Two
hundred and eight years ago this day, Charles Darwin was born. The vision of
life that he created and expounded on transformed humanity's perception of its
place in the universe. After Copernicus's great heliocentric discovery, it was
Darwin's exposition of evolution and natural selection that usurped human
beings from their favored place at the center of the universe. But far from
trivializing them, it taught them about the vastness and value of life,
underscored the great web of interactions that they are a part of, and
reinforced their place as both actor and spectator in the grand game of the
cosmos. Not only as a guiding scientific principle but as an all-encompassing
element of understanding our place in the world, evolution through natural
selection has become the dominant
idea of our time. As the eminent biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it quite
simply, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory that is now as good as a fact.
Both evolution and natural selection happen. And both of them owe their exalted
place in our consciousness to a quiet, gentle and brilliant Englishman.
Today
it is gratifying and redeeming to know how right Darwin was and how much his
theory has been built upon, and frustrating to keep on realizing how those
professing religious certainty threaten to undermine the value of his and
others' careful and patient discoveries. Especially in the United States
evolution has become a bizarre battleground of extreme opinions and
mudslinging, a development that seems to be in step with the tradition of
coloring any and every issue with a political hue. In this country, it seems
today that you can hardly utter an opinion without attaching a label to it. You
cannot simply have an opinion or take a position, no matter how grounded in
fact it is; your position has to be Republican, Democrat, Libertarian,
Neo-Conservative, Socialist or Atheist. If none of these, it has to be Centrist
then.
When
it comes to evolution, attaching the label of "Darwinism" has
obscured the importance and power of the theory of natural selection. On one
hand, those who defend the label sometimes make it sound as if Darwin was the
beginning and end of everything to do with evolution. This is simply untrue; in
his creation of the theory of natural selection, Darwin was a little like
Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights movement owed an incalculable debt to
King, but King was not the Civil Rights movement. On the other hand, those who
oppose the Darwinist label make it sound like all of us who "believe"
in evolution and natural selection have formed a cult and get together every
weekend to worship some Darwin idol.
Unfortunately
both these positions only serve to obfuscate the life and times of the man
himself, a simple, gentle and brilliant soul who painfully struggled with
reconciling his view of the world with prevailing religious sentiments and who
thought it right to cast his religious views aside in the end for the simple
reason that his findings agreed with the evidence while the others did not.
Darwin Day should be a chance to celebrate the life of this remarkable
individual, free from the burdens of religion and political context that his
theory is embroiled in today. Because so much has been said and written about
Darwin already, this will be more of a personal and selective exposition. Since
I am a lover of both Darwin and books, I will tell my short story of Darwin as
I discovered him through books.
When
you read about his life for the first time, Charles Darwin does not evoke the
label of "genius", and this superficial incongruence continues to
beguile and amaze. His famous later photographs show a bearded face with deeply
set eyes. His look is gloomy and boring and is not one which elicits the image
of a sparkling, world-changing intellect and incendiary revolutionary taking on
an establishment steeped in dogma. Darwin was not a prodigy by the standards of
his English contemporaries William Hamilton or Lord Kelvin, nor did he
particularly excel in school and college. He went to Cambridge, of course, but
most well educated Englishmen went to Cambridge or Oxford. At Cambridge,
although he studied religion, Darwin had one overriding quality: curiosity
about the natural world. He consummately nurtured this quality in field trips
and excursions; as one famous story goes, Darwin once held two beetles in two
hands and popped one of them in his mouth so that he could free one hand for
catching a third very attractive one which he had just noticed. He indulged in
these interests much to the chagrin of his father who once said that he would
not amount to anything and that he would be a disgrace to his family.
As
is well-known, Darwin's story really begins with his voyage of the Beagle when
he accepted a position on a ship whose melancholic, manic-depressive captain
Robert Fitzroy wanted an educated, cultured man to keep him company on a long
and dangerous voyage that circumnavigated the world. For Darwin this was a
golden chance to observe and document the world's flora and fauna. One of the
best illustrated expositions of Darwin's voyage is in Alan Moorhead's "The Voyage of the Beagle" which is beautifully illustrated with
original drawings of the wondrous plants, animals and geological formations
that Darwin saw on the voyage. Darwin's own account of the voyage is
characteristically detailed and modest and depicts a man enthralled by the
beauty of the natural world around him. By the time he set off on his historic
journey, young Charles had already been inspired by his teacher Charles Lyell's
book on geology that talked about geological changes over vast tracts of time:
in time, “Principles of Geology” would become a seminal text and a touchstone
of the Great Books program. As is also rather well known, evolutionary ideas
had been in the air for quite some time by then (as marvelously documented in
Rebecca Stott's recent book "Darwin's Ghosts", which traces
evolutionary thinking back to Aristotle and even before), and Darwin certainly
was not the first to note the rather simple fact that organisms seem to have
changed over time, a view that nonetheless and naturally flew in the face of
religious dogma. Most importantly, Darwin was well aware of Thomas Malthus's
famous argument about the proliferation of species exceeding the resources
available to them, an idea whose logical extension would be to conjecture a
kind of competition between species and individuals for finite resources. The
"struggle for survival", taught today in school textbooks, a phrase
that became much maligned later, nonetheless would have been obvious to a man
as intelligent and perceptive as Darwin when he set off on his voyage.
Biology,
unlike mathematics or physics, is a science more akin to astronomy that relies
on extensive tabulation and observation. Unlike a theoretical physicist, a
biologist would be hard-pressed to divine truths about the world by armchair
speculation. Thus, painstakingly collecting and classifying natural flora and
fauna and making sense of its similarities and differences is a sine
qua non of the
biological sciences. Fortunately Darwin was the right man in the right place;
endowed with a naturally curious mind with an excellent memory for assimilation
and integration, he was also unique and fortunate to embark on a worldwide
voyage that would enable him to put his outstanding faculties to optimum use.
Everywhere he went he recorded meticulous details of geology, biology, anthropology
and culture. His observation of earthquakes and rock formations in South
America and his finding of fossils of giant mammals lend credence to his
beliefs about organisms being born and getting extinguished by sometimes
violent physical and planetary change. His observation of the Pacific and
Atlantic islanders (especially the ones on Tierra del Fuego) and their peculiar customs
underscored the diversity of human life along with other life in his mind. But
perhaps his best known and most important stop came after several months of
traveling, when the ship left Ecuador to dock at the Galapagos Islands.
Again,
much has been written about the Galapagos Islands and about Darwin's Finches
(most notably by Jonathan Weiner in his “The Beak of the Finch”). The truth is
subtler, both simpler and more interesting than what it is made out to be.
Darwin had mistaken his famous finches for other species of birds. It was only
after coming back that his friend, the ornithologist John Gould, helped him to
identify their correct lineage. But finches or not, the birds and the islands
provided Darwin with a unique opportunity to study what we now know as natural
selection. The islands were separated from each other by relatively small
distances and yet differed significantly in their geography and flora and
fauna. On each island Darwin observed similar plants and animals that were yet
distinct from each other. As in other places, he also observed that species
seemed to be adapted to their environment. Geographic isolation and speciation
were prominent on those hot, sweaty and incredibly diverse landmasses.
After
five years of exhaustive documentation and sailing Darwin finally returned home
for good, much changed both in physical appearance and belief. His life
following the voyage has been the subject of much psychological speculation
since he settled down with his cousin Emma and never ever left the British Isles
again. He also seemed to have been stricken with what today is noted by many
authors as a kind of psychosomatic illness because of which he was constantly
ill with abdominal and other kinds of pains. After living in London for some
time, Darwin retired to Down's House in Kent where he peacefully lived the rest
of his life with a kind and loving wife, playing with his children, taking
walks along the path at the back of his house named the "Sandwalk",
corresponding with intellectuals around the world and constantly interrupting
his research with salutary visits to spas and resorts for "natural"
treatments that were often of dubious value.
But
peaceful as his life was, psychologically Charles Darwin was fomenting a
maelstrom of revolution that was to have earth-shaking implications. Another
fact that is frequently emphasized in contemporary discourse is his hesitation
to not publish his ideas for another twenty-five years. Darwin was planning to
write it for a while, but was finally jolted into writing it when he received a
letter from an obscure young naturalist named Alfred Russell Wallace who was
living a hard life of science and natural history exploration in Indonesia.
Wallace had read some of Mr. Darwin's papers and manuscripts and had been
struck by the similarity of his ideas to his own. Would Mr. Darwin comment on
them? Darwin finally realized that he had to act to prevent getting scooped but
characteristically credited Wallace in his published work.
In
my mind however, Darwin's procrastination and its story sounds much simpler
than the mystique and psychological speculation that sometimes envelop it. As
we noted earlier, Darwin was a highly trained biologist and scientist of the
first caliber. He knew that he would have to exhaustively document and classify
the windfall of creatures, plant and rock specimens that he had collected on
his voyage. Apart from thinking and writing about his Beagle collections,
Darwin also maintained an astonishingly comprehensive and detailed research
program on marine invertebrates and barnacles. More tellingly, he did
experiments to find out if seeds are viable even when dispersed over long
distances over salt-water. He visited gardens and zoos, and quizzed pigeon
breeders about their profession. Much of this was in preparation for the grand
act that was to follow. In case of the barnacles and marine creatures, Darwin's
research was second to none. He published several extremely detailed books on
the minutiae of these organisms; some of these had titles which would have put anyone
to sleep.
And
yet the level of detail in them reflects the extraordinary patience, power of
observation and meticulous hard work that characterized the man,
characteristics crucial for developing the theory of natural selection. Darwin
was also very fortunate to have had several friends and colleagues who were
experts in areas that he was not, who helped him classify and name all the
material. Foremost among his correspondents were Charles Lyell and Joseph
Hooker to whom he confided not just his scientific questions but also his
emerging convictions about the interconnections and implications that were
emerging from his research and writing. Also as noted above, John Gould
accomplished the crucial task of reminding Darwin that his Galapagos birds were
finches. With help from these collaborators and his own studies and thoughts on
his observations, thoughts that filled literally dozens of rough drafts,
scribblings and private diaries, Darwin finally began to glimpse the formation
of a revolutionary chain of thought in his mind.
But
Darwin did not rush forth to announce his ideas to the world, again for reasons
that are obvious; Victorian England was a hotbed of controversy between science
and religion, with many distinguished and famous scientists there and in other
countries not just fervently believing in God, but writing elegant tomes that
sought a supernatural explanation for the astounding diversity of life around
us. Cambridge was filled with intellectuals who sought a rational framework for
God's intervention. Darwin would have been quite aware of these controversies.
Even though Darwin's grandfather (a more pugnacious character) himself had once
propounded an evolutionary view, Darwin was finely attuned to the sensitive
religious and social debate around him. Not only did he not want to upset this
delicate intellectual and spiritual balance and get labeled as a crackpot, but
he himself had not started his voyage as a complete non-believer. One can
imagine the torment that he must have faced in those early days, when the
evidence pointed to facts that flew in the face of deeply held or familiar
religious beliefs. One of the factors that dispossessed Darwin of his religious
beliefs was the stark contradiction between the observation of a cruel and ruthless
race for survival that he had often witnessed first hand, and the image of an
all-knowing and benign God who kindly reigned over his creations. As the
evidence grew to suggest relationships between species and their evolution by
the forces of natural selection that preserved beneficial characteristics,
Darwin could no longer sustain two diametrically opposite viewpoints in his
mind.
Opponents
of evolution who want to battle the paradigm not from a scientific viewpoint
(because they can't) but from a political one frequently raise a smokescreen
and proclaim that evolution itself is too complex to be understood. The
tricksters who propagate intelligent design further attest to the biochemical
complexity of life and then simply give up and say that only an omniscient God
(admittedly more complex than the systems whose complexity they are
questioning) could have created such intricate beauty. The concept of a
struggle for survival has also been hijacked by these armies of God who
proclaim that it is this philosophy that would make evolution responsible for
genocide, fascism and the worst excesses of humanity. This is a deeply hurtful
insult to natural selection and evolution as only the most dogmatic believers
can deliver.
One
thing that constantly amazes you about evolution is its sheer simplicity.
Stripped down to its essentials, the "theory" of evolution can be
understood by any school child.
1.
Organisms and species are ruthlessly engaged in a constant struggle
for survival in which
they compete for finite resources in a changing environment.
2.
In this struggle, those individuals who are more adapted to the environment, no
matter how slightly, win over other less adapted individuals and
produce more offspring.
3.
Since the slight adaptations are passed down to the offspring, the offspring
are guaranteed to
preserve these features and therefore are in a position to survive and multiply
more fruitfully.
4.
Such constant advantageous adaptive changes gradually build up and, aided by
geological and geographical factors, lead to the emergence of new
species.
It's
almost like a simple three-step recipe that when followed keeps on churning out
culinary wonders of staggering complexity and elegance. In my mind the beauty
of evolution and natural selection is two-fold; firstly, as Darwin emphasized,
the slightest adaptation leads to a reproductive
advantage. Such slight adaptations are often subtle and therefore sometimes can
sow confusion regarding their existence; notice the debate between driver and
passenger mutations in fields ranging from evolutionary biology to oncology.
But the confusion should be ameliorated by the second even more striking fact;
that once a slight adaptation exists, it is guaranteed to
be passed on to the offspring.
As
Gregor Mendel hammered the mechanism for natural selection in place a few years
after Darwin with his discovery of genetic inheritance, it became clear that
not every one of the offspring may acquire the adaptation. The exact pattern
may be complex. But even if some of the offspring acquire it, the adaptation is
then guaranteed to confer reproductive fitness and will be passed on. This fact
should demolish a belief that even serious students of evolution, and certainly
laymen, have in the beginning; that there is something very uncertain about
evolution, that it depends too much on "chance". The key to
circumvent these misgivings is to realize the above fact, that while
adaptations (later attributed to mutations) may arise by chance, once they
arise, their proliferation into future generations is virtually certain.
Natural selection will ensure it. That in my mind is perhaps Darwin's greatest
achievement; he finally found a mechanism for evolution that guarantees its
existence and progress. As for the struggle for survival, it certainly does not
mean that it results in non-cooperation and purging of other individuals. As
examples in the living world now document more than convincingly, the best
reproductive fitness can indeed come about through altruistic leanings and cooperative
behavior.
Every
one of these factors and facts was detailed and explained by Darwin in
"The Origin of Species", one of the very few original works of
science which remain accessible to the layman and which contained truths that
have not needed to be modified in their basic essence even after a hundred and
fifty years. It was readable even when I picked it up as a callow young college
student. No one who approaches it with an open mind can fail to be taken with
its simplicity, elegance and beauty. One of the most extraordinary things about
Darwin and something that continues to stupefy is how right the man was even
when he lacked almost all the modern tools that have since reinforced basic
evolutionary ideas. As one of Darwin's intellectual descendants, the biologist
E O Wilson says, it is frustrating for a modern biologist to discover an
evolutionary idea through his work, and then go back a hundred and fifty years
and discover that the great man had hinted at it in his book.
And
yet as Darwin himself would have acknowledged, there is much in the book that
needed to be modified, there was much that he could not explain. Darwin had no
inkling of genes and molecular biology, nor could he come up with a convincing
mechanism that explained the sheer age of the earth required for evolutionary
processes to work their charm (the mechanism was found later with the discovery
of radioactivity). The exact mechanism of passing on adapted characteristics
was unknown. Major fossils of primates and humanoid ancestors had yet to be
discovered. Quite importantly, random genetic
drift which is
completely different from natural selection was later discovered as another
process operating in evolution. The development of viral and bacterial
resistance in causing diseases like AIDS finally brought evolution to the
discomfort of the masses. It was only through the work of several evolutionary
biologists and geneticists that Darwin finally became seamlessly integrated with
the understanding of life in the middle twentieth century. Genomics has now
proven beyond a shade of doubt that we truly are one with the biosphere. But in
the absence of all these developments, it is perhaps even more remarkable how
many of Darwin's ideas still ring true.
There
is another factor that shines through in "The Origin"; Darwin's
remarkable modesty. One would have to search very hard in history to find a
scientist who was both as great and as modest. Newton may yet be the greatest
scientist in history, but he was nothing if not a petty, bitter and difficult
man. Darwin in contrast was a symbol of kindly disposition. He doted on his
children and told them stories. He loved and respected his wife even though
their religious views gradually grew more distanced. His written correspondence
with her was voluminous and fond. His correspondence with his collaborators,
even those who disagreed, was cordial and decent. Never one for contentious
public debates, he let his "bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley fight his
battles; one of them with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce ended in a famous showdown
when the Bishop inquired whether it was through his father or mother that
Huxley had descended from an ape, and Huxley countered that he would rather
descend from an ape than from the Bishop. Darwin stayed away from these
entertaining confrontations; as far as he was concerned, his magisterial work
was done and he had no need for public glory. To the end of his life this kind
and gentle man remained a wellspring of modest and unassuming wonder. His
sympathetic, humane and sweet personality continues to delight, amaze and
inspire reverence to this day.
In
the later stages of his life Darwin became what he himself labeled as an
agnostic but what we today would probably call an atheist. His research into
the progression of life and the ruthless struggle that it engenders made it
impossible for him to justify a belief in a paternal and loving deity. He was
also disillusioned by popular conceptions of hell as a place where non-believers
go; Darwin's father was a non-believer and yet a good doctor who treated and
helped hundreds of human beings. Darwin simply could not accept that a man as
kind as his father would go to hell simply for not believing in a version of
morality, creation and life trotted out in a holy book. Probably the last straw
that convinced Darwin of the absurdity of blind faith was the untimely death of
his young daughter Annie who was his favorite among all the children. According
to some accounts, after this happened, Darwin stopped even his cursory Sunday
trips to church and was satisfied to take a walk around it while not at all
minding his wife and children's desire to worship inside.
The
second fact is also in tune with Darwin's kind disposition; he admittedly had
no problem reconciling the personal beliefs of other people with his conviction
about their falsity. Darwin's tolerance of people's personal faith and his
unwillingness to let his own work interfere in his personal life and
friendships is instructive; to the end he supported his local parish and was
close friends with a cleric, the Reverend John Innes. Darwin's example should
keep reminding us that it is actually possible to sustain close human bonds
while having radically different beliefs, even when one of these is distinctly
true while the other one is fantasy. Nurturing these close bonds with radical
scientific ideas that would change the world for ever, Charles Darwin died on
April 19, 1882, a content and intellectually satisfied man.
To
follow, nourish and sustain his legacy is our responsibility. In the end,
evolution and Darwin are not only about scientific discovery and practical
tools arising from them, but about a quest to understand who we are. Religions
try to do this too, but they seem to be satisfied with explanations for which
there is no palpable evidence and which seem to be often contradictory and
divisive. It is far better to imbibe ourselves with explanations that come from
ceaseless exploration and constant struggle; the very means that constitute
these explorations are then much more alluring and quietly fulfilling than any
number of divergent fantasies that can only promise false comfort. And these
means promise us a far more humbling and yet grand picture of our place in this
world. Especially in today's age when the forces of unreason threaten to
undermine the importance of the beautiful simplicity in the fabric of life that
Darwin and his descendants have unearthed, we owe it to Charles Darwin to
continue to be amazed at the delightful wonder of the cosmos and life. We owe
it to the countless shapes and forms of life around us with whom we form a
profoundly deep and unspoken connection. And we owe it to each other and our
children and grandchildren to keep rationality, constructive skepticism,
freedom and questioning alive.
LITERATURE
ON DARWIN:
I
don't often write about Darwin and evolution here for a simple reason; there is
literally an army of truly excellent authors and bloggers who pen eloquent
thoughts about these subjects and the amount of stuff published about him will
fill up entire rooms. You could probably put together a thousand-page
encyclopedia simply listing works on Darwin. His original work as stated above
is still very readable. Every aspect of his life and work - the scientific, the
psychological, the social, the political and the personal - has been
exhaustively analyzed. I have certainly not sampled more than a fraction of
this wealth of knowledge, but based on my interest in Darwin and selected
readings, I can recommend the following.
For
what it's worth, if you want to have the best overview of Darwin's life after he came home from his voyage on the
Beagle, I think nothing beats the elegance of language and wit of David
Quammen's "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin". Quammen has exhaustively
researched Darwin's post-Beagle life and work, and no one I have come across
tells the story with such articulate enthusiasm, fondness and attention to
detail in a modest sized book.
Janet
Browne's magisterial biography of Darwin is definitely worth a look if you want
to get all the details of his life. Browne pays more attention to the man than
the science, but her work is considered the authoritative work, and there are
nuggets of eloquence in it.
As a
student in high school I was inspired by Alan Moorehead's "The Voyage of
the Beagle" noted above which combines an account of Darwin's life and
voyage with beautiful and full page illustrations.
Geting
to evolution now, there's an even bigger plethora of writings. Several books
have captured my attention in the last many years. I don't need to extol the
great value of any (and indeed, all) of Richard Dawkins' books. If you ask me
which ones I like best, I would suggest "The Selfish Gene", "The
Extended Phenotype", "Climbing Mount Improbable" and "The
Blind Watchmaker". For a journey into our ancestral history, Dawkins'
strikingly illustrated "The Ancestor's Tale" is excellent. Speaking
of ancestral history, Neil Shubin's "Our Inner Fish" charts a fascinating
course that details how our body parts come from older body parts that were
present in ancient organisms. So does his recent book "The Universe
Within". Shubin provides scores of interesting tidbits; for instance he
tells us how hernias are an evolutionary remnant. Another great general introduction
to evolution is Carl Zimmer's "Evolution"; Zimmer has also recently
written excellent books on bacteria and viruses in which evolution plays a
central theme.
No
biologist- not even Dawkins- has had the kind of enthralling command over the
English language as Stephen Jay Gould. We lost a global treasure when Gould
died at age sixty. His books are relatively difficult to read and for good
reason. But with a little effort they provide the most sparkling synthesis of
biology, history, culture and linguistic exposition that you can ever come
across. And all of them are meticulously researched, although Gould’s political
ideology sometimes has to be watched out for. Out of all these I personally
would recommend "Wonderful Life", and if you want to challenge
yourself with a really difficult unedited original manuscript written just
before he died, "The Hedgehog, the Fox and The Magister's Pox". His
collections of essays - "Full House" and "Eight Little
Piggies" for instance - are also outstanding.
I
don't want to really write about books which criticize creationism since I
don't beat that horse much, but if you want to read one book about the
controversy that rips apart intelligent design proponents' arguments, read Ken
Miller's "Finding Darwin's God" which makes mincemeat out of the
usual "arguments from complexity" trotted out by creationists which
are actually "arguments from personal incredulity". He also has a
book covering the Dover Trial. I have only browsed it but it seems to be
equally good read. What makes Miller a tough target for creationists (and
puzzling for evolutionists) is that he is a devout Christian.
This
is an updated and revised version of a post originally written on Darwin's 200th birthday.
