Science in the Soul Page 11
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*1 At the end of the twentieth century the BBC put on a series of lectures, broadcast on Radio 3, on the theme of ‘Sounding the Century: what will the twentieth century leave to its heirs?’ My contribution was delivered on 24 March 1998; other speakers included Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia and George Steiner. I was uncomfortably conscious of being the only scientist on the list, hence my opening sentences. Parts of the lecture found their way into Unweaving the Rainbow, which I was writing around the same time.
*2 I’m sceptical about the very notion of ‘ordinary people’. The great Francis Crick was once persuaded by a publisher to write a book ‘for ordinary people’. Understandably nonplussed by the commission, he was heard calling out to his colleague the distinguished neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, ‘I say, Rama, do you know any ordinary people?’
*3 I was, perhaps, being unduly pessimistic there. I’m always, and was in the twentieth century too, encouraged by the large and enthusiastic audiences for science writers at festivals such as Hay and Cheltenham, and colleagues such as Steve Jones and Steven Pinker say the same.
*4 This phrase became the title of a chaper in Unweaving the Rainbow which developed the theme more fully. I argued that a well-informed biologist of the future, when presented with an animal – or with its DNA – should be able to ‘read’ the animal and reconstruct the environment in which its ancestors survived and reproduced. Not just the physical environment – weather, soil chemistry and so on – but the biological environment, the predators or prey, parasites or hosts, with which its ancestral lineage ran in evolutionary ‘arms races’.
*5 In 1867, the Scottish engineer Fleeming Jenkin pointed out that blending inheritance would remove variation from the population, generation by generation. By analogy, if you mix black paint with white you get grey, and no amount of mixing grey with grey will restore the original black and white. Therefore natural selection will rapidly find that it has no variation to choose from, therefore Darwin must be wrong. What Jenkin overlooked is that it is manifestly false that every generation is, as a matter of fact, greyer than its parents. He thought he was arguing against Darwin. He was actually arguing against manifest fact. Variation clearly does not dwindle as the generations go by. Did he but know it, far from disproving Darwin, Jenkin was actually disproving blending inheritance. He could have worked out Mendel’s laws intuitively from the depths of an armchair, without bothering to grow peas in a monastery garden.
*6 It was indeed 2003 when it was formally declared complete, although there was still some tidying up to be done.
*7 And less than a decade later, twenty-first-century science did just that, albeit for a different comet. In 2004 the European Space Agency launched the spacecraft Rosetta. Ten years and four billion miles later, after using the gravitation slingshot effect of Mars and then Earth (twice), and after close encounters with two large asteroids, Rosetta finally achieved orbit around its target, the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Rosetta then launched the probe Philae, which successfully landed on the comet, using grappling harpoons to stop it bouncing off, the gravitational field of the comet being very weak.
*8 I commented on this sort of patronizing claptrap in the first piece in this collection; see footnote on this page above.
*9 Nor is it just women who are subject to this kind of bullying. In the footnote (*7, above) I described the successful interception of a comet by the European Space Agency in 2014. One of the heroes of this heartstopping feat of human ingenuity was Dr Matt Taylor, an Englishman (this being the happier time when Britain was still a wholehearted partner in European enterprises). While announcing the achievement to the press, Dr Taylor wore a colourful shirt, a present from his girlfriend, and his doing so was deemed sexist. This trumped-up scandal of ‘offence to women’ eclipsed the news of one of the greatest engineering achievements of all time, and reduced Matt Taylor to tears and abject apology. I could hardly have imagined a more poignant illustration for the jeremiad portions of this lecture.
*10 Pleasingly at the hands of, among others, his son, the mathematician and geophysicist Sir George Darwin. Three of Charles Darwin’s sons were knighted, though their father never was.
*11 Other methods of detecting planets are now available, including the faint dimming of a star when undergoing a planetary transit. The tally of ‘exoplanets’ increases steadily, and now numbers over three thousand.
Dolittle and Darwin*1
I WISH I COULD say that my early childhood in East Africa turned me on to natural history in general and human evolution in particular. But it wasn’t like that. I came to science late. Through books.
My childhood was as near an idyll as you could expect, given that I was sent away to boarding school at seven. I survived that experience as well as the next boy, which means pretty well (some tragic exceptions were lost in the bullied tail of the distribution), and my excellent schooling finally got me into Oxford, ‘that Athens of my riper age’.*2 Home life was genuinely idyllic, first in Kenya, then Nyasaland (now Malawi), then England, on the family farm in Oxfordshire. We were not rich, but we weren’t poor either. We had no television, but that was only because my parents thought, with some justice, that there were better ways to spend time. And we had books.
Maybe obsessive reading imprints a love of words in a child, and perhaps it later assists the craft of writing. In particular, I wonder whether the formative influence that eventually led to my becoming a zoologist might have been a children’s book: Hugh Lofting’s The Adventures of Doctor Dolittle, which I read again and again, along with its numerous sequels. This series of books did not turn me on to science in any direct sense, but Dr Dolittle was a scientist, the world’s greatest naturalist, and a thinker of restless curiosity. Long before either phrase was coined, he was a role model who raised my consciousness.
John Dolittle was an amiable country doctor who turned from human patients to animals. Polynesia, his parrot, taught him to speak the languages of animals, and this single skill provided the plots of nearly a dozen books. Where other books for children (including today’s Harry Potter series) profligately invoke the supernatural as a panacea for all difficulties, Hugh Lofting rationed himself to a single alteration of reality, as in science fiction. Dr Dolittle could speak to animals: from this all else followed. When he was appointed to run the post office of the West African kingdom of Fantippo, he recruited migrant birds into the world’s first airmail service; small birds carried a single letter each, storks large parcels. When his ship needed a turn of speed to overtake the wicked slave trader Davy Bones, thousands of gulls gave him a tow – and a child’s imagination soared.*3 When he got within range of the slaving vessel, a swallow’s keen eyesight aimed his cannon to superhuman accuracy. When a man was framed for murder, Dr Dolittle persuaded the judge to allow the accused’s bulldog to take the stand as the only witness to his innocence, having established his credentials as interpreter by talking to the judge’s dog, who divulged embarrassing secrets only the dog could have known.
The feats that Dr Dolittle could achieve because of this one facility – talking to animals – were frequently mistaken for supernatural by the doctor’s enemies. Cast into an African dungeon to be starved into submission, Dr Dolittle grew fatter and jollier. Thousands of mice carried in food, one crumb at a time, with water in walnut shells and even fragments of soap so he could wash and shave. His terrified captors naturally put it down to witchcraft, but we, the child readers, were privy to the simple and rational explanation. The same salutary lesson was rammed home again and again through these books. It might look like magic, and the bad guys thought it was magic, but there was a rational explanation.
Many children have power dreams in which a magic spell or a fairy godmother or God himself comes to their aid. My dreams were of talking to animals and mobilizing them against the injustices that humanity (as I thought, under the influence of my animal-loving mother and Dr Dolittle) inflicted on them. What Dr Dolittle produced in
me was an awareness of what we would now call ‘speciesism’: the automatic assumption that humans deserve special treatment over and above all other animals simply because we are human. Doctrinaire anti-abortionists who blow up clinics and murder good doctors turn out on examination to be rank speciesists. An unborn baby is by any reasonable standards less deserving of moral sympathy than an adult cow. The pro-lifer screams ‘Murder!’ at the abortion doctor and goes home to a steak dinner. No child brought up on Dr Dolittle could miss the double standard. A child brought up on the Bible most certainly could.
Moral philosophy aside, Dr Dolittle taught me not evolution itself but a precursor to understanding it: the non-uniqueness of the human species in the continuity of animals. Darwin himself expended great effort to the very same end. Parts of The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions are devoted to narrowing the gulf between us and our animal cousins. What Darwin did for his adult Victorian readers, Dr Dolittle did for at least one small boy in the 1940s and 1950s. When I later came to read The Voyage of the Beagle, I fancied a resemblance between Darwin and Dolittle. Dolittle’s top hat and frock coat, and the style of ship that he incompetently sailed and usually wrecked, showed him to be a rough contemporary of Darwin. But that was only the beginning. The love of nature, the gentle solicitude towards all creation, the prodigious knowledge of natural history, the scribbled descriptions in notebook after notebook of amazing discoveries in exotic foreign parts: surely Dr Dolittle and the ‘Philos’ of the Beagle might have met in South America or on the floating island of Popsipetel (shades of plate tectonics), and they would have been soul brothers. Dolittle’s Pushmi-Pullyu, an antelope with a horned head at both ends, was scarcely more incredible than some of the fossils and other specimens discovered by the young Darwin.*4 When Dolittle needed to cross a chasm in Africa, swarms of monkeys gripped one another by arms and legs to constitute a living bridge. Darwin would instantly have recognized the scene: the army ants he observed in Brazil do exactly the same thing. Darwin later investigated the remarkable habit among ants of taking slaves, and he, like Dolittle, was ahead of his time in his passionate hatred of slavery among humans. It was the only thing that roused both these normally mild naturalists to hot anger, in Darwin’s case leading to a falling-out with Captain FitzRoy.
One of the most poignant scenes in all children’s literature is in Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office: Zuzanna, a West African woman whose husband has been seized by Davy Bones, the wicked slaver, is discovered all alone in a tiny canoe in mid-ocean, exhausted and weeping, bowed over her paddle after having given up her pursuit of the slaving vessel. She at first refuses to speak to the kindly doctor, assuming that any white man must be as evil as Davy Bones. But he coaxes her confidence and then summons up the resourceful fury of the animal kingdom in a successful campaign to overpower the slaver and rescue her husband. What irony that Hugh Lofting’s books are now banned as racist by sanctimonious public librarians! There is something in the charge. His drawings of Africans are steatopygic caricatures. Prince Bumpo, heir to the kingdom of the Jolliginki and an avid reader of fairy tales, saw himself as a Prince Charming but was convinced that his black face would frighten any Sleeping Beauty wakened by his kiss. So he persuaded Dr Dolittle to mix a special preparation to turn his face white. Not good consciousness-raising, by today’s lights, and hindsight can find no excuse. But Hugh Lofting’s 1920s simply were racist by today’s standards,*5 and of course Darwin was too, like all Victorians, notwithstanding his hatred of slavery. Instead of being smugly censorious, we should look to our own accepted mores. Which of our unnoticed isms will the hindsight of future generations condemn? The obvious candidate is speciesism, and here Hugh Lofting’s positive influence far outweighs the peccadillo of racial insensitivity.
Dr Dolittle resembles Charles Darwin also in his iconoclasm. Both are scientists who continually question accepted wisdom and conventional knowledge, because of their own temperament and also because they’ve been briefed by their animal informants. The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist. Don’t just accept what everybody tells you – think for yourself. I believe my childhood reading prepared me to love Charles Darwin when my adult reading finally brought him into my life.
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*1 In 2004 the literary agent and impresario of science John Brockman invited his unrivalled circle of intellectual correspondents to contribute to When We Were Kids, a collection of essays on ‘How a child becomes a scientist’. Since I planned, one day, to write a proper autobiography (it ended up being split into two, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark), my essay for the Brockman collection did something different. I chose to extol one particular children’s author who, I believe, influenced me.
*2 Dryden, notwithstanding his Cambridge education.
*3 I remember shamelessly plagiarizing this image in a school essay when I was about nine. My English teacher praised my imagination and predicted that I’d grow up to be a famous writer. Little did he know I stole it from Hugh Lofting.
*4 Although I can’t have been the only child to wonder how the Pushmi-Pullyu disposed of the waste products from the food that went in through its two mouths.
*5 Some early Agatha Christies are worse but, as far as I know, unbanned. As for Bulldog Drummond, the 1920s equivalent of James Bond, he once had occasion to disguise himself as an African. The words with which he finally and dramatically revealed his true identity to the villain were: ‘Every beard is not false, but every nigger smells. That beard ain’t false, dearie, and dis nigger don’t smell. So I’m thinking there’s somethin wrong somewhere.’ Prince Bumpo’s ambitions to be a white Prince Charming seem mild by comparison.
II
ALL ITS MERCILESS GLORY
IF THE FIRST SECTION of this book was about what science is, the second homes in on science as it is done – specifically, on the development and refinement of Darwin’s great theory, now established as scientific fact, of evolution by natural selection in, as Richard has put it elsewhere, ‘all its merciless glory’.* The successive pieces illustrate how the theory was launched in an unlikely double-act of scientific gentlemanliness; how it works, and how far its power and validity might extend; how it is taken forward, and how it is misunderstood. Throughout runs the constant drive to refine, clarify and extend the application of this most powerful of scientific ideas.
The first piece, a speech delivered in the Linnean Society to commemorate the 1858 reading there of Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers that broke the news of their world-shaking discoveries, gives specific and poignant form to the values of science – and scientists – enumerated and defended in section I. After relating the joint work of the two great Victorian scientists, it ends with a bold supposition that Darwinian natural selection is the only adequate explanation not only for how life has evolved but for how it could evolve. Predecessors honoured, successors challenged: these are the hallmarks of Dawkinsian scientific discourse.
Successors challenged, and self challenged too. ‘Universal Darwinism’, written nearly twenty years earlier, subjects that bold supposition to a rigorous interrogation by way of a systematic review of the six alternative theories of evolution identified by the great German-American evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. It then goes one step further by setting out the stall for a new discipline of ‘evolutionary exobiology’. A restless ambition in the cause of a passionately held conviction is not that rare; critical rigour is not that rare. The capacity to apply the latter to one’s own ventures in the former is undoubtedly rarer than either; the evident enthusiasm for the task apparent here, perhaps rarer still. Its reward? The unambiguous assertiveness of a defending counsel confident he has established his case:
Darwinism…is the only force I know that can, in principle, guide evolution in the direction of adaptive complexity. It works on this planet. It doesn’t suffer from any of the drawbacks that be
set the other five classes of theory, and there is no reason to doubt its efficacy throughout the universe.
When Darwin himself was laying down his theory, of course, the gene had not yet been identified, let alone pinpointed as the subject of natural selection. ‘An ecology of replicators’, first published in a collection in honour of Mayr, takes up the discourse of evolution in the context of twentieth-century debates about the level at which natural selection takes place, making the case for the gene, as the only replicator in the system, with exemplary clarity. Significantly, the core of the article is the investigation of an apparent disagreement (with Mayr himself) to identify where it is real and where illusory; the purpose, as so often, that of making a key distinction that enhances and refines understanding, and of revealing a key commonality under a disparity in terminology or expression.
A recurrent motif in this section is an insistence on the inadmissibility of group selection, the notion that the Darwinian principle can operate at the level of a family, a tribe, a species. ‘Twelve misunderstandings of kin selection’ is a tour de force in this campaign, a kind of scholarly sheepdog trial in which a series of meanderings from the proper path are patiently and efficiently redirected to the pen. One might expect this text, written as it is for a specialist periodical, and with a great deal of ground to cover, to be dry, bland, impersonal. Not so. Sentences such as the following reveal the kindred spirit of Douglas Adams: ‘So it is that today the sensitive ethologist with his ear to the ground detects a murmuring of sceptical growls, rising to an occasional crescendo of smug baying when one of the early triumphs of the theory encounters new problems.’ How many other writers for the esoteric end of the scientific bookshelf would dare such a flight? Equally characteristic is the ‘Apology’ at the end, emphasizing that the preceding critical explication is motivated not by any drive to score points over others, but by a desire to increase the common understanding. The progress of science trumps the triumph of the individual, every time.