Darwin as a Role Model for Aging | Telliamed Revisited

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August 14, 2026 · 10:22 am

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Darwin as a Role Model for Aging

I turned 70 years old yesterday. I woke up a bit earlier than usual, and so at 7 AM I set out on a 7-kilometer run. I’m slower than when I was younger, of course, but happy to be alive and reasonably fit. As one of my grandfathers liked to say, “I’m in right good shape for the shape that I’m in.” But I’m also increasingly cognizant of the declining time I have remaining, which reminds me that I still need to get some things done, like writing a book or two.

It’s often said that most scientists do their best work when they are young, and that might be a good rule of thumb. But some people get a lot done in their later years. To mention a favorite example, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species when he was already 50 years old. Moreover, that 500-page masterpiece was a mere abstract of the book that he had intended to write if he hadn’t been rushed to publish by Wallace’s independent discovery of natural selection. In the Introduction to The Origin, Darwin wrote:

My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species … This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy … I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will suffice. No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this.

And true to his word, Darwin plowed ahead. He wrote another 10 books that were published between 1862, when he was 53 years old, and 1881, a few months before his death at the age of 73. That total does not include revisions that led to several later editions of The Origin. His later books include work on the various adaptations of plants: three on the means by which plants attract pollinators and reproduce (1862, 1876, 1877), two on the movement of plants as they climb and track the sun (1875, 1880), and one on carnivorous plants like the Venus flytrap (1875). Some of these books report new findings from experiments that Darwin performed at Down House, including studies on how plants manage to bend toward the light as they grow, and on the effects of outcrossing versus self-fertilization on their fitness.

Among Darwin’s other books is a massive two-volume tome on The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), in which he compiled and interpreted the evidence that he gathered from his many correspondents concerning the influence of heredity on all sorts of organismal traits. While that evidence clearly supported the role of heredity in evolution, alas, Darwin’s own theories concerning the mechanism of heredity did not stand the test of time. It took the rediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s previously ignored experiments with pea plants, along with new studies of chromosomes and flies by Walter Sutton and Thomas Hunt Morgan, for the modern understanding of genetic inheritance to begin to take form.

Two of Darwin’s other books focused on humans—a topic that he neglected in The Origin, presumably to avoid a sensitive topic that wasn’t necessary for understanding his broader findings and theories. The Descent of Man (1871) introduced the idea of sexual selection, whereby by traits that might seem to hinder an organism’s survival, such as the tail of a male peacock, could evolve if they gave the individual an advantage in attracting or competing for mates. My own favorite among Darwin’s later works is The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), in which he presented evidence that people are not so unique among animals, even when it comes to our most human feelings and behaviors.

Darwin’s final book was on earthworms (1881) and how their activities recycle vegetation, thereby contributing to the formation of soils, something he had studied decades earlier. Despite the lowly subject, the book proved to be a surprising best-seller by the standards of the day. In her engaging two-volume biography of Darwin (2002), Janet Browne speculated that he might even have returned to the study of earthworms in anticipation of soon joining them in the local church’s graveyard.

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