Selects: How Charles Darwin Worked

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know – "Selects: How Charles Darwin Worked"

Date: February 14, 2026
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant (iHeartPodcasts)

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Overview

In this engaging episode, Josh and Chuck dive deep into the life, work, and impact of Charles Darwin. They trace Darwin’s journey from a queasy student to the architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection, exploring his personal struggles, scientific milestones, the controversy stirred by his ideas, and the enduring legacy—both scientific and social—left by his work.

The hosts balance humor and empathy as they recount key moments from Darwin’s life and contextualize how his work revolutionized science, rattled religious thinking, and set the stage for decades of debate.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Evolution and Natural Selection

• The episode opens with light banter before transitioning into the subject: Darwin's pivotal role in scientific history.
• Josh: “We are part of this huge, long natural procession of change... That’s why we’re doing good today.” (02:29)
• Chuck: “Evolution. Yeah. Natural selection. I think it’s like one of the most beautiful things that we’ve been able to figure out.” (03:04)
• Hosts distinguish between evolution (the overarching process) and natural selection (the mechanism), emphasizing Darwin’s influence.

2. Darwin’s Early Life & Influences

• Born into privilege, with an initial path set by his father—a doctor—Darwin was expected to pursue medicine but was squeamish about human anatomy.
• Josh: “He was prone to fainting, it seems like.” (08:20)
• Eventually, his father suggested a career in the church instead, leading Darwin to Cambridge.
• Despite religious upbringing, Darwin was more interested in natural science and slowly grew agnostic.

3. The Beagle Voyage & Galapagos Myth

• At 21, Darwin received an invitation from Captain Robert Fitzroy to join the HMS Beagle voyage. This was a pivotal, adventurous career move for the otherwise anxious Darwin.
• Josh: “That’s a pretty bold move.” (10:39)
• The myth of the Galapagos Islands as the genesis of Darwin’s ideas is debunked:
  • Chuck: “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...” (13:00)
• Specimens and insights from the voyage elevated Darwin’s scientific profile back in England.

4. Home Lab: The Down House Years

• Darwin spent 40 years at Down House, conducting meticulous studies of species, using his estate (and even his children) for experiments.
• He became a notorious correspondent, relying on networks for samples and data—his research would have been impossible without a robust postal system.
• Chuck: “He spent the next 40 years there studying his property.” (16:22)
• Earthworms and orchids became obsessions; he experimented even with unmowed lawn sections to measure natural selection over decades (22:20).

5. Darwin’s Personal Life and Struggles

• Marriage to cousin Emma Wedgwood (combining fortunes) brought stability and more children—some of whom tragically died, influencing Darwin’s thoughts on heredity and survival.
• Josh: “He was one of the people who discovered the troubles with inbreeding... it apparently had a really big effect on him.” (18:40)
• Darwin suffered chronic illness and relentless anxiety, worsened by fear of academic and social backlash.

6. The Risk and Revolution of Publishing ‘Origin of Species’

• Darwin worried a “storm” would erupt from challenging the religiously-rooted science of his time.
• Josh: “He is really not looking forward to the storm that this is going to create when he unleashes it on the public.” (21:50)
• The radical book "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" by Robert Chambers, published anonymously, scared Darwin: he saw the ridicule and scorn it received, prompting him to armor his work with evidence. (24:56)
• Prevailing theories included catastrophism—a belief that major, God-driven events explained fossil records.

7. The Wallace Factor & Publication

• Alfred Russel Wallace independently conceived the idea of natural selection. Their works were presented jointly in 1858, but it was the publication of Darwin's book in 1859 that made a splash.
• Josh: “He realized, holy cow, Wallace has come up with the same thing... Forget my anxiety. I’m just publishing this puppy.” (29:31)
• The full title: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” (30:34)

8. Theory Explained and Immediate Reactions

• Natural selection: Traits that aid survival and reproduction are passed on; those that don’t, aren't.
• Implication: Humans are animals, the product of natural—not divine—processes, which Victorians found alarming.
• Josh: “Inherent in that argument is that man, the king of the world, is nothing more than an animal that evolved from who knows what?” (32:30)
• Darwin references humans only twice, careful not to provoke more than necessary.
• Public and scientific reaction was divided; Darwin was both attacked and supported.
• Chuck: “Someone he really respected and his wife really respected, basically slammed him and called it heresy. And that was really impactful. Again, more anxiety, more throwing up.” (35:35)
• Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) emerged as a key defender and coined the term “agnostic.” (36:40)
• Josh: “He just takes it with religious zealotry and starts taking on anybody he can in debate, writing any article he can and defending not just Darwin, but his theory as well.” (36:58)

9. Legacy and Dark Aftermath: Social Darwinism and Eugenics

• Darwin’s scientific revolution created a “paradigm shift” in science, society, and literature.
• Chuck: “You do that kind of work, you pass away, you’re gonna have a legacy. Sure.” (37:41)
• His concepts were twisted by social theorists like Herbert Spencer into “social Darwinism,” fueling ideas like “survival of the fittest,” used to justify laissez-faire economics, neglect of the poor, and eventually eugenics.
• U.S. and German sterilization programs pre-dated and inspired Hitler’s version.
• Josh: “Basically, they replaced God’s will with nature’s will in explaining the cruelty of the world...” (40:18)
• The hosts clarify: humanity has shown compassion for thousands of years—remains of cared-for disabled individuals prove mutual care predates modernity. (44:30)

10. Death, Rumors, and Darwin’s Own Words

• The infamous “deathbed recantation” is declared a fabrication, denied by Darwin’s children:
  • Josh: “He never recanted to the end. He was an ardent supporter of natural selection.” (43:21)
• The episode concludes with Chuck’s moving reading from the last paragraph of "Origin of Species," meditating on the interconnectedness and beauty of all life:
  • Chuck (Quote): “There is grandeur in this view of life... from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.” (46:11)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Chuck (on Darwin's hesitance):
  "He was just wracked with anxiety his entire life." (28:39)

• Josh (on the paradigm shift):
  “He was the epicenter of that divide at first. If that crack in the world first appeared in him.” (20:32)

• Chuck (reading Darwin):
  “There is grandeur in this view of life... from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.” (46:41)

• Josh (on backlash):
  “It caused... a poop storm.” (33:01)

• Chuck (on social Darwinism):
  “He was in the middle of... both bookended by these two ideas.” (39:52)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:29-03:26 – Natural selection vs. evolution: The real mechanism.
• 07:35-09:30 – Early life, family pressures, education, and first scientific interests.
• 10:39-13:00 – The Beagle voyage and myth-busting the Galapagos connection.
• 16:22-18:40 – Down House years: experimentation, personal tragedy, and scientific correspondence.
• 24:56-26:01 – Impact of other radical works (e.g., “Vestiges”) on Darwin’s cautious approach.
• 29:31 – The Wallace-Darwin race to publication.
• 32:30 – The radical human implications of Darwin’s theory.
• 36:40 – Thomas Huxley: Darwin's Bulldog and the term “agnostic.”
• 39:15-42:00 – Social Darwinism, eugenics, and the dangerous misapplications of Darwin’s ideas.
• 43:21 – The debunking of the deathbed recantation myth.
• 46:11-46:41 – Chuck reads the poetic closing of "Origin of Species."

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Tone and Style

The episode is upbeat, irreverent, and conversational. The hosts employ sharp wit, honest curiosity, and a sense of wonder when discussing science and history, while maintaining empathy about historical actors’ personal challenges.

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Conclusion

Josh and Chuck offer an accessible yet thorough account of Darwin’s life—his struggles, innovations, legacy, and the way his ideas have shaped (and sometimes warped) Western thought. They strip away myths, inject warmth, and close with one of the most reverent readings from Darwin’s own pen, framing his vision as both beautiful and profound.

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For further learning:

• Watch the film "Creation" (2009) for a dramatization of Darwin’s life
• Explore BBC’s many Darwin documentaries
• Read more at howstuffworks.com or revisit related Stuff You Should Know episodes on Malthus, population, and eugenics

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“There is grandeur in this view of life...”

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human at Charmin. We heard you shouldn't talk about going.

[Josh Clark]

To the bathroom in public, so we decided to sing about it. Light a candle, pour some wine, grab a roll. The soft kind for a little me time. Charmin ultra soft smooth hair, wavy edges for my rear. So let the softness caress your soul. Just relax, you're on a roll. Let her rip. Charmin ultra soft smooth tear. Charmin ultra soft smooth hair has the same softness you love now with wavy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Edges that tear on the leading oneply brand. Enjoy the go with Charmin. Hi, everyone. Chuck here on a Saturday to introduce this week's select episode, a curated best of. And this is all about old Chuckie Darwin. It's called How Charles Darwin Worked. He's a great person, had a lot of great ideas, and it was pretty groundbreaking stuff. So I hope you guys enjoy listening to this one, either for the first time or all over again. Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. So this is stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And lest I forget, Jerry's over there.

[Chuck Bryant]

She's over there.

[Josh Clark]

You know, we went like five years. I went five years of this podcast. Just mentioning us once in a while, mentioning Jerry. But I mean, like, I can't imagine the podcast without Jerry too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Now, after.

[Josh Clark]

After five years, finally I'm like, yeah, I guess she should stay on.

[Chuck Bryant]

She's earned her place.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. At least she keeps quiet.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

How you doing?

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm great. How are you?

[Josh Clark]

I'm good.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I'm like, low key calm. I'm fine.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's good. I'm a little smelly, which we've talked about off the air, but you keep.

[Josh Clark]

Talking about it, which makes the smell worse.

[Chuck Bryant]

What is it about someone's own special sweet tang of a scent that they're drawn to?

[Josh Clark]

Like you're drawn to your own tang.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, man. Everyone, I think, like, secretly smells their own shoe and their own armpits when they get a little ripe.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe we all, deep down, want to mate with ourselves.

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe. So that's not true because I'm disgusted with myself.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but I see you looking at your armpit, eyeing it like that. I know what you want to do to that thing. You.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I've slipped out twice today just to smell of them.

[Josh Clark]

There's a little on your nose.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gross.

[Josh Clark]

So, Chuck, you're doing good. I'm doing good. We'll Just assume Jerry's doing good. And we're all doing good because we're fairly fit. You know why we're fit? Because we're alive. We are evolving as we speak. We are part of this huge, long natural procession of change from forced by scarcity, competition, the ravages of nature. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Evolution gets all the spotlight. I'm a big natural selection fan myself, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah. Divergence. That stuff turns me on.

[Josh Clark]

That and your smell, intellectually. So let's talk about this. You can't have evolution without natural selection. Again, even though evolution gets all the spotlight. Yeah. At the very least, there's no evolution on Earth without natural selection.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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 is a fairly recent notion, despite how tremendously widespread it is. You know Bill Nye, the science guy?

[Chuck Bryant]

Are you talking about his debate?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he got in a debate with Ken Ham. Just totally off the cuff. Not planned at all. They just both happened to be in the same auditorium.

[Chuck Bryant]

I watched the whole thing.

[Josh Clark]

Did you? The whole two hours?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, man. I couldn't pull myself away from it.

[Josh Clark]

So I'm guessing that you suspect Bill Nye won the debate.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, are there winners and losers?

[Josh Clark]

So don't be shy. There are.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

There is a British religious website that polled its guests.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Cause, you know, people who go to websites are called guests in England.

[Chuck Bryant]

They are.

[Josh Clark]

And said, who won? And I think 92% said Bill Nye won. And the reason why is because in the comment 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think when you say things like dragons, you might lose people.

[Josh Clark]

Did he say dragons? I didn't see it. Yeah, he mentioned dragons.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, that's some people. And like you said, religion and science coexist for a lot of religious folk.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But there are some that are very literal and strict and say that, you know, how to explain dinosaurs. Well, they may have been dragons.

[Josh Clark]

Gotcha. I don't. That doesn't explain anything.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I think the dragons were in The Bible.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

If I'm getting this wrong, I'm going to really get killed.

[Josh Clark]

We should pause here for a second.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Like the point of this episode is not to stomp on anybody's beliefs.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

I think science can be just as dogmatic as religion.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So, like, that's not what we're doing.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

Like if you believe in creationism, to each his own. Like, we're not gonna pound our beliefs into you or, you know, vice versa.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've never understood that. Like, who cares?

[Josh Clark]

Just either way.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You know, it's like convert to my way of thinking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Or else you are just so wrong it's mind boggling. Well, that's not the point of this.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

I think we should just see away with that because it's not what we're like. There's some people who don't always listen. Maybe this is their first episode. Welcome. We are not those kind of guys.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. And specifically with this episode, it's on Charles Darwin, the man and kind of what made him who he was. And we'll tackle. Are we committing to go ahead and doing Natural Selection?

[Josh Clark]

I think we shall to pair with this. As a matter of fact, we'll have this one come out on a Tuesday. We'll do Natural Selection on a Thursday.

[Chuck Bryant]

Look at that. All right, I agree. Let's do it.

[Josh Clark]

Let there be luck.

[Chuck Bryant]

But Darwin is a fascinating dude though, so. Yeah, he deserves his own show.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because you can't really overstate the idea that he was, as Robert Lamb puts in this fine article, I have to say, one of his best. Agreed that Charles Darwin was the fulcrum by which or on which the entire sea 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. And we'll get to that. He wasn't the first or the last. But it turns out he was the most thorough in his research.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And had the most social breeding.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And inbreeding.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Man, this is the ultimate tease.

[Josh Clark]

It is. So let's get started. Chuck, let's talk about Darwin. He didn't. He wasn't born with a Bunsen burner and a flask in his hand.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, he was not. He was born, if anything, with a stethoscope in his hand because his father, Dr. Robert Waring Darwin, had designs on little Chuck being a doctor like him.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because he was, you know, they had some dough. He was an English gentleman. They weren't poor by any means.

[Josh Clark]

No. Apparently his grandfather amassed a vast fortune in China. And not the country, but the porcelain.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Interesting. So it'd be incorrect to say he had a Chinese fortune.

[Josh Clark]

He had a China fortune.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. But little Chuck was not into anatomy. He was definitely not into surgery on humans. It freaked him out. I think he was a little queasy as a person.

[Josh Clark]

He was prone to fainting, it seems like.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But he was way into the natural sciences and was just fine with dissecting a frog.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. You know, he was cool with biology. As long as you weren't human, he'd cut you.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. So he was sent to several schools, 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, so the only other option for you is to be a man of religion.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Parson in the country.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So I'm going to send you to Christ College in Cambridge, which is.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, if you're going to go be a country parson, you could do a lot worse.

[Chuck Bryant]

Agreed.

[Josh Clark]

You know the fighting padres.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is that what they are? Go padres. So he was very well educated and had been exposed to all kinds of science. So he was a very smart guy from early on and way into natural science, like I said, but not into the religion thing as much. He was agnostic from a pretty early age.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And he seemed like he was gonna follow the path that his father was laying out for him, I guess. His father.

[Chuck Bryant]

He's doing it anyway.

[Josh Clark]

He was very domineering.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And Charles Darwin was a pretty great thinker. Pretty all around good guy. But he also was a bit of a panty waist, it seems like. You know, he was, like, really, really affected by stress.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

He had a lot of psychosomatic 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 21 and he was on his way to becoming that country parson that his father had decided he would be. And he got an invitation to go on a tour of the islands off South America from a guy named Robert Fitzroy, who was 26 years old. He was an aristocrat and he liked Darwin. He said, hey, you're good at conversations. When I get bored, I suffer bouts of depression. I'm about to go on this boat called the HMS Beagle for God knows how long. So why don't you come along and we can Chat and I won't get depressed. And Darwin said, you know what? Let's do this. That's right. Which is. That's a pretty bold move.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he was. For someone who was a. Would you say a panty waist?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, panty waist.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's sort of surprising that he was up for that kind of adventure.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. A milquetoast. You could also call him a milquetoast. Maybe we'll call him that.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so this was in 1831. He boarded the HMS Beagle, which for some reason just cracks me up.

[Josh Clark]

You know, our buddy Joe from forward thinking just adopted a dog. It's part beagle and his name's Darwin.

[Chuck Bryant]

Huh.

[Josh Clark]

Because of that association, I would imagine. Yeah, that would have been. And Joe said he looks like Darwin head on.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like Charleston.

[Josh Clark]

Bushy eyebrows.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's funny. All right, so he boarded the HMS Beagle. What'd you say? How old was he? 21.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they took a five year voyage around South America. The purpose for Fitzroy was to chart the waters of South America, the coastlines and that kind of thing. But Chuck 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?

[Josh Clark]

I'm sure he got pretty good at rowing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

From the ship to shore, back and forth. Yeah. He was basically Paul Bettany's character in Master and Commander.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, which is ironic because Paul Bettany played Charles Darwin.

[Josh Clark]

Did he really?

[Chuck Bryant]

In that movie Creation?

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah. I never saw that, but I know what you're talking about.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's funny. You had no idea, huh?

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

You stepped right into that one.

[Josh Clark]

I wonder if he recognized that.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know. It's a good movie, that Creation. You should check it out. It details a lot of the struggles of his life that we're gonna go over here and mainly is about his anxieties of what he was doing in his relationship to his Christian wife.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, I'll bet that was kind of a sore spot.

[Chuck Bryant]

Big time. We'll get to that, though, in a second.

[Josh Clark]

So, okay, so they head off to South America.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

He's spending two thirds of the voyage of this five year voyage he spends on land. One of the most famous places he visited was the Galapagos, which are still around.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And that apparently was really overstated. He was only. What is still around? Is that a joke?

[Josh Clark]

The Galapagos, they're still around.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay. I thought I was missing on something. Because you looked at me like, no, you're missing a joke.

[Josh Clark]

No, that's this look.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay. What was that one? Is you smell?

[Josh Clark]

That was. My eyes are water.

[Chuck Bryant]

So the Galapagos apparently was a little overstated, significance wise. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, it stuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean for sure. And he, you know, collected all kinds of different specimens from the Galapagos, but it wasn't as big a deal.

[Josh Clark]

Have you ever seen the size of the turtles there? Or the tortoises?

[Chuck Bryant]

Are they huge?

[Josh Clark]

Dude, they're like the size of VW beetles.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

They're enormous.

[Chuck Bryant]

Crazy.

[Josh Clark]

And apparently, like, they'll hang out with you.

[Chuck Bryant]

What else are they gonna do?

[Josh Clark]

Run away slowly?

[Chuck Bryant]

They have no choice.

[Josh Clark]

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?

[Chuck Bryant]

We are. I was just poo pooing the Galapagos. But what he did while he was gone was he did a lot of great work and made a real name for himself and kind of came back a well known scientist because the whole.

[Josh Clark]

Time he's making all these findings, he's finding new species of animals that like Europe, Europeans didn't even know existed. Like entire types of animals. 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 basically writing papers as he's doing this journey. So back in the jolly old England, basically he becomes a celebrity.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And he was, you know, like before he even returned.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 Mystery of Mysteries or Transmutation. And he called his research at first the Transmutation notebooks.

[Josh Clark]

Is that right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He wasn't, you know, he was researching stuff that he had heard about.

[Josh Clark]

It was a working title.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was a working title actually. What would later become on the Origin of the Species. Of course.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And he and another guy we'll talk about in a little bit were also 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 Darwin and the guy, Alfred Wallace Russell or Alfred Russel Wallace both read this and said, well, wait a minute. I wonder if that adaptation and change that's forced by scarcity is what creates the change in species that we're seeing here.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was definitely. The book was called Essay on Principle of Population. And that was like a super game changer because it really gave him, like, the notion that by studying any species death, you can kind of study its life.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And it was origins. It wasn't just biology that it gave rise to. It gave rise to economics, largely. Yeah. A lot of anthropology, a lot of ecology. Like, it was, like you say, a game changer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Thomas Malthus, go back and listen to our population podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Is that where he appears?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think he appears a few times, but that was a good one. Yeah, it's an oldie but a goodie. So like we said, he came back sort of a celebrity of sorts. And he came back with a lot of information and settled in at the Down House in Kent. And this place was. He spent the next 40 years there studying his property, essentially. Like, he didn't need to go anywhere. He had plenty of nature there. Apparently there were 40 different species per square meter on his property. He had 10 kids, and he used them as sort of a little laboratory experiment because three of them died. And he was fascinated with why things and people survive and some don't. So it was all sort of part of his. 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 been so good, he may have never been able to write Origin of the Species because he relied on people sending him stuff in due time.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah. And also he was really big on corresponding, which kind of helped develop his ideas, flesh them out even further. He was huge on correspondence.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He had an area on his property called the Sandwalk that he had built. It was basically just a. 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nothing escaped his eye.

[Josh Clark]

One of his favorite subjects was earthworms. Remember our earthworm podcast? There was a quote from him in there 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 creat. So he was down with earthworms.

[Chuck Bryant]

Down with earthworms.

[Josh Clark]

And Orchids. Very famously, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. He was active. He wasn't just looking at things. He raised orchids. He was a beekeeper. He raised pigeons. And like, it was all just in the name of study.

[Josh Clark]

Right. One of the things, though, he married his first cousin. His wife.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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. Like he felt kind of guilty and weird and wondered if maybe his kids early deaths had to do with that. Which has to be kind of startling if you're the guy who discovers the problems with inbreeding and you've inbred. You know, it's got to be a little jarring.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. Emma Wedgwood 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. 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 the fact that he was agnostic and she was Christian, she spent her life caring for him because he was a very sickly man, may have had some sort of viral disease his entire life.

[Josh Clark]

Is that right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe that he picked up in South America.

[Josh Clark]

So he wasn't a panty waist.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, he was a panty waist on top of that. So he was just fraught with anxiety. And she cared for him and all the kids and her life's worry was, are we going to spend eternity together in the afterlife? That was her big concern.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because he didn't buy that stuff.

[Josh Clark]

No. And he was, you know, religious. Ish. When he was younger. But as he grew older. And the more he was an atheist. No. The more he exposed himself to these ideas of evolution and natural selection, the less religious, the less he bought into it. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

He was the epicenter of that divide it first. If that crack in the world first appeared in him.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Isn't that interesting?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. He's the one to blame.

[Josh Clark]

Pretty much. Or he was patient zero, one of the two. So he comes back to Downhouse, he gets married, settles down, doubles his fortune by marrying Emma, and is experimenting with orchids, earthworms, bees, his kids, all this stuff. And he's also, at the same time writing. He's expanding that notebook into what he's calling Natural selection, another working title. And 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 T's, dotting his I's, making sure he's not 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 inherent in the theory of natural selection.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm going to add a third reason, my friend.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

If you're studying natural selection evolution, it takes a long time. Well, yeah, you can't study something for a week and detect changes. And like you said, he was thorough because he lived his life basically in anxiety of not being accepted by these peers.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And like, these are people, these are friends of his.

[Josh Clark]

So his procrastination was definitely fear, driven by his peers and by society at large.

[Chuck Bryant]

And by the fact that it just takes a long time to study something like this.

[Josh Clark]

Right, right.

[Chuck Bryant]

For instance, he left a area of his Lawn unmowed for 20 years just to study what would happen.

[Josh Clark]

And out of like that sounds like an excuse.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

He's like I tell him, studying over there.

[Chuck Bryant]

But out of like the 20 different species he studied, 11 survived and nine died away. So boom. Natural selection right there, just in a portion of his lawn. Right, okay, but it took 20 years is the point.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so time, fear of his peers, fear of the public. And he had good reason to fear or be anxious because the world was a much different place than it is now. And he was well aware that what he was about to unleash on society was going to create some big changes and some big problems. And we'll get into that right after this message. Learning things with Jack and John. So, Chuck, we're talking about Darwin. He's at his house, Downhouse.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

He's working on his manuscript. He's kind of procrastinating a little bit and because it takes time too. But he knows that he's about to unleash this complete change in paradigm. A poop storm onto the world. Exactly. And it's because the world was a much different place than it is today because Darwin hadn't talked about natural selection yet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I Mean, religious biology was biology.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

They didn't call it religious biology. That was just biology.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he was the first one to secularize it and make it just about the science.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because before scientists thought like, well, God created this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And that is our starting point. Like everything else, every other scientific explanation we have has to trace back to creation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Which is kind of. It can make science a little easier, but 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 doesn't use creationism. And that's what Darwin was doing with natural selection.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and add a fourth thing, man.

[Josh Clark]

You just keep them coming.

[Chuck Bryant]

There were two texts that were vital and we talked about one of them, the Malthus principle of population. In 1844, there was a book written called the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. And it was published anonymously for 40 years. No one knew who wrote it because no one wanted to put their name on it. 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 it came out later. It was a guy named Robert Chambers. He was a Scottish journalist. But what Darwin, it scared the crap out of Darwin. Basically.

[Josh Clark]

Darwin was like, mother. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cause a lot. It was mama. It was a lot of the same ideas as he had. So what it did was it caused him to basically rewrite his voluminous work and pare it down and armor it with sturdier armor over the next 13 months.

[Josh Clark]

Smart.

[Chuck Bryant]

Very smart.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, you could say for him that that was a stroke of luck that that was published and he read it and saw what happened.

[Chuck Bryant]

Dude, total stroke of luck. He might have been laug of existence if he had gotten there first.

[Josh Clark]

So he goes back, redoubles his efforts, strengthens his argument, and again, he's combating not just the religious ideals of the time, but the religious ideals of science. Like most scientists at the time were deists, when deists believed that God created the universe. Basically, like a clock maker makes a clock, wound it up and walked away like, see you later. Good luck with everything. And then anything that happened as a result after that was the result of the machinations of this clock.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And there was a theory that was fairly well accepted called catastrophism.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

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 our hands. Why do these kind of resemble the things that are alive today?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

That doesn't make any sense. Well, catastrophism, which was suggested by a guy named George Cuvier and Cuvier said that. Catastrophism. Which one?

[Chuck Bryant]

I like the second one. Catastrophism.

[Josh Clark]

Catastrophism.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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. And that explains why some are extinct and some are now here.

[Chuck Bryant]

I would also call that coincidenceism.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's another way to put it. That's another pronunciation.

[Chuck Bryant]

It wasn't like super science based. Right.

[Josh Clark]

But this is the, like this was a well respected scientist.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And this was the prevailing thought at the time that creationism and the natural sciences 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It's not. That doesn't hold water. And then he went and threw up again and again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Apparently he threw up a lot.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. On the Origin of the Species came out in 1859. He was at a spa recovering from bouts of nausea.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So yeah, he was off throwing up.

[Chuck Bryant]

I felt bad for the guy.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

He was just wracked with anxiety his entire life.

[Josh Clark]

But imagine that. Imagine being racked with anxiety and still. Still going through with it.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's pretty impressive.

[Josh Clark]

It is.

[Chuck Bryant]

So previous to its publication, another important thing happened. We mentioned earlier, Alfred Russel 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 people urged them both to present their works at something called the linnean Society in 1858. They did so together as a team. But it wasn't, it didn't kind of make much of a splash at the time. It wasn't until he officially published his work that it, you know, made the splash.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And Alfred Russel Wallace actually was the impetus for him to publish Origin of the Species. Yeah, he, he'd been sitting there, dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating, not mowing as long. And he got a letter from Wallace like you said, and he realized, holy cow, Wallace has come up with the same thing. Yeah, I've been working this for 30 years. I'm not gonna forget that, Forget my anxiety. I'm just publishing this puppy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And. And he did, and it came out in 1859 and he was hailed as a villain and a genius, depending on who you spoke to. And let's talk about the origin of the species and what it says and what natural selection means. Chuck. First of all, the official title of the book is on the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And that's why everybody calls it Origin.

[Chuck Bryant]

Of Species, because it's long and wordy.

[Josh Clark]

Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But what it basically says is that species adapt. They adapt due to population pressure. They adapt through competition with one another between species, inside species. That when you see, like slightly different traits, individual traits are to be expected, but those individual traits can ultimately lead to a new species on a long enough time table if those traits make their. Increase their chance of surviving to reproduction, age and enhance their ability to reproduce.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And if you don't, if you aren't good at that, then you go bye bye.

[Josh Clark]

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 going on. Yeah, it's very, very slow, so we can't see it happens on a glacial time scale or geologic time scale, but it's still going on. And here's proof. The thing that he doesn't come out and 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 the world, is nothing more than an animal that evolved from who knows what?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I bet he fretted 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, are you saying that we came from apes?

[Josh Clark]

He's like, I'm at a spa recovering from nausea. I can't be rut.

[Chuck Bryant]

But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying that up front in plain English.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And it caused, like you said, a poop storm.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I guess we should say Russell Wallace was. He's been sort of lost to history as far as, you know, what most people know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It's sad.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is sad because he was a smart guy, but he wasn't. He had no standing like Darwin did. And that's kind of one of the reasons he was forgotten to history.

[Josh Clark]

Right. He was out in the field and he seemed to Be happiest out in the field. After this theory was introduced, he retreated back to the Malay Peninsula to collect specimens.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but he would sell them, which kind of degraded his standing, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Just. But he was using those funds to further fund more scientific exploration.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

You know, it's not like he was funding his opium habit or something like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no. But the point is, Darwin didn't need to sell it. So I think he was. People were like, well, this guy's collecting species and selling them. He's a merchant.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Exactly. That's exactly right. And regardless of whether Wallace 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 was Darwin. So Darwin became. He's the fittest. Exactly. Under Victorian aristocracy rules. But he became, 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 weeks ago. Right. So almost literally. And he didn't like that at all. So what he said was, you know what? You guys talk this over, I'm gonna go hit my. Hit the spa.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And throw up. Do what you want with it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

I'm going away.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've got a lawn to not mow.

[Josh Clark]

But lucky for him, he had a lot of supporters, like, right out of the gate.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he had. He had both. He had supporters, scientists that I think some wanted. Wanted to say this stuff all along. And now that they had such a wonderful, concise and well researched piece of work to back them up, they came out of the woodwork and like, yeah, 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 and called it heresy. And that was really impactful. Again, more anxiety, more throwing up.

[Josh Clark]

And there was a lot of name calling. There was a lot of political cartoons that were unflattering and unflattering for the Victorian age. So basically his head on a monkey or something like that. But 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 Aldous Huxley.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And sometimes you'll. If you see Darwin's theory mentioned, you'll see the Darwin Huxley theory, because Huxley basically was a religious man and Darwin, I think firsthand, not just through the Origin of the Species, but through correspondence as well, convinced him, like, no, dude, natural selection is actually right. And very ironically, just like Saul converting to Paul on the road to Damascus, Huxley converts from a religious fervent to a natural selection fervent. And he just takes it with religious zealotry and starts taking on anybody he can in debate, writing any article he can and defending not just Darwin, 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 were still believers in God, but also fervent believers in natural selection as well.

[Chuck Bryant]

Huh. 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 11 more, published 11 more times before 1882, and then finally in 1973, which is pretty old for someone who was in such ill health his entire life.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Heart attack finally got him.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, Very sad. It is. But he lived a good, long, nauseated life, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Good point. So I guess we should talk a little bit about his legacy, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

You do that kind of work, you pass away, you're gonna have a legacy. Sure.

[Josh Clark]

They name a city in Australia after you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really?

[Josh Clark]

I believe it's Darwin. Australia. Please, God, don't let it be New Zealand.

[Chuck Bryant]

You want to look?

[Josh Clark]

No?

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

I'm feeling like a gambling man today.

[Chuck Bryant]

Gotcha. So his influence from then on and continues to be today. Lamb calls it, rightfully so. A 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 were on one side or the other.

[Josh Clark]

It's like Mio water. It changes everything.

[Chuck Bryant]

What's that?

[Josh Clark]

You haven't seen that ad, uh, for, like, the little droplets of flavoring you can add to your water.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've seen that.

[Josh Clark]

So you haven't seen the ad where the guy is 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 ads around. And you know me, I'm an ad aficionado.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's true. Well, one thing we can point to is that Herbert Spencer, he was a sociologist after Darwin applied Darwinism to sociology in the form of social Darwinism, AKA survival of the fittest, which it didn't Bastardize it. But he definitely used it for his own purposes to say that, you know what? The weak. We shouldn't even worry about the weak. If we want to be a strong mankind, then let the weak die out.

[Josh Clark]

Well, you know, so this sociologist that came up with this idea of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, that's a very Malthusian view of humanity and nature.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Because Malthus was basically saying, like, look, man, we take care of the poor and everything, but if we do that, we're interfering with nature and we're gonna end up overburdening the population.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Because population's gonna grow geometrically and we're not gonna be able to support ourselves and society's gonna collapse. Yeah. That was what Malthus was saying. This guy said.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah. It's weird that Darwin was in the middle of kind of both bookended by these two ideas.

[Josh Clark]

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. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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. Survival of the fittest. They weren't meant to be. And basically they replaced God's will with nature's will in explaining the cruelty of the world, you know, and like I said, it took off. It became what we call the eugenics movement very quickly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which was the idea that the government would actually get involved in weeding out the weaker parts of society.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because you don't have to wait around for evolution to do this. We can speed it up by picking out the weakest and exterminating them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or at the very least, letting them exterminate themselves by only breeding. You know, the boys from Brazil.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I finally saw half of that movie. I can't tell you how surprised I was. Surprised I was to see Steve Guttenberg.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, Gootes was one of the kids, wasn't he?

[Josh Clark]

He was like the first one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah. God, I forgot about that.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wait a minute. He was one of the kids from the experiment. No, he wasn't. He was like the journalist.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, was he?

[Josh Clark]

That's like blowing the COVID off of this whole thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

I haven't seen it in a long time. Yeah, I know. It was creepy, though.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, yeah, Possibly gave birth to eugenics.

[Josh Clark]

Which we should say, obviously, the Nazis loved. And they used that to rationalize the extermination of the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, epileptics, the mentally handicapped, the blind, everybody.

[Chuck Bryant]

Guys who smelled like me.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you would have been in big trouble. But prior to the Nazis doing this, the United States, Indiana, Georgia, all sorts of other states, forced sterilization on people of similar stature. 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 was a pretty big fan of it. And if you don't believe me, go back and listen to our episode. Is it legal to sterilize addicts? Oh, yeah, because it's still going on today.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was a good one.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So what about this deathbed recant? Had you ever heard that?

[Josh Clark]

I have.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not true, apparently.

[Josh Clark]

So he supposedly said on his deathbed, basically, I. I take it all back. Yeah. I wish I hadn't have ever said this. Yeah, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And his. Both his daughter and his son, who were both at his side while he died, said this lady was not at his deathbed. She never came to our house.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's a pretty good idea, though, if you're a creationist. Well, I mean, to make up that story, like the father of evolution even changed his mind on his deathbed.

[Josh Clark]

If you look up today on the Internet, like, I think Darwin deathbed even will bring up, like, creationist website after creationist website that use it to support their claims.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really? But it's bunk.

[Josh Clark]

It was debunked right afterward.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And then, Chuck, let me say one more thing about social Darwinism, okay? 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 from up to 500,000 years ago of severely disabled people. Fossils. Their fossils, their remains being found where they could not possibly have lived to the age they lived to without being cared for by their community.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

So this idea that in a more primitive state we just left people to die out in the weather because they couldn't keep up doesn't hold water.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's good to know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It is very comforting that.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that means we were innately have compassion as a species.

[Josh Clark]

I would guess that. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's the way I like to look at it.

[Josh Clark]

I think it's one of the things that makes us human.

[Chuck Bryant]

Agreed.

[Josh Clark]

But not just us. No other species have compassion too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Totes.

[Josh Clark]

So maybe we should. Why don't you play us out with a little bit of Darwin, man?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. The last paragraph of the Origin of the Species to me is one of the most beautiful things ever written. So I'm going to read it.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank. And he's talking about his home in.

[Josh Clark]

Kent, that patch of grass.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, now all of is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, 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 a 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 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 as 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 most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows. 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 to the Fick's law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.

[Josh Clark]

Bravo.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good stuff, Chuck.

[Josh Clark]

Not me, Both of you. That was a great reading, Chuck D. I felt like I was in our Halloween episode again. Oh, yeah, that's good, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Don't thank me.

[Josh Clark]

Chuck's.

[Chuck Bryant]

I can just read.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

Got nothing else.

[Josh Clark]

I think that was a fine way to end this one. If you want to learn more about Charles Darwin, the man and his ideas, you can type Darwin into The search [e-mail] it should bring up a whole bunch of articles, some of which we will record into podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, or that movie creation is really good. Or if you're into documentaries, there are tons of them. The BBC's got like a dozen.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, they love him there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

Well, since I said search bar, I probably did. It's time for listener man.

[Chuck Bryant]

Before the mail. There's a quick correction. In our Kent State episode, we said Mussolini had his brown shirts. Yeah, there were the black shirts.

[Josh Clark]

Duh.

[Chuck Bryant]

No biggie.

[Josh Clark]

It's the presence of all color, not the presence of some colors.

[Chuck Bryant]

Brown is the new black anyway.

[Josh Clark]

Is that right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Orange is all right. I'm going to call this amputee amputee.

[Josh Clark]

Like amputee, amputee.

[Chuck Bryant]

Mm.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey guys. Been listening for a couple years now and really enjoy it. As a 60 year old woman who had her right leg amputated above the knee in 1969 due to cancer, I was especially interested in that podcast. First, I want to correct one offhand comment which you stated that being an amputee probably becomes the focus of your life. Not always. In my case, being an amputee did not become the focus. In fact, occasionally friends forget that I am an amputee. Now I consider it a compliment. As you said, life isn't over because a person becomes an amputee. I was married for 20 years, went to graduate school for my master's degree in counseling psychology. Now two wonderful grown children, worked from the age of 14 to 55 with time off for raising kids and attended graduate school and have been able to travel quite a bit. I've been lucky not to have experienced phantom pain. I have always had and have been told by my doctors will always have phantom feeling though.

[Josh Clark]

That is so weird.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. It feels as though my amputated leg is present but asleep. Sort of a benign 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 1969 was literally a wooden leg from the knee down. I am now on my fourth prosthesis. Prosthesis.

[Josh Clark]

I thought she was gonna say like an old Bessie's still with me.

[Chuck Bryant]

Knock knock. I'm now on my fourth prosthesis and they get better and better. My current leg is very high tech and impressive.

[Josh Clark]

It can make coffee.

[Chuck Bryant]

That is from Denise Slattingren.

[Josh Clark]

Awesome.

[Chuck Bryant]

From Arcata, California.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Not Arcadia.

[Josh Clark]

That's Northern California A R C A T A thanks Denise. You sound like a very well adjusted person and we appreciate you writing and calling us out on that.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I hope you still have old Betty on the shelf somewhere.

[Josh Clark]

At least it's Betsy. Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Betsy. Yeah, I would keep it.

[Josh Clark]

Just got it carved into the side.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice.

[Josh Clark]

You know. Yeah. 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 people's stories. So bring them to us. We will disseminate them as best we can.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

You can go on to stuffyouchouldknow.com and check out our social links. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom with some good old country goodness and send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com Stuff youf Should Know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.