Gillian Beer explores Charles Darwin’s private journals to reveal how his fascination with consciousness of all life forms brought about useful methods of inquiry, in a speech yesterday in Tsai Auditorium.

Many associate Darwin with game theory, genes and the survival of the fittest. But, University of Cambridge Professor Emeritus Gillian Beer, spoke last night of a creative and empathetic Darwin who wondered at the inner lives of oysters.
Beer’s talk, entitled “Darwin and the Consciousness of Others,” acknowledged the popular view that Darwin is “the man who banished mind from the universe.”
But, instead of a man who saw only mechanistic natural selection, Beer said that Darwin was preoccupied with similarities of consciousness between creatures. He believed that his greatest discovery was that all animals were kin, and wondered whether an awareness of the continuity of related species could assuage the pain of death.
Humanities Center Director and Professor Homi K. Bhabha called the literary critic a “magnificent archaeologist of the soul of the scientist.”
Beer said that in Darwin’s writings he used imaginative language to achieve a “reverse anthropomorphism” that nurtured empathy between humans and other living beings. For example, he once observed a plant recoiling in “disgust” from a zinc plate.
According to Beer, Darwin used this language because he believed that living creatures were difficult to understand, and acted on more than just instinct.
He believed that oysters and polyps and plants possessed some free will. Beer paraphrased Darwin’s response to a colleague who believed wasps to be mechanical rather than conscious beings: “Good heavens, is it disputed that a wasp has this much intellect?”
Darwin was also intensely interested in the consciousness of other humans, including children and indigenous people. Near the time Darwin wrote about the free will of oysters, he was intrigued by his indigenous companions who attributed free will to a pot that would not boil potatoes in high altitude.
Beer connected Darwin’s imagination and science with fictional narratives, for which he had a “voracious appetite.” Her work has shown both the importance of narratives in Darwin’s scientific writing and the importance of his theory of evolution to Victorian writers.
English Professor Leah Price ’91, who invited Beer to campus, added that Beer’s work has shown that Darwin was an important influence on  Victorian novelists like George Eliot.
English graduate students in attendance were well-versed in Beer’s seminal work, “Darwin’s Plots,” which will soon be republished in its third edition.
“Ever since ‘Darwin’s Plots,’ everyone writes papers on Darwin and ‘Middlemarch,’” said Lesley A. Goodman. “It’s a rite of passage.”
—Staff writer Alex M. McLeese can be reached at amcleese@fas.harvard.edu.