Steve Jones: Can we please forget about Charles Darwin?
[Steve Jones is professor of genetics at University College London. His new book, 'Darwin's Island'.]
Happy birthday to Charles Darwin, 200 years old next month, and to his most famous tome, The Origin of Species, which will soon will clock up a century and a half. The Grand Darwin Pageant creaks onwards, with an exhibition in the Natural History Museum, a festival in Cambridge and, the ultimate accolade, not just a David Attenborough documentary but four by Melvyn Bragg (and, yes, Steve Jones has written a book to add to the celebratory heap).
All this is quite justified when it comes to marking the foundation of modern biology, but my own ambition for Darwin Year is different. I hope that, by its end, its subject's beard, his gastric troubles and even his voyage on HMS Beagle will have faded from public consciousness. I would be even happier if the squabbles about the social, moral, legal, political, historical, ethical and theological implications of his work were to find, at last, their long-delayed demise. In 2009 we should celebrate the science rather than the man – the fact rather than the anecdote.
So far, there is little sign of that happening. Instead, Darwin's long shadow is in danger of blotting out the great monument of truth that he built during his half century of labour.
Certainly, Charles Darwin was a fascinating and attractive figure – kindly, uxorious (when his wife was in her forties he wrote that "Emma has been very neglectful of late, for we have not had a child for more than one whole year") with a mind that was, as he described it, a "machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts". But what he did could, as is true for all other scientific research, have been done by anyone. His ideas founded today's biology, which is still, from molecular genetics to ant behaviour, a subject held together by his great notion of "descent with modification".
It would be wonderful to celebrate that truth in its profundity – but instead, most of the time, we are hearing more than we need to about the travails of an elderly Victorian. Yes, the Origin was written at a time of uproar in London's streets; yes, Darwwin was passionate in his hatred of slavery and devotion to the unity of humankind; and yes, he despised the use of his ideas to promote a social agenda – but so what? Does biology really need such a cult of personality?
Experts on chloroplasts or chlorine manage with living facts, and are not forced to attach them to dead heroes. But there is something about evolution that calls for Immortals. To their acolytes, the great men's lives form their science, which can as a result only be understood in the context of the times in which they lived.
The Sage of Down House towers above them all, but there are plenty more. But even so, the minutiae of these other scientists' daily lives are not used – as Darwin's are – as the key to their science. I once collected fruit flies in California with perhaps the last in that great line, the memorably named Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Siberian horse-breeder who escaped from Stalin's Russia and appears as a fictional character in a Nabokov novel. Any attempt to fit his research (and he was a keen student of natural selection) into his varied life would be Procrustean at best. And the man who almost stole a march on Charles, Alfred Russel Wallace, was not a toff in Darwin's tradition, but spent his days (when not acting as a surveyor or designing the Mechanics' Institute in Neath) as an impoverished collector of natural history specimens – which makes rather a nonsense of the attempts to read Darwin's scientific thinking into his bourgeois background.
The Origin of Species is, as its author described it, a "long argument". It begins with the familiar, in the form of pigeons and dogs; moves on to the less so, with instincts, islands and embryology; nods at the dangerous notion that what is true for pigeons might be true for humans; and builds up to its last word, "evolved", which appears nowhere else in the book. It lacks any mention of the social, political and historical context of its daring ideas. Darwin's later volumes, on topics ranging from insectivorous plants to pollinators to earthworms, are equally devoid of speculation about the larger implications, such as they are, of his discoveries...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Happy birthday to Charles Darwin, 200 years old next month, and to his most famous tome, The Origin of Species, which will soon will clock up a century and a half. The Grand Darwin Pageant creaks onwards, with an exhibition in the Natural History Museum, a festival in Cambridge and, the ultimate accolade, not just a David Attenborough documentary but four by Melvyn Bragg (and, yes, Steve Jones has written a book to add to the celebratory heap).
All this is quite justified when it comes to marking the foundation of modern biology, but my own ambition for Darwin Year is different. I hope that, by its end, its subject's beard, his gastric troubles and even his voyage on HMS Beagle will have faded from public consciousness. I would be even happier if the squabbles about the social, moral, legal, political, historical, ethical and theological implications of his work were to find, at last, their long-delayed demise. In 2009 we should celebrate the science rather than the man – the fact rather than the anecdote.
So far, there is little sign of that happening. Instead, Darwin's long shadow is in danger of blotting out the great monument of truth that he built during his half century of labour.
Certainly, Charles Darwin was a fascinating and attractive figure – kindly, uxorious (when his wife was in her forties he wrote that "Emma has been very neglectful of late, for we have not had a child for more than one whole year") with a mind that was, as he described it, a "machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts". But what he did could, as is true for all other scientific research, have been done by anyone. His ideas founded today's biology, which is still, from molecular genetics to ant behaviour, a subject held together by his great notion of "descent with modification".
It would be wonderful to celebrate that truth in its profundity – but instead, most of the time, we are hearing more than we need to about the travails of an elderly Victorian. Yes, the Origin was written at a time of uproar in London's streets; yes, Darwwin was passionate in his hatred of slavery and devotion to the unity of humankind; and yes, he despised the use of his ideas to promote a social agenda – but so what? Does biology really need such a cult of personality?
Experts on chloroplasts or chlorine manage with living facts, and are not forced to attach them to dead heroes. But there is something about evolution that calls for Immortals. To their acolytes, the great men's lives form their science, which can as a result only be understood in the context of the times in which they lived.
The Sage of Down House towers above them all, but there are plenty more. But even so, the minutiae of these other scientists' daily lives are not used – as Darwin's are – as the key to their science. I once collected fruit flies in California with perhaps the last in that great line, the memorably named Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Siberian horse-breeder who escaped from Stalin's Russia and appears as a fictional character in a Nabokov novel. Any attempt to fit his research (and he was a keen student of natural selection) into his varied life would be Procrustean at best. And the man who almost stole a march on Charles, Alfred Russel Wallace, was not a toff in Darwin's tradition, but spent his days (when not acting as a surveyor or designing the Mechanics' Institute in Neath) as an impoverished collector of natural history specimens – which makes rather a nonsense of the attempts to read Darwin's scientific thinking into his bourgeois background.
The Origin of Species is, as its author described it, a "long argument". It begins with the familiar, in the form of pigeons and dogs; moves on to the less so, with instincts, islands and embryology; nods at the dangerous notion that what is true for pigeons might be true for humans; and builds up to its last word, "evolved", which appears nowhere else in the book. It lacks any mention of the social, political and historical context of its daring ideas. Darwin's later volumes, on topics ranging from insectivorous plants to pollinators to earthworms, are equally devoid of speculation about the larger implications, such as they are, of his discoveries...