The Cambridge University library, in the United Kingdom, announced that it had recovered two notebooks that had belonged to the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and had been missing for more than 20 years.
Known as “Notebook B” and “Notebook C”, they document important parts of the reasoning that led Darwin to develop the pillars of the theory of evolution, such as the adaptation of animals and plants to their natural environment and the common ancestry of all living things. .
The international press has compared the mysterious story of the manuscripts’ disappearance and reappearance to a plot by Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code”.
At the end of the year 2000, the notebooks, which resemble modern notebooks, were taken from the place where they were stored and photographed. At the beginning of the following year, the library staff realized that the box in which the texts were kept had not been put back in the correct place, but the initial reaction was to think that it was a simple case of distraction — she could have ended up elsewhere by mistake.
However, after many searches, it became clear that the notebooks were no longer in the institution. In 2020, the university’s director of library services, Jessica Gardner, contacted British police and Interpol about the disappearance.
Gardner launched an appeal for the documents to be recovered – and that appeal appears to have been answered on March 9, when a pink gift bag was left on the library’s fourth floor floor, in a public area where there are no surveillance cameras. .
The bag contained the original library box, inside which were the notebooks, wrapped in plastic, and a note saying “Librarian, Happy Easter. X.”
Gardner still had to wait five days for police permission to remove the plastic and confirm that these were indeed the original notebooks. There are still no leads on the identity of the thief, but the documents are in good condition, according to the Cambridge team.
Nicknamed by Darwin the notebooks on “transmutation” (the term “evolution” was not yet used in the sense it would gain among biologists), the manuscripts date from the years 1837 and 1838, shortly after the naturalist’s voyage around the world aboard the ship HMS Beagle.
​Darwin’s observations during the journey, mapping fossils and native animals from places such as Brazil, the pampas of Argentina and the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific, stimulated the young researcher to formulate explanations for the emergence of species around the world.
It is in this context that, practically thinking about the paper, he sketched in “Notebook B” a diagram that would end up becoming one of the icons of evolutionary biology. At the top of the page, Darwin simply wrote “I think” and, at the bottom, a structure similar to the trunk and branches of a constantly branching tree, whose tips would correspond to the current species, united in the past by common ancestors. .
“The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, [pois a] the base of the branches is dead,” he wrote then, referring to the fact that corals, as they grow, rely on limestone skeletons that form reefs.
The red cover “Note B”, also reveals the influence of the naturalist’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who had speculated on the evolution of living beings in the 18th century —at the beginning of the notes Darwin put the title “Zoönomia”, the name of a of Erasmus works.
The texts of the manuscript also show the search for a conciliation between the ideas of transmutation of species over time and the action of God — at the time, Darwin considered himself a Christian and had not yet become an agnostic.
For him, evolution would allow the Creator to act indirectly on living beings, establishing natural laws that would lead to the emergence of new species, a method that, for Darwin, would be “much simpler & more sublime” than direct creation. and instantaneous of living beings.
He also notes, in the same notebook, that human pride was an obstacle to recognizing a common origin with animals. “The animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals,” he writes.
In “Notebook C”, Darwin expands on some of these observations, while revealing the racial prejudices of his time, speaking of the similarity between great apes and human beings considered “primitive”.
“Let man visit the tame orangutan, hear its expressive wails, see its intelligence, then behold the wild, naked, without arts, without improvement, but capable of improvement & he who dares to boast of his proud prominence,” he comments. he.
