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Frank kept returning to Darwin. His intellectual courage, humility, and kindness drew Frank, the scholar, into Darwin’s life. In the course of his graduate work and forty years of scholarship after, Frank has retraced Darwin’s footsteps on the Galápagos based on the ship’s log of the Beagle and Darwin’s own sketches. He wrote the bestselling book Born to Rebel, which profiles how Darwin’s status as a latter-born child—he was the fifth of six siblings—accounts for his open-minded, polymath, risky, and awe-inspired revolutionary life and thought. He now is revising Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, integrating tens of thousands of new scientific studies. In his spare time Frank spearheads conservation efforts on the Galápagos to limit a goat population, an invasive species disrupting the islands’ ecosystems. Other people’s moral beauty can become a moral compass in our own lives, and for Frank, Darwin is a life-altering person of moral beauty.

Over Indian food, Frank ate sparsely, like the competitive miler he was at Harvard. I asked him about Darwin’s awe.

“Frank, why did Darwin write about ‘astonishment,’ ‘admiration,’ and ‘devotion/reverence’ but not ‘awe’? Was he worried about writing about a religious emotion? Or creating conflict with Emma?”

Frank shakes his head.

“That’s silly. . . . It’s more likely that people didn’t use the word ‘awe’ during the mid-nineteenth century. Try Google Trends and see what you find . . .”

Sure enough, Google Trends finds that the use of the word “awe” has risen dramatically since 1990. Darwin’s use of “admiration,” “reverence,” and “devotion” was simply in keeping with linguistic conventions of the day. This small piece of detective work, though, led Frank to other thinking. He continued.

“But Darwin did experience the chills. One had to do with listening to the organ in King’s College at Cambridge.”

Later that night Frank sent me Darwin’s story of musical chills, which we relied on earlier as a guide to musical awe. He added this passage from Darwin’s autobiography about feeling awe—“a sense of sublimity”—toward painting:

I frequently went to the Fitzwilliam Gallery, and my taste must have been fairly good, for I certainly admired the best pictures, which I discussed with the old curator. . . . This taste, though not natural to me, lasted for several years, and many of the pictures in the National Gallery in London gave me much pleasure; that of Sebastian del Piombo exciting in me a sense of sublimity.

In his office, Frank continued wondering.

“And of course, in the Amazonian rain forest when he spoke of the ‘temple of nature.’ ”

Frank continued.

“And now that I think about it, in his Diaries he writes about waking from a dream in Chiloé, Chile. When he awoke, Darwin was awestruck at intertwined vines on the bank of a river, which would appear in the last sentences from Origins, some of my favorites in all of Darwin’s writings.”

Frank then paused, and in reverential tones that can only be compared to those of a radio personality from the 1940s, quoted those last sentences from On the Origin of Species:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.