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Charles Darwin managed to develop and disseminate the most earth-shattering works natural history has ever seen – when he wasn’t overcome by his frequent and lifelong bane/hobby of vomiting. 

“The beauty of Darwin is you don’t just know he generally got sick, you know the exact volume,” quipped John Dillon, who delivered a Wednesday night lecture at UC Berkeley Extension’s International Center entitled “The Personal Evolution of Charles Darwin.” “Darwin was one of the handful of really important figures in science along with Einstein and Newton, but we probably know more about Darwin than any of the others. That’s because he was a hoarder, he saved everything. To say it another way, he was anal retentive.” 

The famed scientist kept a journal, diaries and notebooks, all while writing and receiving a staggering number of candid letters, even keeping copies of the dispatches he sent off. Darwin’s voluminous writings – though scrawled in the worst penmanship in Christendom – manage to reveal a startlingly physical and emotionally fragile man, who, throughout to his eventual conversion from Creationism to Evolution, made for a most unlikely revolutionary. 

The old adage holds that “reform will always come from the bottom. Nobody with four aces asks for a new deal.” Darwin was indeed born with four aces. The son of an incredibly wealthy doctor, and the grandson of controversial early evolutionist Erasmus Darwin, Charles grew up, as Dillon put it, “in Jane Austen’s England.” 

Attempting to follow in father Robert’s medical footsteps, Charles (whose later theories would describe a “nature red in tooth and claw”) found he could not stand the sight of blood, and returned home from Edinburgh University to the great disappointment of his authoritarian dad. With his career options limited, Darwin eventually opted to become a man of the cloth, attending Christ College at Cambridge with hopes of eventually being a country parson.  

Never an exceptional student unless keenly interested in a subject, Darwin found his interest in natural science, eventually landing his much-heralded position on the H.M.S. Beagle upon the recommendation of a professor.  

“Darwin signed up for a two-year mission, and it became five,” said Dillon, the curator of natural science at San Francisco’s Randall Museum. “The very first time he stepped onto the Beagle, he had heart palpitations. But he wouldn’t tell anybody. He’d rather have died than be benched.” 

Darwin sent the world’s largest natural history collection back to England, and, to his great surprise, returned to the British Isles a huge celebrity whose works had been published without his knowledge by the Royal Society. What Dillon feels he didn’t send back home was his newfound belief that creatures were not individually created but evolved, a torturous secret he guarded tightly.  

Unlike previous, Lamarckian views of evolution (which espoused a “chain of perfection,” with humanity – or at least white, Victorian humanity – as the ultimate symbol of perfect life on earth), Darwin’s theory was illustrated not by single-file chain but a much-branching evolutionary bush, with natural selection as the driving force in lieu of progress toward perfection. It was a fabulously controversial and perhaps even heretical worldview, one that Darwin, a physical and emotional wreck, knew would change his life inexorably if he opened his mouth. Understandably, he only shared his theory with a select few scientists friends, not penning “On the Origin of Species,” until 1859, decades after he stepped off the Beagle.  

By 1866, Joseph Hooker, the president of the British Association of Science and Darwin’s close friend, could accurately announce “the world is now Darwinian.” This wasn’t merely because the world at large chose to accept Darwin’s theories – it never hurts to have connections. 

“Sir John Lubbock, along with Charles Lyell, T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer formed what they called ‘The X Club,’ but ‘Darwin’s Mafia’ would have been a better name,” said Dillon. “Their purpose was to revolutionize biology, overthrow the old and bring in Darwinism. These men held such positional strength, and had such connections, that they could influence where grants went and who got on government agencies.” 

Dillon also pointed out Darwin’s biggest mistake. Unaware of Mendel’s pioneering work in genetics, Darwin mistakenly explained heredity via “Pan Genesis” – the belief that every cell in the human body must feed some information to the egg and sperm. This rather Lamarckian idea allowed self-serving groups to adapt evolutionary beliefs to “prove” the superiority of their own class or racial group. This brand of evolution caught on rapidly in Germany and among England’s upper classes. Darwin’s backer Spencer founded Eugenics, the belief in inherent, inborn differences in racial intelligence, which, in due time, became the basis of the Nazi party platform.  

“This is a point Darwin continually made and people got it wrong,” said Dillon. “He did not imply movement toward higher beings. The direction (of evolution) was not toward progress. The problem is when people think ‘what’s next?’ Superman – or a super race to rule the world."