Somebody is publishing private letters! Of course, these are 186 year old private letters from a 12 year old Charles Darwin, and they’re very amusing. I guess he wasn’t a fan of bathing, and later wasn’t shy about trash-talking his college professors. He was a very pugnacious little boy!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Something tells me creationists might use the first letter as a means to ‘obliterate’ evolution.
Ken Ham: Kids, who are you going to trust? A man who wasn’t fond of bathing, or God?
Kids: Go– wait, I’m not a fan of bathing either.
I’m sure the IDiots will have something stupid to say about this. Denyse?
That… reminds me a lot of MY little brother, actually. Little brothers, it seems, are universal.
Some of his grandfather’s correspondence is interesting too. Erasmus Darwin once loned his college notes to a friend, who returned them with a note, which criticized his terrible spelling and called him a son of a whore. Don’t you love history? It’s so colorful.
I hate to think what my students might say behind my back, although so far I don’t suspect any of them of being a future Darwin. Of course, I have also complained about my own teachers behind their backs, but my criticisms have always been thoughtful and well-founded. And, unlike an obstreperous nephew I have, I never, never, ever baited an instructor to his or her face.
I do think students are getting cheekier these days. Fortunately, so far, not smellier.
I’m sure this will be used as Creationist propaganda.
I can see it now:
“Well, evolution is bad because Darwin didn’t bathe!”
Unfortunately, neither did Jesus. Ha! Staying ahead of the game.
Hee! I guess even geniuses are just little brats when they’re young.
Why did he want titanium?
I’m sure Slimy Sal is beside himself with glee. So much new material to quote mine!
I wonder who Erasmus is in those letters. Surely not his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, since he died in 1802. A brother perhaps?
Although an afterlife is highly improbable, I can certainly imagine that in it there could come to pass a time in which Darwin and Jesus meet for a mutual foot-washing. Darwin wouldn’t enjoy it much, it seems.
I love this bit from the second letter:
I’ve known a fair few people like that myself….
I can just see it now… the latest proof for god…
Darwin didn’t bathe.
Because Darwin didn’t bathe, evolution is bad
Therefore, God exists.
@ Neural T: According to Wikipedia, this was Erasmus Alvey Darwin, older brother of Charles Darwin.
“Why did he want titanium?”
Possibly titanium dioxide oil paint, a common white oil paint used in backgrounds in painting picturesand preparing canvases. Titanium oxide has replaced lead oxide and zinc oxide (think sunscreen). I think in the early 1800’s it was the exotic “new thing,” as lead oxide had been around for centuries. See (for example) http://painting.about.com/od/artglossaryw/a/titanium_white.htm
Yeah. This is going to be a quote farm for the loons.
By the way, did anyone catch BoingBoing’s post of the man electrocuting a pickle as a way to explain Christianity?
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/18/man-electrocutes-pic.html
I like it. If you’ve got Jebus in you, your head glows and you’ve got light coming out of your eyes like David Lo Pan (not the short little basket case on wheels, mind you. I’m talking about the ten foot tall road block).
@ Neural T: Irene Delse is correct, Erasmus was his older brother. The first episode of PBS’s Evolution series from 2000 does a great job using Erasmus as a foil for Charles for him to explain things to. He started studying medicine, than realized how much money he was actually going to inherit, and so basically became a playboy.
Off Topic and Self Promotion ALERT!!
Catholics Hijacked by Christo-Fascists AGAIN!!
KPFT Houston, Pacifica Radio
PZ Myers debacle escalates,
http://acksisofevil.org/audio/inner188.mp3
or download from
http://acksisofevil.org/innerside.html
Music by Tom Lehrer
spoken word, Sam Harris
you tube eucharist Challenge
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Iq_XZuF6Vsk
Of course today, this would be email or on Facebook and the kid expelled..
“Why did he want titanium?”
Probably code for something… ‘Can anyone score me some “titanium”‘?
Hey Capt Dan #16
blockquote>did anyone catch BoingBoing’s post of the man electrocuting a pickle as a way to explain Christianity?
Maybe I’m weird but I got the impression the old boy was torturing his own penis for being a bad bad boy.
Very Christian impulse
Creationists depend on Authorities. So, they tend to identify Darwin with the theory of evolution. Or Galileo with heliocentrism. According to the Authority reasoning, the morality of that Authority is important to “establish” the truthiness of theories and hypotheses linked to that person.
I believe that at one time bathing was considered unhealthy. It was thought to open the pores and allow diseases (noxious vapors) to enter the body.
Also, Native Americans did not like the fact that whites didn’t bath regularly and often smelled badly.
As an aside, on the Nixon tapes Nixon can be heard commenting about how dirty he thought the Indians lived, but it turns out it was the white settlers who stunk.
Darwin was interested in chemistry as a boy (he was nicknamed ‘Gas’) and spent a lot of his allowance on chemicals to use in the shed he and Erasmus had converted into a lab.
Umm, legend has it that he bathed at least once.
Actually is it a complete myth that bathing is required to not stink. Body odor is caused by heterotrophic bacteria on the skin metabolizing things (sweat and skin) into compounds that stink. If those bacteria are suppressed by autotrophic ammonia oxidizing bacteria (the normal flora in “the wild”), there is no body odor.
Heterotrophic bacteria grow much faster than autotrophic bacteria (~30x faster doubling time), so it is easy to wash off autotrophic bacteria faster than they can proliferate. Until you have a sufficient population of ammonia oxidizing bacteria, the heterotrophs will cause you to smell bad. It takes 30 times longer to get an autotrophic biofilm going, that is months without bathing instead of days.
Native peoples who never bathe have the proper biofilm so they don’t smell. Westerners who bathe lose the normal biofilm and the abnormal biofilm that develops is the one that causes odor.
This is one of the topics of my nitric oxide research. I have blogged about how these bacteria do suppress heterotrophs, most likely via quorum sensing. Very many eukaryotes do the same thing. This is how eukaryotes keep their surfaces clear of biofilms. They have the proper biofilm of ammonia oxidizing bacteria. When they lose that biofilm is when bad things happen, such as lobster shell disease in lobsters.
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2008/06/suggestion-to-reduce-antibiotic.html
If eukaryotes tried to suppress heterotrophic biofilms by killing them, that would lead to an arms race that bacteria would win because of their many orders of magnitude faster evolution. By not killing bacteria but instead suppressing quorum sensing there is no evolutionary driving force for the bacteria to evolve resistance.
Poor old fella. He would have got a real kick out of blogging… if he could have just hung in there a little longer…
This project was in a free newspaper on my bus today.
The story was about a letter from Darwin to his doctor, detailing Darwin’s use of hydrochloric acid and cayenne pepper in his coffee to reduce his stomach troubles.
Which just kind of makes you wonder how bad they had to be to begin with…
Excuse the comment from a mere chemist, but titanium hadn’t been isolated at this point. Titanium dioxide or rutile was well known as a white pigment, often refered to as ‘titanium’ or ‘titanium white’. Could this be what he wanted?
Excuse the comment from a mere chemist, but titanium hadn’t been isolated at this point. Titanium dioxide or rutile was well known as a white pigment, often refered to as ‘titanium’ or ‘titanium white’. Could this be what he wanted?
In short, cleanliness is indeed next to Godliness.
“Well, evolution is bad because Darwin didn’t bathe!”
Unfortunately, neither did Jesus.
Add that to the “delusions of grandeur” as reasons to avoid being christ-like.
..and if he’d been a woman I bet he wouldn’t have shaved his armpits either.
You know, BoS, some of us more unreconstructed freethinking male-types still rather like that kind of thing. A lot.
Shit, did I post that out loud?
In the second letter, young Charles is now a 16-year old medical student in Edinburgh, chaperoned by his older brother, Ras, also a medical student. Among the “lectures” he had to attend were those where a bloody-aproned dirty saw-bones amputated limbs, sometimes from indigent children, without anesthesia. Any wonder they both eschewed their daddy’s profession?
I have only 200 pages to go in Janet Browne’s two-volume biography. Highly recommended–check your local library.
The Dancing Kid @23 said
Certainly some Indians bathed daily; the Creek Indians were reputed to. It is also certain that some never bathed. Consider that they lived from above the arctic circle, in the desert and on the equator and had a wide range of lifestyles. Beware anyone who would make sweeping generalization about the Indians. A contrary example can almost always be found.
What’s truly amazing is that obviously 12 year old brains are capable of literacy levels far beyond those we generally see today.
Actually, that’s not amazing, it’s sad.
Hey folks,
Glad you all enjoy the letters; and thanks for linking them.
Since the young Darwin stuff is so entertaining, I’ll try to find more of that sort this Friday. He was indeed an excellent writer at 12.
Cambridge University Library archives these CD letters (there are over 13,000 in all), so here at the Press, we publish them as a set and in collections. The Darwin Correspondence Project also has almost all of them for free online.
Cheers – J
@ Warren #25
Legend also has it that at another time he couldn’t bath in water. He couldn’t submerge so he walked on it.