Adversarial Intelligence: Flexibility, Fluidity, Collaboration, and Good Will
According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
LEON C. MEGGINSON,
INTERPRETING DARWIN
The fascinating relationship between Charles Darwin and Robert Fitzroy raises a pair of related questions that must be at the very center of our inquiry: Why do some of us seem to realize our potential in life, while others of us clearly do not—and how precisely do adversarial needs play into these outcomes?
For decades now, in researching the question of optimal living, psychologists have focused their energies on two particular areas of human functioning, areas considered crucial determinants of “optimal performance.” These are, of course, intelligence (“raw intelligence,” or IQ) and more recently, emotional intelligence (or EQ). In other words: How smart are you? And: How emotionally smart are you?
The research in these areas has been helpful. We have learned how living fully is indeed enhanced by both raw intelligence and emotional intelligence. But it has become increasingly obvious that IQ and EQ are not enough. What else is needed in order to thrive and to become everything one can be? Well, in recent years a third “quotient” has been recognized as critical to success in life. You’ve probably guessed it: This is the so-called adversity quotient (or AQ).
What is the adversity quotient? We might call it a measure of adversity intelligence that examines questions like these: How does one cope with, respond to, and ultimately, what does one do with life’s inevitable challenges? What character traits lead to surmounting difficulties and adversity? What traits lead to making creative use of challenges, to managing their emotional effects in a way that leaves us stronger, more flexible, more resilient than ever?
American research psychologist Dr. Paul G. Stoltz introduced the concept of the Adversity Quotient to the scientific world in 1997. AQ, according to Stoltz, is a valid predictor of one’s success, stress threshold, performance, risk taking, capacity for change, productivity, perseverance, improvement, energy, resilience, optimism and health. To measure the adversity quotient in individuals, Stoltz developed an assessment instrument now called the Adversity Quotient Profile (or AQP). Based on thirty-seven years of research and over thirty-five hundred studies at more than 150 universities and organizations worldwide, the AQP is the only scientifically validated tool in existence for measuring how effectively an individual responds to and deals with adversity. (It is now used by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, and more.)
AQ scores fall into three broad bands, with an expected normal distribution. As you read over these scales, you might ask yourself: Where do I fall? How resilient am I in the face of adversity? Am I able to use adversity to my advantage?
Individuals with Low Adversity Quotient exhibit:
Individuals with Moderate Adversity Quotient exhibit:
Individuals with High Adversity Quotient exhibit:
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Perhaps most importantly, the new research into AQ has yielded some fascinating insights into the precise psychological mechanisms that allow us to effectively face adversity and to make creative use of it.
Here is a list of the components of adversity intelligence as we might frame them based on the work of Stoltz and the many others now following his lead. We will dig down into these traits later in this chapter, but for now, see if you can see the seeds of each as we continue to examine the story of Darwin and Fitzroy.
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Before we continue on with Darwin and Fitzroy, however, let’s pause to notice a word we’ve already seen enacted in our story: perseverance. You will notice that perseverance is the very first quality on the list. Why do you think this is so?
Much of the research about adversity shows that intelligent perseverance—the capacity to come back again and again to complex problems—is the most important temperamental component of adversity intelligence. (We have seen how this very trait was nurtured in my adversarial relationship with Helen Compton.) History is peppered with the names of pioneering individuals whose discoveries and creations were the fruits of mature perseverance: Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig von Beethoven, Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller. These were all people who failed over and over again and yet came back to the task at hand, eventually mastering it— transforming themselves and the world.
And how about you? Can you summon the energy to come back again and again to that one very gnarly Gordian knot that you face—to come back perhaps with creative approaches, and with renewed energy? Can you stay with it? Does adversity overwhelm you, or do you rise to meet it?
What enables us to develop perseverance? There are a number of components, but it is clear that the most important of these are based on relationship. For example: when one asks soldiers and warriors from any part of the globe what allows them to persevere in the face of impossible odds, or Herculean tasks, their answer is always the same. Love of their comrades in arms. Love of family at home. Deep and sustaining connection with particular individuals.
Take note: perseverance at its best is not driven by reaching for abstractions like “country” or religious doctrine. Think about it. What does every soldier carry next to his heart? Not a miniature American flag or British flag, not a slogan containing some conceptual “ism”—Marxism, communism, socialism, capitalism, multiculturalism, uniformitarianism. Rather, she carries next to her heart pictures of real individual loved ones—mother, father, husband, wife, lover, child, friend. Remember: there is energy and information flowing forth from those pictures. The smile of a loved one, a Soul Friend— even when it’s viewed in a photograph rather than experienced in person—can provide the sustenance (yes, the food, the energy) we need to persevere.
Consider your own experience for a moment. When you have had to persevere at any seemingly impossible task, where do you go? Do you dig down into the troves of thoughts, feelings, and memories about deepest love objects? I certainly do. I dig down until I find those powerful internal images of Grandma, Grandpa, Sandy, Seth, and the intrepid Helen Compton, among others. Do you, too, rely on evocative memory to call forth a living connection?
Whose images do you suppose Darwin had in the pocket of his vest next to his heart? We know that he carried miniature portraits of his father and his sisters on his voyage. But in his very cabin and throughout the next two decades of his life, he also had—very near to his heart—his Soul Friend, his mentor, his captain, Robert Fitzroy.
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HMS Beagle slowly and painstakingly worked its way down the eastern and southern coasts of South America. At every port, Darwin dived into the jungle, fairly obsessed with the beauty and mystery of what he was seeing. The soul of a naturalist was now coming into full bloom. And, as we shall see, in the process, Darwin increasingly became his own man, with his own well-informed ideas about what he was seeing. He was not content to collect the data. He always wanted to know what it meant—how the data he was collecting fit into the bigger picture of geological time, and the development of life on planet Earth.
Scouring the bay near Punta Alta, Argentina, in September 1832, Darwin came across one of the most momentous finds of the trip: the fossilized bones of a colossal extinct mammal. First, he found the huge skull—which took him several hours to extract. Then, furiously digging deeper—and with no small amount of anticipation—he and his companions discovered an entire skeleton. This skeleton turned out to be a Megatherium, a huge ground-living relative of the sloth. (Megatherium means, simply, “great beast.”)
For Darwin, this find marked an important crossroads in his own thinking. He pondered the questions: How in the world did this huge mammal come to be precisely here? How had the gravel in which it was embedded arrived here? Might a flood of extreme violence have swept over the pampas, washing bones and pebbles before it, or was there another explanation?
Darwin carefully crated up the bones of Megatherium and sent them back to England, where they produced an absolute frenzy of interest. (Because of finds like this, and also because of vivid excerpts from his journal, Darwin would already be famous when in 1836 HMS Beagle finally sailed back into Falmouth Harbor.)
Searching for answers, Darwin now continually scoured the literature, the physical evidence in front of him, and his own mind for a theory that would explain his finds. He dived into Lyell’s Princples of Geology, of course. By this point in the journey, and considering the geological artifacts he was seeing, Darwin simply had to come to grips with Lyell’s chief hypothesis, which was called “uniformitarianism.” This revolutionary hypothesis held that the earth in its entirety was formed by processes still at work today—processes still visible to anyone who cared to look deeply. In other words, geological transformations were not dramatic, one-time upheavals of biblical proportions that were initiated intentionally by the Divine, but rather the result of a steady drip, drip, drip of change over massive periods of time—change driven by inviolable laws of nature which could be discerned. All of these geological changes, then, were entirely predictable, and they were orderly in their own way.
Remember that Robert Fitzroy, though he himself had given Lyell’s book to Darwin, had warned him not to completely buy its conclusions—including, especially, the implications of uniformitarianism. Why? Because Lyell’s conclusions conflicted with everything Robert Fitzroy believed. Because Lyell’s conclusions led inexorably to the view that the earth was indeed not 6,000 years old, as biblical scholars contended. No. It was clear: These creeping geological changes would have taken unimaginable amounts of time. Millions of years, certainly.
Darwin was now approaching his first real scientific split with Fitzroy, and indeed with the whole biblical model of creationism.
Over the course of the next several years, as HMS Beagle moved down the east coast of South America and then again up the west coast, Darwin was seeing evidence all around him of the apparent truth of uniformitarianism. For example: Climbing in the Andes mountains, he would see beds of seashells embedded high up in geological strata at the top of mountains. How did they get here, he wondered? There was only one answer: The shells had originally been under water, of course. That much was obvious. So, the mountains must have been gradually rising up. And this rising must have taken millions of years.
Back on HMS Beagle, discussions of these questions naturally arose at table with Fitzroy. And Fitzroy’s explanation was all too familiar: Darwin’s finds were a product of the Great Flood. “It’s all in Genesis [the first book of the Bible],” was very often Fitzroy’s default response. The two men began to square off about this issue.
The drama soon deepened. Darwin discovered another huge skeleton, this time on the west coast of South America. This was a bizarre, horse-sized mammal with an enormous pelvis and a small, elongated head like that of an anteater. This mammal had clearly lived before the seashells were deposited, since the shells were found in the layer above the skeleton. Again, everything pointed to a gradual deposition of sediments and then uplift of the strata. But how old were these creatures? And how did they become extinct? So many intriguing questions!
“By now the fossils meant everything to him,” wrote biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore of Darwin’s state of mind at this point in the voyage. For Darwin, “nothing touched the raw excitement of the cliff face.” Wrote Darwin himself in his journals, “the pleasure of the first days partridge shooting [his previous sport back in England] . . . cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue.”
A living tongue! It’s hard to exaggerate the degree to which these finds would fire young Darwin’s imagination.
Sometime thereafter, Darwin found himself caught in a massive earthquake in Peru. This was exciting because he was seeing Lyell’s principles in action—he was seeing the laws that guided the unfolding of geological processes. Now, in Peru, in 1833 he could observe carefully the precise changes these laws occasioned. He saw the subtle shifts that had occurred all around him during the earthquake. All of this, of course, simply confirmed his belief in uniformitarianism: The planet, its geology, its flora and fauna, were built systematically, not by individual acts of Divine intervention, but by laws of nature, which were at play everywhere and always. Absolutely everything we can observe in nature, wrote Lyell, can be explained by these laws. This, of course, was blasphemy, and we can see why: it implied that there are no miracles, no Divine intervention.
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Now arose an even more complex problem for Darwin. In tandem with the question of geological processes arose its twin: the question of how animals and plants had been modified to match what were obviously very slowly changing landscapes. Was there a natural mechanism—a discernable set of laws—for slowly transforming flora and fauna to keep pace with geological change? Lyell himself struggled with this query and had posed, in Principles, the very question that would haunt Darwin for the rest of his life: How do species develop, evolve, change, and become extinct?
As the voyage reached its fifth and final year, Darwin—though he wasn’t quite yet ready to say it—was on the verge of challenging another central part of the creationist creed: the stability of species. Lyell and most others actually still believed in the stability of species. They believed that species could not morph or change decidedly in any direction. Species were created by God with his purposes in mind, and did not morph, change, drift, or evolve into other forms. They were stable. They were permanent.
But Darwin was no longer convinced of this. And there was another point of view about this issue that was already abroad—a radical argument with which Darwin was familiar, and with which he was then flirting. This was called transmutation. Transmutationists believed that species do indeed slowly transmute, and can be radically modified over time. But why do they morph into new forms? wondered Darwin. Perhaps to adapt more successfully to their environment? Darwin already had had doubts about the stability of species. But by the end of his voyage, Darwin was seeing through new eyes. Virtually everything Darwin now saw seemed to argue against the strict stability of species.
Darwin’s experience on the Galapagos Islands, toward the very end of the five-year voyage, put the theory of transmutation into stark focus. On these relatively recently formed volcanic islands Darwin found that certain species—particularly mockingbirds, finches, and tortoises—had all evolved (presumably over relatively short periods of time, since the islands themselves were so young) into different types on different islands. Wow! Darwin soon learned that these variations of species were so distinct and predictable that the Spanish inhabitants of the nearby mainland, who had observed the flora and fauna of the islands for decades, could immediately tell precisely which island any of these creatures hailed from simply by the idiosyncratic form of the species. Why? How?
When Darwin finished his in-depth survey of the Galapagos (a good deal of this in-depth survey of the evidence, by the way, was done with specimens when he was safely home again in his study in England), he felt increasingly sure: species were clearly modified over time as they adapted to new environments.
As Darwin pondered all of this from HMS Beagle on the voyage back to England, he wrote: “When I see these Islands [the Galapagos] in sight of each other, & possessed of but a scanty stock of animals, tenanted by these birds, but slightly differing in structure & filling the same place in Nature, I must suspect they are only varieties . . . If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks, the zoology of Archipelagoes—will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of Species.”
The HMS Beagle finally sailed back into an English port—Falmouth harbor—on a stormy October 2, 1836. The discoveries and accomplishments of Darwin and Fitzroy had now become practically the stuff of legend. A hero’s welcome awaited them at Falmouth, and in London.
But Darwin was not the slightest bit interested in being a hero. He was not the least bit interested in his new notoriety, and never would be throughout his long life. Rather, he sped home to see his father, his sisters, and other family members and loved ones. But in the background of this joyful homecoming, his mind was on fire. Evolution! He had all of the pieces of a massive puzzle that he was now driven to put together. This puzzle was his chief interest and driving force for the rest of his life.
Darwin had sent back to England massive numbers of specimens, specimens to which he would now have access. He had taken voluminous notes on the voyage, and kept careful personal journals, all of which miraculously survived. Now he sat with the great questions: What did it all mean? Could he solve the puzzles with which he had been confronted? From the moment of his arrival home, Darwin was a man possessed.
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Charles Darwin had learned some crucial lessons on HMS Beagle over the course of his five-year voyage. Above all, he had learned the value of perseverance, the value in coming back again and again to a complex problem. It’s dogged that gets it done! He had also had a taste of the deep fulfillment of perseverance, and the sense of excitement that lies beneath a slow, systematic, even plodding movement toward understanding. He learned these lessons in the main from Robert Fitzroy. But in order to solve the massive conundrum now facing him—what does it all mean—he would in coming years simply have to move beyond what he’d learned from Fitzroy.
Upon his return to England, Darwin’s noble adversary had become not just Captain Fitzroy, but the entire religious, cultural, and scientific paradigm of creationism. In order to successfully confront this prevailing paradigm, Darwin would need every item on our earlier list of the components of adversarial intelligence: Perseverance. Flexibility. Endurance. Perspective. Self-efficacy. Self-soothing.
Take note of the second item on our list of the components of adversarial intelligence: flexibility. As it turned out, very happily, this was already one of Darwin’s greatest character traits. Flexibility would become one of Darwin’s greatest allies in the coming struggle. Luckily, Darwin had learned flexibility of thought from two of his earliest selfobjects: his brother, Erasmus, and his famous grandfather, also named Erasmus. Darwin’s family was full of free-thinking Unitarians who were not limited by prevailing paradigms, and who were already skilled at thinking outside the box. Darwin, unlike Fitzroy, was not to be bound by previous thinking—even the thinking of powerful men and institutions. Interestingly, Charles Darwin recognized this quality in himself and he valued it highly. He wrote in his journal: “No previously formed conjecture warped my judgment [of what I observed directly with my own eyes].”
As we continue to examine the story of Darwin and Fitzroy, we will find that flexibility and creativity go hand in hand. And what about you: What is your own capacity for flexibility of thought? Are you locked into a default response to the problems that come your way? Are you boxed into one strategy for facing adversity, or for dealing with whatever particular challenge presents itself? Are you clinging to your views and beliefs about what the challenge means, and what is even possible? All of these things will inhibit your capacity to master your challenge. For one thing, this kind of rigidity of thinking attenuates what we now call “fluid intelligence,” the ability to visualize and conceive of alternative explanations and views of the world— in other words, to think outside the box, as Darwin had to do.
Can you adapt to the possibility of new views of the world, and even to revolutionary new strategies for understanding its challenges? Can you be open to an altogether new way of looking at the challenges in front of you?
Happily, Darwin could.
Upon his return to England, Darwin soon cloistered himself in his study at his new country home at Down. Here he carefully reread his journals and examined many of the specimens he’d brought or sent home. He began to make notes in a series of special notebooks that he would keep secret for almost twenty years. He was working out the problem in the same manner in which the continents had been raised: slowly, methodically, step-by-step, drip by drip.
Darwin continued to meet with Fitzroy through these years—especially the early ones—at Down House, where he would invite Fitzroy and his wife to stay. (Both men had been married shortly after their return to England.) But now, interestingly, Darwin kept his most radical thoughts under his hat. He discussed only the most mainstream aspects of his thinking with Fitzroy, sounding him out to see just how far Fitzroy—the devout Christian and creationist—would go with him. In this phase of his work, Darwin became quite secretive. Even his own wife did not really know the full extent of what he was up to.
We see in this phase that Fitzroy still had a powerful influence on Darwin. The captain—still a selfobject—was the very embodiment of many of the cultural aspirations to which Darwin still clung. Darwin wanted above all things to be able to make a case for his theories that would convince even his beloved friend. He longed for “the third way.”
Alas, it did not entirely work as he’d hoped; Fitzroy slowly became Darwin’s greatest skeptic. And sadly, Fitzroy was the skeptic that mattered.
Nothing moved quickly in Darwin’s world, as he himself admitted. Darwin’s own awakening to the truth of his theory of evolution only came slowly, ploddingly and systematically. He himself describes his very gradual shedding of the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity, and particularly of its views of the creation story in Genesis.
. . . disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate [wrote Darwin in his autobiography], but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
As Darwin settled into the secret refinement of his theory of evolution at Down House, his regular debates with Fitzroy allowed him to understand more deeply the opposing point of view. They pushed him to continually refine his thinking. He was using the adversary to his advantage.
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As I’ve said, after their voyage Fitzroy continued to visit Darwin at Down House in Kent regularly—at least until the spring of 1857. Slowly, and, I think, painfully for him, Fitzroy became a major public critic of his friend’s work. As we know, Fitzroy suffered from depression and a sharp temper, but contemporaries noticed that he nonetheless never bore grudges and almost always showed compassion to those with whom he disagreed. This extended, in the early years, after the Beagle’s return to England, especially to his protégé and friend Darwin.
And, of course, there were many positives in their debate. As I have said, interactions with Fitzroy helped Darwin clarify his views about evolution and anticipate many objections to his theory prior to its publication.
But, alarmingly, the written record shows that Fitzroy slowly became more strident—more hardened in his thinking. In December 1859, Fitzroy began an exchange in The Times criticizing the dating of stone tools that had been found near the river Somme and identified as more than 14,000 years old. This exchange was written under the pseudonym Senex, from the Latin nemo senex metuit louem, meaning, “An old man should be fearful of God.”
Fearful of God! This was a key theme in Fitzroy’s later adversarial relationship with Darwin. We see here that Fitzroy had gradually been overwhelmed by fear. Fear, perhaps, of the disapprobation of his peers, or his wife. Fear of God himself, perhaps? Fear for his soul? This fear lead to a constriction of thinking, a lack of flexibility, and a lack of perspective.
It’s clear, in retrospect, that Darwin was not at all immune to this same fear, and probably for many of the same reasons. In fact, for the twenty years that Darwin continued to secretly work on his theory of evolution, he was a conflicted and tormented man. He was often sick. He suffered recurrent digestive ills, and very painful stomach cramps. He became a regular frequenter of English spas with cures of all kinds—some mainstream, some very marginal, and some requiring a surprising amount of magical thinking for a scientist like Darwin. There is simply no doubt that Darwin was tormented. And, indeed, the superb biography of Darwin by authors Adrian Desmond and James Moore is tellingly entitled Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist.
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For three years after arriving home, Darwin was almost continually closeted in his study. By 1839, he had roughed out, in pencil, the broad strokes of his theory of “the Origin of Species.” By June 1839, indeed, Darwin had created a solid and compelling thirty-five page overview of the theory of evolution. (“It’s dogged that gets it done.”)
Well, talk about “undermining the concept of the stability of species”! Darwin had really done it.
We are all familiar, at least to some degree, with the theory that he sketched out—what he called “the theory of evolution by natural selection.” It went like this:
Voilà! The theory of evolution through natural selection.
Now, a fascinating conundrum: Darwin would refuse to publish this theory for almost two decades. Why?
We can only speculate on the answer to this question, because Darwin himself did not write at any length about his motivations for such secrecy and such delay. But we can be absolutely sure that he understood the revolutionary implications of his theory. He understood that publication of such ideas would be seen as a betrayal by members of his own class, even by his own family and friends. He assumed that such a perceived betrayal might alienate him—and his wife and family—from the society they so much needed. And we can assume, too, of course, that he feared a final break with Fitzroy.
Indeed, it was only when Darwin learned that another scientist—a much younger man named Alfred Russel Wallace—was about to publish an almost identical theory that Darwin was moved to action. Finally, with the spectre of being “scooped,” Darwin felt the necessity of publication—and with the support and urging of his friends, he worked day and night on the manuscript. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published on November 24, 1859.
Even in its final form, Origin seemed to be written with Robert Fitzroy in mind. It was a plodding, scientifically based answer to Fitzroy and his ilk—and interestingly, one that did not cut God out of the equation at all. It simply reframed where God’s intervention happened. In the publication of his theory, Darwin had indeed taken the third way. Not “either- or,” but “both-and.” He did not erase God from the picture.
Desmond and Moore describe his view perfectly: “Wild animals are not a product of God’s whim any more than planets are held up by his will. Everything results from grand laws—laws that ‘should exalt our notion of the power of the omniscient Creator.’ This was a modified Unitarian view of the Divine government.” (Emphasis added.)
Darwin saw that the very laws themselves, their implacable nature, their genius, should exalt the Creator. Individual acts of Divine and miraculous intervention were not needed. In this, we can see one of Darwin’s great strengths at work: He knew how to maintain his perspective.
Perspective. This is one final trait of adversarial intelligence that Darwin would find absolutely essential—though he certainly did not entirely master this one.
Perspective, say Dr. Stoltz and others, is the most effective tool against emotional overwhelm. A global perspective creates and supports so-called fluid intelligence, or thinking outside the box, using the whole brain—not succumbing to the tunnel vision of fight or flight, or panic-driven action.
The very opposite of perspective, as Stoltz notes in his Adversity Quotient Profile, is something we might call “catastrophizing.” This happens when we become caught up in the grip of fear about what might become of our efforts. This is Chicken Little Syndrome: The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Darwin was not immune to catastrophizing. Indeed, he did quite a bit of it—though in the end, he almost always regained a more global perspective.
Are you a catastrophizer? Quite honestly, I am, and I come from a whole line of great catastrophizers. So I know for a fact: this trait is not helpful in facing adversity. Mark Twain—another world-class catastrophizer—is reported to have said: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Can you identify with this? Do you lose time and energy “buying trouble” by anticipating the most calamitous outcomes? (I know. Me too.)
Perseverance. Flexibility. Perspective. We can see these traits in Darwin’s approach to the massively complex practical and theoretical problems he faced in working out his theory of evolution.
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Darwin finished Origin with a brilliant philosophical flourish, and one that cries out with the quality of perspective we are now examining. He wrote:
It is derogatory that the Creator of countless systems of worlds should have created each of the myriads of creeping parasites and [slimy] worms which have swarmed each day of life on land and water (on) [this] one globe. . . . From death, famine, rapine, and the concealed war of nature we can see that the highest good, which we can conceive, the creation of the higher animals has directly come.
Darwin was always interested in “the higher good.”
There is a grandeur in this view of life [he said in Origin], with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; 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.
We can see here that Darwin’s own mind had become expanded by the process of struggling with his puzzle—just as in the contemplative traditions, the highest fruit of the noble adversarial relationship is the transformation of consciousness itself, a transformation in which the mind becomes expanded to include more and more possibilities.
As Darwin grew old, his perspective became increasingly vast. Indeed, we can only say that Charles Darwin, as he sat pondering his great Gordian knot at Down House, fell in love with the world he was seeing—with the moving, flowing world in flux, in change, with the absolute wonder of species and their adaptation. He was often simply overcome with awe—and, we must say it, with love.
“ . . . disinterested love for all living creatures [is] the most noble attribute of man,” he wrote in The Descent of Man.
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But Darwin’s increasingly vast perspective on issues of evolution, and his belief in a magnificent “first principle”—the “fixer of laws”—did not, in the end, placate Robert Fitzroy. Fitzroy would remain stolid. In fact, after the publication of Origin, Fitzroy became more fixed than ever in his views.
As it turns out, Fitzroy, later in life, had increasingly become a scriptural literalist. Biographers Desmond and Moore write of Fitzroy at this stage: “Now he could plainly see how wrong all the geologists were: all Darwin’s high-and-dry shells, all his fossil trees in the Andes, all the gravelly pampas plateaux, all the fossil bones attested one thing only—a great catastrophic flood.”
Finally, toward the end of his life, Fitzroy—overtaken now, I think, by his depressive illness—decidedly took the lower road. He simply could not hold the creative tension with Darwin any longer. He could not stay in the noble adversary position. He could not sustain the third way. Rather, he drew battle lines. He became fierce, angry—even Shakespearean, as we shall see—in his disposition toward evolution, though not personally toward Darwin.
In late-in-life correspondence with Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster about evolution, Fitzroy (now leaning toward the Shakespearean hue) referred to Revelation 13, likening Darwin’s theory of evolution to the “beast rising up out of the sea . . . opening his mouth in blasphemy against God.”
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We must (remembering to maintain perspective on our own part) have compassion for Fitzroy. Remember that it took a certain kind of genius to see beyond the current worldview in which Fitzroy was so deeply enmeshed. Fitzroy was simply not equipped for this, by training or by temperament. And he was clearly hampered in his flexibility of thinking by his increasing clinical depression.
For those of us who grew up in a world—and with a scientific establishment—entirely organized around Darwin’s principles, it is hard to imagine the extent to which Darwin’s discoveries undermined the very pillars of then-contemporary views of the world. For example: the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s distinguished professor of geology at Cambridge University, accused Darwin, in his research, of trying to “sever the link between material nature and its moral meaning.”
Sedgwick declared that only the belief in the direct and intentional creation of all creatures by God himself could keep the social fabric secure. Were it possible to break the link, “humanity, in my mind,” he wrote, “would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a cesspit.”
Darwin had not underestimated the terror his theory would provoke.
Sedgwick had put his finger on the fear, mind you: that seeing ourselves as beasts, we would become beasts. That acknowledging our connection to “the ape,” we would more and more begin to resemble him. (Said Darwin of this view much later in his career, “We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”)
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Of course, Darwin was right all along about the firestorm his new theory would occasion. As you might imagine, then, upon the publication of Origin, fierce debates raged across the country—and indeed around the world. This is precisely what Darwin had been hoping to avoid. He was not drawn toward these confrontations.
The fury reached its peak in June 1860, only months after Origin had been published. It would issue forth in perhaps the most famous debate on evolution—the great debate at Oxford University on the 30th of June. This was, as it turned out, the moment that Fitzroy publicly declared himself against Darwin and evolution. And this is where it all becomes truly Shakespearean.
The debate was held in the brand-new gothic revival Museum of Natural History at Oxford University—a splendid building then regarded as “a high temple of science”—and it was hosted by the well-respected British Association for the Advancement of Science. As they entered the new temple of science for this great event, the Oxford dons and the public were ushered into the new glass-roofed atrium—ablaze with natural light, where, says one biography, they imagined themselves “glorying in all the designs of nature” by which God manifests himself to Man! (And just so everyone knew where this new “temple of science” stood on the issue of creation, a massive stone statue of an angel stood over the entrance.)
Imagine the scene: Between 700 and 1,000 participants squeezed into the large hall, eager to hear the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce (probably the most well-known and powerful religious speaker of his day) hold forth on the scandalous new theory, and enter into debate with Darwin’s proponents—principally with the brilliant and sharp–tongued Thomas Henry Huxley, and the botanist Joseph Hooker. (Darwin himself was ill—“tormented”—as he most often was in those days, and could not attend.)
The debate shaped up to be a confrontation between the firmly entrenched creationist views of the Anglican divines and the new, revolutionary, scientifically based theories and speculations of a small cast of brilliant young scientists—Darwin’s young Turks.
No one who was looking for drama on that day was disappointed.
The debate quickly became heated. Bishop Wilberforce and his ilk were openly disdained by the younger scientists. The younger men described the old pillars of science directly to their faces as elderly Tories who simply clung to their outmoded scientific doctrine and dogma.
At one point, deep into the several-hour-long event, the young botanist Joseph Hooker (a disciple of Darwin) rose to confront the regal Bishop Wilberforce, and accused him of never having read Origin at all, and of being “absolutely ignorant of the very rudiments of Bot[anical] Science.” (This, of course, was completely true, but it did not prevent Wilberforce from holding forth on the topic.)
The Lord Bishop, not to be undone by Hooker’s challenge, rose to ask another of Darwin’s disciples—this time, Thomas Huxley—whether he was descended from an ape on his mother’s side or his father’s side.
The crowd roared its approval. Wilberforce had landed a punch.
Huxley replied, masterfully, with a counterpunch: “If . . . the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means & influence [he was referring, of course, to Bishop Wilberforce himself] & yet who employs these faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”
Whereupon, Lady Brewster fainted, one onlooker later declared, with obvious relish.
And then came perhaps the most astonishing moment of an already-astonishing event. The crowd hushed as a “grey haired Roman nosed elderly gentleman” marched into the room carrying an enormous Bible over his head. This magisterial—and clearly revered—gentleman stood in the center of the audience and proclaimed four words repeatedly:
“Believe God, not Man,” he roared.
“Believe God, not Man!”
The gray-haired gentleman was none other than Admiral Robert Fitzroy. It was now a full twenty-four years since Darwin and Fitzroy and HMS Beagle had returned from their famous voyage—though, of course, Darwin was only now publishing his radical ideas. In the intervening years, Fitzroy had risen to the rank of admiral, and was now head of the government’s Meteorological Department and a highly revered figure in the British navy.
Admiral Fitzroy, with Bible held aloft, and over the rising din of the crowd, then described how the publication of Origin had given him “acutest pain,” and he expressed deep regret at having ever invited Darwin to accompany him on his epic voyage in the first place. He described his “guilt” at having himself unleashed this blasphemy of “evolution” into the sacred halls of academe.
Finally, having said his piece, the aging admiral walked stiffly out of the hall.
19
We can see that Fitzroy had finally now utterly split with Darwin. He had cut himself off from one of his best friends, at what turned out to be the very time that he most needed a friend. What resulted was a narrowing of view. He had left himself isolated, alone with his doctrine and his dogma.
It is, of course, a human tendency to split with those with whom we disagree. To draw lines. To exclude rather than include. But remember, at its best the noble adversary calls upon us not to exclude, but to expand to include the adversary.
Contemporary Thai Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story about the Buddha and his powerful spiritual adversary, Mara (understood as a kind of “devil” in the Buddhist tradition). One day Mara (called by many “the Evil One”) is seen approaching the hut in which the Buddha is living. Ananda, the Buddha’s chief disciple, is the first to spot Mara and he runs into the meditation hall, beside himself with anxiety, and calls out to the Buddha, “Mara is coming, Mara is coming! What shall we do?” The Buddha calms Ananda and answers, simply, “Why, invite him in for tea. He is our honored guest, for without Mara, no Buddha.”
No Mara, no Buddha.
No Fitzroy, no Darwin.
20
It’s important to note that Darwin, for his part, did not split with Fitzroy—ever. He did not hold any ill will for his friend, his mentor, and his adversary. He did not demonize. He regularly invited Fitzroy in to tea (literally!) at Down House.
Darwin had maintained perspective. And had maintained love (“love for all living creatures [is] the most noble attribute of man”). Toward the end of his career, Darwin was a man increasingly full of good will for all creatures, and full of a sense of the dignity and magnificence of the creation.
21
Can you see the paradox playing itself out here? The end of the story is all about adaptation. Fitzroy was deeply adapted to the environment of his social station and his Tory and Anglican upbringing. He stood increasingly for the old paradigm, and he stood staunchly and faithfully—true to character.
But Darwin’s theory proposed that species by their very nature must adapt—must adapt in order to survive. Indeed, flexibility is at the very heart of life on this planet. And to be aligned with this trait is, in fact, to become more and more human.
To paraphrase the now-famous utterance by American philosopher Eric Hoffer: In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists. Fitzroy attempted to hold down the very shaky seat of “knower.”
We can read in Darwin’s journals that Fitzroy’s inflexibility and increasing ill will saddened Darwin deeply. He felt the loss of his friend. Yet Darwin appeared to have only good will for Fitzroy. And he even had the flexibility to include his former mentor’s views where he could in his theorizing. Darwin was committed to the third way.
In the denouement of the friendship between Fitzroy and Darwin, we can see how fragile the dilemma of the noble adversary really is. And how, at its most intense, it lives on a knife-edge of human frailty. It’s clear that when we slip over the line from noble adversary to enemy, we lose not only our own peace of mind, but our perspective and discernment as well.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu writes of this truth in his classic Tao Te Ching.
There is no greater misfortune than feeling “I have an enemy”
For when “I” and “enemy” exist together there is no room left for my treasure
Thus, when two opponents meet the one without an enemy will surely triumph
Lao-tzu says that when we slip over that line from friend to enemy, we lose our own “treasure.” Sadness is the appropriate response to the defeat of a noble adversary. The sadness of General Grant at the surrender of General Lee. The sadness of Richard the Lionheart on hearing the death of his worthy opponent, Saladin. The sadness of Charles Darwin as he watched Fitzroy’s decline.
By all means, let us not demonize Admiral Fitzroy. In his later years, Fitzroy made heroic contributions to science, and especially to meteorology, inventing the very concept of weather forecasting. He created ingenious systems to get weather information to sailors and fishermen for their own safety. Among sailors Fitzroy became a hero, and his weather forecasts saved countless lives. Fitzroy was always a creature of perseverance as best he knew it: devotion to duty. But alas, his was perseverance without flexibility or fluidity—the very traits Darwin had mastered.
Meanwhile, Fitzroy had split from the sources of his deepest connection. And this inevitably split his psyche down the middle. He could not reconcile these dueling parts of himself. (This kind of internal war is Freud’s very definition of neurosis and mental suffering.)
By April 1865, Fitzroy found himself in a pit of despair. For five years he had brooded over Origin. He had recently lost the post of Chief Naval Officer in the Marine Department to an ambitious subordinate. He was overworked. His health was failing. His hearing was going. And he had gradually become caught up in one of his own inner storms of depression. On Sunday, April 30, Fitzroy kissed his daughter, walked into his bathroom, locked the door, and slit his throat—exactly as his mother’s half brother, Lord Castlereagh, had done in 1822. It was the very fate Fitzroy had dreaded and had tried to avoid all those years earlier when he’d invited the young Charles Darwin aboard HMS Beagle to be his friend and companion.
Darwin was devastated. As ever, he saw the nobility in Fitzroy. He saw the good. His final statement on the matter was eloquent in its perspective and clear-sightedness.
I never knew in my life so mixed a character. Always much to love & I once loved him sincerely; but so bad a temper & so given to take offence, that I gradually . . . wished only to keep out of contact with him. But certainly there was much noble and exalted in his character.
There is of course a great paradox in Fitzroy’s end. Clearly, we can see with our current perspective that he died as a result of a chronic clinical depression. We can also see, though, that he suffered from what we might call “clinging to views and beliefs.” In the Buddhist view, this very same “clinging to views and beliefs” is precisely the cause of some of the deepest sources of suffering in human life. When clinging to our doctrine and dogma, we cannot see what is true. We become too adapted to our niche. We do not have enough flexibility to maneuver and adapt. Darwin, by contrast, fitted himself to the new world that he found.
We can see that as Charles Darwin grew older, his consciousness had been vastly expanded by his persistent endurance and flexibility, and that he adopted more and more of a global perspective. This was a man full of flexibility, of fluidity, and of good will. Late in life, he would write in The Descent of Man, published twelve years after On the Origin of Species,
As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.
It was the effective and creative use of adversity that culminated in this beautifully expanded consciousness. We should extend our sympathies to the men of all nations and races!
Darwin’s discoveries, his consciousness, his intense humanity, would not have been possible without his deep adversarial friendship with Robert Fitzroy. There is simply no other way to view this mystery:
No Fitzroy, no Darwin.
things to ponder: adversity