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There is no record of how Dr. Robert Darwin diagnosed Charles' illness. Some doctors were “puzzled” by the illness. Others viewed it as a form of dyspepsia: Dr. James Gully diagnosed it as “nervous dyspepsia”. Dr. Edward Wickstead Lane described it as “dyspepsia of an aggravated character”. George Busk thought it was “waterbrash”, whereas the British Medical Journal reported that Darwin had suffered from “catarrhal dyspepsia”. Dr. Henry Holland concluded that Darwin was suffering from a form of gout without joint inflammation, “nearer to suppressed gout”. Drs. William Brinton and William Jenner also suspected “suppressed gout”, and Dr. Andrew Clark found manifestations of a “gouty” state. For several doctors, these two diagnoses were related. Darwin came to believe that two causes for his illness were the ill effects of the Beagle cruise and heredity.

This chapter focuses on Charles Darwin who spent five years as the naturalist of the ship HMS Beagle, spending much time in South America and eventually going all the way around the globe. During this time Darwin's religious beliefs changed from fairly conservative Anglican to deist, a view he held for the next several decades, changing again at the end of his life to a form of agnosticism. Although by the nature of his work he had to spend much time thinking and writing about the science–religion relationship, he always claimed that by nature he was not a particularly a religious man. Darwin returned to England and in the next two years became first an evolutionist and then a Darwinian, meaning he discovered his mechanism of change, natural selection. What spurred the move to evolution was, above all, the distribution of the animals on the Galapagos Archipelago, a group of islands in the Pacific that the HMS Beagle visited in the final part of its journey.

On 29 August 1831, through the influence of Professor Henslow, Charles Darwin was offered the position of naturalist on the HMS Beagle, which was preparing to sail around the world. When the Beagle twice attempted to sail but was driven back by heavy gales, there was a delay of two months. During these months, Darwin suffered what he later rated as a “most miserable” illness, consisting of a mixture of fluctuating psychiatric and psychosomatic symptoms: a “wearisome anxiety”, “giddiness” and feeling “giddy & uncomfortable” in the head, “palpitations and pain about the heart”, along with the conviction that he had heart disease, and feelings of depression that caused him to regard the weather as “inexpressibly gloomy” and to feel disinclined to wash his hands or read a book. The causes for the illness were mental conflicts between his resolve to go on the voyage, despite “all hazards”, and his burgeoning realizations and apprehensions of its hardships and hazards. He was also attacked by several Triatoma infestans. He thought “the golden rule for saving time was taking care of the minutes”.

This chapter starts when after his travels ended Charles Darwin took lodgings in Great Marlborough Street in London, and in the next twenty months, he became “engaged” in writing Journal of Researches, editing a zoology of the Beagle voyage, preparing accounts of the geology of the islands and countries the Beagle had visited, and serving on the Council of the Geological Society. When he was engaged in correcting the proof sheets of Journal of Researches, he experienced uncomfortable palpitation of the heart. On 1 May 1838, he noted he was “unwell”, meaning that he occasionally suffered from palpitations, headaches, and a disordered stomach, which occurred as single symptoms or in varying combination with each other. In November and December, he was sometimes troubled and “unwell”, from the pressures of doing Beagle zoology, searching for a London house, and working on a theory of evolution. Darwin doubtless knew that, although the theory of natural selection differed from that of Lamarck, he would have been as savagely attacked as Grant when was his theory to become publicly known. On 29 January in the following year, he and Emma were married quietly at Maer Church.

This chapter chronicles Charles Darwin's swashbuckling adventures aboard the Beagle in search of nature's secrets, riding in the company of gauchos, the pirates of the pampas. It compares Darwin to Jim Hawkins, the central character in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island. There's quite a bit of Jim Hawkins in Darwin's youthful persona, and perhaps a bit of romantic admiration for the piratical characters of the world. When imagining Darwin, instead of a Victorian gentleman, think young Jim Hawkins. Imagine Darwin being on the deck of the Beagle amidst a stormy sea. This chapter recounts Darwin's voyage aboard the Beagle, which first sailed on May 22, 1826, and again on December 27, 1831. It describes an act of piracy committed by the ship's captain Robert FitzRoy, who took several Fuegians hostage; the struggle between the military government of the Blancos and the elected government of Uruguay; and Darwin's encounter with young gauchos.

This chapter chronicles Charles Darwin's voyage aboard the Beagle, which set sail on September 7, 1835, for the Galápagos Islands and rounded South America. Catastrophes are no stranger to Darwin's journey as he sailed the southern oceans and trekked the Andes Mountains. Against a background of strife and danger, he sought creatures new to him—and often to science—whether the inhabitants of the land or the buried denizens of the past, the victims of extinction. On each of his excursions Darwin reveled in a cornucopia of fossil and faunal discoveries. This chapter discusses Darwin's search for fossils in places such as Bahía Blanca and Santa Fe, Patagonian Coast and Tierra del Fuego; his encounter with graybeards; the conflict over control of the Falkland Islands; and the demise of the Fuegians. It also considers Darwin's observations of volcanoes, earthquakes, and native Galápagos tortoises.

This chapter deals with how Charles Darwin suffered from chronic anxiety while working on his evolution theory, which can largely be attributed to the conflict between religion and evolution. His On the Origin of Species was more than just an exposition of a new theory, Darwin had to rebut the conventional views of nature, including natural theology and prevailing Creationist views. However, not once did he deny the existence of a Creator, only that the Creator was a mere instigator of the laws of matter. Darwin's Beagle voyage led him to dig deep into geology, and with Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology at hand, began questioning his previous learnings from the clerical teachers at Cambridge. The chapter also cites Reverend Edward Pusey's negative critique on Darwin's concept, which stressed two points: the divine and miraculous initial creation of life and the exceptionalism of human origins.

The records of Darwin's Beagle voyage reveal the connections he drew between natural, political and moral economies. He explicitly described his encounter with the natives of Tierra del Fuego in terms of prevailing Whig ideology. Letters from home had kept Darwin up to date with political reform in England, and upon his return he socialized with Harriet Martineau and other Malthusian Whig reformers. Origin reflected these political associations, which coloured the book's reception. Where the 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation had made for sensational society reading, Darwin made evolution scientifically respectable. While many of Darwin's contemporaries interpreted natural selection as an endorsement of the actions of ‘every cheating tradesman’, Darwin thought otherwise. He was impressed by Alfred Russel Wallace's 1864 account of the evolution of mind and morals, but was dismayed to see him later deny that selection could account for these aspects of humanity.

This chapter discusses the adventures of Charles Darwin, mainly in South America, during the five-year voyage of the HMS Beagle. The possibility of Darwin engaging with the concept of transmutation is evident through his Geological Notes, Zoological Notes, Diary, and letters sent to John Stevens Henslow, his Cambridge botany teacher. Darwin was clearly considering transmutational notions as soon as he started his field work on the Beagle, and became a fuly fledged transmutationist by the time he wrote the latter half of the Red Notebook in early 1837. Darwin's earliest analysis of transmutation was generally more Brocchian than Lamarckian; the chapter concludes with Darwin's admission of this fact in a letter addressed to Leonard Jenyns in 1844.

In which we examine the life of Charles Darwin from his birth in Shrewsbury, through his schooling at Edinburgh and Cambridge, the voyage of the Beagle, and the years leading up to and following his publication of the Origin of Species. Emphasis is placed on the teachers and authors who influenced Darwin’s thinking as he developed his theory, his circle of family and friends, and the landscapes that are reflected in his writing. Darwin and the Darwinian period are presented as the epitome of natural history.

It is now well known that there is a spectrum of views about humans and the world they live in, ranging from the concept of the environment as an external force to the idea that people exist through a series of relations which it makes little sense to divide up as culture on the one hand and nature on the other. It is worth thinking through the implications of these varied views briefly (although I do not want to duplicate Davies’s detailed introduction in Chapter 1), so that we can think about what is lost and gained when trying to combine nature and culture, my main aim in current work. Let us start with views in which there is a radical separation of people and the physical world. In such views, which are in themselves varied, the physical world is seen as a series of energy budgets and nutrients that people have to extract in the most cost-efficient way possible in order to maintain life. Leslie White (1949) made a three-fold division between the physical, the biological, and the cultural. Academic study, in which physicists, chemists, or earth scientists probe the physical state of the universe, biologists investigate living things, and the social sciences and humanities focus on the human world, was not constructed around a series of heuristic divisions, but instead mirrored reality, White argued. Culture was also divided into three levels, of which the first, technology determined social organization and ideology. The primary function of culture for White was the harnessing of energy and the more efficiently this was done, the more it allowed for organizational complexity and multiple ideologies. Human history moved by revolutions in energy capture from early periods in which human muscles were key, to the agricultural revolution where plants and animals were domesticated to increase food supplies and animals could be used for traction, through to the industrial revolution (and the possibility of a future nuclear revolution) (see also Armstrong Oma, Chapter 11 this volume).

Chapter 1 analyses the defining moment of Darwin’s conception of sexual selection: his lived experience of savage encounter with the indigenes of Tierra del Fuego during the voyage of the Beagle. It is argued that his early adoption of the view that the different human races had different in-born, heritable standards of beauty or aesthetic taste, a view that underpinned his notion of aesthetic choice in animals, was founded in Darwin’s reconciliation of his liberal abolitionist background with a pervasive contemporary “visual ideology” that had some commonalities with later biological racism.

This chapter opens part 1 of the book, “Theorizing on the Move,” by examining three major contexts or sources for Darwin’s ambition as a prospective naturalist. First, it describes the existence of a well-known and consequential scientific puzzle to which he would eventually offer a new answer: how were coral reefs formed? This question was of great practical significance to the British Admiralty and individual navigators, and it had important theoretical implications for geologists who were interested in the history of the earth. Second, the chapter explains the purpose of the 1831-1836 Royal Navy voyage of HMS Beagle and of Darwin’s presence aboard, emphasizing the role of Francis Beaufort in directing hydrographic surveyors to study coral reef formation in the South Seas. Third, it describes the range of intellectual and practical experiences Darwin brought to the voyage by examining his training at Edinburgh University and the University of Cambridge. This discussion calls attention to his expertise in the sciences of marine zoology and (terrestrial) geology, his early exposure to the work of Alexander von Humboldt, and the mentorship Darwin received from Robert Grant, John Stevens Henslow, and Adam Sedgwick.

This chapter uses the geologist Charles Lyell’s concept of an “amphibious being” (introduced in chapter 1) to illustrate why Darwin’s experience on a maritime surveying voyage had the potential to yield important theoretical insights in geology. Sponsel argues that during the Beagle voyage Darwin gained a familiarity with the seafloor that was unprecedented among naturalists of his day. The ship’s hydrographers furnished him with techniques for visualizing underwater topography and for sampling the ocean floor. This in turn allowed Darwin’s geological work on dry land to involve “amphibious” comparisons between terrestrial and submarine processes. Working with surveyors helped Darwin to develop a scientific approach resembling that of Alexander von Humboldt, and Sponsel argues that Darwin’s so-called Humboldtian Science (a term made famous by the historian Susan Faye Cannon) should be seen as a consequence of his first-hand familiarity with surveying as well has his interest in Humboldt’s writings. The chapter emphasizes Darwin’s study of zoophytes (colonial marine invertebrates) in the southern Atlantic Ocean along the shore of South America and argues that his early ambition as a naturalist was to study the zoology of corals rather than the geology of coral reefs.

This chapter examines the transitory form that late-modern humans might embody to give rise to the posthuman. It discusses the philosophical fiction of “Homo nexus”, which is described as both a modern hyperconnected individual and an indebted free person reduced to the status of a quasi-slave. The chapter also talks about Alfred Elton van Vogt and his 1950 novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle, which tells the story about a carnivorous alien stalking the crew of an exploration ship in outer space. In The Voyage of the Space Beagle, van Vogt invented the term “nexialism”, which is based on the concept of nexus treated in Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy.

This chapter talks about false promises of the molecular revolution, the persistence of junk, and the victory of stasis over entropy. It reviews the cinematographic presence of junk in cyberfictions, such as Alfred Elton van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ridley Scott’s movies Alien and Blade Runner. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the molecular and molar junk in the form of a “vanishing sequence”.

JPL and Oxford worked together to devise a powerful instrument called the Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer, PMIRR for short, to study the weather and climate on Mars. It was selected for flight by NASA on the Mars Observer spacecraft, which however failed to achieve orbit around the Red Planet and ended up lost in space. PMIRR was then selected again, this time as part of the payload on Mars Climate Orbiter, which launched nearly a decade later, only this time to crash on the surface of Mars. This disaster had a silver lining in that it led to the accidental deployment of the first British hardware on the surface of Mars, fully three years before Beagle 2 also crashed. Both experiments reside as wreckage on the surface of the planet, awaiting discovery by some future human expedition.