DavidB66
Senior Member
I recently started watching a Netflix documentary series on genetic engineering, Unnatural Selection.
I'm not going to comment on the series, just on an alleged quotation which appeared prominently on screen at the beginning of Episode 1:
Many quotations have been wrongly attributed to Darwin, and I found this one implausible. I have read quite a lot by or about Darwin, but I didn't recall this remark. Nor can I imagine any context in which he would have made it. It is well known that Darwin did keep his theory of evolution by natural selection to himself for about 20 years, revealing it only to a few trusted friends and colleagues, so it would be odd for him to ask 'would you keep it to yourself?' The language of the quote itself should also arouse suspicion. The use of the word 'you', addressed to the reader, and the colloquial phrase 'keep it to yourself', seems too informal for Darwin or other serious writers of his generation in England. It just isn't Victorian.
So I did a bit of online searching. The quote itself comes up in many places, but none of these, as far as I could see, gives any actual source in Darwin's work or correspondence. Fortunately, most of this is available in searchable form online. The works (published and many unpublished) are here:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/
and the correspondence is here:
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/
Searching these sites for the distinctive keyword 'outrage' produced no source for the quote or anything similar to it. Not could I find it in the Wikiquote entry for Darwin, either as a genuine or misattributed quote. (I did put a query on the Discussion page.) I also searched the Quote Investigator site, but found nothing relevant. (I emailed Quote Investigator suggesting that they might look into it, but so far with no response.)
I did however find a likely original source for the quote, which is mentioned in several of the search results. In 2009 the Natural History Museum in London mounted an exhibition to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, under the title 'Darwin's Big Idea'. Publicity material included a photograph of Darwin holding his finger to his lips, as if to say 'Shush', and next to it the 'quote' in question. The photograph is an obvious photoshop job, using a standard portrait photo of the elderly Darwin, reversed left-to-right, with someone's finger - probably not Darwin's - superimposed. As for the 'quote', crucially it is not presented as a quote at all, from Darwin or anyone else. It is just a question posed for the reader to contemplate.
I therefore suspect that someone seeing the publicity material has assumed that it was a quote from Darwin himself, and relied on the authority of the NHM without making further checks. Then once it circulates online it becomes something 'everyone knows'. In one source the quote is prefaced by the words 'as Charles Darwin famously posed...'
I stop short of claiming a 'debunk', because it is conceivable that I have overlooked some obscure but genuine source, perhaps in Darwin's notebooks. Incidentally, while researching this quote, I came across another popular one even less credibly attributed to Darwin: 'We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us'. This sounds like post-Freudian psychobabble, far too late for Darwin, but I haven't looked into it any further.
I'm not going to comment on the series, just on an alleged quotation which appeared prominently on screen at the beginning of Episode 1:
Many quotations have been wrongly attributed to Darwin, and I found this one implausible. I have read quite a lot by or about Darwin, but I didn't recall this remark. Nor can I imagine any context in which he would have made it. It is well known that Darwin did keep his theory of evolution by natural selection to himself for about 20 years, revealing it only to a few trusted friends and colleagues, so it would be odd for him to ask 'would you keep it to yourself?' The language of the quote itself should also arouse suspicion. The use of the word 'you', addressed to the reader, and the colloquial phrase 'keep it to yourself', seems too informal for Darwin or other serious writers of his generation in England. It just isn't Victorian.
So I did a bit of online searching. The quote itself comes up in many places, but none of these, as far as I could see, gives any actual source in Darwin's work or correspondence. Fortunately, most of this is available in searchable form online. The works (published and many unpublished) are here:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/
and the correspondence is here:
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/
Searching these sites for the distinctive keyword 'outrage' produced no source for the quote or anything similar to it. Not could I find it in the Wikiquote entry for Darwin, either as a genuine or misattributed quote. (I did put a query on the Discussion page.) I also searched the Quote Investigator site, but found nothing relevant. (I emailed Quote Investigator suggesting that they might look into it, but so far with no response.)
I did however find a likely original source for the quote, which is mentioned in several of the search results. In 2009 the Natural History Museum in London mounted an exhibition to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, under the title 'Darwin's Big Idea'. Publicity material included a photograph of Darwin holding his finger to his lips, as if to say 'Shush', and next to it the 'quote' in question. The photograph is an obvious photoshop job, using a standard portrait photo of the elderly Darwin, reversed left-to-right, with someone's finger - probably not Darwin's - superimposed. As for the 'quote', crucially it is not presented as a quote at all, from Darwin or anyone else. It is just a question posed for the reader to contemplate.
I therefore suspect that someone seeing the publicity material has assumed that it was a quote from Darwin himself, and relied on the authority of the NHM without making further checks. Then once it circulates online it becomes something 'everyone knows'. In one source the quote is prefaced by the words 'as Charles Darwin famously posed...'
I stop short of claiming a 'debunk', because it is conceivable that I have overlooked some obscure but genuine source, perhaps in Darwin's notebooks. Incidentally, while researching this quote, I came across another popular one even less credibly attributed to Darwin: 'We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us'. This sounds like post-Freudian psychobabble, far too late for Darwin, but I haven't looked into it any further.
