Dedicated to Rita for ME/CFS Awareness Day

I am, in nursing fits and starts, rereading The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (copyright 1994). I first read it in 2003. It was a pivotal book for me. It nudged me. 

   The author uses a biographical conceit: he looks at the ol' New Science via the life and times of Charles Darwin.

Darwin suffered from terrible illness as an adult. Darwin often lamented 'how much was lost to [his] illness'. He was "slowed by frequent illness ‒ violent shivering and vomiting attacks, gastric pain and epic flatulence, faintness, heart palpitations" [229]. I wondered (based on more evidence than this quote ;) if he had ... well, to modernize it crudely, if he had ME/CFS. 

Many have wondered, and many have speculated about, why he took so long to publish his IDEA (i.e., natural selection). (It's well established that he worked out natural selection years and years before giving others an inkling.) It's a mystery that calls not for solution.

   But investigation ‒ !

   There's the barnacles theory ... the hostile social climate theory ... the illness theory. Some speculators imply that Darwin was sick in order to hide, or as a result of hiding, his theory. (Probably most Mysteriously Chronically Ill people are familiar with this train of thought.)

"Given all this ‒ a secure workplace, the faint sound of the grim reaper's footsteps, and completion, at last, of all scholarly obligations from the Beagle expedition ‒ given all this, what cause could there possible be to further postpone the writing of Darwin's book on natural selection?

   "In a word: barnacles." [231] Barnacles: red herring; barnacles: white elephant; barnacles: decoy duck.

   [. . .]

   "Some people accept that Darwin had a bona fide disease, probably contracted in South America (perhaps Chagas' disease or chronic fatigue syndrome), but say he used barnacles to subconsciously forestall the day or reckoning." [233] Well! There you have it. Interesting. In 1994, Wright refers to CFS as a bona fide disease. 

Billions and billions of blistering blue!