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It's hard to see Charles Darwin. Not that there's a dearth of stuff around.
Turn on the television and you will see David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins
or perhaps even me expounding his greatness. You can gaze at his birds at
the Natural History Museum in London, as well as his notebooks - or at least
facsimiles of them. You can have your fill of Darwin at a hundred lectures
given at universities and schools across the country. Send for the poster,
buy the mug (I have), browse the supplement; if, by July, you're not fed up
with all things Darwinian, then you haven't been paying attention.
Yet for all that, it is hard to see Darwin. For he is no longer a man. He is
an idea, a symbol, a battle cry. He is the power of reason against
irrationality; progress against reaction; the light of science cutting
through the gloom of religion. When he was buried at Westminster Abbey he
became an icon of the materialist, secular age. And, like many a saint, he
has grown vast in his afterlife. Einstein is as 20th-century as a Warhol
print; but Darwin? He is an icon for the 21st.
Every evolutionary biologist worth his salt has fantasised about having Darwin
as a colleague. You're at Down House, trying to think thoughts worthy of the
hallowed ground upon which you tread, when he shuffles into view: the cloak,
the stick, the beard, the hooded brows. What do you say to him? “You have
won,” would be a good place to start. “In the 21st century, the theory of
evolution by natural selection - your theory - reigns as the only rational
explanation for organic design. To be sure, others have tried: mutationists,
Lamarckians, creative evolutionists, complexity theorists - every generation
has produced its pretender. But the crown is still yours and we, your men,
are legion .”
Darwin's big idea was natural selection, which provided a mechanism for
species to change through time, to adapt to their environment. Take two
birds, one with a long beak and one with a short beak. Assume that the
difference is inherited. If a long beak assists in the finding of food,
those with long beaks are more likely to reproduce, and their long-beaked
progeny to reproduce. Short-beaked competitors will starve and eventually
die out. Particular species colonise particular environmental niches; in
this way, Nature selects the winners and losers in the game of life.
When we look at much of science today, we find that Darwin got there first.
It's all there in embryonic form in On the Origin of Species. Biogeography,
palaeontology, genetics, evolutionary-developmental biology, ecology,
sociobiology: every chapter, occasionally every page, is now a discipline in
its own right. Darwin would marvel, though, at how mathematical the theory
of evolution has become - he struggled with maths at Cambridge. The
geologist in him would grasp instantly how plate tectonics tumbles the
continents across the face of the globe, and how this explains why New
Zealand has a frog. The palaeontologist would marvel at the exquisite
microscopic fossils that Chinese researchers have been harvesting from
Guizhou. They prove what he always supposed, that animals must have swarmed
in the pre-Cambrian seas, long before they were preserved in English rocks.
The proto-bird Archaeopteryx he knew about. But he didn't know about the
fossilised whales-with-legs that now link humpbacks to hippopotamuses. And
he certainly didn't know about Sahelanthropus, Australopithecus, Homo
habilis, erectus, heidelbergensis - the whole panoply of hominid fossils
that show, in irrefutable detail, the descent of man from apes. He might,
though, retort: “Found them in Africa, you say? Just where I said they would
be.”
Darwin didn't get everything right: he didn't guess that genes are the units
of inheritance. But he would grasp instantly how DNA can be used to unravel
the history of life. He would understand how his 1837 sketch of a tree (with
that infinitely moving “I think” scrawled next to it), which in his hands
was a mere metaphor to explain the descent of species from a common
ancestor, has become, in ours, a reality. It is a vast map of the organic
world, in which every living thing has its place, providing the narrative
spine of the greatest story every told: the story of life itself.
Perhaps my deepest pleasure would come from telling him how natural selection,
far from being the weak and invisible force that he thought it was, is often
strong and manifest in the natural world. Because he is, above all, a
naturalist, I would tell him about just one wonderful, new part of the
living world: the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi. Four million years ago a
fish entered the lake that Livingstone called Nyassa, when it first formed -
and now there are perhaps 600 species of cichlids, all descended from that
one original fish. Some are as large and as fierce as a pike and have
gunmetal scales; others eat algae and are as brilliant as jewels. They build
castles in the sand, flash their fins at each other, and brood their young
in their mouths. They are, Mr Darwin, like your finches and tortoises: an
evolutionary experiment, but on a far grander scale. They are living,
swimming, copulating proof of the power of natural selection to transform
living things in ways that we can hardly imagine.
How he would rejoice. But I would also have to tell him that in America we are
still fighting the Church. He would see “intelligent design” for what it is
- old-fashioned natural theology by another name. He would, however, delight
in the belligerence of Richard Dawkins.
People have said that if Darwin had not hit upon natural selection, someone
else would have. Leaving aside the fact that Darwin co-published his idea
with Alfred Russel Wallace, was Darwin simply a beetle-collector who got
lucky? No. I know this because I have walked in Darwin's footsteps.
Everywhere he went, he didn't just look. He theorised. Every fervent note
that he scribbled brought him closer to the theory of evolution.
You can follow in his footsteps, too. Book for Buenos Aires and pack only
boots and The Voyage of the Beagle. Stand above the cliffs of Bahia
Blanca, where he dug a giant ground sloth (Mylodon darwinii ) from the clay.
Strike south to Port Desire, find some gauchos and chase the Darwin's rheas
across the pampas - you are in Patagonia. Turn west to the high cordilleras,
traverse their passes and find the beds of fossil seashells that he
discovered on their summits. Follow their rivers back down again - the roar
of their pebbles is just as he describes. End in Rio and seek out the
remains of the Mata Atlântica, the Brazilian coastal forest that so
overwhelmed him when he first arrived in the New World that he compared it
to a cathedral.
If you look at it through his eyes, you will view the world anew. You will no
longer see just rocks and creatures and people; you will see vast contesting
forces and infinities of time and the way our world is shaped by them. But,
of course, nobody except Darwin could see the world through his eyes. He was
not just a scientist, but an incomparably great one. And that is why, today,
we are celebrating what would have been his 200th birthday.
Armand Leroi is Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial
College London and author of Mutants. He is also presenter of Darwin's Lost
Voyage (National Geographic).
Darwin: the tweet
Darwin clearly wasn't thinking of future technologies when he coined the
original title of his opus. Users of Twitter, who entertain each other by
swapping messages of 140 characters or less, would recognise that you don't
give yourself much room for manoeuvre when your book title alone stretches
to 111-characters: On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. By its sixth
print run, Darwin had managed to pare it down to the snappier On the Origin
of Species. Given another 172 years, he could probably have distilled its
contents down to one succinct tweet:
DarwinC Great creatures adapt. Not so great 1s die. Check out those finches
beaks. Survival of the fittest innit.
10:31 AM Oct 27th,1837 from TweetDeck
TIMELINE
1809
Darwin born in Shropshire into Wedgwood-Darwin dynasty. Famous grandfathers -
Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood
1825
Studies medicine at Edinburgh University but hates surgery
1826
Joins nature society at Edinburgh University and is taught taxidermy by a
freed black slave, John Edmonstone
1827
Quits medicine
1828
Moves to Cambridge to study for the Church
1831
Joins Beagle voyage, during which he concieves the idea of natural
selection by looking at finches
1836
Returns home
1837
Debuts as a naturalist, making his first presentation to the Royal Geological
Society. Begins to doubt the creation of species by God
1839
Marries Emma Wedgwood, a first cousin and devout Christian
1840
Ill-health sets in, turning Darwin into a recluse
1842
Moves to Down House, Kent, paying £2,200 for it, and makes first private notes
on transmutation of species
1858
Alfred Russel Wallace writes from Malay Archipelago to say that he has
discovered natural selection. Panicked, Darwin co-publishes, with Wallace,
the first account of natural selection.
1859
On the Origin of Species published, in which the word “evolution” does
not appear
1863
The fossil of a lizard-bird is discovered, which strengthens Darwin's theory
of transmutation of species
1866
Phrase “survival of the fittest” coined by Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of
Darwin
1871
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex published by
Darwin
1872
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published by Darwin
1882
Darwin dies; state funeral. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Wallace is a
pallbearer
1911
Australian settlement of Palmerston officially renamed Darwin
1964
Darwin College founded at Cambridge University
2000
Darwin replaces Dickens on the ten-pound note (Bank of England claims his
beard is hard to forge)
2009
200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and 150th anniversary of publication of
Origin of Species.
On the Origin of Species is reissued with a Damien Hirst cover, and a
commemorative two-pound coin is issued featuring Darwin face-to-face with an
ape
