Darwin and FitzRoy Depart

The "On This Day . . ." feature on Wikipedia's main page notes today, December 27, as the day the HMS Beagle left Devonport (now Plymouth), England for its most famous voyage.  In Charles Darwin's The Voyage of The Beagle, first published twenty years before On the Origin of Species, the ship's naturalist and gentleman companion to its captain begins in matter-of-fact fashion:

After having been twice driven back by heavy southwestern gales, Her Majesty's ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, commenced under Captain King in 1826 to 1830--to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and some islands in the Pacific--and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round the World.  

According to Janet Browne's excellent Charles Darwin: Voyaging (first of a two-volume biography) the Hydrographer of the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort, was deeply committed to expanding scientific knowledge and the capacity to use it in the Royal Navy. Darwin's invitation to join the voyage was a result of inquiries within the network of scholars at Cambridge University. Captain Robert FitzRoy wanted not only a gentleman companion, but also someone who shared his scientific curiosity. Darwin eventually got the job, though he wasn't the first to be asked. 

In the early days of the voyage, screams of sailors FitzRoy had flogged combined with Darwin's debilitating seasickness to make the young adventurer regret what he'd gotten himself into, at least momentarily.  Fortunately, he regained his enthusiasm and amassed an overwhelming amount of evidence, from comparative anatomy and the fossil record, that biological forms change over time. Given enough time--amounts of time that were mostly unimaginable before Darwin's geologist friend Charles Lyell argued for what we might now call deep time--the forms could change a lot. 

The theory of natural selection followed, offering an explanation for exactly how one species can change into another, and for 150 years now has been validated by streams of evidence converging from almost every corner of science. For a lot of us, the body of knowledge begun by Darwin is exciting. It takes us out of  a temporally and spatially limiting context, one that most of our religiously conservative contemporaries still find nurturing. 

But our immemorial, cosmic context is hospitable to human life, and also has its nurturing features, at least for now. This larger context can also be indifferent to human life at times, though for myself I prefer atmospheric thermodynamics to the notion of a wrathful god as an explanation for deadly tropical storms.  

I even find the inner life richer for all the room I have to bump around in. I feel more connected to everything else--my friend Marlowe, the dog lying on the floor in my office right now, has most of the same genes I have. His general body plan (phylum) is like mine--he has legs with femurs and forelegs that each have a radius, ulna, and humerus, and so on. I have four teeth named for his kind. Even the plastic keys I'm typing on used to be fossils before they were petroleum and then petrochemicals. Before they were fossils, they were alive. 

Those who prefer to think of themselves as assembled by a personal deity find meaning and purpose in those beliefs, and I understand the need to find meaning and purpose. I work on it a lot, most of the time less consciously than I'd like. But it's my privilege and my responsibility to make meaning from all the building blocks in the world that I myself could never make. That's challenging and humbling at the same time.