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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 You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
So this is Stuff You Should Know.
That's right.
And lest I forget, Jerry's over there.
She's over there.
You know, we went like five years.
I went five years of this podcast with just mentioning us.
Once in a while, mentioning Jerry.
I can't imagine the podcast without Jerry, too.
Now?
After five years, finally, I'm like, I guess she should stay on.
She's earned her place.
At least she keeps quiet.
That's right.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm low-key, calm.
I'm fine.
That's good.
I'm a little smelly, which we've talked about off the air.
You keep talking about it, which makes the smell worse.
What is it about someone's own special sweet tang of a scent that they're drawn to?
Like you're drawn to your own tang?
Yeah, man.
Everyone, I think like, secretly smells their own shoe and their own armpits when they get a little ripe.
Maybe we all deep down want to mate with ourselves.
Maybe so.
That's not true because I'm disgusted with myself.
Yeah, but I see you looking at your armpit, eyeing it like that.
I know what you want to do to that thing.
Yeah.
I've slipped out twice today just to smell them.
There's a little on your nose.
That's gross.
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 forced by scarcity competition, the ravages of nature.
Yeah.
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.
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.
Yeah, evolution gets all the spotlight.
I'm a big natural selection fan myself too.
Yeah.
You know?
Oh, yeah.
Divergence?
That stuff turns me on.
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.
Right.
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?
Are you talking about his debate?
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.
I watched the whole thing.
Did you?
The whole two hours?
Yeah, man.
I couldn't pull myself away from it.
So I'm guessing that you suspect Bill Nye won the debate.
Well, I mean, are there winners and losers?
So don't be shy.
There are.
Okay.
There's a British religious website that polled its guests.
Yeah.
Because, you know, people who go to websites are called guests.
In England, they are.
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.
I think when you say things like dragons, you might lose people.
Did he say dragons?
I didn't see it.
Yeah.
He mentioned dragons?
Well, I mean, that's some people.
And like you said, religion and science coexist for a lot of religious folk.
Oh, yeah.
But there are some that are very literal and strict and say that you know how do you explain dinosaurs.
Well, they may have been dragons.
Gotcha.
That doesn't explain anything.
Well, I think the dragons were in the Bible.
Oh, yeah.
If I'm getting this wrong, I'm going to really get killed.
We should pause here for a second.
The point of this episode is not to stomp on anybody's beliefs.
No.
I think science can be just as dogmatic as religion.
Sure.
So that's not what we're doing.
No.
If you believe in creationism, to each his own.
We're not going to pound our beliefs into you or, you know, vice versa.
I've never understood that.
Like, who cares?
Just right, it's proselytizing either way yeah, you know, it's like convert to my way of thinking.
Yeah, or else you are just so wrong.
It's mind-boggling, you know.
Um well, that's not the point of this.
No, 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.
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?
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.
Look at that.
All right, I agree.
Let's do it.
Let there be light.
But Darwin is a fascinating dude, though.
So he deserves his own show.
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 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.
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.
Right, and had the most social breeding.
Yeah.
And inbreeding.
Yeah.
Man, this is the ultimate tease.
It is.
So let's get started, Chuck.
Let's talk about Darwin.
He wasn't born with a Bunsen burner and a flask in his hand.
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.
Right.
Because he was, you know, they had some dough.
He was an English gentleman.
They weren't poor by any means.
No, apparently his grandfather amassed a vast fortune in China, and not the country, but the porcelain.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Interesting.
So it would be incorrect to say he had a Chinese fortune.
He had a China fortune.
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.
He was prone to fainting, it seems like.
Yeah, but he was way into the natural sciences and was just fine with dissecting a frog.
Yeah.
He was cool with biology.
As long as you weren't human, he'd cut you.
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 or so.
The only other option for you is to be a man of religion.
Yeah, parson in the country.
Yeah, so I'm going to send you to Christ College in Cambridge.
Which is, I mean, if you're going to go be a country parson, you could do a lot worse.
Agreed.
You know, the fighting padres.
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.
Right, and he seemed like he was going to follow the path that his father was laying out for him.
I guess his father was very domineering.
And Charles Darwin was a pretty great thinker, pretty all-around good guy, but he also was a bit of a panty waste, it seems like.
He was really, really affected by stress.
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 a pretty bold move.
Yeah, he was, for someone who was, would you say a panty waist?
Yeah, panty waist.
It's sort of surprising that he was up for that kind of adventure.
Yes.
A milk toast.
You could also call him a milk toast, maybe.
We'll call him that.
All right.
So this was in 1831.
He boarded the HMS Beagle, which for some reason just cracks me up.
You know, our buddy Joe from Forward Thinking just adopted a dog.
Oh, yeah?
It's part beagle, and his name's Darwin.
Huh.
Because of that association.
I would imagine.
Yeah.
And Joe said he looks like Darwin head on.
Like Charles Darwin?
He's got, like, bushy eyebrows.
That's funny.
All right, so he boarded the HMS Beagle.
What did you say?
How old was he, 21?
Yeah.
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 most of my time not on the boat but on land just researching stuff?
I'm sure he got pretty good at rowing.
Oh, yeah.
From the ship to shore.
Back and forth.
Yeah.
He was basically Paul Bettany's character in Master and Commander.
Well, which is ironic because Paul Bettany played Charles Darwin.
Did he really?
In that movie Creation.
Oh, yeah.
I never saw that, but I know what you're talking about.
That's funny.
You had no idea, huh?
No.
You stepped right into that one.
I wonder if he recognized that.
I don't know.
It's a good movie.
Creation, you should check it out.
It details a lot of the struggles of his life that we're going to go over here, and mainly is about his anxieties of what he was doing and his relationship to his Christian wife.
Oh, yeah, I'll bet that was kind of a sore spot.
Big time.
We'll get to that, though, in a second.
So, okay, so they head off to South America.
Yes.
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.
Yeah, and that apparently was really overstated.
He was only, what is still around?
Is that a joke?
The Galapagos, they're still around.
Oh, okay.
I thought I was missing on something because you looked at me like, you're missing a joke.
No, that's this look.
Oh, okay.
What was that one?
You smell?
Yeah, that was my eyes are watering.
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.
Yeah.
I mean, it's stuck.
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.
Have you ever seen the size of the turtles there?
Or the tortoises?
Are they huge?
Dude, they're like the size of VW Beetles.
Wow.
They're enormous.
Crazy.
And apparently, like, they'll hang out with you.
What else are they going to do, run away?
Slowly.
They have no choice.
They have agency.
They could be like, I don't want to be here around you.
I'm going to go this way.
It wouldn't work very well.
Or very quickly.
So where are we, man?
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 time he's making all these findings, he's finding new species of animals that 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.
Yeah, mail them back to Europe.
Mail back some of his findings.
He's basically writing papers as he's doing this, this journey.
So, back in the jolly old England there, um basically becomes a celebrity.
Yeah, and he was, you know, like before he even returned.
Yeah, he was looking at, he had the idea of natural selection, but it was like we said he, 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.
Is that right?
Yeah, he was researching stuff that he had heard about.
It was a working title.
It was a working title, actually.
What would later become On the Origin of the Species, of course.
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 Russell 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.
Yeah, that was definitely.
Um, the book was called essay on principle of population and that was like a super game changer because it really gave him, like the, the notion that by studying our any species death, you can kind of study its life.
Yeah, and 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.
Thomas Malthus.
Go back and listen to our population podcast.
Is that where he appears?
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 and 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 have been so good, he may have never been able to write uh origin of the species, because he relied on people sending him stuff in due time.
Oh yeah.
And also he was a really big on corresponding, which kind of helped develop his um, his ideas, flesh them out even further, was he was huge on correspondence.
Yeah.
He had a, um, 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 countless hours just walking this path and thinking and looking at everything.
Everything.
Right.
Nothing escaped his eye.
One of his favorite subjects was earthworms.
Remember our earthworm podcast?
Oh, yeah.
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 creatures.
He was down with earthworms.
Down with earthworms.
And orchids, very famously, too.
Yeah, he was active.
He wasn't just looking at things.
He raised orchids.
He was a beekeeper.
He raised pigeons, like it was all just in the name of study, right one of the things, though we he married his first cousin, his wife yeah, 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 kid's early deaths had to do with that.
Yeah.
Which has to be kind of startling.
Oh, I'm sure.
If you're the guy who discovers the problems with inbreeding and you've inbred.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
It's got to be a little jarring.
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, right.
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.
Is that right?
Maybe, that he picked up in South America.
So he wasn't a pain in the waist.
No, he was a penny waste on top of that.
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?
Yeah, that was her big concern.
Yeah, which?
Because he didn't buy that stuff.
No, he and he was, you know, religious-ish when he was younger, but as he grew older and 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.
Um, 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.
He was the epicenter of that divide at first.
That crack in the world first appeared in him.
Yeah.
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah, for sure.
He's the one to blame.
Pretty much.
Or he was patient zero, one of the two.
So he comes back to Down House.
He gets married, settles down, doubles his fortune by marrying Emma, and...
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.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
And the second connected reason to that first one is that he is really not looking forward to the storm.
Yeah. 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.
I'm going to add a third reason, my friend.
Oh, okay.
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.
That's true.
And, like you said, he was thorough because he lived his life basically an anxiety of not being accepted by these peers.
Right.
And, like, these are people, these are friends of his.
So his procrastination was definitely fear-driven by his peers and by society at large.
And by the fact that it just takes a long time to study something like this.
Right, right.
For instance, he left an area of his lawn unmowed for 20 years. just to study what would happen.
That sounds like an excuse.
Exactly.
He's like, I'm studying over there.
But out of the 20 different species he studied, 11 survived and 9 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.
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.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
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So, Chuck, we're talking about Darwin.
He's at his house, down house.
Yeah.
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, basically because Darwin hadn't talked about natural selection yet.
Yeah, I mean religion.
Religious biology was biology.
Right, they didn't call it religious biology, that was just biology.
Yeah, so he was the first one to secularize it and make it just about the science.
Yeah, because before, scientists thought like well, God created this and that is our starting point.
Like everything else, every other scientific explanation we have has to trace back to creation, 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.
Yeah.
I'm going to go ahead and add a fourth thing.
Man, you just keep them coming.
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.
Like 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 It scared the crap out of Darwin, basically.
I'm sure Darwin was like, mother.
Yeah, because 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.
Smart.
Very smart.
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.
Dude, total stroke of luck.
He might have been laughed out of existence if he had gotten there first.
So he goes back, redoubles his efforts, strengthens his argument.
Yeah.
And again he's combating not just the religious ideals of the time, but the religious ideals of science.
Yeah.
Like most scientists at the time were deists, and deists believed that God created the universe, basically like a clockmaker 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.
Yeah.
And there was a theory that was fairly well accepted called catastrophism.
Yes.
And that basically sought to account fossils.
Because fossils were a big sticking point.
Why were there clearly extinct animals that had lived before?
Yeah.
There's fossils.
We have them in our hands.
Why do these kind of resemble the things that are alive today?
Yes.
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, catastrophism which was suggested by a guy named George Cuvier, and Cuvier said that catastrophism which one
I like the second one, Catastrophism.
Catastrophism.
Yeah.
It 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.
Right.
And that explains why some are extinct and some are now here.
I would also call that coincidentism.
Yeah.
That's another way to put it.
That's another pronunciation.
It wasn't like super science-based.
Right.
But this was a well-respected scientist.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
It's not, that doesn't hold water.
And then he went and threw up.
Again and again.
Apparently he threw up a lot.
Yeah, when On the Origin of the Species came out in 1859, he was at a spa recovering from bouts of nausea.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he was all throwing up.
I felt bad for the guy.
Sure.
He was just wracked with anxiety his entire life.
But imagine that.
Imagine being wracked with anxiety and still going through with it.
It's pretty impressive.
It is.
Uh, so previous to its publication, another important thing happened.
Um, we mentioned earlier Alfred Russell 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 um People urged them both to present their works at something called the Linnaean Society in 1858.
They did so together as a team, but it didn't kind of make much of a splash at the time.
It wasn't until he officially published his work that it made the splash.
Right, and Alfred Russell Wallace actually was the impetus for him to publish Origin of the Species.
Yeah.
He'd been sitting there dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating, not mowing his lawn.
And he got a letter from Wallace, like you said, and he realized, holy cow, Wallace has come up with the same thing.
I've been working on this for 30 years.
I'm not going to forget that, forget my anxiety.
I'm just publishing this puppy.
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.
Okay.
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.
Yeah.
And that's why everybody calls it Origin of Species.
Because it's long and wordy.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi Bowen, hi Matt.
Hey Elmo.
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Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
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What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of nlp it's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all nlp, might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to mind games on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
You do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you.
I'm ben higgins and, if you can hear me, is where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation.
Each episode i sit down with people from all walks of life celebrities, thinkers and everyday folks and we go deeper than the polished story.
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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 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 increase their chance of surviving to reproduction age and enhance their ability to reproduce.
Yeah.
Right?
And if you aren't good at that, then you go bye-bye.
Right.
And this explains why some species are extinct, why the ones that are here today are the winners, and, chillingly, that all of this is still going on.
Yeah.
It's very, very slow, so we can't see it.
It happens on a glacial timescale, or geologic timescale.
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.
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.
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?
He's like, I'm at a spa recovering from nausea.
I can't be reached.
But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying that up front in plain English.
Yeah, and it caused, like you said, a poop storm.
Yeah, and I guess we should say Russell Wallace was...
He's been sort of lost to history as far as what most people know.
Yeah, it's sad.
It is sad because he was a smart guy but he had no standing like Darwin did, and that's kind of one of the reasons he was forgotten to history.
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 Mele Peninsula to collect specimens.
Yeah, but he would sell them, which kind of degraded his standing, I think.
Right, but he was using those funds to further fund more scientific exploration.
Right.
You know, it's not like he was funding his opium habit or something like that.
No, no, no.
But the point is, Darwin didn't need to sell it.
So I think people were like well, this guy's collecting species and selling them.
He's a merchant.
Right, exactly.
That's exactly right.
And regardless of whether Wallace Russell was 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.
He was 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 going to go hit the spa.
Yeah.
Throw up.
Do what you want with it.
Right.
I'm going away.
I've got a lawn to not mow.
But lucky for him, he had a lot of supporters, like right out of the gate.
Yeah, he had, he had both.
He had um supporters, uh scientists that i think some wanted wanted to say this stuff all along, and now that they had such a like wonderful, concise and well-researched piece of work to back them up, they came out of the woodwork and like yeah, all right see, this is great, but some people weren't.
Uh, in fact, i think oh, i can't remember the guy's name someone he really respected and his wife really respected basically slammed him in, Called it heresy.
And that was really impactful again.
More anxiety.
Well, yeah.
More throwing up.
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.
Right.
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 Algeus Huxley.
Oh, yeah?
Uh-huh.
And sometimes if you see Darwin's theory mentioned, you'll see the Darwin slash Huxley theory.
Because Huxley basically was a religious man.
Yeah.
And Darwin, I think first hand, not just through the origin of the species but through the 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.
Yeah, 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.
Huh, 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.
Sure.
Heart attack finally got him.
Yeah.
Very sad.
It is, but he lived a good, long, nauseated life.
That's a good point.
So I guess we should talk a little bit about his legacy, right?
Yeah.
You do that kind of work, you pass away, you're going to have a legacy.
Sure.
They name a city in Australia after you.
Really?
Really.
I believe it's Darwin, Australia.
Please, God, don't let it be New Zealand.
You want to look?
No.
Okay.
I'm feeling like a gambling man today.
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.
It's like Mio water.
It changes everything.
What's that?
You haven't seen the ad?
Uh-uh.
For like the little droplets of flavoring you can add to your water.
I've seen that.
So you haven't seen the ad where the guy's in the office talking and like, as they cut back and forth, everything keeps changing because they're adding Mio.
Oh, it's one of the better ads around.
And you know me.
I'm an ad aficionado.
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 week, we shouldn't even worry about the week.
If we want to be a strong mankind, then let the weak die out.
Well, you know.
So, um this uh sociologist that came up with this idea of social darwinism, herbert spencer yeah, that's a very malthusian view of humanity and um nature yeah, because malthus was basically saying like, look man, we take care of the poor and everything.
Yeah, but if we do that, we're interfering with nature And we're going to end up overburdening the population, because population is going to grow geometrically and we're not going to be able to support ourselves and society is going to collapse.
That was what Malthus was saying.
This guy said, yeah.
Yeah, it's weird that Darwin was in the middle of kind of both bookended by these two ideas.
And I think it really just – you can kind of say like it really just kind of – he was lacking a bit of evil there.
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.
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.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
And like I said, it took off.
It became what we call the eugenics movement very quickly.
Yeah.
Yeah, which was the idea that the government would actually get involved in weeding out the weaker parts of society.
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.
Or, at the very least, letting them exterminate themselves by only breeding the boys from Brazil.
Yeah, I finally saw half of that movie.
I can't tell you how surprised I was to see Steve Guttenberg.
Oh, Gutz was one of the kids, wasn't he?
He was like the first one.
Yeah, yeah.
God, I forgot about that.
Oh, wait a minute.
He was one of the kids from the experiment?
No, he wasn't.
He was like the journalist.
Oh, was he?
That's like blowing the cover off of this whole thing.
I haven't seen it in a long time.
Yeah.
I know it was creepy, though.
Yeah.
So, yeah, possibly gave birth to eugenics.
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.
Guys who smelled like me.
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.
That was a good one.
Yeah.
So what about this deathbed recant?
Had you ever heard that?
I have.
Not true, apparently.
So he supposedly said on his deathbed, basically, I... I take it all back.
Yeah, I wish I hadn't have ever said this.
It's not true.
You know, 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.
And 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.
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.
Yeah, that's a pretty good idea, though, if you're a creationist.
Well, I mean, to make up that story.
The father of evolution even changed his mind on his deathbed.
If you look up today on the internet, I think Darwin Deathbed even will bring up creationist website after creationist website that use it to support their claims.
Oh, really?
But it's bunk.
It was debunked right afterward.
And then, Chuck, let me say one more thing about social Darwinism.
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 500000 years ago of severely disabled people 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.
Wow.
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.
Well, that's good to know.
Yeah, it is.
Very comforting.
So that means we innately have compassion as a species?
I would guess that, yeah.
That's the way I like to look at it.
I think it's one of the things that makes us human.
Agreed.
But not just us.
No.
Other species have compassion, too.
Totes.
So maybe we should, why don't you play us out with a little bit of Darwin, man?
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.
Okay.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, and he's talking about his home in Kent.
That patch of grass?
Yeah, well, no, all of it.
It 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, 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 is 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 fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.
Bravo.
Good stuff, Chuck.
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 was good, Chuck.
Don't thank me.
Chucks.
I can just read.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
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 bar at HowStuffWorkscom.
It should bring up a whole bunch of articles, some of which we will record into podcasts.
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 of them.
Oh, yeah, they love him there.
Sure.
Well, since I said search bar, I probably did.
It's time for listener mail.
Before the mail, there's a quick correction.
In our Kent State episode, we said Mussolini had his brown shirts.
Yeah.
They were the black shirts.
Duh.
No biggie.
It's the presence of all color, not the presence of some colors.
Brown is the new black anyway.
Is that right?
Oranges.
All right.
I'm going to call this amputee.
Amputee.
Like amputee comma amputee?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
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, in 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 and have two wonderful grown children.
I worked from the age of 14 to 55 with time off for raising kids.
That is so weird.
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'm now on my fourth prosthesis.
I thought she was going to say, like, an old Bessie's still with me.
Knock, knock.
I'm now on my fourth prosthesis, and they get better and better.
My current leg is very high-tech and impressive.
It can make coffee.
Exactly.
That is from Denise Slatengren.
Awesome.
From Arcata, California.
Nice.
Not Arcadia.
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.
And I hope you still have old Betty on the shelf somewhere at least.
It's Betsy, Chuck.
Betsy.
Yeah.
I would keep it.
Just got it carved into the side.
Nice.
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.
That's right.
You can go on to stuffyoushouldknowcom 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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradiocom.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi Bowen, hi Matt.
Hey Elmo.
Hey Matt, hey Bowen.
Hi Cookie.
Hi.
Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty.
I'm ben higgins and, if you can hear me, is where culture meets the soul honest conversations about identity loss purpose peace, faith and everything in between.
Celebrities thinkers, everyday people.
Some have answers, most are still figuring it out, and if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, Listen to, If You Can Hear Me, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the last couple years?
Didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people?
Because of what happened in Alabama.
This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019 and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race.
To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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