Origin of Species in Dub: The Video Mix

Track 8: Dub fi Annie

Track 8 Dub fi Annie

Rationale for the track

Charles Darwin’s daughter Annie died at the age of ten. She died in Great Malvern, Worcestershire—an inland resort and spa town perched on the side of the Malvern Hills. This event had a deep emotional effect on Darwin, explored by Darwin's great-great-grandson, Randal Keynes in his book, Annie’s Box (as an aside: Randall's son and Charles Darwin's great-great-great grandson, Skandar Keynes is the actor that plays Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).

Here, we follow Keynes in exploring the potential effect of Darwin's daughter's death on his evolutionary thinking. In particular, we explore the way in which Darwin attempts to create an evolutionary justification for suffering and death—an evolutionary theodicy—towards the end of the Origin. We begin with a religious passage, moving through Darwin’s words from the closing passage of Origin of Species, via Dawkins’ bleak outlook and then Lincoln’s Gettysburg address to some humanistic passages, that celebrate the “most exulted object we are capable of conceiving”. In the Origin, Darwin defines this object as “the higher animals”. However, in this interpretation, we assume that what he really had in mind was “humanity”, but avoided saying so to avoid scandalizing his readers. As Keynes points out, the closing passage from the Origin seems particularly poignant when read as an attempt to justify Annie’s death.

Melody taken from “Massa’s in the cold cold ground” by Stephen Collins Foster.

Lyrics with notes

“I and I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” Rastafarian version of opening words of Psalm 121, known locally in Malvern as “the Malvern psalm”. The opening passage in Latin is the motto of Malvern Town Council (crest shown) and features in the large mural in Malvern Link. A quotation from later in the same psalm forms the opening words of Bob Marley’s track Night Shift from the album Rastaman Vibration “The sun shall not smite I by day, Nor the moon by night”. “Anne Elizabeth Darwin, a dear and a good child.” Inscription on Anne Darwin’s gravestone in the graveyard of Malvern Priory, Great Malvern, Worcestershire.

“Our poor child, Annie, was born in Gower Street on March 2nd 1841 and expired at Malvern at Midday on the 23rd of April 1851. From whatever point I look back at her, the main feature in her disposition, which at once rises before me, [is] her buoyant joyousness... We have lost the joy of the household and the solace of our old age: she must have known how we loved her; oh that she could know how deeply, how tenderly we do still and shall ever lover her dear joyous face.”
Excerpts from a memoir of Annie Darwin, written on April 30th 1851, by Charles Darwin, a week after her death, cited in Randall Keynes’s Annie’s Box.

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”
Richard Dawkins in River out of Eden, A Darwinian View of Life, 1995

"We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."
Abraham Lincoln, Gettsyburg Address. As Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, Lincoln and Darwin were born on the very same day: Feb 12th 1809.

“What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”
Hamlet, William Shakespeare

“Presume not God to scan; the proper study of Mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great.”
Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

Notes on the Video

Image of Malvern Hills. Then images of Annie Darwin and her grave in Malvern. Images of Gower street, Malvern, the house in which she died (Montreal House on the Worcester Road in Great Malvern). Images of the Boxing Day Tsuanami of 2004 (the modern equivalent of the Lisbon Earthquake in terms of theodicy) Then of Battle of Gettysburg and of Lincoln Memorial. Paintings by Stubbs and Bosch. Image of Tom Pallen as neonate. Vitruvian man by Da Vinci. Michelangelo’s David. Images from Da vinci notebooks; Nasa images; Mark Pallen with newborn Emma Pallen; Plaque from Pioneer 10.