Slowing Down

This is partially an exploration of the questions about Darwin’s relationship to time—and to the duration of the process of natural selection—that Lindsey poses in her recent post, especially “how does the idea of linear time more generally affect/frame Darwin's arguments?”

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Darwin is forever warning his readers against “quickness.” In Chapter VI, for instance, he advises us to “pause before being too positive even in this case,” this case being our prior assumption that the “fly flapper” of the giraffe does not serve a crucial purpose in the animal’s well-being, and thus has not been honed over long years by natural selection (178). However, it is important to note that Darwin himself pauses, or at least takes his time, in coming to this point. He raises the question at the very beginning of the chapter, as that of an imagined potential objector, taking on the objector’s own voice in asking why we would believe that natural selection is responsible for “organs of such wonderful structure” (as the eye) along with “organs of trifling importance” (159). However, he does not return to the question of the “fly flapper” until much further into the chapter; through his own formal delay, he conveys himself as contemplator who ruminates necessarily at great length before making any assertions, exactly what he encourages his readers to do throughout. I’d like to suggest, ultimately, that Darwin’s favoring of “slowness” is operating on multiple levels and multiple subjects, form and content being tightly intertwined: for one, Darwin’s scientific method happens over a great duration of time (considering this book is only an “abstract”), for another, his prose style has a carefully plodding quality, and ultimately, natural selection is itself a slow process (as Darwin slowly presents it to be).

While Nature itself may “never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps,” so, too, in Darwin’s view, must human beings who pursue their own ever-evolving understanding of Nature (178). When Darwin tells us that Nature cannot “take a leap,” he may just as well be outlining the need for the scientist, or even the scientific reader, to constantly “pause,” as he goes on to ask of us on that same page. So, too, Darwin could be outlining not only a scientific ‘coming-to-knowledge’, but a temporal methodology for his narrative. His sentence structure enforces the idea of a cool and steady calculation, the work of a writer who—unlike Audubon—takes his time, always paces himself. Consider the length of many of Darwin’s sentences, their sense of cautious and purposeful motion, and his rare usage of the exclamation point. I haven’t counted to be sure, but I think that a comparison of Audubon’s writing would display a much greater use of exclamation, and a willingness to convey “excitability.” Darwin, however, due maybe to the controversy of the theory he is presenting (for Audubon, there was never so much at stake) can’t afford the risk of getting too excited, and looking like he has simply “run away” from the objective position of scientist (Not that he doesn’t manage to convey his passion for his work in other ways, as in, for instance, his frequent praises of beautiful forms in nature).

Darwin instead constructs his text in a natural-selection like fashion, constantly honing in new sentences those sentences that have come before; you find him always qualifying previous statements in order to lead to greater clarity on the most particular points (even those that may seem to the lay reader as unimportant, at first, as the tail of a giraffe) just as nature further produces modifications in species. In fact, Darwin’s sentences often utilize modifiers of modifiers, which serve to put forth contentious ideas as tentatively and modestly as possible. My personal favorite, which I’ll give as an example, is from Chapter IV: “From these several considerations…I am strongly inclined to suspect that, both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, an occasional intercross with a distinct individual is a law of nature” (98). While “law of nature” is strong wording, it is downplayed by the word “occasional,” rather than just “intercross” alone, and becomes even more diluted by the introductory phrase “I am strongly inclined to suspect that.” It isn’t good enough for Darwin that his cautious, slow, reflective nature be conveyed by the word “suspect” here, which he chooses to say instead of “believe,” or by the even stronger wording, which would be removing the “I” from the picture entirely and just saying “An occasional intercross is a law of nature.” Rather, even Darwin’s “suspect” has to be modified: he doesn’t suspect; he is “inclined to suspect” (strongly, though, to give him some credit). What I find so fascinating about Darwin’s language is how it often becomes an amalgam of the confidently assertive and the carefully tiptoeing—few writers, I think, could manage to do both at once.

Even though Darwin is pushed, to some extent, into writing in this seemingly modest way, by the gravity of his subject matter, he also is aware that slowness in general is not something that the people of his own increasingly fast-paced modern world are predisposed to appreciate. Consider the chapter on natural selection, where he states, “That natural selection will always act with extreme slowness, I fully admit” (103). The fact that Darwin feels he has to “fully admit” this fact was rather humorous to me, because I read it as having the air of providing an apology for nature, and so, too, perhaps, for the scientist. Something like: ‘I’m sorry that it may not be as dynamic as what you have been hoping for, but patience, as they always say, is a virtue, and just because it’s slow—unlike the Biblical God who creates the world in seven days, and species in only a couple—doesn’t mean it isn’t just as powerful.’ After Darwin’s initial “confession” of Nature’s slowness, he goes on, then, to repeat the word “slow” or “slowly” five times in the course of the following page (105). It is as if his audience’s recognition of the slowness of natural selection must also necessarily dawn on them slowly, and only with mass repetition at that. Darwin’s chorus of “slow, slow, slow” resonates for me, with Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify, simplify,” which is also, in a sense, an imperative to slow down modern life. While I don’t think that Darwin would say Nature is simple (he prefers to talk about its “complexity” and “intricacy”), it does simplify, since even without consciousness, its adaptations (yes, including the tail of the giraffe) make life simpler, though never simple, for individual species.

Darwin further “justifies” the slowness of natural selection to his readers in the following paragraph:

“Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection” (104).

Again, Darwin is making concessions of a sort here: Yes, Nature may be slow, but you can expect it to be all the more powerful than those creations that humans have demonstrated themselves to be capable of making quickly. “Beauty and infinite complexity” are here promised as rewards for taking one’s time (a gradual unfolding) and this is also Darwin’s gift to the reader at this stage in his own long project. After all, he introduces himself, as well as his research, in the Introduction to Origin of Species, as one who has been “patiently accumulating and reflecting” and “steadily [pursuing] the same object” (12). He ends his first paragraph with an appeal to his own timeliness: his desire “to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision,” just as he hopes, too, that the readers of Origin—like him, like Nature itself—will not be “hasty” either, in forming an assessment or dismissing his theories offhandedly.