So Simple a Beginning : The Origin of Species at 150 years

This guest post comes from Courtney Humphries, author of last year’s acclaimed book, Superdove. Among Courtney’s other identifiers is her status as an alumna of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, which goes to show you that out of little acorns mighty oaks may grow. Courtney starts off So Simple a Beginning’s coverage of Chapter One with this post on the matter of Darwin’s pigeon fancy.

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I suspect that many people who pick up the Origin today hoping for inspiration and big ideas are frustrated to find themselves wading through a lot of details about horses, peas, and pigeons. For Darwin, the accumulation of facts was something of an obsession, and necessary to support his theory of natural selection. He recognized that the abundant data about variation in domestic animals and plants could illuminate processes of change in the natural world—even though quotidian facts about the habits, appearance, and breeding cycles of these species were seen as concerns of the farmer and not the naturalist.

What struck me most about the first chapter is how a provocative rumination about variation and inheritance of traits in domestic animals soon gives way to a long discourse on pigeons. When I first read it I had little knowledge of pigeons, and I had never heard of the fancy pigeons Darwin was talking about. This long discourse on an obscure bird so soon into the book was a mystery and, frankly, a bit of a letdown.

Yet it also led me to wonder why Darwin chose to single out these birds. “Believing that it is always best to study some special group, I have, after deliberation, taken up domestic pigeons,” Darwin tells us. It was a choice that made far more sense to readers in Victorian England. At the time, the pigeon fancy was a well-known and popular hobby. So when Darwin then launched into comparisons of the beaks of the English carrier and the short-faced tumbler, his readers may not have been as baffled as many today undoubtedly are.

First—what are these birds, and what made Darwin choose them over so many other domesticated species? At the time, fancy breeds of pigeons had been cultivated for centuries; many had been imported into England from the Middle East, India, and other parts of Europe. Pigeon fanciers formed clubs, and their birds were displayed and judged at shows. The pigeons were certainly something to behold; because they were cultivated solely for display, fancy pigeons had (and have) incredible extremes of form. Go to a fancy pigeon show today and it’s easy to see what attracted Darwin.

“The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing,” Darwin writes. It certainly was for a naturalist accustomed to looking at variation in nature, where the finest details of structure and function might separate one species from another. Applying the same eye to fancy pigeons must have felt like stepping from a darkened room into a sunlit afternoon. Darwin lists some of the points of variation in fancy pigeons: the shape of bones, the number of vertebrae and ribs, the proportion of facial features, the size of inner structures like the esophagus, the number and shape of wing and tail feathers, even the appearance of the eggs and the differences between males and females.

“Altogether at least a score of pigeons might be chosen, which if shown to an ornithologist, and he were told that they were wild birds, would certainly, I think, be ranked by him as well-defined species,” he points out. Having established the tremendous variety in pigeons, he then mentions what makes these variations important: all of the breeds are all thought to descend from the rock pigeon Columba livia. This is the crux of why Darwin singled out fancy pigeons, aside from the personal affection he eventually acquired for them. Their incredible diversity arose from a well-documented history that was believed to travel all the way back to a single origin. They showed very clearly the radiating quality of evolution over time.

Darwin never argued that different breeds of fancy pigeons are different species, but his point raises the question: if we see such divergences occur under breeding, couldn’t they also happen in an analogous way in nature? In his typical roundabout fashion, Darwin gently points out at the end of the section the ridiculousness of seeing it in any other way. If naturalists insisted that fancy pigeon breeds all descended from a single species, “may they not learn a lesson of caution, when they deride the idea of a species in a state of nature being lineal descendants of other species?”

His question carries implicit criticism of naturalists who had for so long overlooked domesticated animals and plants as a rich source of information about biology—and as vivid evidence for the capacity of species to evolve under different conditions. Darwin himself had purchased and bred pigeons; he joined local fancying clubs and learned about the different breeds. Although his letters poke fun at pigeon-fanciers as odd men, their obsessive devotion to detail certainly resonated with his own.

Incidentally, in making his case for the evolution of pigeons, Darwin found himself arguing against the prejudices of breeders as well as naturalists. Pigeon fanciers were so fixated on the uniqueness and purity of each breed—which they referred to as “races”–that they did not easily accept the idea that all breeds came from the humble blue rock pigeon. In a text on pigeons written in 1886, fancier Edmund Star declared that the origin of fancy pigeons “is still open” despite Darwin’s efforts to define the rock pigeon as the sole source. “But while with his eye single to the purpose of that theory he satisfied the conditions and his followers, there remains reason for doubt,” Star wrote, and he gave as one piece of evidence the fact that the blue rock “exists in abundance at the very doors of the English, the most expert of breeders” and yet stubbornly remained the same.

–Courtney Humphries

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Once More (Briefly) Into the Introduction…Geography/Geology edition

Tom Levenson

March 10th, 2009

This will be, I think, just about the last post on Darwin’s attempt to ease his way into his subject. After all, it’s been almost a month since the birthday, and we, like Charles, must eventually come to grips with the meat of the matter. More posts from other contributors are on the way to move the matter forward.

Here I just want to draw attention to one seemingly minor transposition Darwin wrote into the introduction to The Origin. If you look into the table of contents, you see a very clear sequence of ideas: geology first, important enough to be broken into two chapters — ten and eleven — after which comes Darwin’s treatment of the importance of geography for his theory, also very important, also weighty enough to require two chapters of explication (out of a total of only fourteen).

At first glance, this seems reasonable, and in fact, it plays into something of the current furore over evolution. Many of the anti-evolutionists fix on the very problem Darwin addresses in The Origin — the imperfection of the geological record, the fact that so much of the information one could want about the change in biological form and function over time is missing from the rock record.

So, placing the geology chapters first seems to match their importance to the underlying idea Darwin is trying to advance. The theory, after all, posits a process that generates change over time — lots of time. That time is frozen into the accumulation of strata, and so an examination of what the rock record does and does not tell us would seem to take pride of place on a book considering the origin of species.

And of course, the gaps in this story told in stone were then and are now ripe fodder for those who choose not to come to grips with the theory as Darwin advanced it and subsequent work has informed and extended it. So, as we will see later in this tour through the ur-text, Darwin took pains to begin as the field would mean to go on: by emphasizing both what the geological record could not tell the patient (and honest) observer, and then what it could.

The geographical chapters that immediately follow the two geological ones seem to follow in priority too, in the sense that they return to the what will become the exhaustive (exhausting?) accumulation of facts placed in a highly structured order. Here Darwin offers a kind of answer to the broad charge of missing links in the geological record. He does so by looking at how the distribution of species in space provides one way of filling in the gaps in the historical sequence. All in all, the sequence of logic is clear: the same idea that could explain a sequence of events in time also explains the distribution of outcomes in space, thus reinforcing the argument for the truth of that underlying idea’s.

And yet…in the introduction, in Darwin’s brief summary of what is to come, he momentarily reverses this sequence. He writes on page 6:

Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare? Yet these relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare, and, as I believe, the future success and modification of every inhabitant of this world. Still less do we know of the mutual relations of the innumerable inhabitants of the world during the many past geological epochs in its history.

Why time before space in this disarming confession of incomplete understanding? In part because Darwin’s claimed uncertainty is at least partly that useful ignorance Socrates wielded with such devastating effect. Darwin does not know why a particular species may claim a wide range or not, but he does know the form of the theory that accounts for the fact that some species do and do not wander all over the lot.

But there is more here than yet another instance of Darwin’s attempts to disarm critics before they can recognize how hard pressed their cherished assumptions have become. It is a striking fact of current creationism that you very rarely find someone in the anti-evolution game making the kind of detailed critique of evolutionary explanations for the geographical distribution of species that are commonplace amongst those who follow such pseudo fields as Flood geology or other attempts to exploit gaps in the fossil record to decry evolutionary explanations.

Why might this be so?

Because, as Darwin was certainly aware, the geographical argument was and is a truly powerful one. The question of why species are distributed the way they are is one that was recognized as significant well before Darwin, by amateurs as well as the small but growing tribe of professionals — and this at a time when the general argument that the species existed as and where they did because God created them that way. Take, for example, this stray comment in one of the classics of eighteenth century nature writing, The Natural History of Selbourne. In Letter XXIV, Gilbert White wonders:

The question you put with regard to those genera of animals that are peculiar to America, viz., how they came there and whence? is too puzzling for me to answer, and yet so obvious as often to have struck me with wonder.

White puts his finger on it there, as he so often did, as one of the best pure observers of the natural world of his day (or probably any other): how to explain the similarities and differences in the biospheres of distant regions is the question that any theory that attempts to account for the diversity of life on earth must answer. Darwin’s did, economically and powerfully by demonstrating that inherited variation combined with natural selection could produce the observered results. That theoretical understanding, now vastly enriched and deepened by 150 years advance on a whole zoo of scientific pursuits, remains amongst the hardest of nuts for critics of evolutionary thought to crack.

Darwin himself surely knew that the elegance with which his theory answered the essence of White’s awed inquiry, was one of its most powerful pillars. The plan of the book may have required that geology, with its study of change over time, precede the excitement of geography, with its exuberant display of variation over space. But at least once (actually at least twice — see page three of the introduction) Darwin allowed space to take precedence over time. To this day Darwin’s would-be opponents, fighting their battles a century and a half late, still shy away from engaging the old man, (and his heirs) on this ground.

More to come on the nitty gritty of all this when we reach chapters nine through twelve. Which is as good a cue as any to come to grips with Chapter one, which I and friends will do beginning later this week.

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Our Current Chapter

Introduction

"INTRODUCTION"

TOM LEVENSON: "Ship's Naturalist? Oh, Really?" (February 12, 2009)

JOHN DURANT: "First Thoughts on Re-reading the Origin" (February 13, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A bit on one notable day in the prehistory of The Origin" (February 15, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A Theory That “Cannot Fail To Be True”: A Newton-Darwin connection." (February 23, 2009)

A Theory That “Cannot Fail To Be True”: A Newton-Darwin connection.

Tom Levenson

February 23rd, 2009

Up to now, we’ve been talking around the edges of what Darwin said to ease his readership into his ideas. Now it’s time to dig into the meat of the introduction to The Origin. (Past time, given the week or more that has passed since the epochal birthday – the celebration of which has already given at least one learned observer a bit of a hangover. What would Chris Norris think of a whole year, give or take, immersed in Mr. Darwin’s Abstract?)

So to begin: It’s going to take me a moment or two to get there, but what I want to point out here how much debt, and how much use Darwin makes of an approach to scientific argument originated by someone who is often seen as something of the anti-Darwin in subject, personality, and style. That would be the one man with a clear claim to the title of greatest English scientist ahead of the master of Down House: Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton, 1689.

It seems an unlikely comparison. Opinions divide on the quality of Darwin’s prose, but there is no doubt that The Origin is at least a reasonably painless read. Not so the Principia, even in its best translations. (Here is my choice for an English version, which comes complete with Newton’s text and an invaluable guide to the work by the great Newton scholar I. B. Cohen.)

Where Darwin coaxes, Newton commands. Only once as I read the text does Newton break character and seem to give in – just a little — to the urge to persuade. In Book III, as he describes how his new mathematical physics allows him to predict the paths of comets, he writes, “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.” (Book III, prop. 41, problem 21.)

Even here, of course Newton buttresses his claim with a three – step chain of logical inference. The big stick of a formal proof seems to lurk in the shadows. Still, that “cannot fail …” has a hint of rhetorical pressure, there to give its push to the reader.

Against such a modest expression of a hope for the reader’s assent, Darwin is ever-ingratiating, almost deferential.

After explaining the sequence of events that led him to write The Origin, for example, he begs that “I hope I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.”

On the significance of the observation of domesticated animals, he almost craves pardon, writing that “I may venture to express my conviction of the high value of such studies, although they have been very commonly neglected by naturalists.”

Even when he states the central theme of the Introduction and the work as a whole, Darwin remains unfailingly polite, and conscious of the sensibilities of his reader. In the paragraph on page 3 in which Darwin finally stops clearing his throat, he writes:

“In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species.”

But for all the quites and the mights here, there is no disguising the muscle beneath the softness, as tough as Newton’s declaration that herein lies truth. What follows actually bears more connection to Newton’s approach to the presentation of radical argument than may be obvious under the warming blanket of Darwin’s verbiage.

Newton’s Laws, 1687.

Remember: Newton, for all the seeming artlessness of Principia – its apparent “just the facts ma’am” sequence of one demonstration after another –produced a book with a clearly articulated structure that enhanced the power of the content itself.* Crucially, in his introductory material, he laid down his famous three laws of motion as axioms, principles known (or to be seen) as true from which all else could be derived.

Newton’s use of this device was not new, (he said himself that he modeled his book on the works of the ancients) but it hadn’t been used in this way in the context of the new science of the seventeenth century, and he deployed it in the Principia to devastating effect. By developing a seemingly exhaustive analysis of matter in motion based on the derivation of theorems from that handful of basic principles, Newton laid claim to more just the truth he proclaimed near the end of Book III. His book, like Euclid’s before it, promised a method to discover new truths — in Newton’s case, by subjecting motion to number, and thus to the rigorous scrutiny of mathematical analysis.**

Did this triumph have an influence on Darwin? Not directly. Those susceptible to its charms had to possess more stomach for mathematics (or, like John Locke, be willing to take the proofs on faith) than Darwin ever did.

But (at last, having travelled the long road home!) the introduction to the Origin shows the debt Darwin owed to the Newtonian style. For all the cushioning of the blow, the essence of what Darwin said as he summarized the chapters to come turn on the axiomatic presentation Newton had deployed to such effect 150 years before. Instead of Newton’s three laws, Darwin offers just two principles – but they are sufficient, he promises, to the matter at hand.

That is: the concept of the descent of one species from another – the proposition to be demonstrated — he wrote, cannot be affirmed “until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration.”

And now, writes Darwin, it can be told: this modification takes place through the operation of just two facts of nature: variation and selection. On variation, Darwin says that “we shall thus see that a large amount of hereditary modification is at least possible, and, what is equally or more important, we shall see how great is the power of man in accumulating by his Selection successive slight variations.”

As for natural, as opposed to human or artificial selection – that too will gain the status of a truth universally acknowledged, in Darwin’s promised treatment of “the Struggle for Existence: amongst all organic beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from their high geometrical powers of increase”:

“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”***

There is no deference here. No hesitation designed to obscure a possible discomforting moment for the reader. At the point of the issue Darwin does not obscure the hard truth: living things vary. That variance has consequences, and if we must reproduce,**** then those consequences will include the differential selection of those better able to survive (and reproduce again).

All this could be, of course, just rather long-winded glimpse of the obvious: that in The Origin of Species Darwin made use of the two concepts we all know he did, variation and selection, to organize all the observations and interpretations of nature to come.

I’m actually trying to say something a bit different (kind of you – ed.). Darwin’s ideas emerged for him from his close introspection on the mass of facts he collected on the Beagle and afterwards. But his presentation of theory of evolution to the public proceeds the other way round: within a brief, seemingly (and deceptively) simple logical structure, the facts follow theory. As Newton had before him, Darwin presented his work in a way that framed individual facts – the track of a comet, the existence of nipples on male chests – into a weave of logic and prediction such that both theories cannot fail to be true.

Darwin was not Newton. He would never put the matter quite that baldly. But even if Charles was more polite than Isaac, he was no less aware of the real claim he was making.

And this speaks to an issue that runs through a modern reading of any 19th century text on biology. It is a commonplace to say that Darwin got lots wrong, and that there is a lot that is missing in The Origin. In later posts, I’ll wrangle with what it means to say that Darwin made errors. But leaving aside much of what I think is anachronistic in the “trip the genius” game (both as it applies to Darwin and to Newton, inter alia), the point is that Darwin, like Newton, was concerned in his book with the issue of creating a world view, a way of understanding all the specific phenomena each man sought to analyze.

Here, the axiom-and-application model is key. It is the structural device through which Darwin asserted that he had a theory of evolution, in the full, robust Newtonian sense of the term. Darwin was not merely arguing for that the current state of knowledge suggested the modification of species: he was demonstrating the explanatory power of a view that showed how modification could account for both what was known, and what was to be discovered. Q.E.D., for the last 150 years.

[Cross posted at The Inverse Square Blog.]

Notes and references:

*I write more about the way Newton put together the Principia here, to be available in June.

**The phrase “to subject motion to number” originates with Alexander Koyré, who applied it to Galileo. It works here too.

***To be sure, by the end of the book the catalogue of biological laws expands to five: growth with reproduction; inheritance; variability; the struggle for life induced by high rates of increase; which induces natural selection, leading to divergence (of species) and extinction. The core ideas remain the same, however, or clearly logically connected to the starting two principles.

****In conversation about matters evolutionary with Olivia Judson this week, she pointed out that, of course, reproduction requires death; immortality would preclude sex (for those species that so indulge). I asked how many 18 year olds would choose deathlessness over sex; she answered, correctly in my view, none.

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Our Current Chapter

Introduction

"INTRODUCTION"

TOM LEVENSON: "Ship's Naturalist? Oh, Really?" (February 12, 2009)

JOHN DURANT: "First Thoughts on Re-reading the Origin" (February 13, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A bit on one notable day in the prehistory of The Origin" (February 15, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A Theory That “Cannot Fail To Be True”: A Newton-Darwin connection." (February 23, 2009)

A bit on one notable day in the prehistory of The Origin

Tom Levenson

February 15th, 2009

[cross posted at The Inverse Square Blog.]

Darwin, around 1859.

Happy Birthday, Charles! A day or two — or four late.

With that out of the way, what happened on the great day? Not quite now, nor on the day baby “Bobby” made his appearance 200 years ago, but rather, on Feb. 12, 1859, the day Darwin turned fifty?

That birthday, of course, came nine months before he published the book that is the reason for the odd bit of hullabaloo you may have noticed around the web (and bricks-and-mortar “reality”) as well.

The answer, from Charles’ perspective?

Not much good …

…and the reason for Darwin’s discomfort?

That same, dominating, seemingly terrifying book.

Here’s what Charles Darwin wrote to his cousin, William Darwin Fox, from Moor Park, the water-cure establishment to which he had retreated to secure relief from his persistent stomach troubles:

I have been extra bad of late, with the old severe vomiting rather often & much distressing swimming of the head.

Now, as Darwin points out, this is an old complaint, a re-eruption of the distressing symptoms that he had first experienced in Chile during the voyage of the Beagle. As such, this is mere incident, part of the fabric of a life often lived in great discomfort.

Wallace's map of his voyages in the Malay archipelago

Wallace’s map of his travels in the Malay archipelago

But with Darwin, it never does to ignore the mind-body connection. Consider the sequence: on 18 June, 1858, Darwin received the famous parcel from Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalizing in the Malay archipelago (now Indonesia), which included the younger man’s sketch of a theory that described the mutability of species through a selection mechanism very close to Darwin’s own ideas about natural selection.

Darwin had some hints of Wallace’s interests before, both through Wallace’s published work and in correspondence between the two, but this, coming in the midst of his own attempt to distill a the work of a decade and more into a write up on the species problem, came as a terrible blow.

His friends famously rallied him: presenting both Wallace’s paper and some of Darwin’s unpublished work to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858 — thus establishing Darwin’s joint priority with Wallace, and laying the ground for Darwin to claim pride of place if he could only present the first fully developed argument for the ideas that he and Wallace had broached…

…which is why, from the summer of 1858 through the autumn 1859 publication of what became On the Origin of Species, Darwin was hard at work, extracting from his proposed much longer work what he called “an abstract” of the larger argument. It was that effort, much more than any birthday, even so canonically fraught a milestone as the two-score-and-tenth, that consumed Darwin. Certainly, he had no doubt as to the source of his physical distress:

My abstract is the cause, I believe of the main part of the ills to which my flesh is heir…

At first reading, this line plays to those who retail the conventional account of Darwin as deeply fearful of the dreadful secrets he was about to reveal in The Origin. It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that the man who wrote of confessing to a murder early on in his consideration of the species problem might break under the stress of going public with his conclusions. And it is true that Darwin did play his cards close to his vest for years, and that he was determined, at the least, not to go widely public with his thinking until he felt his arguments were ironclad.

What then of the long-running argument that Darwin’s illness was not psychological, not a trick played on his unfortunate body by his conflicted mind? The most common diagnosis of an infectious cause of Darwin’s gastric symptoms is that of Chagas disease, which is supported by the fact that Darwin wrote in his journal of the voyage of the Beagle that, one night while naturalizing in Chile,

“I experienced an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Benchuca (Vinchuca), a species of Reduvius, the great black bug of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body. Before sucking they are quite thin but afterwards they become round and bloated with blood.”

The Benchuca bug is the insect carrier of Chagas disease, and the fact that this illness produces many of the symptoms that Darwin endured, plus this gold-standard report of encountering its vector persuaded a number of high profile Darwinists to entertain the suggestion after it was proposed in 1959 by Dr. Saul Adler, a tropical medicine specialist. Among them — Ernst Mayr, writing in the introduction to the Harvard University Press facsimile of the first edition of The Origin of Species I’m using for this project.

There are, though, serious problems with the diagnosis, not least that Darwin lived a long life characterized by a lessening of the symptoms that seemed to strike at moments of greatest stress with remarkable regularity. Writing more recently than Mayr, many Darwin experts have come to see the search for a specific point-source of Darwin’s illness to be a mug’s game. Here is Janet Browne on the subject in Charles Darwin: Voyaging.

...he only recorded being bitten by benchucas some months after this illness [his collapse on the way from Santiago to Valparaiso in 1834]…and that incident was not followed by any of the fever typical of sleeping sickness [Chagas] infections…Chagas disease was endemic in Chile and the characteristic symptoms of infection…would not have gone unremarked…Yet there was no serious sugggestion that a South American disease could be to blame [for Darwin's post-Beagle illnesses], although once or twice in extreme old age Darwin attributed his breakdown in health to this Valparaiso attack. (Voyaging, pp. 279-280).

Browne goes on to suggest that “sour new-made wine seems as good a reason as any for disorders in Chile,” while noting that the purgatives he was prescribed for his symptoms “would have incapacitated the hardiest.”

In the end, without exhuming Darwin and being fortunate enough to retrieve enough biological material to run retrospective diagnostics, it is likely that the question of exactly what laid Darwin low on his fiftieth birthday (and all the other times) will remain unsolvable in any absolute sense. There doesn’t even have to be a single cause, nor an exclusively physical or psychological account.

Still, it is important to pay attention to what Darwin himself tells us. No man or woman may be a perfect witness to their own state of being, but at least Charles was first on the scene. He knew, or thought he did, what ailed him: his abstract was making him sick.

But for all the evidence — and there is plenty — of Darwin’s doubts and even genuine fear of public ridicule or worse in the 1840s, it does not follow that Darwin in the late 1850s, already working on his much longer version of the story he compressed within The Origin of Species, was vomiting up terror at his presumption.

It is always a risky game to psychoanalyze from a distance. But we do have direct testimony here: when pressed, not by disapproving public opinion but by the threat of professional eclipse, Darwin turned out to be eager, even swift to write up his ideas for as wide an audience as he could reach.

It seems to me that Darwin himself gives us a simpler explanation for his manuscript’s role in his illness. In essence, he had been working too hard.

And in that context, his letter to Fox betrays a hint of relief, and the prospect of better days to come, given that “I have only two more chapters & to correct all, & then I shall be a comparatively free man.” Even better, Darwin told his cousin, his peers were falling into line. “I have had the great satisfaction of converting Hooker & I believe Huxley & I think Lyell is much staggered.”

This does not sound to me like a man cowering before the enormity of what he was about to do. This is someone who, when not retching into the bucket by his bed, is getting used to the scale of his achievement.

You go, Charles. Happy 200th (a bit late).

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Our Current Chapter

Introduction

"INTRODUCTION"

TOM LEVENSON: "Ship's Naturalist? Oh, Really?" (February 12, 2009)

JOHN DURANT: "First Thoughts on Re-reading the Origin" (February 13, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A bit on one notable day in the prehistory of The Origin" (February 15, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A Theory That “Cannot Fail To Be True”: A Newton-Darwin connection." (February 23, 2009)

First Thoughts on Re-reading the Origin

John Durant

February 13th, 2009

We know the Origin was written in a hurry, but there’s nothing hurried about it. A mere ‘Abstract’ of a larger work that was never to be completed, the book reads like what it is: the mature product of an immense amount of painstaking observation, thought and reflection. Clearly, Darwin wants us to know this. The very first paragraph of the Introduction outlines his path to the Origin over a quarter of a century: “I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details”, he writes, “as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.” Here’s the first (but is it really the first? — see below!) of many occasions in the Origin where Darwin displays an acute awareness of his audience, together with a fine ability to anticipate and disarm potential critics.

Portion of the frontispiece of the Origin of Species

The frontispiece to the first edition of On the Origin of Species (click here to view the full page via Darwin Online).

As I re-read the Origin, I’m going to be looking particularly at the way Darwin crafts his case for evolution by natural selection in an effort to make it as persuasive as possible to as many people as possible. From his private letters and notebooks, we know he was keenly conscious of how controversial his views would be; indeed, in the notebooks of the late-1830s and early-1840s he often rehearsed the kinds of arguments and even the individual words and phrases that he should use when it came time to publish his theory. By the time he sat down to write the Origin, then, Darwin was extremely well prepared with a battery of argumentative devices and techniques all designed to make the (bitter?) pill of evolution by natural selection easier to swallow.

Here’s a great example of one of Darwin’s devices, just to get us going. In the frontispiece of the first edition of the Origin, we find quotations from two other authors: the 19th century philosopher and historian of science William Whewell (pronounced “hew-el”); and the 17th century philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon.

Read the texts: Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (via Project Gutenberg), and William Whewell’s Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (via Google Books; click here to jump to the page that Darwin quotes from).

“But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws.”

W. WHEWELL: Bridgewater Treatise.

“To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.”

BACON: Advancement of Learning.

More than two centuries separate these quotes, but they have a common theme: natural theology, or the attempt to explain the ways of God by reason and evidence. Darwin quotes Bacon on the subject of the “two books” of God’s revelation to humankind — the book of his words (Scripture), and the book of his works (nature); and he quotes Whewell to the effect that God’s preferred way of operating in the natural world is through the establishment of general laws rather than what Whewell calls “insulated interpositions of Divine power” (read: miracles).

Why does Charles Darwin in 1859 position himself next to the 19th-century Whewell (left) and the 17th-century Bacon (right)?.

Why does Darwin do this? Why does he give these particular authors such a prominent place in the Origin? The answer, it seems to me, is perfectly clear: he wants to pre-empt theological objections to his ideas by placing evolution by natural selection squarely within the conventional framework for natural history in mid-Victorian Britain, which is natural theology. He’s trying to smooth some easily ruffled feathers; to reassure the religiously orthodox among his readers that what he’s doing in the Origin — extending the domain of natural law to include the diversity of life — is perfectly consistent with what religiously orthodox naturalists and philosophers have been doing for many, many years.

Is he sincere? Does he actually agree with Whewell and Bacon? Does he really believe that evolution by natural selection is a general law established by God for populating the earth with a great variety of life? Before leaping to easy answers here, we should recall that Darwin himself was trained in the tradition of natural theology (he read William Paley’s famous “Natural Theology” as a student at Cambridge), and that his personal views on religion evolved gradually through the course of his life. On the face of it, though, there’s an obvious case to be made that the Origin is the last and greatest work of Victorian natural theology!

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Introduction

"INTRODUCTION"

TOM LEVENSON: "Ship's Naturalist? Oh, Really?" (February 12, 2009)

JOHN DURANT: "First Thoughts on Re-reading the Origin" (February 13, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A bit on one notable day in the prehistory of The Origin" (February 15, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A Theory That “Cannot Fail To Be True”: A Newton-Darwin connection." (February 23, 2009)

Ship’s Naturalist? Oh, Really?

Tom Levenson

February 12th, 2009

Welcome to So Simple A Beginning’s simple beginning.

Charles Darwin in an 1840 portrait, only a few years after returning from his time on the HMS Beagle.

As described in the “Welcome” post (and on our About page), this is the start of what will be a roughly year-long effort to produce a new, crowd/cloud sourced commentary on the most important book about science published since 1687: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

The Origin, of course, celebrates its 150th anniversary later this year, and I and the rest of the folks here are taking this bit of numerology as the opportunity to read and react to this foundational text with as nearly new eyes as we can.

We want you to help too: read, respond, write. When it’s all done, if this works as well as it could and should, we will have a jointly built a web of ideas and knowledge surrounding Charles’s original construction — one which can continue to accrete as long as people want to wrestle with the extraordinary transformation that Mr. Darwin set in motion.

So that said, lets begin at the beginning. I’m going to offer a pair of short posts today and tomorrow — dipping our collective toe into the water — on a couple of facets of the introduction to The Origin. The first one, below, considers the lie with which Darwin begins his book of revelation. The second will explain the significance of the year 1687 for any assessment of Darwin and his book.

Over the next few days, you’ll see a couple more posts on the introduction: one by John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, on Darwin’s carefully chosen epigraphs, and the other by Evo-Devo’s and the University of Wisconsin’s Sean Carroll, still aglow from his January trip to England to handle the actual notebooks in which Darwin recorded the prehistory of The Origin. After that, it’ll be on to Chapter One and off to the races.

Enough preamble: Let’s start to look at the way Darwin tried to ease his audience into the radical notions to come.

The HMS Beagle in 1841, watercolor by Owen Stanley.

So, just to get this out of the way: Darwin’s great book begins with a truthful lie. He writes, line one, first up: “When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle’ as naturalist…”

The truth: he functioned as ship’s naturalist throughout the voyage, collecting and analyzing as he went. He worked in close quarters — and usually comfortable collegiality — with the naval natural historians amongst the rest of the Beagle’s crew, including his captain, Robert Fitzroy, the other officers, and even the captain’s steward and the ship’s clerk. Within the first few months of the five year expedition, Darwin had become the central locus of all the biology and geology to be done in and amongst the naval surveying that was the official job for the voyage. There is no doubt — and no lie in the claim — that he was the chief investigator of the natural world on the Beagle for the entire five year journey.

But in fact, Darwin was not enrolled on the Beagle’s muster as its naturalist. That function on Royal Navy vessels whose duty permitted such efforts was usually performed by the ship’s surgeon. On the Beagle, that would have been Dr. Robert McCormick who fully expected to have the opportunity to build his collection at each Beagle port of call. Darwin himself was a private gentleman, the captain’s guest and dinner companion, nothing more.

Captain Robert FitzRoy, in 1836, the year the HMS Beagle returned to England.

McCormick did not last long; frozen out by Fitzroy, and faced with the sight of Darwin’s collecting apparatus where his should have had first dibs, he quarreled with his captain and took passage home from Rio de Janiero just four months into the voyage. For a detailed account of the whole episode, see Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging, pp. 191-210.

As Browne points out, at least part of the significance of this episode is the glimpse it gives of the web of connections and social hierarchies in which Darwin worked. To put it another way: the world of science in which Darwin lived mapped onto nineteenth century British society in complicated ways. It’s a cartoon to say that Darwin had the good fortune to be born into the right kind of family for genteel inquiry in Britain in the 1830s and that McCormick did not. But it is true that Fitzroy expressly required a class connection to the companion he sought to keep him sane on the long journey. The county-bred, well-to-do Darwin met that requirement and the middle-class McCormick did not.

Such simple minded pigeonholing is not the whole story, nor even perhaps most of it. The specifics of personality matter, especially in any place so confined as vessel just ninety feet long. McCormick was not the easiest person to love, prickly about position and prerogatives, and he could well have fallen out with Fitzroy with or without Darwin on the scene.

The sage of Down House: Darwin’s later, iconic appearance.

But still, Charles Darwin became the Beagle’s de-facto naturalist after displacing another man as ambitious as himself. He shed no tears for McCormick, and before and after the doctor left the voyage, Darwin pursued his own naturalization with no sense of deferring to the “official” naturalist on board. As Darwin aged, and then after he died, the image of the retiring, self-effacing sage of Down House — that old man with the heroic beard — forms the iconic portrait of the founder of modern biology. The Origin was not written by that man—or better, that caricture.

Darwin was — not ruthless, so much — but relentlessly focused on the task of gathering what he wanted to know about nature. He would seek out and gladly use whatever he could coax from correspondents, and, at least as a young man, as McCormick learned he was cheerfully prepared use whatever advantages he had to ensure his access to the natural history treasures he sought.

And the relevance of all this to reading The Origin: Don’t be fooled. Darwin is a tough man, a tough thinker, and someone prepared for the fight over facts and their meaning that will play out over the rest of the book.

Posted in Context and Subtext, Introduction, Voyage of the Beagle | 1 Comment »

Chapter Commentary

About the site

GETTING STARTED

TOM LEVENSON: "Welcome to So Simple a Beginning" (February 12, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A Bit of Housekeeping. (February 12, 2009)

A Bit of Housekeeping.

Tom Levenson

February 12th, 2009

On the Origin of Species cover page, 1859.

Front page of the first, 1859 edition of “On the Origin of Species.”

We’re reading and thinking about The Origin of Species here — but which one?

Darwin prepared six editions of the book in his lifetime, each somewhat, and, between first and last, ultimately quite different from each other. Even the title evolved: The work only settled into the name by which it is best known with the last of these, when Darwin (or his publisher) dropped the “On” from the original title On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

More significantly each of the five editions following the initial publication of November 24, 1859 included alterations, corrections, cuts, and especially additions: the sixth edition is about fifty thousand words — almost one third — longer than the first. As time passed, Darwin added examples, responses to criticism, and self correction, and as he did so, more of the vocabulary of modern biology — of modern life, actually — began to appear in the text. The phrase, “the survival of the fittest” coined by the British social thinker Herbert Spencer, entered Darwin’s usage only in the fifth edition, published ten years after the first, and Darwin only used the word “evolution” itself in the sixth edition.*

“The Origin of Species,” 1872 — with the “on” off!

But if the later versions are longer, and in some sense more complete, it was in the first edition that both the idea of evolution by natural selection — of the material explanation for the diversity of life and its capacity to change over time — and of Charles Darwin himself emerged into the public fray. So that’s the one we’ll be reading here.

To follow along you’ve got some options, starting with the links at the top of the page. You can also go to The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online website, and browse both text and facsimiles of an enormous trove of Darwin writings, published and private. (Darwin’s correspondence, which we will dive into often, can be found here.) You can also download the complete text of the first edition (and all the others, in fact) at Gutenberg.org.

For all those resources. I’m enough of a luddite to value actually holding the volume in my hand, so I’ve actually got several different copies of The Origin lying about. There are plenty of versions out there, the differences being mainly the quality of the paper and the extent and value of the introductions, but for this project I’m using a (paperback) facsimile of the first edition, the version published by Harvard University Press with a fine opening essay by the great evolutionary biologist and historian Ernst Mayr. It’s almost twenty bucks, overpriced in my view, but it’s a nice volume and you can get it a little cheaper through Amazon.

Any edition will do, of course, but the virtue of the facsimile editions is that the page numbers will track both this site and the other online sources of Darwin’s works. (BTW: there is a Kindle facsimile edition for $0.99, but for those of us without that lovely device, the $350 barrier to entry looms pretty large).

Notes and references:

*In the sixth edition Darwin wielded the word evolution — and “evolutionist”, referring presumably to someone whose systematic understanding of the species problem extended beyond natural history, a scientific thinker, and not only an observer. He did so in response to a now-familiar criticism of evolutionary ideas, that natural selection could not produce a complex result out of rudimentary and presumably useless (or even harmful) structures. How could you get an eye, Darwin’s critics asked most famously, out of rudimentary, pieces, or of other examples to which Darwin responds to in the sixth edition. Darwin’s answer is the same as the one modern biologists have worked out in exquisite detail in the matter of the evolution of the eye: look around you and you will find examples of advantageous intermediate forms of complicated biological structures throughout nature. It was never wise to challenge Charles Darwin to deploy facts of natural history in support of his theory, and his critic St. George Jackson Mivart found himself on the receiving end of a howitzer’s worth of information, delivered, as ever, in Darwin’s usual, understated voice. For instance, consider the starfish:

The Echinodermata (star-fishes, sea-urchins, &c.) are furnished with remarkable organs, called pedicellariæ, which consist, when well developed, of a tridactyle forceps—that is, of one formed of three serrated arms, neatly fitting together and placed on the summit of a flexible stem, moved by muscles. These forceps can seize firmly hold of any object; and Alexander Agassiz has seen an Echinus or sea-urchin rapidly passing particles of excrement from forceps to forceps down certain lines of its body, in order that its shell should not be fouled. But there is no doubt that besides removing dirt of all kinds, they subserve other functions; and one of these apparently is defence.

With respect to these organs, Mr. Mivart, as on so many previous occasions, asks: “What would be the utility of the first rudimentary beginnings of such structures, and how could such incipient buddings have ever preserved the life of a single Echinus?” He adds, “Not even the sudden development of the snapping action could have been beneficial without the freely moveable stalk, nor could the latter have been efficient without the snapping jaws, yet no minute merely indefinite variations could simultaneously evolve these complex co-ordinations of structure; to deny this seems to do no less than to affirm a startling paradox.” Paradoxical as this may appear to Mr. Mivart, tridactyle forcepses, immovably fixed at the base, but capable of a snapping action, certainly exist on some star-fishes; and this is intelligible if they serve, at least in part, as a means of defence. Mr. Agassiz, to whose great kindness I am indebted for much information on the subject, informs me that there are other star-fishes, in which one of the three arms of the forceps is reduced to a support for the other two; and again, other genera in which the third arm is completely lost. In Echinoneus, the shell is described by M. Perrier as bearing two kinds of pedicellariæ, one resembling those of Echinus, and the other those of Spatangus; and such cases are always interesting as affording the means of apparently sudden transitions, through the abortion of one of the two states of an organ.

With respect to the steps by which these curious organs have been evolved, Mr. Agassiz infers from his own researches and those of Müller, that both in star-fishes and sea-urchins the pedicellariæ must undoubtedly be looked at as modified spines. This may be inferred from their manner of development in the individual, as well as from a long and perfect series of gradations in different species and genera, from simple granules to ordinary spines, to perfect tridactyle pedicellariæ. The gradation extends even to the manner in which ordinary spines and the pedicellariæ with their supporting calcareous rods are articulated to the shell. In certain genera of star-fishes, “the very combinations needed to show that the pedicellariæ are only modified branching spines” may be found. Thus we have fixed spines, with three equi-distant, serrated, moveable branches, articulated to near their bases; and higher up, on the same spine, three other moveable branches. Now when the latter arise from the summit of a spine they form in fact a rude tridactyle pedicellaria, and such may be seen on the same spine together with the three lower branches. In this case the identity in nature between the arms of the pedicellariæ and the moveable branches of a spine, is unmistakable. It is generally admitted that the ordinary spines serve as a protection; and if so, there can be no reason to doubt that those furnished with serrated and moveable branches likewise serve for the same purpose; and they would thus serve still more effectively as soon as by meeting together they acted as a prehensile or snapping apparatus. Thus every gradation, from an ordinary fixed spine to a fixed pedicellaria, would be of service.

And, just to deal with the more notorious question of what good is an imperfect eye, such that evolution by natural selection could act upon it to produce more perfect organs, see see Russell Fernald’s review in Science, 29 September 2006 Vol 313, pp. 1914-1918.

Posted in About the site, The Making of the Book | 1 Comment »

Chapter Commentary

About the site

GETTING STARTED

TOM LEVENSON: "Welcome to So Simple a Beginning" (February 12, 2009)

TOM LEVENSON: "A Bit of Housekeeping. (February 12, 2009)

Welcome to So Simple a Beginning

Tom Levenson

February 12th, 2009

Charles Darwin, 1859.

Is there anyone outside of a copper cage who does not know what happened 200 years ago this February 12, 2009? On that day in 1809, in the town of Shrewsbury, seat of the county of Shropshire in central England, the wife of a well-to-do country doctor was delivered of a son, the couple’s fifth child.*

We celebrate that bicentennial this week. On November 24, 2009, we will mark the 150th anniversary of the first date on which one could have purchased the canonical book produced by the man that baby became: The Origin of Species by Mr. Charles Darwin.

Darwin himself is, of course, the central focus of much of the celebrations going on now and for the foreseeable future. (Go here for a good starting place among the many gateways into the festivities).

This project, So Simple A Beginning, is going to take a slightly different tack, focusing on the other milestone in this year of Darwin: We are going to read and invite you to join in our thinking about The Origin, which is of course one of the handful of most important creations our species has ever produced. It has suffered the fate of many such great works in that it is much more referenced (or mis-represented) than read.**

Darwin’s book, 1859.

That fact provides the reason-for-being for this project; it is an effort to come to gain some sense of a book that has throughout its history often disappeared under the weight of competing claims about what it actually says and means.

So, over the next ten months (maybe a little more, if we get really wound up), this site will play host to a range of writers responding section by section to The Origin of Species or to give the book its full title-page mouthful, On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

So beginning this coming Thursday, come here to read and react to a range of work by our different contributors that bear on the text of the The Origin piece by piece from beginning end. As we settle down to our regular schedule, the minimum guarantee is that at the beginning of each week I’ll post an piece provocations, at least some of the time on whatever point in Darwin’s argument we’ve reached. Midweek, we’ll put up links and connections sometimes very loose ones to the material at hand, and towards the end of the week, another writer will chime in with her or his thoughts. As folks get motivated, more, I’m sure, will show up, especially on the hottest sections. That’s what RSS feeds are for (feed link). You can get more detail on all of us on here, but so far, the group includes Janet Browne, Sean B. Carroll, John Durant, and Carl Zimmer. Alex Wellerstein and Ellen Bales will both be posting and building the tangled bank of web connections in which all our posts will be embedded. A couple more folks are probably going to join in, and some guests are going to drop in for a post or two on particular areas of expertise.

But of course, the making of this project rests with the reader/writers who join us here. Please chime in. Read, react, extend the argument.

Here’s thanks in advance, and looking forward to the ride.

Notes:

*It’s become a cliché to add that on the same day as the baby to be christened Charles Darwin made his appearance, another birth into much wilder country and poorer circumstances brought the boy to be named Abraham Lincoln into the world. But it’s not soft-minded numerology that juxtaposes Lincoln and Darwin. These two men did come to one common conclusion: that all races shared a common, fully human status. And they did so through at least overlapping lines of reasoning something that is no mere coincidence, as we will surely explore here over the next several months.

**Go here to read John Whitfield’s witty and engaged account of his correcting that gap for himself.

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