers having been originally breathed into a few forms, or
into one. That's where he's kind of skirting around things,
and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according
(44:43):
to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning,
endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and
are being evolved. Good stuff, Chuck, not me, both of you.
I felt like it was in our Halloween. Up as
it again? Oh yeah, yeah, it was good. Chuck. Don't
(45:03):
think me, Chuck's I can just read you got anything else?
Got nothing else? I think that was a fine way
to end this one. Um, if you want to learn
more about Charles Darwin, the man uh and his ideas,
you can type Darwin into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com. It should bring up a whole
bunch of articles, some of which we will record into podcasts. Yeah,
(45:23):
or that movie creation is really good, or if you're
in the documentaries, Um, there are tons of them. The
BBC has got like a dozen. Oh yeah, they love
him there sure. Uh Well, since I said uh, search bar,
I probably did, it's time for listening before the mail.
There's a quick correction. In our Kent State episode, we
(45:46):
said Mussolini had his brown shirts. Yeah they're the black shirts. Duh, No, biggie.
It's the presence of all color, not the presence of
some colors brownison, new black anyway? Is that right? Oranges?
All right? I'm gonna call this uh amputee uh ampt
(46:06):
like ampute comma ampute. Hey, guys, been listening for a
couple of years now and really enjoy it. As a
sixty year old woman who had to right leg amputated
above the knee in nineteen sixty nine due to cancer,
I was especially interested in that podcast. First, I want
to correct one off hand comment which he stated that
being an empt probably becomes the focus of your life,
(46:27):
not always. In my case, being an ampute did not
become the focus. In fact, occasionally friends forget that I
am an ampute. Now I consider it a compliment. Um.
As you said, life isn't over because the person becomes
an ampute. I was married for twenty years. I went
to graduate school for my master's degree in counseling psychology.
Now two wonderful grown children, worked from the age of
(46:48):
fourteen to fifty five, with time off for raising kids,
and attend to graduate school, and have been able to
travel quite a bit. I've been lucky not to have
experienced fan of pain. I have always had, and have
been told by my doctors will always have phantom feeling
though it feels I know, uh, it feels as though
my amputated leg is present but asleep, sort of a benign,
(47:10):
prickly feeling. The feeling quickly faded into the background, and
I only notice it now when I'm thinking about it.
You may be interested also to know that the artificial
leg I received in nineteen sixty nine was literally a
wooden leg from the knee down. I am now in
my fourth press prestesis. I thought she's gonna say, like
an old Bessie still with me? Not now. I'm now
(47:34):
on my fourth procesis and they get better and better.
My current leg is very high tech and impressive. It
can make coffee. That is from Denise. Uh slat slatting
grin awesome from Arcada, Arcata, California. Nice, not Arcadia. That's
northern California, A R C A T A. Thanks Denise.
She sounds like a very well adjusted person. Uh, and
(47:57):
we appreciate you writing in calling us out on that.
I hope you still have old Betty on the shelf
somewhere at least it's Betsy Chuck Betsy. Yeah, I would
keep it, just got it carved into this side, you know. Um.
Thanks for writing in, and if any of you out
there want to write in, share your story. We love
hearing them. We're pretty much like the central clearinghouse for
(48:19):
people's stories. So bring him to us. We will disseminate
them as best we can. You can hang out with
us on Twitter, s y s K podcast. You can
hang out with us on Facebook dot com slash stuff.
You should know you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcasts at Discovery dot com. Check out the Stuff
You Should Know Television Network on our YouTube channel Josh
(48:42):
and Chuck, and as always, hang out with us on
our home on the web, Stuff You Should Don't dot
count for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff you should know, Friendhouse Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's
Charles W Chuck Bryan. So this is stuff you should know.
That's right, unless I forget. Jerry's over there. She's over there.
(00:21):
You know, we went like five years, I went five
years of this podcast. Were just mentioning us once in
a while, mentioning Jerry. But I mean, like, I can't
imagine the podcast without Jerry too. Now, after after five years,
finally I'm like, yeah, I guess she should stay young.
She's earned her place. Yeah, at least she keeps quiet.
That's right. How you doing, I'm great. How are you?
(00:46):
I'm good. Yeah, I'm like low key calm, I'm fine,
that's good. I'm a little smelly, which we talked about.
I know, but I'm talking about it, which makes the
smell worse. What is it? What is it about someone's
own special sweet tang of assent that they're drawn to,
like you're drawn to your own tang? Yeah? Man, everyone
I think like secretly smells their own shoe and their
(01:08):
own armpits when they get a little ripe. And maybe
we all deep down one to mate with ourselves. Maybe,
so that's not true because I'm disgusted with myself. Yeah,
but I see you looking at your armpit eye and
it like that. I know if you I do that thing. Yeah,
I've slipped out twice today just to smell them. There's
a little on your nose. Uh So, Chuck, you're doing good.
(01:30):
I'm doing good. We'll just assume Jerry's doing good. Um,
and we're all doing good because we're fairly fit. You
know why we're fit because we're alive. We're evolving as
we speak. We are part of this huge, long, natural
procession of change forced by scarcity, competition, the ravages of nature,
(01:54):
and we as humans have climbed to the top of
the food pyramid of the evolutionary chain and said we
own this planet. That's why we're doing good today. It's
one of my most favorite notions evolution. Yeah, natural selection.
I think it's like one of the most beautiful things
that we've been able to figure out. Yeah, evolution gets
(02:16):
all the spotlight. I'm a big natural selection fan myself too,
you know, so divergent that stuff turns me on. That
and your smell intellectually. Uh So, let's let's talk about this.
You can't have evolution without natural selection again, even though
evolution gets all the spotlight, at the very least, there's
(02:37):
no evolution on Earth without natural selection, and the idea
of natural selection of evolution in general, the idea that
God didn't create everything exactly the way we see it now,
um is a fairly recent notion, despite how tremendously widespread
(02:58):
it is. You know Bill Nye, the science guy you're
talking about this debate, Yeah, he got in a debate
with Ken hamp just just totally off the cuff, not
planned at all. They just both happened to be in
the same auditorium. I watched the whole thing, did you
the whole two hours? I couldn't pull myself away from it.
So I'm guessing that you suspect Bill ni won the debate. Well,
(03:21):
I mean, are there winners and losers, So don't be shy.
There are, um there's there's a British uh religious website
that pulled it's um it's guests because you know, people
who go to websites are called guests. But in England
there and said who won? And um, I think ninety
(03:42):
two said Bill ny one and The reason why is
because in the comments section, it was revealed that most
of these people said, yeah, we believe in God, but
evolution is still real. And to deny evolution outright is
pretty silly. I think when you say things like dragons,
you might lose people. Did he say dragons that didn't
(04:04):
see it? Yeah, he mentioned dragons. Well, I mean that's
some people. And like you said, religion and science co
exists for a lot of religious folk. But um, there
are some that are very literal and strict and say
that you know, how to explain dinosaurs while they may
have been dragons, and I don't that that doesn't explain
anything that well, I think that just changes in the Bible.
(04:26):
Oh yeah, if if I'm getting this wrong and I
really get killed, we should pausitive for a second. Um, Like,
the point of this episode is not to stomp on
anybody's beliefs. No, I think science can be just as
dogmatic as religion. Um, so like that's not what we're
doing now. Like, if you believe in creationism, to each
(04:48):
his own, Like, we're not gonna pound our beliefs into
you or you know, vice versa. I've never understood that,
Like who cares just either way, you know, it's like
to my way of thinking, or else you are just
so wrong it's mind boggling. Um, well, that's not the
point of this. I think we should just c o
(05:09):
a with that, because that's not what we're like. There's
some people who don't always listen. Maybe this is their
first episode. Welcome. Uh, we are not those kind of guys, know,
And specifically with this episode, it's on Charles Darwin the
man and kind of what made him who he was not?
And we'll tackle are we committing to go ahead and
doing natural selection? As a matter of fact, we'll have
(05:30):
this one come out on a Tuesday. We'll do natural
selection on a Thursday. Look at that? All right? I agree,
let's do it. Let there be like, but h Darwin
is a fascinating dude though, Yeah, yeah, because you can't
really overstate the idea that he was. As Robert lam
puts in his fine article, I have to say one
(05:51):
of his best um that Charles Darwin was the fulcrum
by which or on which the entire he change from
a religious worldview to a scientific worldview took place. It
was on this man's shoulders, even though oddly enough. He
wasn't the only person to come up with natural selection now,
(06:12):
and we'll get to that. He wasn't the first or
the last. Uh. But it turns out he was the
most thorough in his research right and had the most
social breeding and in breeding. Yeah. Man, this is the
ultimate tease. It is. So let's get started, Chuck. Let's
talk about Darwin He Um didn't He wasn't born with
(06:32):
a Bunsen burner in a flask in his hand. No,
he was not. Uh. He was born, if anything, with
a stethoscope in his hand. Because his father, doctor Robert
Wearing Darwin Um, had designs on little Chuck being a
doctor like him, because he was you know, they had
(06:52):
some dough that he was an English gentleman. They weren't
poor by any means. No. Apparently his grandfather a massive,
vast fortune in China, and not the country, but the
porcelain interesting, So would be incorrect to say he had
a Chinese fortune. He had a China fortune, okay, Uh.
But little Chuck was not into anatomy. He was definitely
(07:13):
not into surgery on humans. It freaked him out. I
think he was a little queasy as a person. It
seems like, yeah, but he was. He was way into
the natural sciences and was just fine with dissecting a frog. Yeah.
You know, he was cool with biology. As long as
you weren't human, he'd cut you, that's right. Uh. So
(07:35):
he was sent to several schools um first when he
was going to be a doctor, to the Anglican Shrewsbury School,
then to Edinburgh University, and finally his dad was like,
all right, you don't want to be a doctor or
so the only other option for you is to be
a man of religion parson in the country. Yeah, so
I'm gonna send you to christ College in Cambridge, which
is I mean, if you're gonna go be a country parson,
(07:57):
you could do a lot worse. I agreed. You know,
the fighting padres is over there, padres um. So he
was very well educated, uh and had been exposed to
all kinds of science, so he was. He was a
very smart guy from early on, um, and way into
natural science, like I said, but not into the religion
(08:20):
thing as much. He was agnostic from a pretty early age, right,
and he seemed like he was going to follow the
path that his father was laying out for him. I
guess he was very domineering and Charles Darwin was a
pretty great thinker, pretty all around good guy. But he
also was a bit of a pantywaist. It seems like,
(08:41):
you know, he was like really really affected by stress. Yeah. Sight,
he had a lot of psycho somatic symptoms from stress
pretty much throughout his whole life. Despite that, though, he
took a very brave course in life. And it started
when he was twenty one and he was on his
way to becoming that country parson that his father had
(09:04):
decided he would be. And he got an invitation to
go on a tour of the islands off South America
UM from a guy named Robert Fitzroy who was twenty
six years old. He was an aristocrat and he liked Darwin.
He said, hey, you're good at conversations. When I get bored,
I suffer about to depression. I'm about to go on
(09:25):
this boat called the h MS Beagle for god knows
how long, So why don't you come along and uh,
we can chat and I won't get depressed. And Darwin said,
you know what, let's do this. That's right, which is
a that's a pretty bold move. Yeah, he's he was
for someone who was would you say, pennyways, Yeah, Pennyways.
It's sort of surprising that he was up for that
kind of adventure. Yes, a milk toast. You could also
(09:49):
call him a milk toast. Maybe call him that. All right? Uh,
so this was one He boarded the HMS Beagle, which
I for some reason just cracks me up. You know,
our buddy go from forward thinking just adopted a dog
part beagle, and his name is Darwin. Huh because of
that association, I would imagine, And Joe said, he looks
(10:10):
like Darwin head on ibrow. That's funny. Um. All right,
so he board at the HMS Beagle. What did you say?
How old was he? Twenty one? And they took a
five year voyage around South America. Um. The purpose for
fitz Roy was to chart the waters of South America
and the coastlines and that kind of thing. But Chuck
(10:31):
was like, I'm into natural stuff and species that I
don't know, So what better thing to do than spend
like most of my time not on the boat but
on land just researching stuff. I'm sure he got pretty
good at rowing from the ship too short back and forth. Yeah,
he's basically Paul Bettany's character and master and commander Well,
(10:54):
which is ironic because Paul Bettany played Charles Darwin. Did
he really in that movie Creation? Oh yeah, I never
saw that, but I know what you're talking about. That's funny.
You had no idea. Huh. No, he stepped right into
that one. I wonder if he recognized that. I don't know.
It's a good movie, that Creation. You should check it out.
It's um details a lot of the struggles of his
life that we're gonna go over here, and mainly is
(11:14):
about his uh anxieties of what he was doing in
his relationship to his Christian wife. Oh yeah, I'll bet
that was kind of a sore spot big time. We'll
get to that though in a second. So okay, So
they head off to South America. There he's spending two
thirds of the voyage. Of this five year voyage, he
spends on land. Uh. One of the most famous places
(11:36):
he visited was the Galapa Ghost which are still around. Yeah,
and that apparently was really overstated. He was only, uh,
what is still around? Is that a joke? The Galapa
Ghost They're still around? Okay. I thought I was missing
on something because you looked at me like you're missing
a joke. That's this look Okay, um what was that one?
As you smell that was my either water. So the
(12:00):
Glapaos apparently it was a little overstated it's significance wise. Um,
he was only there for about five weeks out of
the five years, and historians think it's been overstated because
it was so exotic and people wanted to point to
some like kind of fantastical birthplace of all these ideas
I mean stuck, yeah, I mean for sure, and he
(12:23):
you know, collected all kinds of different specimens from the Glapicos,
but it wasn't as big a deal. Have you ever
seen the size of the turtles there or the tortoises?
Are the huge, dude, They're like the size of VW. Beatles.
They're enormous and apparently like they'll hang out with you.
What else are they gonna do? Run away slowly? Okay? Yeah,
(12:44):
they have no choice, they have agency. They could be
like I don't want to be here around you, I'm
gonna go this way. They just it wouldn't work very
well or very quickly. Yeah. Okay, so where are we? Man?
We are? I was just poopooing the Galapagos. Yeah. Um,
but what he did while he was gone was he
did a lot of great work and made a real
(13:04):
name for himself and kind of came back a well
known scientist. Scientists because the whole time he's making all
these findings, he's finding new species of animals that like
Europeans didn't even know existed, like entire types of animals. Um,
he's sending back specimens, which means he killed a lot
of animals while he was on these islands, mailed them
back to Europe, mailed back some of his findings. He's
(13:27):
basically writing papers as he's doing this, this journey, so
back in the jolly old England there um basically becomes
his celebrity. Yeah. And he was, you know, like before
he even returned. Yeah, he was looking at he had
the idea of natural selection, but it was, like we said,
it was already out there. It was known as the
(13:49):
mystery of Mysteries or transmutation. And he called his his
research at first the Transmutation Notebooks, so that yeah, he
wasn't you know, his reach searching stuff that he had
heard about. It was a working title. What was the
working title actually? Um, what would later become on the
origin of the species of course. Yeah, and uh, he
(14:10):
and another guy will talk about a little bit. We're
also UM inspired. Both were inspired by Thomas Malthus, who
we've talked about, who came up with the idea of
carrying capacity and basically introduced the idea that scarcity and
competition forces adaptation and change. And then uh, Darwin and
the guy Um, Alfred Wallace Russell or Alfred Russell Wallace
(14:34):
UM both read this and said, well, wait, man, I
wonder if that adaptation and change that's forced by scarcity
is what creates the change and species that we're seeing here. Yeah,
that was definitely UM. The book was called Essay on
Principle of Population and that was like a super game
changer because it really gave him, like the the notion
(14:56):
that by studying our any species death, you can kind
of study its life. Yeah. And it wasn't it wasn't
just biology that it gave rise to. It gave rise
to um economics, largely, a lot of anthropology, a lot
of ecology. Like it was, like you say, a game changer.
(15:18):
Thomas Malthis go back and listen to our population podcast.
Is that where he appears I think he appears a
few times, but that was a good one. Yeah, it's
an oldie, but a goodie. Um. So, like we said,
he came back sort of a celebrity of sorts, and
he came back with a lot of information, uh, and
settled in at the down House in Kent, and this
(15:41):
place was He spent the next forty years there studying
his property essentially, like he didn't need to go anywhere.
He had plenty of nature there. Apparently there were forty
different species per square meter on his property. Uh. He
had ten kids and he used them as sort of
a a little laboratory experiment because three of them died
(16:03):
and he was fascinated with why things and people survive
and some don't. So it was all sort of part
of his Uh. It was just everything was part of
his laboratory. Essentially. He had people sending him samples from
all over the world, and there are some theories that
if the postal service hadn't have been so good, he
may have never been able to write the origin of
(16:25):
the species because he relied on people sending him stuff
in due time. Oh yeah, and also he was really
big on corresponding, which kind of helped develop his UM,
his ideas, flesh him out even further. Was he was
huge on correspondence. Yeah. He had a UM area on
his property called the Sandwalk that he had built. It
(16:46):
was basically just a loop path through the woods and
he would just spend like countless hours just walking this
path and thinking and looking at everything everything right, nothing design.
One of his favorite UM subjects was earthworms. Remember our
Earthworm podcast. There was a quote from him in there
(17:09):
UM where he said, it may be doubted whether there
are many other animals which have played so important a
part in the history of the world as these lowly
organized creatures. So he was down with earthworms, downs and
orchids very famously too. Yeah, he was. He was active.
He wasn't just looking at things. He raised orchids. He
was a beekeeper, he raised pigeons and like it was
(17:30):
all just in the name of study. Right. One of
the things though, we um He married his first cousin,
his wife um and at the time they didn't really
know much about the troubles with inbreeding, and he was
one of the people who discovered the troubles with inbreeding,
and it apparently had a really big effect on him.
(17:51):
Like he felt kind of guilty and weird and wondered
if maybe his kids early deaths had to do with that. Yeah, um,
which has to be kind of startling if you're the
guy who discovers the problems with inbreeding and you've inbred,
you know, Yeah, it's gotta be a little jarring. Sure. Uh.
(18:13):
Emma Wedgewood was his wife's maiden name, And one thing
that happened when he married her was he got more
money because she was also in the family fortune. So
they were set up pretty nicely. Uh. And like I said,
she was Christian and she was amazing though, like the
Creation movie really like it's a great love story. Despite
(18:33):
the fact that they had he was Agnostic and she
was Christian. She spent her life caring for him because
he was a very sickly man. Um may have had
some sort of viral diseases entire life, maybe that he
picked up in South America. Now he was a pennywaise
on top of that, so he was just fraught with anxiety. Uh.
(18:55):
And she cared for him and all the kids, and
her life's worry was are we going to spend it
turn nity together in the afterlife? Yeah, that was her
big concern, Yeah, which is he didn't buy that stuff. No,
he and he was you know, religious ish when he
was younger, but as he grew older and no, the
more he exposed himself to these ideas of evolution and
(19:18):
natural selection, the less religious, the less he bought into it. Um.
And it's funny that that divide first occurred in him
and then it just kind of grew out from him
to create this divide throughout the world. He was the
epicenter of that divide. It first, if that crack in
the world first appeared in him. Yeah, isn't that interesting? Yeah,
(19:41):
for sure. Um, he's the one to blame pretty much.
Or he was a patient zero, one of the two. Um.
So he he comes back to down House, he gets married,
settles down doubles his fortune by marrying Emma. Um and
and his experimenting with orchids, earthworms. F he's his kids,
all this stuff. Um. And he's also at the same
(20:04):
time writing he's expanding that notebook into what he's calling
a natural selection another working title. And um, he is
taking his sweet time with it. One of the reasons
he's taking his sweet time with this is one he
is being very diligent. He's making sure he's crossing all
of his teams, dotting his eyes, making sure he's not
(20:25):
looking at it wrong, making sure he's backing up everything.
And the second connected reason to that first one is
that he is really not looking forward to the storm
that this is going to create when he unleashes it
on the public. He was well aware of it from
the beginning, because there's a couple of things that are
(20:46):
inherent in the theory of natural selection. I'm going to
add a third reason, my friend, if you're studying natural selection,
evolution takes a long time, well, yeah, you can't study
something for a week and detect change is And like
you said, he was thorough because he lived his life, uh,
basically an anxiety of not being accepted by these peers
(21:09):
and like these are people, these are friends of his.
So his procrastination is definitely fear driven by his peers
and by society at large, and by the fact that
it just takes a long time to study something like this. Right.
For instance, he left a area of his lawn unmode
for twenty years just to study what would happen and
out of that sounds like an excuse exactly, but out
(21:34):
of like the twenty different species he studied, eleven survived
and nine died away. So boom, natural selection right there,
just in a portion of his lawn. Okay, but it
took twenty years, is the point. Okay. So the time
fear of his peers, fear of the public, and he
had good reason to fear um or be anxious, because
the world was a much different place than it is now,
(21:56):
and he was well aware that what he was about
to unleash on society was going to create some big
changes in some big problems. And uh, we'll get into
that right after this message. So chuck, um, we're talking
about Darwin. He's at his house down house. Um, he's
working on his manuscript. He's kind of procrastinating a little bit,
(22:18):
and because it takes time to um, but he knows
that he's about to unleash this complete change in paradigm,
a poop storm, onto the world exactly. And Um, it's
because the world was a much different place than it
is today. Because Darwin hadn't talked about natural selection yet. Yeah,
(22:42):
I mean, religion, religious biology was biology. They didn't call
it religious biology, that was just biology. Yeah. So he
was the first one to secularize it and make it
just about the science. Um. Yeah, because before scientists thought like, well,
God created this and that is our starting point. Like
(23:02):
everything else, every other scientific explanation we have has to
trace back to creation, which is kind of It can
make science a little easier, um, but at the very
at the same time, it leaves you open to a
huge problem when somebody comes along and can fill in
all these other gaps through a completely different explanation that
(23:26):
doesn't use creationism. And that's what Darn was doing with
natural selection. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and at a
fourth thing. Man, you just keep them coming. Uh. There
were two texts that were vital, and we talked about
one of them, the mouths uh principle of population. In
four there was a book written called The Vestiges of
the Natural History of Creation and it was published anonymously
(23:48):
for forty years. No one kne who wrote it because
no one wanted to put their name on it. Like
that's how radical it was. And it was slammed like
it was hugely popular. It was like a phenomenon, like
everybody read it and everybody slammed it. And uh, it
came out later it was a guy named Robert Chambers.
He was a Scottish journalist. But what Darwit scared the
(24:11):
crap out of Darwin was like, yeah, because a lot
it was, Mama, there's a lot of the same same
ideas as he had. So what it did was it
caused him to basically rewrite his voluminous work and pare
it down the armor it with sturdier armor over the
next thirteen months. It's smart, very smart. I mean you
(24:34):
could say for him that that was a stroke of
luck that that was published and he read it and
saw what happened to total stroke of luck. He might
have been laughed out of existence if he had gotten
there first. So he he goes back, redoubles his efforts,
strengthens his argument um, and again he's combatting not just
the i the religious ideals of the time, but the
(24:55):
religious ideals of science. Yeah, like most scientists at the
time were aist when Dais believed that God created the
universe basically like a clockmaker makes a clock, wounded up
and walked away like see you later, good luck with everything.
And then anything that happened as a result after that
was the results of the mechanations of this clock and
(25:17):
there was a theory that was fairly well accepted called catastrophism, Yes,
and that basically sought to account fossils, because fossils were
a big sticking point. Why were there clearly extinct animals
that had lived before there's fossils, we have them in
(25:38):
our hands. Why do these kind of resemble the things
that are alive today. That doesn't make any sense. Well,
catastrophism um who which was suggested by a guy named
George Cuvier, And Cuvier said that catastrophism, which one I
(26:00):
like the second one catastrophism. Catastrophism, uh says that something happens, volcanoes, floods, pestilence,
something very biblical happens, and a species dies out in
an area and a new species comes in and fills
it in, and maybe that species just from living in
proximity was similar. Uh. And they that that explains why
(26:23):
some are extinct and some are now here. I would
also call that coincidences. M. Yeah, it's another way to
put it as another pronunciation. But it wasn't like super
science based, right, but this is these like these, This
was a well respected scientists, um, and this was the
prevailing thought at the time that creationism and the natural
(26:45):
scientists went hand in hand. Creationism was the basis for it,
and Darwin is about to say, you know that basis
that everybody's built science on for the last several centuries.
It's not that's that doesn't hold water. And then he
went through up again and again apparently throw a lot. Yeah,
when his when on the Origin of the Species came
(27:06):
out in eighteen fifty nine, he was at a spa
um recovering from bouts of KNOWLEDGEA so, yeah, he was
all thrown up. I feel bad for the guy. Sure,
he was just racked with anxiety his entire life, but
imagine that. Imagine being racked with anxiety and still going
to it. It's pretty impressive. Uh So. Previous to its publication,
(27:26):
another important thing happened. Um we mentioned earlier Alfred Russell Wallace.
He was a fellow Englishman and specimen collector, and he
basically wrote almost exactly the same thing that Darwin had
been working on, sent it to Darwin, and um people
(27:49):
urged them both to present their works at something called
the Linnaean Society in eight They did so together as
a team. But um, it wasn't it didn't kinda make
much of a splash at the time. It wasn't until
he officially published his work that you know made the splash, right.
And Alfred Um, Alfred Russell Wallace actually was the impetus
(28:12):
for him to publish Um Origin of the Species. He
he'd been sitting there dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating. Um.
Not long and um. He got a letter from Wallace,
like you said, and he realized, holy cow, Wallace has
come up with the same thing. I've been working on
this for thirty years. I'm I'm not gonna forget that.
(28:36):
Forgive my anxiety. I'm just publishing this puppy. And uh.
He he did, and it came out in eighteen fifty nine. Um,
and he was hailed as a villain and a genius,
depending on who you spoke to. And let's talk about
the Origin of Species and what it says and what
(28:58):
natural selection means, Chuck Um. First of all, the official
title of the book is on the Origin of Species
by means of natural selection or the preservation of favorite racism,
the Struggle for life. And that's why everybody calls the
Origin of Species. Because it's long and wordy, but what
it basically says is that um species adapt. They adapt
(29:25):
due to population pressure, they adapt through competition with one
another between species inside species. UM that when you see
like slightly different traits, individual traits to be expected, but
those individual traits can ultimately lead to a new species
on a long enough time table if those traits make
(29:49):
their their increase their chance of surviving to reproduction age,
and enhance their ability to reproduce. Yeah right, and if
you if don't, if you aren't good at that, then
you go bye bye. Right, And this explains why some
species are extinct, why the ones that are here today
are the winners. And chillingly that all this is still
(30:12):
going on. It's very very slow, so we can't see
it happens on a glacial time scale, our geologic time scale,
but it's still going on. And here's proof. The thing
that he doesn't come out in state, But that wasn't
lost on the Victorians, especially the religious victorians, is that
inherent in that argument is that man, the king of
(30:36):
the world, is nothing more than an animal that evolved
from who knows what. Yeah he I bet, I bet
He threaded over that so much because he believed it,
but I think there are only two mentions of mankind
in the entire work, but the implications were clear, Like
the public at large may not have been wise to
it at first, but scientists were like, wait a minute,
(30:57):
are you saying that we came from apes? He's like,
I'm at a spa recovering from I can't be reached. Um.
But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying
that upfront in plain English. Yeah, and it caused like
he said, a poop storm. Yeah, And I guess we
should say Russell Wallace was he's been sort of lost
(31:20):
to history as far as you know what most people know. Um. Yeah,
it's sad. It is sad because he was a smart guy,
but he wasn't. He had no standing, um like Darwin did.
And that's kind of one of the reasons he was
forgotten to history, right he Um, he was out in
the field. He was he seemed to be happiest out
in the field. After this um this theory was introduced. Um,
(31:41):
he retreated back to the Melee Peninsula to collect um specimens. Yeah,
but he would sell them, which kind of degraded his standing,
I think, right, just but he was using those funds
to further fund more scientific exploration. You know, it's not
like he was funding his opium habit or not. But
the point is Darwin didn't need to sell it, so
(32:02):
I think he was. People were like, well, this guy's
collecting species and selling them. He's a merchant, right, exactly,
That's exactly right. And regardless of whether Wallace um Russell
was a you know, a great scientist or not, it
didn't matter. If you put these two men and their
theories were exactly equal, but one was of higher social
standing and greater wealth, well that guy won, and that
(32:23):
was Darwin. Um. So Darwin became he will, exactly under
Victorian aristocracy rules, but he became the again, the rallying point,
the fulcrum, the center of the universe in this new
debate that he unleashed between creationism and evolution that's still
going on today literally not today, but a couple of
(32:46):
weeks ago, right, so almost literally. Um, And he didn't
like that at all. So what he said was, you
know what, you guys talked this over, I'm gonna go
hit and hit the spa and throw up do what
you want with it, right, I'm going away. I've got
a lawn to not moo. But lucky for him, he
(33:06):
had a lot of supporters, like right out of the game, yeah,
he had he had both. He had um supporters scientists
that I think some wanted I wanted to say this
stuff all along, and now that they had such a
like wonderful, concise and well researched piece of work to
back them up, they came out of the woodwork and like, yeah,
(33:27):
see this is great. But some people weren't. In fact,
I think I can't remember the guy's name. Someone he
really respected and his wife really respected, basically slammed him
in called it heresy, and that was really impactful. Again
more anxiety, well yeah, more throwing up. And there was
a lot of name calling. There was a lot of
(33:48):
political cartoons that were unflattering, um, and unflattering for the
Victorian Nates so basically his head on a monkey or
something like that. Um. But he while he had his detractors,
he had his supporters. And there was one guy in
particular named Thomas Huxley, and he was I believe the
grandfather of Algius Huxley. Uh huh and um. Sometimes you'll
(34:11):
if you see Darwin's theory mentioned, you'll see the Darwin
slash Huxley theory. Because Huxley UM basically was a religious man,
and Darwin, I think firsthand, not just through the origin
the species, but through the correspondence as well, convinced him
(34:32):
like no, dude, natural selection is actually right, and very ironically,
just like uh, Saul converting to Paul on the Road
to Damascus, Huxley converts from a religious fervent to a
natural selection and he just takes it with religious selotry
(34:52):
and starts taking on anybody he can in debate, writing
any article he can and defending not just darw and
but his theory as well. And it came so much
so that he came to be known as Darwin's bulldog.
And he actually coined the term agnostic. Oh really, Yeah,
he was the one that coined that term to differentiate
people like himself who was who were still believers in
(35:15):
God but also fervent believers in UM in natural selection
as well. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So that wasn't the
only thing he wrote that was his life's work, for sure,
But he wrote UM eleven more, published eleven more times
before two uh, and then finally in nineteen seventy three,
which is pretty old for someone who was in such
(35:36):
ill health as entire life. Heart heart attack finally got him. Yeah,
it's very sad, it is. But he lived a good, long,
nauseated life. You know. That's a good point. So I
guess we should talk a little bit about his legacy, right, Yeah,
you did that kind of work. He pass away, you're
gonna have a legacy. They name a city in Australia
(35:57):
after you. Really, I believe it's dar in Australia. Please, guy,
don't let it be New Zealand. Do you want to look? No? Okay,
I'm I'm I'm feeling like a gambling man today got you?
Uh So his influence um from then on and continues
to be today. Uh Lamb calls it rightfully, so a
(36:17):
paradigm shift in science, society and literature. Like it can't
be understated. It was a game changer for kind of
everything and the way things went. You're on one side
or the other. It's like meo water, it changes everything.
What's that you haven't seen the ad for? Like the
little droplets of flavoring you can add to your water.
(36:38):
I've seen that. So you haven't seen the ad where
the guys in the office talking and like as you
as they cut back and forth, everything keeps changing because
they're adding meal. Oh it's one of the better adds around.
And you know me, I'm an ad aficionado. That's true. Well,
one thing we can um point to is that, uh,
Herbert Spencer, he was a sociologist after Darwin applied Darwinism
(37:03):
to sociology in the form of social Darwinism a k A.
Survival of the fittest, which it didn't bastardize it, but
it definitely he definitely used it for his own purposes
to say that, uh, you know what, the week, we
shouldn't even worry about the week. If we want to
be a strong mankind, then let the week die out. Well,
(37:27):
you know, so, um, this sociologist that came up with
this idea of social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, that's a very
Mauthusian view of humanity and um nature, because Mauthis was
basically saying, like, look, man, we take care of the
poor and everything, but if we do that, we're interfering
(37:48):
with nature and we're gonna end up over burdening the
population because population is gonna grow geometrically and we're not
going to be able to support ourselves and society is
going to collapse. Yeah, that was what Mauthis was saying.
This guy said, yeah, Yeah, it's weird that Darwin was
in the middle of kind of both book ended by
(38:08):
these two. And I think it really just you can
kind of say, like it really just kind of he
was lacking a bit of evil, where if he had
been a little more evil maybe he would have come
up with social Darwinism himself. Um, but he didn't. Herbert
Spencer did, and it kind of took off like a rocket,
this idea like yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute,
wait a minute, we don't need to pay taxes anymore,
(38:29):
we don't need to tithe. We can just you know,
let the poor die in the streets. It's social Darwinism,
survival of the fittest. We don't have to feel guilt
for not taking care of these other people any longer.
The survival of this they weren't meant to be. And
basically they replaced God's will with nature's will in there
(38:50):
the in explaining the cruelty of the world, you know,
and um, like I said, it took off. It became
what what uh we call the eugenics movement very quickly. Yeah,
which was the idea that the government would actually get
involved in weeding out the weaker uh parts of society. Yeah,
(39:12):
because you don't have to wait around for revolution to
do this. We can speed it up by picking out
the weakest and and exterminating them, or at the very
least letting them exterminate themselves by only breeding. Uh. You know,
the the Boys from Brazil. Yeah, I finally saw half
of that movie. I can't tell you how surprised I
(39:33):
was there. Surprised I was to see Steve Guttenberg. Oh
Goods was one of the kids, wouldn't he He was
like the first one. Yeah, yeah, godd I forgot about that.
Oh wait a minute, he was one of the kids
from the experiment. No, he wasn't. He was like the journalist.
It's like blowing the cover off of this whole thing.
I haven't seen him a long time. Yeah, I know.
It's creepy though. So Yeah. Possibly gave birth to eugenics,
(39:56):
which we should say obviously, Um, the Nazis loved, and
they used that to rationalize the extermination of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, epileptics,
the mentally handicapped, the blind, everybody, Um, guys who smelled
like me. Yeah, it would have been in big trouble. Um.
But prior to the Nazis doing this, Uh, the United States, Indiana, Georgia,
(40:23):
all sorts of other states forced sterilization on uh people
of similar stature. Um. And actually Adolf Hitler, Well, Germany
had its own sterilization program as well. But Adolf Hitler
was apparently well aware of what was going on in
America and um was a pretty big fan of it.
(40:43):
And if, um, you don't believe me, go back and
listen to our episode. Um, is it legal to sterilize addicts?
Because it's still going on today? Yeah? So what about
this deathbed recan have you ever heard that? I have?
Not true? Apparently so, he supposedly said on his deathbed, basically,
(41:05):
I take it all back. Yeah, I wish I hadn't
e ever said this. It's not true. You know, God
is God is good. God's the one. And a woman
from New England named Lady Hope claimed that she was
there and took this confession and his both his daughter
and his son, who were both at his side while
(41:27):
he died. He said, this lady was not at his deathbed.
She never came to our house. Uh, and she had
absolutely no influence on our father's way of looking or
judgment or opinions at all. He never recanted to the end.
He was an ardent supporter of natural selection. Yeah, that's
a pretty good idea, though, if you're a creationist, well,
(41:48):
I mean to make up that story. The father of
evolution even changed his mind on his deathbed. If you
look up today on the internet, like, um, I think
darwin deathbed even will bring up like creationist website after
creationist website that use it to support their claims. Oh really,
but it's bunk. It's it was debunked right afterwards. And chuck,
(42:10):
let me say one more thing about social Darwinism. Um.
This idea, although in a very cold calculated sense it
might make sense, it doesn't appear in humanity's history. In fact,
there's evidence UM from up to five thousand years ago
of severely disabled people fossils, their fossils, their remains being
(42:34):
found UM where they could not possibly have lived to
the age they lived to without being cared for by
their community. So this idea that you know, in a
more primitive state. We just you know, left people to
to die out in the weather because they couldn't keep up.
It doesn't hold water. Yeah, it's very comforting that. So
(42:54):
that means we were innately have compassion as a species.
I would guess that. Yeah, that's what I like. I
think it's one of the things that makes us human, agreed,
But not just us. No other species have compassion, So um,
maybe we should. Uh, why don't you play us out
with a little bit of Darwin Man. Yeah, the last
(43:16):
paragraph of the Origin of the Species, to me, is
one of the most beautiful things I ever written, So
I'm gonna read it. It is interesting to contemplate an
entangled bank, and he's talking about his home in Kent
that pats of grass. Well, now all of it. Uh,
It is interesting to contemplate and entangled bank clothed with
many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
(43:39):
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through
the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,
so different from each other and dependent on each other
in so complex of manner, have all been produced by
laws acting around us. These laws taken in the largest sense,
being growth with reproduction inheritance, which is almost implied by
(44:00):
reproduction variability, from the indirect and direct action of the
external conditions of life, and from use and disuse. A
ratio of increase so high is to lead to a
struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection,
entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms. Thus,
from the war of nature, from famine and death, the
(44:22):
most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely
the production of the higher animals, directly follows Uh. There
is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers having been originally breathed into a few forms, or
into one. That's where he's kind of skirting around things,
and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according
(44:43):
to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning,
endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and
are being evolved. Good stuff, Chuck, not me, both of you.
I felt like it was in our Halloween. Up as
it again? Oh yeah, yeah, it was good. Chuck. Don't
(45:03):
think me, Chuck's I can just read you got anything else?
Got nothing else? I think that was a fine way
to end this one. Um, if you want to learn
more about Charles Darwin, the man uh and his ideas,
you can type Darwin into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com. It should bring up a whole
bunch of articles, some of which we will record into podcasts. Yeah,
(45:23):
or that movie creation is really good, or if you're
in the documentaries, Um, there are tons of them. The
BBC has got like a dozen. Oh yeah, they love
him there sure. Uh Well, since I said uh, search bar,
I probably did, it's time for listening before the mail.
There's a quick correction. In our Kent State episode, we
(45:46):
said Mussolini had his brown shirts. Yeah they're the black shirts. Duh, No, biggie.
It's the presence of all color, not the presence of
some colors brownison, new black anyway? Is that right? Oranges?
All right? I'm gonna call this uh amputee uh ampt
(46:06):
like ampute comma ampute. Hey, guys, been listening for a
couple of years now and really enjoy it. As a
sixty year old woman who had to right leg amputated
above the knee in nineteen sixty nine due to cancer,
I was especially interested in that podcast. First, I want
to correct one off hand comment which he stated that
being an empt probably becomes the focus of your life,
(46:27):
not always. In my case, being an ampute did not
become the focus. In fact, occasionally friends forget that I
am an ampute. Now I consider it a compliment. Um.
As you said, life isn't over because the person becomes
an ampute. I was married for twenty years. I went
to graduate school for my master's degree in counseling psychology.
Now two wonderful grown children, worked from the age of
(46:48):
fourteen to fifty five, with time off for raising kids,
and attend to graduate school, and have been able to
travel quite a bit. I've been lucky not to have
experienced fan of pain. I have always had, and have
been told by my doctors will always have phantom feeling
though it feels I know, uh, it feels as though
my amputated leg is present but asleep, sort of a benign,
(47:10):
prickly feeling. The feeling quickly faded into the background, and
I only notice it now when I'm thinking about it.
You may be interested also to know that the artificial
leg I received in nineteen sixty nine was literally a
wooden leg from the knee down. I am now in
my fourth press prestesis. I thought she's gonna say, like
an old Bessie still with me? Not now. I'm now
(47:34):
on my fourth procesis and they get better and better.
My current leg is very high tech and impressive. It
can make coffee. That is from Denise. Uh slat slatting
grin awesome from Arcada, Arcata, California. Nice, not Arcadia. That's
northern California, A R C A T A. Thanks Denise.
She sounds like a very well adjusted person. Uh, and
(47:57):
we appreciate you writing in calling us out on that.
I hope you still have old Betty on the shelf
somewhere at least it's Betsy Chuck Betsy. Yeah, I would
keep it, just got it carved into this side, you know. Um.
Thanks for writing in, and if any of you out
there want to write in, share your story. We love
hearing them. We're pretty much like the central clearinghouse for
(48:19):
people's stories. So bring him to us. We will disseminate
them as best we can. You can hang out with
us on Twitter, s y s K podcast. You can
hang out with us on Facebook dot com slash stuff.
You should know you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcasts at Discovery dot com. Check out the Stuff
You Should Know Television Network on our YouTube channel Josh
(48:42):
and Chuck, and as always, hang out with us on
our home on the web, Stuff You Should Don't dot
count for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how Stuff Works dot com
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Chuck Bryant
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