Hey, it’s Charles.
I need to tell you something I have barely told anyone. I have been carrying it so long it has started to feel like a physical weight.
I came home from the Beagle voyage and spent months organizing my specimens. The finches. The tortoises. The fossils. I laid everything out and the conclusion was exactly what I feared on that volcanic rock in the Galápagos.
Species are not fixed. They change.
Slowly, over enormous stretches of time, animals and plants adapt to their environments. The ones with traits that help them survive pass those traits to their offspring. The ones that do not, die. Generation after generation, tiny advantages accumulate until creatures on one island look completely different from creatures on another, even though they started as the same thing.
I call it natural selection. And it explains everything. The giant sloth fossils next to the tiny living sloths. The finch beaks. The tortoise shells. The patterns I have seen in nature since I was a boy flipping over rocks looking for beetles — it all fits.
It also means every species alive today, including us, was not designed and placed on the earth fully formed. We developed. We share ancestors with other creatures. Go back far enough and the line between humans and animals gets very blurry.
I wrote all of this down in a private essay in 1844. Sealed it. Told my wife Emma that if I died, she should publish it. Then I put it in a drawer.
That was twenty years ago.
I have not published it. I have not even told most of my colleagues what I actually believe. For twenty years I have been sitting in my house in the English countryside, raising my children, writing letters, and quietly collecting more evidence for a theory I am too afraid to say out loud.
I told my closest friend — a botanist named Joseph Hooker — and prefaced it by writing that it felt “like confessing a murder.”
That is honestly how it feels. I know what happens when I publish this. The Church will call me a heretic. Half the scientific community will turn on me. My own wife — Emma, who I love more than anything — is deeply religious. She believes in creation. She believes in heaven. And I am sitting across from her at breakfast every morning knowing I have a drawer full of evidence that contradicts the thing that gives her the most comfort.
How do you publish something when you know it will hurt the person you love most?
So I keep stalling. I tell myself I need more evidence. I spent eight years studying barnacles. Eight years. I am now the world’s foremost expert on barnacles, which is not a title anyone has ever aspired to. My children think it is normal to have barnacles all over the house. One of them went to a friend’s home and asked “where does your father keep his barnacles?” as if every household has them.
But the real reason I have spent twenty years on barnacles and pigeons and earthworms instead of publishing is simple — I am scared. I am not a fighter. I get stomach aches when people disagree with me. I have a mysterious illness that has plagued me since the Beagle — nausea, vomiting, trembling — and it gets worse every time I think about going public. My body physically rejects confrontation.
And yet the evidence keeps growing. Every new fossil, every new specimen, every letter from a naturalist in some distant country describing exactly the patterns I predicted — it all points to the same conclusion. I am right. I have been right for twenty years. And I have been too afraid to say so.
I know I cannot keep this in the drawer forever. The truth does not care about my stomach aches or my fear of angry clergymen. Sooner or later I have to open my mouth.
I just keep hoping it can be later.
— Charles
