November 8, 2024 • 40 mins
Charles Darwin was stumped by peacocks. According to his theory of evolution, some creatures were better equipped to survive in their particular environment than others. It explained a lot - but it didn't explain the peacock's brightly coloured tail feathers, which were extravagant and cumbersome. Surely such plumage made it harder for peacocks to survive?
It so happens that the life of Darwin's own grandfather offered clues to the puzzle of the peacock's tail - if only he'd known to look there...
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hello, dear listeners, it is Tim Harford here with an
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Speaker 1 (01:01):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Charles Darwin hated peacocks. The sight of a feather in
a peacock's tail, he said, whenever I gaze at it
makes me sick. But what had peacocks ever done to
Charles Darwin? For years, Darwin had been working out the
details of his theory of evolution. At the core of
(01:28):
that theory was a simple but powerful insight some creatures
are better equipped than others to survive in their particular environment,
and they get to pass on their characteristics to the
next generation. Darwin called it natural selection, and it explained
a lot, but not everything. Look around in nature and
(01:51):
you'll see plenty of things that don't seem to help
with survival. The peacock's tail, for example, with its long,
brightly colored feathers. Surely having to lug around such cumbersome
plumage must make it harder for peacocks to survive. Wouldn't
a peacock with a lighter, shorter tail be better able
(02:12):
to run away from predators? And yet evolution had produced
the peacock's tail. How every time Darwin saw a peacock,
it painfully reminded him that he hadn't fully worked out
the details of his theory. And in the English countryside
in the eighteen sixties, Charles Darwin must have seen peacocks
(02:34):
rather often. They were popular with a landed gentry. Charles
was a country gentleman himself. Where could Darwin turn for
inspiration to solve his peacock problem, Perhaps to the writings
of others. It's Charles whose name we associate with evolution today,
but many earlier thinkers had speculated along similar lines. Chief
(02:58):
among them was Darwin's own grandfather, the larger than life
Erasmus Darwin, who had died before Charles was born, was
enormously fat, gross, and corpulent, said one unkind obituarist. His
features were coarse, He was rather clumsy and slovenly, and
(03:19):
frequently walked with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
What he lacked in conventional standards for good looks, though, Erasmus,
made up for in charm. He attracted two beautiful wives
and fathered fourteen children, two of them with a third woman.
Between the marriages, Erasmus made his living as a doctor,
(03:42):
dabbled as an inventor, and one fame as a poet
and a writer, including on evolution. Would it be too
bold to imagine, wrote Erasmus, that all warm blooded animals
have arisen from one living filament. That's impressive for the
(04:03):
seventeen hundreds, long before anyone conceived of DNA. As it happens,
there was one particular aspect of Charles Darwin's grandfather's life
that might have helped Charles figure out the peacock's tail.
But this is a story about how answers aren't always
(04:26):
found in the most obvious places to look. I'm Tim
Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Josiah Wedgwood was
(05:01):
born in seventeen thirty in the village of Burslem in
the English Midlands. The region was known for pottery from
its low called clay soils. Josiah's father was a potter,
but not a successful one. His wares were low priced
and low quality. His profit margin's slim. While other branches
(05:22):
of the Wedgewood family had done well for themselves, Josiah's
side were the poor relations. Josiah was the youngest child
of eleven. Five of his older siblings died of smallpox.
Those who lived went to work in the family workshop
as soon as they were able. First, they shoveled clay
(05:43):
into a kind of mill. The horse walked in circles,
turning a shaft that pummeled the clay with metal blades
until it was ready to throw onto the potter's wheel,
if in a glaze and bake in the brick oven.
It was hard physical work. As a boy, or Josiah
two got smallpox. It seemed for a while that he
(06:06):
wasn't going to make it. He lay in bed, weak
and delirious, his body covered in pustules. At last, the
fever broke, the skin scabbed over, but part of Josiah
never really recovered from the illness, his right knee. He
hobbled back to the workshop and tried to find ways
(06:27):
he could make himself useful while sitting down, resting his
leg on a stool. It wasn't easy, but times were changing.
Some other local potters were starting to experiment with new
techniques and ingredients to make new designs and colored glazes,
bowls that looked like tortoise shell teapots shaped like a
(06:49):
couliflower or pineapple. Josiah found a job he could manage
despite his painful leg. He discovered that he loved to
experiment a new shade of green, a vibrant orange, yellow,
a more visually pleasing pineapple teapot. By the age of thirty,
sire had set up on his own. Every evening after work,
(07:13):
he'd sit in his kitchen and mix together some new
combination of metals and minerals, salts, and enamels to glaze
his wares. He carefully recorded the results in a leather
bound notebook. Experiment number four six. This seems to separate
parties run thin like water. That is a good color,
says one entry. Experiment number four eight much the same,
(07:38):
but less of the exuded watery part. Every experiment was systematic.
Very one ingredient hold the other's constant and see how
it changed the outcome. Experiment number four nine rather better.
Josiah was trying to solve a problem that frustrated every
(08:01):
potter at the time. When they tried to make white
colored wares, they always had a browny yellow tinge. And
then experiment number four one one a good white glaze.
Josiah's new white plates were like nothing else on the market.
(08:21):
He could print on them verses and pictures. Business began
to boom. Josiah hired new workers, he expanded into a
second workshop, and he finally felt successful enough to propose
to the love of his life. Sally was his cousin
from the wealthy branch of the Wedgwood family. They had
(08:43):
been smitten with each other for years, but Sally's father,
a successful banker, had always been sniffy about his only
daughter marrying a potter. He wanted Josiah to make him
financial guarantees. Exasperated, Josiah told a friend, I have gone
through a long series of bargain making, of settlements, reversions, provisions,
(09:06):
et cetera, et cetera. It was mortifying, he said, to
have to negotiate marriage like just another business deal. If
it were up to him and Sally, they could settle
the whole affair in three lines and so many minutes.
Sally put her foot down. She was nearly thirty, she'd
(09:28):
never wanted anyone else, and her father relented. Josiah was
soon gushing in another letter to his friend they were
two married lovers, as happy as this world can make them.
Sali joined Josiah in the kitchen every night, mixing chemicals,
glazing pots, and filling notebooks. He'd taught her his code.
(09:52):
She helped him make more fashionable products that caught the
attention of high society. One hundred and fifty miles away
in London, an order came in that Josiah could barely
have dreamed of a tea service for the Queen of England,
Queen Charlotte, the wife of mad King George the Third.
(10:15):
Josiah's business could hardly be going better. His right leg, though,
was giving him more and more trouble on a badly
rutted road, had fallen from his horse. The pain was
constant now, and his trusted doctor said there was only
one thing for it. That leg would have to come off.
(10:38):
The doctor Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was born in seventeen
thirty one, a year after Josiah. His career as a
doctor got off to a shaky start. His first patient,
a man who'd been stabbed in a drunken brawl, died.
(11:01):
He got no other patients. After a couple of months,
he gave up and moved forty miles to another town
to try for a fresh start. This time, his first
patient was a young man from a wealthy family whose
doctor had told them that his illness was incurable. In desperation,
(11:23):
the young man's mother called on the new doctor in
town and asked for a second opinion. Was there nothing
Erasmus could do? In truth, there wasn't much choice of
treatments In the seventeen hundreds. Erasmus later wrote down his
prescriptions for a range of conditions. For anorexia, for instance,
(11:44):
opium half a grain twice a day. For impotence, a
grain of opium before bed epilepsy, opium a grain every
half hour, gallstones, tetanus, you guessed it. History doesn't record
what Erasmus gave the young man whose doctor had given
(12:05):
up on him. Perhaps it was opium, but whether or
not Erasmus had anything to do with it. The patient
made a miraculous recovery, and his family recommended Erasmus to everyone.
Soon Erasmus was making friends among the great and the
good of the Industrial Revolution, treating their illnesses and sending
(12:25):
them ideas for inventions. Some didn't work out, like the
horizontal windmill. Others did, like a clever new steering mechanism
for carriages. He didn't bother to patent it. He just
wanted to make his own journeys safer. Erasmus had to
travel a lot to see his patients, and the roads
(12:46):
were terrible. His idea for the steering mechanism was good
enough to last over a century later. It was the
standard in the early car industry. In his early thirties,
Erasmus heard from an up and coming potter from the
other side of the county, Josiah Wedgwood, was lobbying to
(13:08):
raise from them for a canal. It was hard to
get his fragile goods to distant cities on the potholed roads.
Josiah explained, no matter how much straw he packed them in,
something always got smashed. Erasmus was well respected, would he
support the campaign?
Speaker 1 (13:27):
He would.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Erasmus threw himself into the cause, writing a long pamphlet
on the benefits of inland waterways. He became close friends
with Josiah and doctor to the Wedgwood family. Erasmus recommended
a surgeon to take care of Josiah's troublesome leg. The
amputation was risky no antibiotics in the seventeen sixties, and
(13:52):
fearful no anesthetic either. Erasmus prescribed opium. Josiah sat in
a chair at home in a drug induced haze, while
his wife Sally waited anxiously in the next room with
their little daughter, Susannah. The surgeon readed his sore cautionary tales.
(14:14):
Will be back after the break. You're listening to a
cautionary tale about Charles Darwin and how he struggled to
understand how the peacock's tail could have evolved when it
(14:35):
seemed so obviously to hinder survival. We'll come back to
Charles and his peacock problem later on. But I promised
that Charles might have better understood the peacock's tail if
only he'd paid more attention to his own grandfather's life.
So let's get back to that life where we left it.
(14:59):
Erasmus Darwin anxiously watched over his friend Josiah Wedgwood. Josiah
was off his head on opium, his right leg a
stu ump wrapped in bandages. Ever, the hard nosed businessman
Josiah would have been happy to know his employees were
getting on.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
With a job.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
A letter survives from the Midlands workshop to the London showroom.
Sir mister Wedgewood has this day had his leg taken
off and is as well as can be expected after
such an execution. Mister Horn's goods are packed a moncrate
for the warehouse. Josiah's leg healed well. He commissioned a
(15:42):
craftsman to make him a wooden prosthetic with joints that
moved and a foot that could wear a shoe and stocking.
Josiah worked hard on his tea service for the Queen.
The request was specific a complete set of tea things
with a gold ground and raised flowers upon it in green.
(16:05):
Josiah knew how to do green glazes, but gold. He
had some gold leaf sent up from London and tried
to work out how to burn it onto his smooth
ivory white plates. He was mortified to find it does
not look so well as I expected. He consulted books
with ArKade knowledge that might help or might not. Mix
(16:28):
the gold leaf with virgin honey, add resin asphaltaman lead, boil,
straying through a flannel. Night after night, Josiah depleted his
stocks of gold until at last he was happy. He
sent off the tea set and waited nervously. Then he
(16:50):
received an invitation to Buckingham Palace. Josiah traveled to London,
dressed up in his best scarlet waistcoat and blue velvet jacket,
and treated himself to a brand new wig that the palace.
Queen Charlotte told Josiah how much all her guests had
(17:10):
been impressed with her new tea service. She wanted to
give Josiah a title potter to her majesty. It was
an honor and a marketing godsend. Josiah promptly paid for
announcements in the newspapers. He also left the palace with
Charlotte's blessing to make more of the same design and
(17:32):
market them. As queenswear orders flooded in, Josiah took on
a business partner and drew up plans for a big
new factory. It is really amazing, Josiah mused to his partner,
how rapidly the use of queenswear has spread almost over
the whole globe, and how universally it is liked. Then
(17:56):
Josiah asked himself, why how much of this general estimation
is owing to the mode of its introduction and how
much to its real utility and beauty. We should be
a good deal interested in the answer to that question,
he said, because if a royal or noble introduction be
(18:16):
as necessary as real elegance and beauty, then the manufacturer
should bestow as much pains and expense on the former
as the latter. Josiah now had an open door into
London's high society. That's what happens when you're potter. To
(18:38):
her Majesty, he sought out the aristocratic trendsetters.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
What were they excited by?
Speaker 2 (18:46):
The answer turned out to be antique vases currently being
brought back from the excavation of Pompeii. What if Josiah
could produce new vases in a similar style. He went
back to his workshop to experiment forget Potter to her majesty,
(19:06):
he playfully told his business partner going to be vase
maker general to the universe. There remained the problem of
transporting those fragile vases from Josiah's new factory to the
rest of the universe. But the new canal that Josiah
(19:29):
had lobbed for was finally being built, and just like
in Pompeii, some unexpected things were being excavated. Josiah was
fascinated to be shown a prodigious rib with the backbone
of a monstrous sized fish. It had to be the
whale that swallowed Jonah. The canal diggers said other long
(19:52):
buried remains were even more mysterious. Josiah thought Erasmus might
be interested, so he sent them off. Erasmus had no
idea what he was looking at, so he made a
joke of it. The bone seems to be the third
vertebra of a camel, he wrote back. The horn must
(20:15):
have been that of a Patagonian ox, But beneath the jokes.
Erasmus was intrigued. These long dead creatures that once roamed
the English midlands were unlike anything alive today. How did
species change through the ages? Erasmus began to think, but
(20:37):
also decided to keep his thoughts to himself. Everyone thought
that God created species just as they were. If he
openly doubted that he'd scandalized the devout among his patients,
he couldn't afford to risk the income. Erasmus had a
growing family to support, and his wife was becoming more
(20:59):
and more unwell, with violent pains in her side and
fits of delirium. Nothing Erasmus tried any help except the
opium to ease the pain, until one day the dear
partner of all the cares and pleasures of my life
(21:21):
ceased to be ill, Erasmus wrote, and I felt myself
alone in the world. When Erasmus became a widower, his
youngest son, Robert, was just four years old. Josiah Wedgwood's
new Pompeii themed vases were a huge success. Vass for
(21:46):
the mantlepieces, vazis as candle holders, vases for potpourri. They
exceed the ancients, said one impressed aristocrat in beauty and variety.
But success brought problems. Josiah was investing so much to
expand production, his cash flow became stretched.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Where should he cut back?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Tiah embarked on an exercise of what we'd now call
management accounting. It didn't have a name then, as nobody
did it. He wanted to understand how much profit each
line brought in when you apportioned wages, materials, coal for
the kilns.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
And so on.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I'm puzzling my brains, he wrote to his partner, But
he figured it out. Josiah was a pioneer beyond accountancy.
In marketing his new vases. He instinctively hit on two
ideas that wouldn't be given names for over a century.
(22:48):
One idea was conspicuous consumption. A few wealthy aristocrats would
pay a high price to be among the first to
buy a new design of vas that could show off
both their money and their good taste. Josiah gave his
London showroom manager strict instructions when the first.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Samples of a new product arrived.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Do not keep them open in the rooms, he said,
show them only to people of fashion. He defined his
target market that sort of customers who can afford to
pay for anything they like. The second idea Josiah instinctively
understood is now known as the trickle down theory of fashion.
(23:35):
When a high status person shows off something new, others
try to copy them. We see it today with wasteful
fast fashion in the clothing industry. A new designer look
debuts on the catwalk, a few weeks later, high street
stores are selling cheaper lookalikes. Here's how Josiah described the process.
(23:56):
The great people have had their vases in their palaces
long enough for them to be seen and admired by
the middling class of people, He wrote to his business partner.
The middling people would probably buy quantities of them at
a reduced price. Josiah's marketing strategy fit perfectly with what
he had discovered from his accounting exercise. It cost a
(24:19):
lot to figure out how to make something new, but
then he could easily churn out replicas that would eventually
cause the item to fall out of fashion.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
And Josiah knew it.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Our customers will not much longer be content with queenswear,
he wrote, a few years after its launch. It now
being rendered vulgar and common everywhere, But that was fine.
It simply created demand for another novelty. It always seemed
to be ladies who drove new fashions. Josiah noticed. He
(24:54):
studied the trends in the leading female salons and never
launched a product without his wife, Sally's approval. He also
kept in mind his lesson that new products benefited from
a noble introduction. When he made a new flower pot.
For example, he suggested to his partner, suppose you present
(25:16):
the Duchess of Devonshire with a set and beg leave
to call them Devonshire flower pots. The Duchess of Devonshire
was quite the social trendsetter, much like her great great
great grand niece, Princess Diana Wedgwood's Devonshire flower pots flew
(25:38):
off the shelves. Make something new, charge a high price,
sell cheaper copies to the mass market, rinse and repeat.
Josiah became very rich. Erasmus brought in a teenage governess
to look after his children when his wife died. Before long,
(26:02):
it had two more daughters with her. Then he fell
madly in love with the young wife of an elderly
aristocratic patient. He bombarded her with love poems. Understandably, perhaps
the old husband decided to get himself a different doctor,
but he died anyway. Erasmus married his widow, who'd inherited
(26:25):
a sizeable income. They had seven more children together and
folded the two young daughters of the governess into their
blended family. Erasmus's new wife encouraged him to publish his
thoughts about evolution, among other things. He was growing older.
(26:46):
He didn't need to worry so much about money anymore,
and if his writings caused a scandal, who cares? Cautionary
tales will be back after the break. As Josiah Wedgwood
(27:08):
became richer and more famous, his experiments became more ambitious.
I want to astonish the world, he wrote to his
business partner, for I hate piddling, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Josiah came up with a.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Brand new way of coloring pottery, not by adding a glaze,
but by infusing color into the clay itself. A distinctive
shade of pale blue became synonymous with the Wedgewood name.
He made teapots and vases with tasteful decorations in white relief,
(27:45):
and medallions with the profiles of famous people. By the
late seventeen eighties, Josiah and Erasmus were both approaching sixty.
Josiah launched a product that became a best seller, a
medallion depicting a black African slave in chains inscribed with
(28:08):
the words words am I not a man and a brother?
Josiah gave the prophets to the cause of abolishing slavery.
The medallion, said one campaigner, had an effect equal to
that of the best written pamphlet. Erasmus meanwhile, transformed almost
(28:29):
overnight from an obscure provincial doctor into one of the
most famous writers in the land. His first publication was
a poem, The Loves of the Plants. In rhyming couplets,
Erasmus combined an explanation of sexual reproduction in plant species
(28:49):
with riskuae allusions to human relationships. The poem is all
flushed cheeks and seductive smiles, while the footnotes read like
popular science. It sounds like it shouldn't work, but apparently
it did. The most del poem on earth, said one
(29:11):
famous critic. The author is a great poet. The follow
up poem was an even bigger success, and even more unlikely.
In a single poem with eighty thousand words of explanatory footnotes.
Erasmus deals with everything from astronomy to geology to the
(29:31):
workings of steam engines, an artistic interpretation of his friend
Josiah's Latest VARs, and a polemic against his country's role
in the slave trade, inspired by Josiah's medallion the poor
fettered Slave on bended knee from Britain's sons imploring to
be free. By now Erasmus's daughters with the Governess were
(29:59):
grown up, Erasmus started a school for girls and put
them in charge. He wrote a plan for the conduct
of female education, ahead of its time, for the seventeen nineties,
when any kind of education for girls was a niche idea.
Some of his other books haven't aged as well, such
(30:21):
as his textbook on medicine, which took nearly eight hundred
pages to leave the strong impression that whatever your ailment,
you may as well try opium. He finally published his
thoughts on evolution too.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Would it be too bold to.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Imagine that all warm blood animals have arisen from one
living filament? Too bold it was for many readers. These
godless musings proved just as controversial as Erasmus had feared,
and for all that his living filament sounds startlingly prescient.
(31:01):
Erasmus couldn't yet explain convincingly how evolution worked. That would
have to wait a cut of generations. Charles Darwin read
everything his grandfather wrote about evolution, but he was reluctant
to cite Erasmus in his own work. He seems to
have been embarrassed by Erasmus's libertine lifestyle and unashamed enjoyment
(31:26):
of sex. Charles Darwin was a product of his era,
the Victorian era, prudish and straight laced. In our present
state of society, wrote Charles, it may seem a strange
fact that my grandfather's practice as a physician should not
have suffered by his openly bringing up illegitimate children. As
(31:52):
for the popular acclaim for Erasmus's racy poems, while that
was quite incomprehensible to Charles, Just like Erasmus, Charles dithered
for years before publishing his ideas on evolution, fearful of
the backlash they might cause. Remember Charles's great insight about
(32:16):
natural selection. Creatures that survive would pass on their characteristics
to the next generation. But the peacock's cumbersome tale seem
to hinder survival not help it, so how had it evolved?
The answer, Charles realized, starts with the insight that survival
(32:38):
isn't enough to pass on your characteristics to the next generation.
You need not only to survive, but to attract a mate.
In his private writing, Charles began to work out another
strand to his theory, sexual selection. If p hens chose
(32:59):
to mate with peacocks with the most magnificent tales, then
magnificent tales will be passed on to their offspring. Charles
was thinking along the right line, but when it came
to going public with his theory, Charles knew he had
a problem. In prudish, patriarchal Victorian society, nobody would want
(33:21):
to believe that sex was a powerful force in shaping nature,
even worse, female choice about who to have sex with. Today,
that idea is uncontroversial, but as Eveline Richards argues in
her book Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, to
(33:44):
male Victorian scientists, it was almost unthinkable. That's why the
sight of a peacock made Charles feel so sick. He
knew he'd need some brilliantly persuasive arguments to have his
idea taken seriously, but he failed to find them. When
Charles eventually published his theory of sexual selection, it was ridiculed,
(34:09):
widely ignored, and quickly forgotten. For one hundred years, it
languished in intellectual obscurity. Perhaps Charles could have made a
more convincing case if he had had access to insights
from modern biology. One intellectual breakthrough came in the nineteen
(34:30):
seventies the handicap principle. To Charles and his critics, it
seemed like an obvious weakness in his theory that lugging
around a massive tale surely makes survival harder. The handicap
principle turns that objection on its head. It says, the
peacock's tail evolved precisely because it hinders survival. The peacock
(34:56):
is showing off to pea hens. Look how fit and
strong I am. I can grow this magnificent tale and
still outrun any predators. Josiah Wedgwood would have understood this
idea instinctively because it so closely mirrors another idea he anticipated,
conspicuous consumption. Remember how Josiah defined his target market for
(35:21):
his expensive new vases, that sort of customers who could
afford to pay for anything they like. Josiah knew some
of his customers wanted to say something much like the peacock.
Look how wealthy I am. I can buy Wedgwood's latest
vas and still afford to live in luxury. If only
(35:44):
this analogy had occurred to Charles Darwin, he might have
been less sickened by the peacock's tail. He might have
realized that hindering survival could be a powerful feature of
his sexual selection theory, not a troublesome bug. But that
wasn't the only insight Charles was lacking. When Charles published
(36:07):
his theory, his critics scorned the implication that pea hens
must have a human likability to appreciate beauty. It seemed
like a stretch, and biologists now say sexual selection can
work without it.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Pea Hens didn't.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Need to evaluate the objective ideal of beauty, if there
is such a thing. They only needed to be able
to spot the distinguishing features of the highest status peacocks.
Once again, Josiah Wedgwood would have had no trouble grasping
that idea. Remember what he wants, asked himself about the
(36:44):
success of queenswear. How much of this general estimation is
owing to the mode of its introduction and how much
to its real utility and beauty. Josiah knew that people
might buy queenswear even if they themselves didn't find it beautiful,
simply to boost their own status by associating themselves with
(37:05):
the queen biologists. Now I'll see sexual selection as being
about signals. Peacocks, for example, signaling their genetic fitness through
their tail in much the same way we humans send
signals about ourselves with our purchasing decisions. We signal our wealth,
our taste, our understanding of the latest trends, even our virtue. Josiah,
(37:32):
with his anti slavery medallion, understood that too. I told
you that Charles Darwin might have found the answer to
the peacock puzzle in the life of his grandfather. But
I didn't mean Erasmus Darwin. I meant his other grandfather,
Josiah Wedgwood. In the winter of seventeen ninety four, Josiah
(37:56):
became ill. His friend Erasmus prescribed everything he could think of,
but nothing could work because Josiah had cancer of the jaw.
He died aged sixty four. The following year. His daughter
Susanna married Erasmus's son Robert. Susannah Wedgwood and Robert Darwin
(38:19):
had six children, including a boy called Charles. While Charles
grew up to share one grandfather's fascination with evolution, he
didn't share the other grandfather's fascination with pottery. We are
degenerate descendants of old Josiah w. Charles wrote to a friend,
(38:41):
for we have not a bit of pretty where in
the house, pretty where you can almost hear the condescension. Yet,
perhaps if Charles had studied his grandfather's pretty ware business,
the peacock's tail might not have puzzled him so much.
He might have noticed that peacock's showing off their tales
(39:04):
are much like Josiah's customers showing off their vases. The
clues were right there in Charles's family history, just not
where it thought to look. This episode relied on biographies
(39:29):
such as Josiah Wedgwood, Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment by Brian
Dolan and Tristram Hunts The Radical Potter. For a full
list of sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
The show is produced by Alice Fines, with Marilyn Rust.
(39:52):
The sound design and original music for the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script. Cautionary Tales features
the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show would have impossible
without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(40:14):
Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Berry. If
you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
It doesn't really make a difference to us and if
(40:35):
you want to hear the show ad free, sign up
to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hello, dear listeners, it is Tim Harford here with an
exciting idea up my sleeve. I want to know if
you'd be interested in joining a cautionary club with additional
member only content. And with that in mind, the Cautionary
Tales team and I have put together a survey. We'd
like to find out exactly what kind of content you're
keen to get your hands on. Would you like a
(00:40):
cautionary newsletter, perhaps some extra conversations like my last one
with Adam Grant, or maybe you have another idea for
us altogether. The link is in the episode description and
it will take you just a few short minutes to answer,
so please do take a moment to fill it out
and let us know your thoughts. We are really keen
to hear from you.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Charles Darwin hated peacocks. The sight of a feather in
a peacock's tail, he said, whenever I gaze at it
makes me sick. But what had peacocks ever done to
Charles Darwin? For years, Darwin had been working out the
details of his theory of evolution. At the core of
(01:28):
that theory was a simple but powerful insight some creatures
are better equipped than others to survive in their particular environment,
and they get to pass on their characteristics to the
next generation. Darwin called it natural selection, and it explained
a lot, but not everything. Look around in nature and
(01:51):
you'll see plenty of things that don't seem to help
with survival. The peacock's tail, for example, with its long,
brightly colored feathers. Surely having to lug around such cumbersome
plumage must make it harder for peacocks to survive. Wouldn't
a peacock with a lighter, shorter tail be better able
(02:12):
to run away from predators? And yet evolution had produced
the peacock's tail. How every time Darwin saw a peacock,
it painfully reminded him that he hadn't fully worked out
the details of his theory. And in the English countryside
in the eighteen sixties, Charles Darwin must have seen peacocks
(02:34):
rather often. They were popular with a landed gentry. Charles
was a country gentleman himself. Where could Darwin turn for
inspiration to solve his peacock problem, Perhaps to the writings
of others. It's Charles whose name we associate with evolution today,
but many earlier thinkers had speculated along similar lines. Chief
(02:58):
among them was Darwin's own grandfather, the larger than life
Erasmus Darwin, who had died before Charles was born, was
enormously fat, gross, and corpulent, said one unkind obituarist. His
features were coarse, He was rather clumsy and slovenly, and
(03:19):
frequently walked with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
What he lacked in conventional standards for good looks, though, Erasmus,
made up for in charm. He attracted two beautiful wives
and fathered fourteen children, two of them with a third woman.
Between the marriages, Erasmus made his living as a doctor,
(03:42):
dabbled as an inventor, and one fame as a poet
and a writer, including on evolution. Would it be too
bold to imagine, wrote Erasmus, that all warm blooded animals
have arisen from one living filament. That's impressive for the
(04:03):
seventeen hundreds, long before anyone conceived of DNA. As it happens,
there was one particular aspect of Charles Darwin's grandfather's life
that might have helped Charles figure out the peacock's tail.
But this is a story about how answers aren't always
(04:26):
found in the most obvious places to look. I'm Tim
Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Josiah Wedgwood was
(05:01):
born in seventeen thirty in the village of Burslem in
the English Midlands. The region was known for pottery from
its low called clay soils. Josiah's father was a potter,
but not a successful one. His wares were low priced
and low quality. His profit margin's slim. While other branches
(05:22):
of the Wedgewood family had done well for themselves, Josiah's
side were the poor relations. Josiah was the youngest child
of eleven. Five of his older siblings died of smallpox.
Those who lived went to work in the family workshop
as soon as they were able. First, they shoveled clay
(05:43):
into a kind of mill. The horse walked in circles,
turning a shaft that pummeled the clay with metal blades
until it was ready to throw onto the potter's wheel,
if in a glaze and bake in the brick oven.
It was hard physical work. As a boy, or Josiah
two got smallpox. It seemed for a while that he
(06:06):
wasn't going to make it. He lay in bed, weak
and delirious, his body covered in pustules. At last, the
fever broke, the skin scabbed over, but part of Josiah
never really recovered from the illness, his right knee. He
hobbled back to the workshop and tried to find ways
(06:27):
he could make himself useful while sitting down, resting his
leg on a stool. It wasn't easy, but times were changing.
Some other local potters were starting to experiment with new
techniques and ingredients to make new designs and colored glazes,
bowls that looked like tortoise shell teapots shaped like a
(06:49):
couliflower or pineapple. Josiah found a job he could manage
despite his painful leg. He discovered that he loved to
experiment a new shade of green, a vibrant orange, yellow,
a more visually pleasing pineapple teapot. By the age of thirty,
sire had set up on his own. Every evening after work,
(07:13):
he'd sit in his kitchen and mix together some new
combination of metals and minerals, salts, and enamels to glaze
his wares. He carefully recorded the results in a leather
bound notebook. Experiment number four six. This seems to separate
parties run thin like water. That is a good color,
says one entry. Experiment number four eight much the same,
(07:38):
but less of the exuded watery part. Every experiment was systematic.
Very one ingredient hold the other's constant and see how
it changed the outcome. Experiment number four nine rather better.
Josiah was trying to solve a problem that frustrated every
(08:01):
potter at the time. When they tried to make white
colored wares, they always had a browny yellow tinge. And
then experiment number four one one a good white glaze.
Josiah's new white plates were like nothing else on the market.
(08:21):
He could print on them verses and pictures. Business began
to boom. Josiah hired new workers, he expanded into a
second workshop, and he finally felt successful enough to propose
to the love of his life. Sally was his cousin
from the wealthy branch of the Wedgwood family. They had
(08:43):
been smitten with each other for years, but Sally's father,
a successful banker, had always been sniffy about his only
daughter marrying a potter. He wanted Josiah to make him
financial guarantees. Exasperated, Josiah told a friend, I have gone
through a long series of bargain making, of settlements, reversions, provisions,
(09:06):
et cetera, et cetera. It was mortifying, he said, to
have to negotiate marriage like just another business deal. If
it were up to him and Sally, they could settle
the whole affair in three lines and so many minutes.
Sally put her foot down. She was nearly thirty, she'd
(09:28):
never wanted anyone else, and her father relented. Josiah was
soon gushing in another letter to his friend they were
two married lovers, as happy as this world can make them.
Sali joined Josiah in the kitchen every night, mixing chemicals,
glazing pots, and filling notebooks. He'd taught her his code.
(09:52):
She helped him make more fashionable products that caught the
attention of high society. One hundred and fifty miles away
in London, an order came in that Josiah could barely
have dreamed of a tea service for the Queen of England,
Queen Charlotte, the wife of mad King George the Third.
(10:15):
Josiah's business could hardly be going better. His right leg, though,
was giving him more and more trouble on a badly
rutted road, had fallen from his horse. The pain was
constant now, and his trusted doctor said there was only
one thing for it. That leg would have to come off.
(10:38):
The doctor Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was born in seventeen
thirty one, a year after Josiah. His career as a
doctor got off to a shaky start. His first patient,
a man who'd been stabbed in a drunken brawl, died.
(11:01):
He got no other patients. After a couple of months,
he gave up and moved forty miles to another town
to try for a fresh start. This time, his first
patient was a young man from a wealthy family whose
doctor had told them that his illness was incurable. In desperation,
(11:23):
the young man's mother called on the new doctor in
town and asked for a second opinion. Was there nothing
Erasmus could do? In truth, there wasn't much choice of
treatments In the seventeen hundreds. Erasmus later wrote down his
prescriptions for a range of conditions. For anorexia, for instance,
(11:44):
opium half a grain twice a day. For impotence, a
grain of opium before bed epilepsy, opium a grain every
half hour, gallstones, tetanus, you guessed it. History doesn't record
what Erasmus gave the young man whose doctor had given
(12:05):
up on him. Perhaps it was opium, but whether or
not Erasmus had anything to do with it. The patient
made a miraculous recovery, and his family recommended Erasmus to everyone.
Soon Erasmus was making friends among the great and the
good of the Industrial Revolution, treating their illnesses and sending
(12:25):
them ideas for inventions. Some didn't work out, like the
horizontal windmill. Others did, like a clever new steering mechanism
for carriages. He didn't bother to patent it. He just
wanted to make his own journeys safer. Erasmus had to
travel a lot to see his patients, and the roads
(12:46):
were terrible. His idea for the steering mechanism was good
enough to last over a century later. It was the
standard in the early car industry. In his early thirties,
Erasmus heard from an up and coming potter from the
other side of the county, Josiah Wedgwood, was lobbying to
(13:08):
raise from them for a canal. It was hard to
get his fragile goods to distant cities on the potholed roads.
Josiah explained, no matter how much straw he packed them in,
something always got smashed. Erasmus was well respected, would he
support the campaign?
Speaker 1 (13:27):
He would.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Erasmus threw himself into the cause, writing a long pamphlet
on the benefits of inland waterways. He became close friends
with Josiah and doctor to the Wedgwood family. Erasmus recommended
a surgeon to take care of Josiah's troublesome leg. The
amputation was risky no antibiotics in the seventeen sixties, and
(13:52):
fearful no anesthetic either. Erasmus prescribed opium. Josiah sat in
a chair at home in a drug induced haze, while
his wife Sally waited anxiously in the next room with
their little daughter, Susannah. The surgeon readed his sore cautionary tales.
(14:14):
Will be back after the break. You're listening to a
cautionary tale about Charles Darwin and how he struggled to
understand how the peacock's tail could have evolved when it
(14:35):
seemed so obviously to hinder survival. We'll come back to
Charles and his peacock problem later on. But I promised
that Charles might have better understood the peacock's tail if
only he'd paid more attention to his own grandfather's life.
So let's get back to that life where we left it.
(14:59):
Erasmus Darwin anxiously watched over his friend Josiah Wedgwood. Josiah
was off his head on opium, his right leg a
stu ump wrapped in bandages. Ever, the hard nosed businessman
Josiah would have been happy to know his employees were
getting on.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
With a job.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
A letter survives from the Midlands workshop to the London showroom.
Sir mister Wedgewood has this day had his leg taken
off and is as well as can be expected after
such an execution. Mister Horn's goods are packed a moncrate
for the warehouse. Josiah's leg healed well. He commissioned a
(15:42):
craftsman to make him a wooden prosthetic with joints that
moved and a foot that could wear a shoe and stocking.
Josiah worked hard on his tea service for the Queen.
The request was specific a complete set of tea things
with a gold ground and raised flowers upon it in green.
(16:05):
Josiah knew how to do green glazes, but gold. He
had some gold leaf sent up from London and tried
to work out how to burn it onto his smooth
ivory white plates. He was mortified to find it does
not look so well as I expected. He consulted books
with ArKade knowledge that might help or might not. Mix
(16:28):
the gold leaf with virgin honey, add resin asphaltaman lead, boil,
straying through a flannel. Night after night, Josiah depleted his
stocks of gold until at last he was happy. He
sent off the tea set and waited nervously. Then he
(16:50):
received an invitation to Buckingham Palace. Josiah traveled to London,
dressed up in his best scarlet waistcoat and blue velvet jacket,
and treated himself to a brand new wig that the palace.
Queen Charlotte told Josiah how much all her guests had
(17:10):
been impressed with her new tea service. She wanted to
give Josiah a title potter to her majesty. It was
an honor and a marketing godsend. Josiah promptly paid for
announcements in the newspapers. He also left the palace with
Charlotte's blessing to make more of the same design and
(17:32):
market them. As queenswear orders flooded in, Josiah took on
a business partner and drew up plans for a big
new factory. It is really amazing, Josiah mused to his partner,
how rapidly the use of queenswear has spread almost over
the whole globe, and how universally it is liked. Then
(17:56):
Josiah asked himself, why how much of this general estimation
is owing to the mode of its introduction and how
much to its real utility and beauty. We should be
a good deal interested in the answer to that question,
he said, because if a royal or noble introduction be
(18:16):
as necessary as real elegance and beauty, then the manufacturer
should bestow as much pains and expense on the former
as the latter. Josiah now had an open door into
London's high society. That's what happens when you're potter. To
(18:38):
her Majesty, he sought out the aristocratic trendsetters.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
What were they excited by?
Speaker 2 (18:46):
The answer turned out to be antique vases currently being
brought back from the excavation of Pompeii. What if Josiah
could produce new vases in a similar style. He went
back to his workshop to experiment forget Potter to her majesty,
(19:06):
he playfully told his business partner going to be vase
maker general to the universe. There remained the problem of
transporting those fragile vases from Josiah's new factory to the
rest of the universe. But the new canal that Josiah
(19:29):
had lobbed for was finally being built, and just like
in Pompeii, some unexpected things were being excavated. Josiah was
fascinated to be shown a prodigious rib with the backbone
of a monstrous sized fish. It had to be the
whale that swallowed Jonah. The canal diggers said other long
(19:52):
buried remains were even more mysterious. Josiah thought Erasmus might
be interested, so he sent them off. Erasmus had no
idea what he was looking at, so he made a
joke of it. The bone seems to be the third
vertebra of a camel, he wrote back. The horn must
(20:15):
have been that of a Patagonian ox, But beneath the jokes.
Erasmus was intrigued. These long dead creatures that once roamed
the English midlands were unlike anything alive today. How did
species change through the ages? Erasmus began to think, but
(20:37):
also decided to keep his thoughts to himself. Everyone thought
that God created species just as they were. If he
openly doubted that he'd scandalized the devout among his patients,
he couldn't afford to risk the income. Erasmus had a
growing family to support, and his wife was becoming more
(20:59):
and more unwell, with violent pains in her side and
fits of delirium. Nothing Erasmus tried any help except the
opium to ease the pain, until one day the dear
partner of all the cares and pleasures of my life
(21:21):
ceased to be ill, Erasmus wrote, and I felt myself
alone in the world. When Erasmus became a widower, his
youngest son, Robert, was just four years old. Josiah Wedgwood's
new Pompeii themed vases were a huge success. Vass for
(21:46):
the mantlepieces, vazis as candle holders, vases for potpourri. They
exceed the ancients, said one impressed aristocrat in beauty and variety.
But success brought problems. Josiah was investing so much to
expand production, his cash flow became stretched.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Where should he cut back?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Tiah embarked on an exercise of what we'd now call
management accounting. It didn't have a name then, as nobody
did it. He wanted to understand how much profit each
line brought in when you apportioned wages, materials, coal for
the kilns.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
And so on.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I'm puzzling my brains, he wrote to his partner, But
he figured it out. Josiah was a pioneer beyond accountancy.
In marketing his new vases. He instinctively hit on two
ideas that wouldn't be given names for over a century.
(22:48):
One idea was conspicuous consumption. A few wealthy aristocrats would
pay a high price to be among the first to
buy a new design of vas that could show off
both their money and their good taste. Josiah gave his
London showroom manager strict instructions when the first.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Samples of a new product arrived.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Do not keep them open in the rooms, he said,
show them only to people of fashion. He defined his
target market that sort of customers who can afford to
pay for anything they like. The second idea Josiah instinctively
understood is now known as the trickle down theory of fashion.
(23:35):
When a high status person shows off something new, others
try to copy them. We see it today with wasteful
fast fashion in the clothing industry. A new designer look
debuts on the catwalk, a few weeks later, high street
stores are selling cheaper lookalikes. Here's how Josiah described the process.
(23:56):
The great people have had their vases in their palaces
long enough for them to be seen and admired by
the middling class of people, He wrote to his business partner.
The middling people would probably buy quantities of them at
a reduced price. Josiah's marketing strategy fit perfectly with what
he had discovered from his accounting exercise. It cost a
(24:19):
lot to figure out how to make something new, but
then he could easily churn out replicas that would eventually
cause the item to fall out of fashion.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
And Josiah knew it.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Our customers will not much longer be content with queenswear,
he wrote, a few years after its launch. It now
being rendered vulgar and common everywhere, But that was fine.
It simply created demand for another novelty. It always seemed
to be ladies who drove new fashions. Josiah noticed. He
(24:54):
studied the trends in the leading female salons and never
launched a product without his wife, Sally's approval. He also
kept in mind his lesson that new products benefited from
a noble introduction. When he made a new flower pot.
For example, he suggested to his partner, suppose you present
(25:16):
the Duchess of Devonshire with a set and beg leave
to call them Devonshire flower pots. The Duchess of Devonshire
was quite the social trendsetter, much like her great great
great grand niece, Princess Diana Wedgwood's Devonshire flower pots flew
(25:38):
off the shelves. Make something new, charge a high price,
sell cheaper copies to the mass market, rinse and repeat.
Josiah became very rich. Erasmus brought in a teenage governess
to look after his children when his wife died. Before long,
(26:02):
it had two more daughters with her. Then he fell
madly in love with the young wife of an elderly
aristocratic patient. He bombarded her with love poems. Understandably, perhaps
the old husband decided to get himself a different doctor,
but he died anyway. Erasmus married his widow, who'd inherited
(26:25):
a sizeable income. They had seven more children together and
folded the two young daughters of the governess into their
blended family. Erasmus's new wife encouraged him to publish his
thoughts about evolution, among other things. He was growing older.
(26:46):
He didn't need to worry so much about money anymore,
and if his writings caused a scandal, who cares? Cautionary
tales will be back after the break. As Josiah Wedgwood
(27:08):
became richer and more famous, his experiments became more ambitious.
I want to astonish the world, he wrote to his
business partner, for I hate piddling, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Josiah came up with a.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Brand new way of coloring pottery, not by adding a glaze,
but by infusing color into the clay itself. A distinctive
shade of pale blue became synonymous with the Wedgewood name.
He made teapots and vases with tasteful decorations in white relief,
(27:45):
and medallions with the profiles of famous people. By the
late seventeen eighties, Josiah and Erasmus were both approaching sixty.
Josiah launched a product that became a best seller, a
medallion depicting a black African slave in chains inscribed with
(28:08):
the words words am I not a man and a brother?
Josiah gave the prophets to the cause of abolishing slavery.
The medallion, said one campaigner, had an effect equal to
that of the best written pamphlet. Erasmus meanwhile, transformed almost
(28:29):
overnight from an obscure provincial doctor into one of the
most famous writers in the land. His first publication was
a poem, The Loves of the Plants. In rhyming couplets,
Erasmus combined an explanation of sexual reproduction in plant species
(28:49):
with riskuae allusions to human relationships. The poem is all
flushed cheeks and seductive smiles, while the footnotes read like
popular science. It sounds like it shouldn't work, but apparently
it did. The most del poem on earth, said one
(29:11):
famous critic. The author is a great poet. The follow
up poem was an even bigger success, and even more unlikely.
In a single poem with eighty thousand words of explanatory footnotes.
Erasmus deals with everything from astronomy to geology to the
(29:31):
workings of steam engines, an artistic interpretation of his friend
Josiah's Latest VARs, and a polemic against his country's role
in the slave trade, inspired by Josiah's medallion the poor
fettered Slave on bended knee from Britain's sons imploring to
be free. By now Erasmus's daughters with the Governess were
(29:59):
grown up, Erasmus started a school for girls and put
them in charge. He wrote a plan for the conduct
of female education, ahead of its time, for the seventeen nineties,
when any kind of education for girls was a niche idea.
Some of his other books haven't aged as well, such
(30:21):
as his textbook on medicine, which took nearly eight hundred
pages to leave the strong impression that whatever your ailment,
you may as well try opium. He finally published his
thoughts on evolution too.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
Would it be too bold to.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Imagine that all warm blood animals have arisen from one
living filament? Too bold it was for many readers. These
godless musings proved just as controversial as Erasmus had feared,
and for all that his living filament sounds startlingly prescient.
(31:01):
Erasmus couldn't yet explain convincingly how evolution worked. That would
have to wait a cut of generations. Charles Darwin read
everything his grandfather wrote about evolution, but he was reluctant
to cite Erasmus in his own work. He seems to
have been embarrassed by Erasmus's libertine lifestyle and unashamed enjoyment
(31:26):
of sex. Charles Darwin was a product of his era,
the Victorian era, prudish and straight laced. In our present
state of society, wrote Charles, it may seem a strange
fact that my grandfather's practice as a physician should not
have suffered by his openly bringing up illegitimate children. As
(31:52):
for the popular acclaim for Erasmus's racy poems, while that
was quite incomprehensible to Charles, Just like Erasmus, Charles dithered
for years before publishing his ideas on evolution, fearful of
the backlash they might cause. Remember Charles's great insight about
(32:16):
natural selection. Creatures that survive would pass on their characteristics
to the next generation. But the peacock's cumbersome tale seem
to hinder survival not help it, so how had it evolved?
The answer, Charles realized, starts with the insight that survival
(32:38):
isn't enough to pass on your characteristics to the next generation.
You need not only to survive, but to attract a mate.
In his private writing, Charles began to work out another
strand to his theory, sexual selection. If p hens chose
(32:59):
to mate with peacocks with the most magnificent tales, then
magnificent tales will be passed on to their offspring. Charles
was thinking along the right line, but when it came
to going public with his theory, Charles knew he had
a problem. In prudish, patriarchal Victorian society, nobody would want
(33:21):
to believe that sex was a powerful force in shaping nature,
even worse, female choice about who to have sex with. Today,
that idea is uncontroversial, but as Eveline Richards argues in
her book Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, to
(33:44):
male Victorian scientists, it was almost unthinkable. That's why the
sight of a peacock made Charles feel so sick. He
knew he'd need some brilliantly persuasive arguments to have his
idea taken seriously, but he failed to find them. When
Charles eventually published his theory of sexual selection, it was ridiculed,
(34:09):
widely ignored, and quickly forgotten. For one hundred years, it
languished in intellectual obscurity. Perhaps Charles could have made a
more convincing case if he had had access to insights
from modern biology. One intellectual breakthrough came in the nineteen
(34:30):
seventies the handicap principle. To Charles and his critics, it
seemed like an obvious weakness in his theory that lugging
around a massive tale surely makes survival harder. The handicap
principle turns that objection on its head. It says, the
peacock's tail evolved precisely because it hinders survival. The peacock
(34:56):
is showing off to pea hens. Look how fit and
strong I am. I can grow this magnificent tale and
still outrun any predators. Josiah Wedgwood would have understood this
idea instinctively because it so closely mirrors another idea he anticipated,
conspicuous consumption. Remember how Josiah defined his target market for
(35:21):
his expensive new vases, that sort of customers who could
afford to pay for anything they like. Josiah knew some
of his customers wanted to say something much like the peacock.
Look how wealthy I am. I can buy Wedgwood's latest
vas and still afford to live in luxury. If only
(35:44):
this analogy had occurred to Charles Darwin, he might have
been less sickened by the peacock's tail. He might have
realized that hindering survival could be a powerful feature of
his sexual selection theory, not a troublesome bug. But that
wasn't the only insight Charles was lacking. When Charles published
(36:07):
his theory, his critics scorned the implication that pea hens
must have a human likability to appreciate beauty. It seemed
like a stretch, and biologists now say sexual selection can
work without it.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Pea Hens didn't.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Need to evaluate the objective ideal of beauty, if there
is such a thing. They only needed to be able
to spot the distinguishing features of the highest status peacocks.
Once again, Josiah Wedgwood would have had no trouble grasping
that idea. Remember what he wants, asked himself about the
(36:44):
success of queenswear. How much of this general estimation is
owing to the mode of its introduction and how much
to its real utility and beauty. Josiah knew that people
might buy queenswear even if they themselves didn't find it beautiful,
simply to boost their own status by associating themselves with
(37:05):
the queen biologists. Now I'll see sexual selection as being
about signals. Peacocks, for example, signaling their genetic fitness through
their tail in much the same way we humans send
signals about ourselves with our purchasing decisions. We signal our wealth,
our taste, our understanding of the latest trends, even our virtue. Josiah,
(37:32):
with his anti slavery medallion, understood that too. I told
you that Charles Darwin might have found the answer to
the peacock puzzle in the life of his grandfather. But
I didn't mean Erasmus Darwin. I meant his other grandfather,
Josiah Wedgwood. In the winter of seventeen ninety four, Josiah
(37:56):
became ill. His friend Erasmus prescribed everything he could think of,
but nothing could work because Josiah had cancer of the jaw.
He died aged sixty four. The following year. His daughter
Susanna married Erasmus's son Robert. Susannah Wedgwood and Robert Darwin
(38:19):
had six children, including a boy called Charles. While Charles
grew up to share one grandfather's fascination with evolution, he
didn't share the other grandfather's fascination with pottery. We are
degenerate descendants of old Josiah w. Charles wrote to a friend,
(38:41):
for we have not a bit of pretty where in
the house, pretty where you can almost hear the condescension. Yet,
perhaps if Charles had studied his grandfather's pretty ware business,
the peacock's tail might not have puzzled him so much.
He might have noticed that peacock's showing off their tales
(39:04):
are much like Josiah's customers showing off their vases. The
clues were right there in Charles's family history, just not
where it thought to look. This episode relied on biographies
(39:29):
such as Josiah Wedgwood, Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment by Brian
Dolan and Tristram Hunts The Radical Potter. For a full
list of sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
The show is produced by Alice Fines, with Marilyn Rust.
(39:52):
The sound design and original music for the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script. Cautionary Tales features
the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show would have impossible
without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(40:14):
Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Berry. If
you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
It doesn't really make a difference to us and if
(40:35):
you want to hear the show ad free, sign up
to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts
or at pushkin dot Fm, slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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