Speaker 1: Pushkin.
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Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Charles Darwin hated peacocks. The sight of a feather in
Speaker 2: a peacock's tail, he said, whenever I gaze at it
Speaker 2: makes me sick. But what had peacocks ever done to
Speaker 2: Charles Darwin? For years, Darwin had been working out the
Speaker 2: details of his theory of evolution. At the core of
Speaker 2: that theory was a simple but powerful insight some creatures
Speaker 2: are better equipped than others to survive in their particular environment,
Speaker 2: and they get to pass on their characteristics to the
Speaker 2: next generation. Darwin called it natural selection, and it explained
Speaker 2: a lot, but not everything. Look around in nature and
Speaker 2: you'll see plenty of things that don't seem to help
Speaker 2: with survival. The peacock's tail, for example, with its long,
Speaker 2: brightly colored feathers. Surely having to lug around such cumbersome
Speaker 2: plumage must make it harder for peacocks to survive. Wouldn't
Speaker 2: a peacock with a lighter, shorter tail be better able
Speaker 2: to run away from predators? And yet evolution had produced
Speaker 2: the peacock's tail. How every time Darwin saw a peacock,
Speaker 2: it painfully reminded him that he hadn't fully worked out
Speaker 2: the details of his theory. And in the English countryside
Speaker 2: in the eighteen sixties, Charles Darwin must have seen peacocks
Speaker 2: rather often. They were popular with a landed gentry. Charles
Speaker 2: was a country gentleman himself. Where could Darwin turn for
Speaker 2: inspiration to solve his peacock problem, Perhaps to the writings
Speaker 2: of others. It's Charles whose name we associate with evolution today,
Speaker 2: but many earlier thinkers had speculated along similar lines. Chief
Speaker 2: among them was Darwin's own grandfather, the larger than life
Speaker 2: Erasmus Darwin, who had died before Charles was born, was
Speaker 2: enormously fat, gross, and corpulent, said one unkind obituarist. His
Speaker 2: features were coarse, He was rather clumsy and slovenly, and
Speaker 2: frequently walked with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
Speaker 2: What he lacked in conventional standards for good looks, though, Erasmus,
Speaker 2: made up for in charm. He attracted two beautiful wives
Speaker 2: and fathered fourteen children, two of them with a third woman.
Speaker 2: Between the marriages, Erasmus made his living as a doctor,
Speaker 2: dabbled as an inventor, and one fame as a poet
Speaker 2: and a writer, including on evolution. Would it be too
Speaker 2: bold to imagine, wrote Erasmus, that all warm blooded animals
Speaker 2: have arisen from one living filament. That's impressive for the
Speaker 2: seventeen hundreds, long before anyone conceived of DNA. As it happens,
Speaker 2: there was one particular aspect of Charles Darwin's grandfather's life
Speaker 2: that might have helped Charles figure out the peacock's tail.
Speaker 2: But this is a story about how answers aren't always
Speaker 2: found in the most obvious places to look. I'm Tim
Speaker 2: Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Josiah Wedgwood was
Speaker 2: born in seventeen thirty in the village of Burslem in
Speaker 2: the English Midlands. The region was known for pottery from
Speaker 2: its low called clay soils. Josiah's father was a potter,
Speaker 2: but not a successful one. His wares were low priced
Speaker 2: and low quality. His profit margin's slim. While other branches
Speaker 2: of the Wedgewood family had done well for themselves, Josiah's
Speaker 2: side were the poor relations. Josiah was the youngest child
Speaker 2: of eleven. Five of his older siblings died of smallpox.
Speaker 2: Those who lived went to work in the family workshop
Speaker 2: as soon as they were able. First, they shoveled clay
Speaker 2: into a kind of mill. The horse walked in circles,
Speaker 2: turning a shaft that pummeled the clay with metal blades
Speaker 2: until it was ready to throw onto the potter's wheel,
Speaker 2: if in a glaze and bake in the brick oven.
Speaker 2: It was hard physical work. As a boy, or Josiah
Speaker 2: two got smallpox. It seemed for a while that he
Speaker 2: wasn't going to make it. He lay in bed, weak
Speaker 2: and delirious, his body covered in pustules. At last, the
Speaker 2: fever broke, the skin scabbed over, but part of Josiah
Speaker 2: never really recovered from the illness, his right knee. He
Speaker 2: hobbled back to the workshop and tried to find ways
Speaker 2: he could make himself useful while sitting down, resting his
Speaker 2: leg on a stool. It wasn't easy, but times were changing.
Speaker 2: Some other local potters were starting to experiment with new
Speaker 2: techniques and ingredients to make new designs and colored glazes,
Speaker 2: bowls that looked like tortoise shell teapots shaped like a
Speaker 2: couliflower or pineapple. Josiah found a job he could manage
Speaker 2: despite his painful leg. He discovered that he loved to
Speaker 2: experiment a new shade of green, a vibrant orange, yellow,
Speaker 2: a more visually pleasing pineapple teapot. By the age of thirty,
Speaker 2: sire had set up on his own. Every evening after work,
Speaker 2: he'd sit in his kitchen and mix together some new
Speaker 2: combination of metals and minerals, salts, and enamels to glaze
Speaker 2: his wares. He carefully recorded the results in a leather
Speaker 2: bound notebook. Experiment number four six. This seems to separate
Speaker 2: parties run thin like water. That is a good color,
Speaker 2: says one entry. Experiment number four eight much the same,
Speaker 2: but less of the exuded watery part. Every experiment was systematic.
Speaker 2: Very one ingredient hold the other's constant and see how
Speaker 2: it changed the outcome. Experiment number four nine rather better.
Speaker 2: Josiah was trying to solve a problem that frustrated every
Speaker 2: potter at the time. When they tried to make white
Speaker 2: colored wares, they always had a browny yellow tinge. And
Speaker 2: then experiment number four one one a good white glaze.
Speaker 2: Josiah's new white plates were like nothing else on the market.
Speaker 2: He could print on them verses and pictures. Business began
Speaker 2: to boom. Josiah hired new workers, he expanded into a
Speaker 2: second workshop, and he finally felt successful enough to propose
Speaker 2: to the love of his life. Sally was his cousin
Speaker 2: from the wealthy branch of the Wedgwood family. They had
Speaker 2: been smitten with each other for years, but Sally's father,
Speaker 2: a successful banker, had always been sniffy about his only
Speaker 2: daughter marrying a potter. He wanted Josiah to make him
Speaker 2: financial guarantees. Exasperated, Josiah told a friend, I have gone
Speaker 2: through a long series of bargain making, of settlements, reversions, provisions,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. It was mortifying, he said, to
Speaker 2: have to negotiate marriage like just another business deal. If
Speaker 2: it were up to him and Sally, they could settle
Speaker 2: the whole affair in three lines and so many minutes.
Speaker 2: Sally put her foot down. She was nearly thirty, she'd
Speaker 2: never wanted anyone else, and her father relented. Josiah was
Speaker 2: soon gushing in another letter to his friend they were
Speaker 2: two married lovers, as happy as this world can make them.
Speaker 2: Sali joined Josiah in the kitchen every night, mixing chemicals,
Speaker 2: glazing pots, and filling notebooks. He'd taught her his code.
Speaker 2: She helped him make more fashionable products that caught the
Speaker 2: attention of high society. One hundred and fifty miles away
Speaker 2: in London, an order came in that Josiah could barely
Speaker 2: have dreamed of a tea service for the Queen of England,
Speaker 2: Queen Charlotte, the wife of mad King George the Third.
Speaker 2: Josiah's business could hardly be going better. His right leg, though,
Speaker 2: was giving him more and more trouble on a badly
Speaker 2: rutted road, had fallen from his horse. The pain was
Speaker 2: constant now, and his trusted doctor said there was only
Speaker 2: one thing for it. That leg would have to come off.
Speaker 2: The doctor Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was born in seventeen
Speaker 2: thirty one, a year after Josiah. His career as a
Speaker 2: doctor got off to a shaky start. His first patient,
Speaker 2: a man who'd been stabbed in a drunken brawl, died.
Speaker 2: He got no other patients. After a couple of months,
Speaker 2: he gave up and moved forty miles to another town
Speaker 2: to try for a fresh start. This time, his first
Speaker 2: patient was a young man from a wealthy family whose
Speaker 2: doctor had told them that his illness was incurable. In desperation,
Speaker 2: the young man's mother called on the new doctor in
Speaker 2: town and asked for a second opinion. Was there nothing
Speaker 2: Erasmus could do? In truth, there wasn't much choice of
Speaker 2: treatments In the seventeen hundreds. Erasmus later wrote down his
Speaker 2: prescriptions for a range of conditions. For anorexia, for instance,
Speaker 2: opium half a grain twice a day. For impotence, a
Speaker 2: grain of opium before bed epilepsy, opium a grain every
Speaker 2: half hour, gallstones, tetanus, you guessed it. History doesn't record
Speaker 2: what Erasmus gave the young man whose doctor had given
Speaker 2: up on him. Perhaps it was opium, but whether or
Speaker 2: not Erasmus had anything to do with it. The patient
Speaker 2: made a miraculous recovery, and his family recommended Erasmus to everyone.
Speaker 2: Soon Erasmus was making friends among the great and the
Speaker 2: good of the Industrial Revolution, treating their illnesses and sending
Speaker 2: them ideas for inventions. Some didn't work out, like the
Speaker 2: horizontal windmill. Others did, like a clever new steering mechanism
Speaker 2: for carriages. He didn't bother to patent it. He just
Speaker 2: wanted to make his own journeys safer. Erasmus had to
Speaker 2: travel a lot to see his patients, and the roads
Speaker 2: were terrible. His idea for the steering mechanism was good
Speaker 2: enough to last over a century later. It was the
Speaker 2: standard in the early car industry. In his early thirties,
Speaker 2: Erasmus heard from an up and coming potter from the
Speaker 2: other side of the county, Josiah Wedgwood, was lobbying to
Speaker 2: raise from them for a canal. It was hard to
Speaker 2: get his fragile goods to distant cities on the potholed roads.
Speaker 2: Josiah explained, no matter how much straw he packed them in,
Speaker 2: something always got smashed. Erasmus was well respected, would he
Speaker 2: support the campaign?
Speaker 1: He would.
Speaker 2: Erasmus threw himself into the cause, writing a long pamphlet
Speaker 2: on the benefits of inland waterways. He became close friends
Speaker 2: with Josiah and doctor to the Wedgwood family. Erasmus recommended
Speaker 2: a surgeon to take care of Josiah's troublesome leg. The
Speaker 2: amputation was risky no antibiotics in the seventeen sixties, and
Speaker 2: fearful no anesthetic either. Erasmus prescribed opium. Josiah sat in
Speaker 2: a chair at home in a drug induced haze, while
Speaker 2: his wife Sally waited anxiously in the next room with
Speaker 2: their little daughter, Susannah. The surgeon readed his sore cautionary tales.
Speaker 2: Will be back after the break. You're listening to a
Speaker 2: cautionary tale about Charles Darwin and how he struggled to
Speaker 2: understand how the peacock's tail could have evolved when it
Speaker 2: seemed so obviously to hinder survival. We'll come back to
Speaker 2: Charles and his peacock problem later on. But I promised
Speaker 2: that Charles might have better understood the peacock's tail if
Speaker 2: only he'd paid more attention to his own grandfather's life.
Speaker 2: So let's get back to that life where we left it.
Speaker 2: Erasmus Darwin anxiously watched over his friend Josiah Wedgwood. Josiah
Speaker 2: was off his head on opium, his right leg a
Speaker 2: stu ump wrapped in bandages. Ever, the hard nosed businessman
Speaker 2: Josiah would have been happy to know his employees were
Speaker 2: getting on.
Speaker 1: With a job.
Speaker 2: A letter survives from the Midlands workshop to the London showroom.
Speaker 2: Sir mister Wedgewood has this day had his leg taken
Speaker 2: off and is as well as can be expected after
Speaker 2: such an execution. Mister Horn's goods are packed a moncrate
Speaker 2: for the warehouse. Josiah's leg healed well. He commissioned a
Speaker 2: craftsman to make him a wooden prosthetic with joints that
Speaker 2: moved and a foot that could wear a shoe and stocking.
Speaker 2: Josiah worked hard on his tea service for the Queen.
Speaker 2: The request was specific a complete set of tea things
Speaker 2: with a gold ground and raised flowers upon it in green.
Speaker 2: Josiah knew how to do green glazes, but gold. He
Speaker 2: had some gold leaf sent up from London and tried
Speaker 2: to work out how to burn it onto his smooth
Speaker 2: ivory white plates. He was mortified to find it does
Speaker 2: not look so well as I expected. He consulted books
Speaker 2: with ArKade knowledge that might help or might not. Mix
Speaker 2: the gold leaf with virgin honey, add resin asphaltaman lead, boil,
Speaker 2: straying through a flannel. Night after night, Josiah depleted his
Speaker 2: stocks of gold until at last he was happy. He
Speaker 2: sent off the tea set and waited nervously. Then he
Speaker 2: received an invitation to Buckingham Palace. Josiah traveled to London,
Speaker 2: dressed up in his best scarlet waistcoat and blue velvet jacket,
Speaker 2: and treated himself to a brand new wig that the palace.
Speaker 2: Queen Charlotte told Josiah how much all her guests had
Speaker 2: been impressed with her new tea service. She wanted to
Speaker 2: give Josiah a title potter to her majesty. It was
Speaker 2: an honor and a marketing godsend. Josiah promptly paid for
Speaker 2: announcements in the newspapers. He also left the palace with
Speaker 2: Charlotte's blessing to make more of the same design and
Speaker 2: market them. As queenswear orders flooded in, Josiah took on
Speaker 2: a business partner and drew up plans for a big
Speaker 2: new factory. It is really amazing, Josiah mused to his partner,
Speaker 2: how rapidly the use of queenswear has spread almost over
Speaker 2: the whole globe, and how universally it is liked. Then
Speaker 2: Josiah asked himself, why how much of this general estimation
Speaker 2: is owing to the mode of its introduction and how
Speaker 2: much to its real utility and beauty. We should be
Speaker 2: a good deal interested in the answer to that question,
Speaker 2: he said, because if a royal or noble introduction be
Speaker 2: as necessary as real elegance and beauty, then the manufacturer
Speaker 2: should bestow as much pains and expense on the former
Speaker 2: as the latter. Josiah now had an open door into
Speaker 2: London's high society. That's what happens when you're potter. To
Speaker 2: her Majesty, he sought out the aristocratic trendsetters.
Speaker 1: What were they excited by?
Speaker 2: The answer turned out to be antique vases currently being
Speaker 2: brought back from the excavation of Pompeii. What if Josiah
Speaker 2: could produce new vases in a similar style. He went
Speaker 2: back to his workshop to experiment forget Potter to her majesty,
Speaker 2: he playfully told his business partner going to be vase
Speaker 2: maker general to the universe. There remained the problem of
Speaker 2: transporting those fragile vases from Josiah's new factory to the
Speaker 2: rest of the universe. But the new canal that Josiah
Speaker 2: had lobbed for was finally being built, and just like
Speaker 2: in Pompeii, some unexpected things were being excavated. Josiah was
Speaker 2: fascinated to be shown a prodigious rib with the backbone
Speaker 2: of a monstrous sized fish. It had to be the
Speaker 2: whale that swallowed Jonah. The canal diggers said other long
Speaker 2: buried remains were even more mysterious. Josiah thought Erasmus might
Speaker 2: be interested, so he sent them off. Erasmus had no
Speaker 2: idea what he was looking at, so he made a
Speaker 2: joke of it. The bone seems to be the third
Speaker 2: vertebra of a camel, he wrote back. The horn must
Speaker 2: have been that of a Patagonian ox, But beneath the jokes.
Speaker 2: Erasmus was intrigued. These long dead creatures that once roamed
Speaker 2: the English midlands were unlike anything alive today. How did
Speaker 2: species change through the ages? Erasmus began to think, but
Speaker 2: also decided to keep his thoughts to himself. Everyone thought
Speaker 2: that God created species just as they were. If he
Speaker 2: openly doubted that he'd scandalized the devout among his patients,
Speaker 2: he couldn't afford to risk the income. Erasmus had a
Speaker 2: growing family to support, and his wife was becoming more
Speaker 2: and more unwell, with violent pains in her side and
Speaker 2: fits of delirium. Nothing Erasmus tried any help except the
Speaker 2: opium to ease the pain, until one day the dear
Speaker 2: partner of all the cares and pleasures of my life
Speaker 2: ceased to be ill, Erasmus wrote, and I felt myself
Speaker 2: alone in the world. When Erasmus became a widower, his
Speaker 2: youngest son, Robert, was just four years old. Josiah Wedgwood's
Speaker 2: new Pompeii themed vases were a huge success. Vass for
Speaker 2: the mantlepieces, vazis as candle holders, vases for potpourri. They
Speaker 2: exceed the ancients, said one impressed aristocrat in beauty and variety.
Speaker 2: But success brought problems. Josiah was investing so much to
Speaker 2: expand production, his cash flow became stretched.
Speaker 1: Where should he cut back?
Speaker 2: Tiah embarked on an exercise of what we'd now call
Speaker 2: management accounting. It didn't have a name then, as nobody
Speaker 2: did it. He wanted to understand how much profit each
Speaker 2: line brought in when you apportioned wages, materials, coal for
Speaker 2: the kilns.
Speaker 1: And so on.
Speaker 2: I'm puzzling my brains, he wrote to his partner, But
Speaker 2: he figured it out. Josiah was a pioneer beyond accountancy.
Speaker 2: In marketing his new vases. He instinctively hit on two
Speaker 2: ideas that wouldn't be given names for over a century.
Speaker 2: One idea was conspicuous consumption. A few wealthy aristocrats would
Speaker 2: pay a high price to be among the first to
Speaker 2: buy a new design of vas that could show off
Speaker 2: both their money and their good taste. Josiah gave his
Speaker 2: London showroom manager strict instructions when the first.
Speaker 1: Samples of a new product arrived.
Speaker 2: Do not keep them open in the rooms, he said,
Speaker 2: show them only to people of fashion. He defined his
Speaker 2: target market that sort of customers who can afford to
Speaker 2: pay for anything they like. The second idea Josiah instinctively
Speaker 2: understood is now known as the trickle down theory of fashion.
Speaker 2: When a high status person shows off something new, others
Speaker 2: try to copy them. We see it today with wasteful
Speaker 2: fast fashion in the clothing industry. A new designer look
Speaker 2: debuts on the catwalk, a few weeks later, high street
Speaker 2: stores are selling cheaper lookalikes. Here's how Josiah described the process.
Speaker 2: The great people have had their vases in their palaces
Speaker 2: long enough for them to be seen and admired by
Speaker 2: the middling class of people, He wrote to his business partner.
Speaker 2: The middling people would probably buy quantities of them at
Speaker 2: a reduced price. Josiah's marketing strategy fit perfectly with what
Speaker 2: he had discovered from his accounting exercise. It cost a
Speaker 2: lot to figure out how to make something new, but
Speaker 2: then he could easily churn out replicas that would eventually
Speaker 2: cause the item to fall out of fashion.
Speaker 1: And Josiah knew it.
Speaker 2: Our customers will not much longer be content with queenswear,
Speaker 2: he wrote, a few years after its launch. It now
Speaker 2: being rendered vulgar and common everywhere, But that was fine.
Speaker 2: It simply created demand for another novelty. It always seemed
Speaker 2: to be ladies who drove new fashions. Josiah noticed. He
Speaker 2: studied the trends in the leading female salons and never
Speaker 2: launched a product without his wife, Sally's approval. He also
Speaker 2: kept in mind his lesson that new products benefited from
Speaker 2: a noble introduction. When he made a new flower pot.
Speaker 2: For example, he suggested to his partner, suppose you present
Speaker 2: the Duchess of Devonshire with a set and beg leave
Speaker 2: to call them Devonshire flower pots. The Duchess of Devonshire
Speaker 2: was quite the social trendsetter, much like her great great
Speaker 2: great grand niece, Princess Diana Wedgwood's Devonshire flower pots flew
Speaker 2: off the shelves. Make something new, charge a high price,
Speaker 2: sell cheaper copies to the mass market, rinse and repeat.
Speaker 2: Josiah became very rich. Erasmus brought in a teenage governess
Speaker 2: to look after his children when his wife died. Before long,
Speaker 2: it had two more daughters with her. Then he fell
Speaker 2: madly in love with the young wife of an elderly
Speaker 2: aristocratic patient. He bombarded her with love poems. Understandably, perhaps
Speaker 2: the old husband decided to get himself a different doctor,
Speaker 2: but he died anyway. Erasmus married his widow, who'd inherited
Speaker 2: a sizeable income. They had seven more children together and
Speaker 2: folded the two young daughters of the governess into their
Speaker 2: blended family. Erasmus's new wife encouraged him to publish his
Speaker 2: thoughts about evolution, among other things. He was growing older.
Speaker 2: He didn't need to worry so much about money anymore,
Speaker 2: and if his writings caused a scandal, who cares? Cautionary
Speaker 2: tales will be back after the break. As Josiah Wedgwood
Speaker 2: became richer and more famous, his experiments became more ambitious.
Speaker 2: I want to astonish the world, he wrote to his
Speaker 2: business partner, for I hate piddling, you know.
Speaker 1: Josiah came up with a.
Speaker 2: Brand new way of coloring pottery, not by adding a glaze,
Speaker 2: but by infusing color into the clay itself. A distinctive
Speaker 2: shade of pale blue became synonymous with the Wedgewood name.
Speaker 2: He made teapots and vases with tasteful decorations in white relief,
Speaker 2: and medallions with the profiles of famous people. By the
Speaker 2: late seventeen eighties, Josiah and Erasmus were both approaching sixty.
Speaker 2: Josiah launched a product that became a best seller, a
Speaker 2: medallion depicting a black African slave in chains inscribed with
Speaker 2: the words words am I not a man and a brother?
Speaker 2: Josiah gave the prophets to the cause of abolishing slavery.
Speaker 2: The medallion, said one campaigner, had an effect equal to
Speaker 2: that of the best written pamphlet. Erasmus meanwhile, transformed almost
Speaker 2: overnight from an obscure provincial doctor into one of the
Speaker 2: most famous writers in the land. His first publication was
Speaker 2: a poem, The Loves of the Plants. In rhyming couplets,
Speaker 2: Erasmus combined an explanation of sexual reproduction in plant species
Speaker 2: with riskuae allusions to human relationships. The poem is all
Speaker 2: flushed cheeks and seductive smiles, while the footnotes read like
Speaker 2: popular science. It sounds like it shouldn't work, but apparently
Speaker 2: it did. The most del poem on earth, said one
Speaker 2: famous critic. The author is a great poet. The follow
Speaker 2: up poem was an even bigger success, and even more unlikely.
Speaker 2: In a single poem with eighty thousand words of explanatory footnotes.
Speaker 2: Erasmus deals with everything from astronomy to geology to the
Speaker 2: workings of steam engines, an artistic interpretation of his friend
Speaker 2: Josiah's Latest VARs, and a polemic against his country's role
Speaker 2: in the slave trade, inspired by Josiah's medallion the poor
Speaker 2: fettered Slave on bended knee from Britain's sons imploring to
Speaker 2: be free. By now Erasmus's daughters with the Governess were
Speaker 2: grown up, Erasmus started a school for girls and put
Speaker 2: them in charge. He wrote a plan for the conduct
Speaker 2: of female education, ahead of its time, for the seventeen nineties,
Speaker 2: when any kind of education for girls was a niche idea.
Speaker 2: Some of his other books haven't aged as well, such
Speaker 2: as his textbook on medicine, which took nearly eight hundred
Speaker 2: pages to leave the strong impression that whatever your ailment,
Speaker 2: you may as well try opium. He finally published his
Speaker 2: thoughts on evolution too.
Speaker 1: Would it be too bold to.
Speaker 2: Imagine that all warm blood animals have arisen from one
Speaker 2: living filament? Too bold it was for many readers. These
Speaker 2: godless musings proved just as controversial as Erasmus had feared,
Speaker 2: and for all that his living filament sounds startlingly prescient.
Speaker 2: Erasmus couldn't yet explain convincingly how evolution worked. That would
Speaker 2: have to wait a cut of generations. Charles Darwin read
Speaker 2: everything his grandfather wrote about evolution, but he was reluctant
Speaker 2: to cite Erasmus in his own work. He seems to
Speaker 2: have been embarrassed by Erasmus's libertine lifestyle and unashamed enjoyment
Speaker 2: of sex. Charles Darwin was a product of his era,
Speaker 2: the Victorian era, prudish and straight laced. In our present
Speaker 2: state of society, wrote Charles, it may seem a strange
Speaker 2: fact that my grandfather's practice as a physician should not
Speaker 2: have suffered by his openly bringing up illegitimate children. As
Speaker 2: for the popular acclaim for Erasmus's racy poems, while that
Speaker 2: was quite incomprehensible to Charles, Just like Erasmus, Charles dithered
Speaker 2: for years before publishing his ideas on evolution, fearful of
Speaker 2: the backlash they might cause. Remember Charles's great insight about
Speaker 2: natural selection. Creatures that survive would pass on their characteristics
Speaker 2: to the next generation. But the peacock's cumbersome tale seem
Speaker 2: to hinder survival not help it, so how had it evolved?
Speaker 2: The answer, Charles realized, starts with the insight that survival
Speaker 2: isn't enough to pass on your characteristics to the next generation.
Speaker 2: You need not only to survive, but to attract a mate.
Speaker 2: In his private writing, Charles began to work out another
Speaker 2: strand to his theory, sexual selection. If p hens chose
Speaker 2: to mate with peacocks with the most magnificent tales, then
Speaker 2: magnificent tales will be passed on to their offspring. Charles
Speaker 2: was thinking along the right line, but when it came
Speaker 2: to going public with his theory, Charles knew he had
Speaker 2: a problem. In prudish, patriarchal Victorian society, nobody would want
Speaker 2: to believe that sex was a powerful force in shaping nature,
Speaker 2: even worse, female choice about who to have sex with. Today,
Speaker 2: that idea is uncontroversial, but as Eveline Richards argues in
Speaker 2: her book Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, to
Speaker 2: male Victorian scientists, it was almost unthinkable. That's why the
Speaker 2: sight of a peacock made Charles feel so sick. He
Speaker 2: knew he'd need some brilliantly persuasive arguments to have his
Speaker 2: idea taken seriously, but he failed to find them. When
Speaker 2: Charles eventually published his theory of sexual selection, it was ridiculed,
Speaker 2: widely ignored, and quickly forgotten. For one hundred years, it
Speaker 2: languished in intellectual obscurity. Perhaps Charles could have made a
Speaker 2: more convincing case if he had had access to insights
Speaker 2: from modern biology. One intellectual breakthrough came in the nineteen
Speaker 2: seventies the handicap principle. To Charles and his critics, it
Speaker 2: seemed like an obvious weakness in his theory that lugging
Speaker 2: around a massive tale surely makes survival harder. The handicap
Speaker 2: principle turns that objection on its head. It says, the
Speaker 2: peacock's tail evolved precisely because it hinders survival. The peacock
Speaker 2: is showing off to pea hens. Look how fit and
Speaker 2: strong I am. I can grow this magnificent tale and
Speaker 2: still outrun any predators. Josiah Wedgwood would have understood this
Speaker 2: idea instinctively because it so closely mirrors another idea he anticipated,
Speaker 2: conspicuous consumption. Remember how Josiah defined his target market for
Speaker 2: his expensive new vases, that sort of customers who could
Speaker 2: afford to pay for anything they like. Josiah knew some
Speaker 2: of his customers wanted to say something much like the peacock.
Speaker 2: Look how wealthy I am. I can buy Wedgwood's latest
Speaker 2: vas and still afford to live in luxury. If only
Speaker 2: this analogy had occurred to Charles Darwin, he might have
Speaker 2: been less sickened by the peacock's tail. He might have
Speaker 2: realized that hindering survival could be a powerful feature of
Speaker 2: his sexual selection theory, not a troublesome bug. But that
Speaker 2: wasn't the only insight Charles was lacking. When Charles published
Speaker 2: his theory, his critics scorned the implication that pea hens
Speaker 2: must have a human likability to appreciate beauty. It seemed
Speaker 2: like a stretch, and biologists now say sexual selection can
Speaker 2: work without it.
Speaker 1: Pea Hens didn't.
Speaker 2: Need to evaluate the objective ideal of beauty, if there
Speaker 2: is such a thing. They only needed to be able
Speaker 2: to spot the distinguishing features of the highest status peacocks.
Speaker 2: Once again, Josiah Wedgwood would have had no trouble grasping
Speaker 2: that idea. Remember what he wants, asked himself about the
Speaker 2: success of queenswear. How much of this general estimation is
Speaker 2: owing to the mode of its introduction and how much
Speaker 2: to its real utility and beauty. Josiah knew that people
Speaker 2: might buy queenswear even if they themselves didn't find it beautiful,
Speaker 2: simply to boost their own status by associating themselves with
Speaker 2: the queen biologists. Now I'll see sexual selection as being
Speaker 2: about signals. Peacocks, for example, signaling their genetic fitness through
Speaker 2: their tail in much the same way we humans send
Speaker 2: signals about ourselves with our purchasing decisions. We signal our wealth,
Speaker 2: our taste, our understanding of the latest trends, even our virtue. Josiah,
Speaker 2: with his anti slavery medallion, understood that too. I told
Speaker 2: you that Charles Darwin might have found the answer to
Speaker 2: the peacock puzzle in the life of his grandfather. But
Speaker 2: I didn't mean Erasmus Darwin. I meant his other grandfather,
Speaker 2: Josiah Wedgwood. In the winter of seventeen ninety four, Josiah
Speaker 2: became ill. His friend Erasmus prescribed everything he could think of,
Speaker 2: but nothing could work because Josiah had cancer of the jaw.
Speaker 2: He died aged sixty four. The following year. His daughter
Speaker 2: Susanna married Erasmus's son Robert. Susannah Wedgwood and Robert Darwin
Speaker 2: had six children, including a boy called Charles. While Charles
Speaker 2: grew up to share one grandfather's fascination with evolution, he
Speaker 2: didn't share the other grandfather's fascination with pottery. We are
Speaker 2: degenerate descendants of old Josiah w. Charles wrote to a friend,
Speaker 2: for we have not a bit of pretty where in
Speaker 2: the house, pretty where you can almost hear the condescension. Yet,
Speaker 2: perhaps if Charles had studied his grandfather's pretty ware business,
Speaker 2: the peacock's tail might not have puzzled him so much.
Speaker 2: He might have noticed that peacock's showing off their tales
Speaker 2: are much like Josiah's customers showing off their vases. The
Speaker 2: clues were right there in Charles's family history, just not
Speaker 2: where it thought to look. This episode relied on biographies
Speaker 2: such as Josiah Wedgwood, Entrepreneur to the Enlightenment by Brian
Speaker 2: Dolan and Tristram Hunts The Radical Potter. For a full
Speaker 2: list of sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Speaker 2: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
Speaker 2: The show is produced by Alice Fines, with Marilyn Rust.
Speaker 2: The sound design and original music for the work of
Speaker 2: Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the script. Cautionary Tales features
Speaker 2: the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Speaker 2: Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show would have impossible
Speaker 2: without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
Speaker 2: Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.
Speaker 2: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
Speaker 2: at ward Or Studios in London by Tom Berry. If
Speaker 2: you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.
Speaker 2: It doesn't really make a difference to us and if
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