Charles Darwin

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Biography

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) was the English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection, set out in On the Origin of Species (1859), transformed biology and, eventually, every discipline that touches living systems. After five years aboard HMS Beagle and two decades of painstaking evidence-gathering, he published only when Alfred Russel Wallace's independent arrival at the same theory forced his hand. He spent the rest of his life extending and defending the work.

Darwin matters to Munger not primarily as a biologist but as a method. Darwin was, by his own account, not a quick or dazzling thinker; he was a thorough one. His genius was procedural: he noticed what others overlooked, he followed anomalies wherever they led, and — most importantly for Munger — he built systematic defenses against his own tendency to believe what he wanted to believe. Whenever he encountered a fact that contradicted a cherished theory, he wrote it down immediately, knowing from experience that his mind would otherwise quietly discard it.

Munger, "a certified biography nut," used Darwin's life as proof that method can outrun raw intellect. "It is my opinion," he told the Harvard School graduating class of 1986, "that Charles Robert Darwin would have ranked near the middle of the Harvard School graduating class of 1986. Yet he is now famous in the history of science." The turtle, in Munger's phrase, outran the hares — and the turtle's secret was extreme objectivity.

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Key Stories

The disconfirmation habit. Munger's canonical Darwin passage appears in the 1995 Psychology of Human Misjudgment: "One of the most successful users of an antidote to first conclusion bias was Charles Darwin. He trained himself, early, to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one." The more Darwin loved a hypothesis, the harder he attacked it. In Munger's catalog of the standard causes of human misjudgment, this is the master antidote to confirmation bias — discovered and systematized by a Victorian naturalist a century before psychologists named the disease.

The tomb next to Newton. At Stanford in 1996, Munger made the point as a promise to his audience: "Almost everyone in this room has a higher IQ than Darwin. Yet, Darwin's body now lies right next to Newton in Westminster Abbey." Part of Darwin's secret was doggedness, part extreme curiosity, and part immense objectivity — and "what a diligent, objective curiosity will do for you in this life to elevate you above your intellectual betters — is a lot." For Munger this is the single most hopeful fact in the history of thought: disciplined method is available to everyone, and it compounds.

The backward thinker. Munger repeatedly folded Darwin into his inversion doctrine. Darwin "spent much of his long life thinking in reverse as he tried to disprove his own hardest-won and best-loved ideas" — the same backward twist Munger celebrated in Jacobi. In the 1986 commencement address, Darwin's working method was exhibit one in the case that great results come from violating the standard rules of self-comfort: he "always gave priority attention to evidence tending to disconfirm whatever cherished and hard-won theory he already had."

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Impact on Munger's Work

Darwin's first impact on Munger was methodological. The disconfirmation protocol — write down immediately any evidence against your own theory, and grant such evidence priority attention — became Munger's personal operating rule and one of his most repeated prescriptions. He returned to it at the 2007 USC Law commencement ("Darwin paid special attention to disconfirming evidence particularly to disconfirm something he believed and loved") and built it into his argument that objectivity-maintenance routines are as necessary to an investor as to a naturalist.

The second impact was substantive. Darwinian thinking supplied several of the mental models in Munger's latticework: businesses as organisms in an economic ecosystem, competitive niches, and the survival dynamics of adaptation. In the 1994 USC lecture Munger argued explicitly that an economy "is a lot like an ecosystem," with many of the same results — and noted that the idea had been made unfashionable by the robber barons' misuse of "survival of the fittest," not by any defect in the model itself. Late in life he went back and filled in modern Darwinism with the aid of Dawkins, calling the modern synthesis "so awesomely beautiful and so awesomely right."

The third impact was aspirational. Darwin was Munger's standing proof that the game of clear thinking is winnable by ordinary mortals with extraordinary discipline. "Tendency is not destiny," Munger argued — Ben Franklin trained himself out of his faults, "and Darwin did it. He trained himself out of first conclusion bias — which is an automatic tendency of the human mind." That sentence is the entire self-improvement program of the Munger philosophy in miniature, with Darwin as its patron saint.

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Key Passages From Munger's Speeches and Letters

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Referenced In

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Source: Charlie Munger Knowledge Base — Munger speeches, Wesco Financial annual letters, DJCO annual meeting transcripts