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To celebrate
the 199th birthday of the father of evolution we asked a selection of
scientific commentators what they’d like to say to him round the supper
table
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The geneticist
Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics UCL |
WHAT
WOULD YOU TELL HIM? I’d tell him that the thing which defeated
him all his life, the mechanism of inheritance, had been solved and
it didn’t destroy his theory – as he had thought it might – but
actually supported it. He was a very rare thing, an honest scientist.
Scientists are often extremely unwilling to accept that some of their
ideas might be wrong and will go to any lengths to deny that possibility.
But when Darwin wrote the Origin he was written to by a Scottish engineer
called Fleming Jenkins with what Darwin thought was an absolutely fatal
enquiry. Darwin thought that heredity worked somehow by the mixing of
the averaging of the blood of the parents. In that case, Jenkins asked,
if you have an advantageous character in the blood, how could you ever
get it back, wouldn’t it just dilute away? Darwin immediately saw
that that was fatal to his theory. He did six editions of the Origin,
each one worse than the one before, as he got more and more tangled
up and less confident about the basic idea. But he was working with
the wrong substance – blood. Inheritance is based not on liquids,
as he thought, but on particles: genes. It’s a digital not an analogue
system. Genetics confirms Darwin. Of course this is Mendel’s discovery,
which Darwin was sent but never read.
I’d
also tell him that we now understand the distribution of plants and
animals across the continents, because of tectonic plate theory. He
knew about the similarities but thought it was land bridges which linked
continents. Now we know about Pangaea.
WHAT
WOULD YOU ASK HIM? I would ask
him what he thought his illness was. There is endless argument about
this. He never discusses what it is, though he talks endlessly about
his symptoms.
The standard
claim is that he had chaga’s disease, which is transmitted by blood-sucking
assassin bugs in South America. But if you look at his symptoms, vomiting,
bloating and so on, it just doesn’t fit. And it came up very suddenly,
before he went on the Beagle. There then emerged this rather silly notion
that it was a psychological conflict, which seems very unlikely. My
theory, for what it’s worth, is that he might have had an ulcer. Medicine
wasn’t up to diagnosing it then. We now know that ulcers are not stress
or alcohol induced but bacteria, which are easily treatable. It’s
funny to think that he could have been cured with a pill and then there’d
be no Origin of the Species because he would have been healthy and wouldn’t
have sat at Down House and ratiocinated for years.
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THE HISTORIAN
Dr
John van Wyhe, Bye-Fellow, Christ’s College, Cambridge and Editor
of Darwin online
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WHAT
WOULD YOU TELL HIM? Although he would have thought little about
it, and perhaps cared even less, as an historian I would have to tell
him about the way the story of his life has evolved over the years.
Initially he was the great scientific saint who banished religion from
the realms of science, then he was a Freudian puppet reacting to his
supposedly tyrannical father (thus “killing God” with his theory
of evolution was like patricide), then he was said to have discovered
evolution on the Galapagos in a eureka moment when he observed the beaks
of the finches, then he was said to have held back his theory for 20
years because he was terrified of the consequences of publishing. At
every anniversary a new myth like this appears, none of which has any
grounding in the evidence. So what new myth(s) will be invented about
Darwin in 2009, the bicentenary of his birth?
WHAT
WOULD YOU ASK HIM? I would
ask about his first coming to accept evolution. This is really the great
question left to be fully answered and there is little to go on.
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Only one correspondent
ever seems to have asked him if he believed in evolution during the
Beagle voyage. Darwin said that as far as he could remember he still
believed in the fixity of species but that vague doubts occasionally
flitted across his mind. I would ask him to elaborate on these doubts.
When exactly did he experience these? Which kinds of evidence most influenced
this? Was he at all reluctant to consider evolution a possibility in
those early days? Although Frank Sulloway showed some years
ago that Darwin did not hit on his
theory while on the Galapagos, Darwin wrote a letter home from there
which was lost. What was in it? By now he would be very tired and I
would be doomed to kicking myself for not managing to ask so many other
important questions. Such as: in what year did he stop going to church? |
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THE BIOLOGIST
Jerry Coyne, Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the
University of Chicago
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WHAT
WOULD YOU TELL HIM? So much to
tell, and so little time! I’d tell him about all the amazing fossils
that have been discovered since the Origin was published: transitional
forms that link major groups such as reptiles with mammals, land animals
with whales, fish with amphibians. These fossils constitute even more
support for evolution – evidence that Darwin never had, although he
predicted that transitional fossils would exist. He’d probably be
most interested in the group of hominid fossils found in Africa dating
back as far as six million years ago. These clearly show our ancestry
from apes and completely confirm Darwin’s guarded prediction, made
in 1871, that “it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors
lived on the African continent.”
Darwin
didn’t know how old the Earth was, but conjectured, based on scanty
evidence, that it was millions of years old. He’d be astonished to
learn that it is actually 4.6 billion years old, and that life began
only a billion years after that. I’d tell him how scientists have
determined this fact (radiometric dating), and he’d surely be pleased
by the confirmation that there was ample time for all living species
to have evolved in the way he suggested.
WHAT WOULD
YOU ASK HIM? I’d take the opportunity to ask him a question that has
preoccupied Darwin scholars for decades. As is well known, Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace presented the theory of evolution by natural selection
at about the same time. Darwin found out about their parallel ideas
when Wallace sent him a letter and essay from Indonesia, asking for
his opinion. The material upset Darwin, who wanted to behave like a
gentleman in the face of a simultaneous discovery, but also wanted credit
for a theory that he’d been gestating for 20 years. Darwin’s and
Wallace’s theories were read together before the Linnaean Society
of London on 1 July 1858, and published back to back in their Proceedings.
This is one of the most famous coincidences in the history of science,
but there is a mystery about its timing.
Darwin
wrote to his friend Charles Lyell on 18 June 1858, saying that he received
Wallace’s letter and essay that same day. These Wallace materials,
however, have vanished from Darwin’s correspondence. This is not so
unusual, but scholars studying the timetables of mail ships have suggested,
on good grounds, that Darwin actually received Wallace’s material
not in mid-June but in May. This means that Darwin may have had an entire
month to mull over the coincidence and figure out what to do about it.
Some historians have suggested darkly that Darwin used this time to
steal Wallace’s ideas, and that The Origin of Species, published in
1859, was not wholly original. This is almost certainly nonsense, but
the issue of timing remains.
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THE SCIENCE JOURNALIST James Randerson, Science Correspondent,
The Guardian |
WHAT
WOULD YOU TELL HIM? Prof Jones
will tell Darwin about genes; I’d like to go a stage further and tell
him about DNA – its elegant helical structure, the way it copies itself
and the code consisting of 3-letter DNA words that instructs protein
manufacture. Most interesting for him, I think, will be the universality
(with some tiny exceptions) of that DNA language throughout all kingdoms
of life – from bacteria to elephants. That important piece of evidence
supports his notion of a common origin for all life. I think he would
be thrilled to see it. It is remarkable that Darwin succeeded with his
theory despite not fully understanding the mechanism of genetic inheritance.
WHAT
WOULD YOU ASK HIM? I would like
to ask about his personal faith, or lack of it. Perhaps surprisingly
for a man whose life’s work did more to challenge religion than anything
else in science, it is difficult to find out from his letters and writing
what he actually thought about God. People regularly wrote to him asking
where his theory left their faith. He always replied courteously and
briefly without giving much away. One such reply in 1866 went. “My
opinion is not worth more than any other man who has thought on the
subject.” One thing is sure. His science did nothing to cement a belief
in a creator.
His wife
Emma was deeply religious and wrote of a “painful void” that could
open up between them because of his religious doubts. And in 1879 he
wrote to his friend John Fordyce saying, “In my most extreme fluctuations
I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of
a God. I think that generally, and more and more so as I grow older
– but not always – that an agnostic would be the more correct description
of my state of mind.”
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