Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

The year was 1840 and the young Charles Darwin was puzzling over the meaning of a word,

Mum. That word probably doesn't sound too mysterious now. Many of us use it every time we talk to or about our mothers.

But Darwin was hearing mum in a rather different context. The naturalist's

infant son, William, had started making the sound as a way of asking for food. He used it as an

imperative, shouting, mum, when he was hungry. He also combined it with the new words he was learning,

calling sugar shoe mum and licorish black shoe mum, literally black sugar food.

Since William's birth, Darwin had been taking extensive notes on the boy's development.

He'd recently hit upon his theory of evolution and thought his son might serve as an example of it.

If humans had evolved from simpler life forms, some of that evolution might be echoed in the development of a single infant.

Darwin was particularly interested in the beginning of speech, although as he soon realized, it was hard to pinpoint when exactly speech started at first it was all

instinctive cries but william soon became more cunning turning the noise on and off when he wanted

something he started making different sounds to signal different things he wanted like food or

relief from pain finally he invented his first word, charged with his

own unique meaning, mum. Darwin believed he was watching the story of human evolution,

replayed in miniature. Phases which William passed through in a matter of months might represent

thousands of years of slow progress.

Some of our ancestors might have spent generations communicating at the level of a gurgling, howling infant.

Darwin envisaged ape-like beings mimicking the noises of other animals until these noises became symbols for their first dim ideas.

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