Roy Porter on the origins of Charles Darwin's particular species of genius.
Looking back on his brilliant career, Charles Darwin wrote in 187l:
I have been speculating... what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things, and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever – much cleverer than the discoverers – never originate anything.
Darwin did, of course, originate something – the Origin of Species – and was a supreme discoverer of undiscovered things. But whether Darwin was also clever has been debated ever since Darwin, or rather ever since Robert Waring Darwin, his father; for Charles confessed in his Autobiography that
I was considered... by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep mortification my father once said to me, 'You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.
In the century since Darwin's death, intelligence and creativity have become as sacred to our society as blood and pedigrees were to Habsburg Spain; discovering the ....
