“I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at
“I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.”
In his 1986 speech at the commencement of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles (found in Poor Charlie's Almanack) Charlie Munger gave a short Johnny Carson-like speech on the things to avoid to end up with a happy and successful life. One of his most salient prescriptions comes from the life of Charles Darwin:
It is my opinion, as a certified biography nut, that Charles Robert Darwin would have ranked in the middle of the Harvard School graduating class if 1986. Yet he is now famous in the history of science. This is precisely the type of example you should learn nothing from if bent on minimizing your results from your own endowment.
Darwin's result was due in large measure to his working method, which violated all my rules for misery and particularly emphasized a backward twist in that he always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had. In contrast, most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: “You couldn't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn.”
The life of Darwin demonstrates how a turtle may outrun a hare, aided by extreme objectivity, which helps the objective person end up like the only player without a blindfold in a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
The great Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson agreed. In his book, Letters to a Young Scientist, Wilson argued that Darwin would have probably scored in the 130 range on a standard IQ test. And yet there he is, buried next to the calculus-inventing genius Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. (As Munger often notes.)
What can we learn from the working and thinking habits of Darwin?
Extreme Focus Combined with Attentive Energy
The first clue comes from his own autobiography. Darwin was a hoover of information related to a topic he was interested in. After describing some of his specific areas of study while aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin concludes in his Autobiography:
The above various special studies were, however, of no importance compared with the habit of energetic industry and of concentrated attention to whatever I was engaged in, which I then acquired. Everything about which I thought or read was made to bear directly on what I had seen and was likely to see; and this habit of mind was continued during the five years of the voyage. I feel sure that it was this training which has enabled me to do whatever I have done in science.
This habit of pure and attentive focus to the task at hand is, of course, echoed in many of our favorite thinkers, from Sherlock Holmes, to E.O. Wilson, Feynman, Einstein, and others. Munger himself remarked that “I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”
In Darwin's quest, there was almost nothing relevant to his task at hand — the problem of understanding the origin and development of species — which might have escaped his attention. He had an extremely broad antenna. Says David Quammen in his fabulous The Reluctant Mr. Darwin:
One of Darwin's great strengths as a scientist was also, in some ways, a disadvantage: his extraordinary breadth of curiosity. From his study at Down House he ranged widely and greedily, in his constant search for data, across distances (by letter) and scientific fields. He read eclectically and kept notes like a pack rat. Over the years he collected an enormous quantity of interconnected facts. He looked for patterns but was intrigued equally by exceptions to the patterns, and exceptions to the exceptions. He tested his ideas against complicated groups of organisms with complicated stories, such as the barnacles, the orchids, the social insects, the primroses, and the hominids.
Not only was Darwin thinking broadly, taking in facts at all turns and on many subjects, but he was thinking carefully, This is where Munger's admiration comes in: Darwin wanted to look at the exceptions. The exceptions to the exceptions. He was on the hunt for truth and not necessarily to confirm some highly-loved idea. Simply put, he didn't want to be wrong about the nature of reality. To get the theory whole and correct would take lots of detail and time, as we will see.
The habit of study and observation didn't stop at the plant and animal kingdom for Darwin. In a move that might seem strange by today's standards, Darwin even opened a notebook to study the development of his own newborn son, William. This is from one of his notebooks:
Natural History of Babies
Do babies start (i.e., useless sudden movement of muscles) very early in life. Do they wink, when anything placed before their eyes, very young, before experience can have taught them to avoid danger. Do they know frown when they first see it?
From there, as his