DARWIN AND THE BARNACLE
Rebecca Stott
        Most associate the word “Darwin” with “Evolution.” If we connect him with any book it is “Origin of Species by Natural Selection.” We also may remember the cruise of the Beagle in which Darwin collected all sorts of creatures. 
        What I never remembered—and what most people don’t remember—is that Darwin spent most of his career focused on one creature. The barnacle.
        Most of us don’t like barnacles.
        Our encounters with the creature are often painful. They are rough, sharp “things” that seem glued to rocks, water soaked logs and boat bottoms. I pay $50 a gallon for paint to deter barnacles from making a home on the bottom of my boat. We scrape barnacles off the “bouncing tree” so that children will not scour themselves raw when they slip off into the water. We don’t think of them as “alive.”
        Yet, they are like sand dollars and many other “things” found in tide lands. Look carefully and you see that those rough shelled “things” have “feet” that reach out to gather possible food to feed a life that exists inside. Darwin, like so many other observers, recognized long ago that these were a form of animal life that existed on earth far longer than anything we can think of. 
        Darwin’s unique thought was that if one observed enough barnacles from pre-historic times until now, it could be shown that many changes occurred during those millions of years. He ended up with four illustrated volumes that demonstrated without philosophical declaration that mutations happened as the ages rolled by. 
        We all pretty much know all of that. What the book shows is Charles Darwin, the wealthy scientist, meticulously collecting, dissecting, observing and recording what he saw in his microscope day after day after day. He fought health problems, problems with an ever-increasing family, and problems of transferring results to print and public knowledge. 
        We also get a picture of a man who was devoted to the pursuit of science, focusing primarily on this one creature, the barnacle. Nothing took him off this course of life.
        Darwin was helped by those who shared their collections and research. In turn he was generous with his own knowledge. He received and wrote 1,000’s of letters in a time before modern communication devices. Mail was invariably slow. He was also generous in giving of credit. He was known as a kind and thoughtful man. One letter to his son reveals how he felt about kindness:
“You will surely find that the greatest pleasure in life is in being beloved; & this depends almost
  more in pleasant manners, than on being kind with grave & gruff manners…Depend upon it,
  that the only way to acquire pleasant manners is to try to please everybody you come near, 
  your school fellows, servants & everybody” (p. 193)
        Popular knowledge of Darwin has him as the one who challenged the idea of “creationism,” of a God-created world, as biblical teachers had proclaimed for centuries. Darwin’s teachings about evolution ran counter to this idea and shook the faith of many. Darwin was aware that his research results would be received as “heresy,” so we was careful to avoid philosophical or theological interpretations. It was more than a decade after his first publications that he would come forth with the implications of his research.
        Darwin had privately given up the popular idea of a creation God that controlled the life and everlasting fate of all life. When his daughter Annie was dying, Darwin admitted in the doubt in his heart that there was a God to punish her for not having been raised a proper “Christian.” He found no comfort in the “heaven” others proclaimed for her. If there was “God” it was not the kind of God.
        The battle is not done. Some people still view Darwin as an enemy of believers. Others view him as a liberator. Others find themselves forced to redefine the nature of the core life source.  
        I find myself on a different track. I salute the barnacle. If any such creature could be found on Mars it would be history’s greatest discovery. That creature has been here almost forever and has found a way to survive that has eluded virtually every creature and species so far. Perhaps we can still learn from the barnacle. 
- Art Morgan, Summer 2003