Free The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder Page B

his method for decrypting the Vigenère cipher a secret. In the absence of further evidence, the question of Babbage’s involvement with the British Secret Service during the Crimean War will remain, as one historian has put it, “Mr. Babbage’s Secret.” If Babbage did put his considerable skills in statistics to the service of the state, and the public good, by providing a means to end the Crimean War sooner, he was at last, in his sixties, returning to one of the original aims of the Philosophical Breakfast Club.
    W HILE B ABBAGE WAS busy breaking the “unbreakable cipher,” Charles Darwin was still hard at work attempting to decipher the “mystery ofmysteries,” as Herschel had called it, the origin of new species. In 1837 and 1838—after attending Babbage’s soirées, and reading Malthus’s
Essay on the Principle of Population
—Darwin had reached the conclusion that species change, that one species, over time, transforms or transmutes into another. Darwin had therefore rejected the “special creation” of species, the belief that God had intervened in the natural world to create every species, each one remaining the same for all time until (as was clearly the case for some) it died out, becoming extinct. Darwin had already described his theory and his main arguments for it in a short sketch of his view that ran to thirty-five pages, written in 1842, and in a longer essay, written in 1844, neither of which he published. He would continue to refine his theory, and collect evidence for it, for another fifteen years before he would disclose it to the world. 36
    In the 1844 essay he began, as he would in the larger book, with the topic of variation among domestic animals. Individual sheep, dogs, and pigeons are born with slight differences or variations in size, color, and other characteristics. Because some of these variations are inherited, breeders are able to choose or “select” traits they wish to perpetuate or amplify by carefully pairing animals together. For example, dogs with a particularly good sense of smell could be bred together, and soon one would have a prime pack of hunting dogs. Darwin chose his examples well: he knew that his readers would be familiar with examples of domestic variation, either from experience on farms, or from knowledge of the very popular hobbies of pigeon and dog breeding.
    Variation exists among non-domesticated organisms in nature as well, Darwin argued further. Some of these variations, too, are inheritable. Darwin’s reading of Malthus had led him to realize that overpopulation relative to resources was a problem not only for human populations, but also for animal and plant species. Malthus had argued that populations increase geometrically over generations, but their food supply does not. Darwin saw that Malthus was correct at least in suggesting that there was a kind of natural struggle—what he would later term a “struggle for existence”—among individuals of a species, and between different species, competing over existing resources. Individuals more successful at using those resources because of a “variation” lacking in other members of the population would live longer and thus be more likely to produce greater numbers of offspring, many of which would inherit the helpful variation. Wolves that could run faster would be more likely to catch preyfirst and thus be more likely to survive in an environment with diminishing numbers of edible animals relative to the growing wolf population. Their offspring would tend to run faster as well, until over many generations the whole species of wolves had been transmuted into a faster species. This was a kind of “natural selection,” analogous to the artificial selection of the farmer or the breeder. In this way, new species are created—and are created so as to be best suited for their environments. Darwin thus presented an alternative option to explain the fitness of species to their environments, one that