- Robert Darwin, to his son Charles.
Two
hundred and seven 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
William Hamilton or Lord Kelvin, nor did he particularly excel in school and
college. A Cambridge man who 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.
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 book"Darwin's Ghosts"),
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. Like chemistry it is a synthetic rather than a purely analytical science. 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. The truth is
more subtle, sometimes simpler and sometimes 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 land masses.
After five years of
exhaustive documentation and sailing Darwin finally returned home for good,
much changed both in physical appearance and belief. His following life 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 sometimes 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 is his hesitation to not publish his ideas for another
twenty five years in the form of the famous "The Origin of Species".
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 a 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 circumventing 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 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 still 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.
Getting 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.
Out
of all these I personally would recommend "Wonderful Life" and
"The Mismeasure of Man", 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". In general, pick up
any Gould book and you would have access to an extraordinary writer and mind.
His collections of essays - "Full House" and "Eight Little
Piggies" for instance - are also outstanding. One has to guard against the frequent intrusion of Gould’s political ideology into his writings, but as a
man who could turn a phrase he had few peers.
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.
