In
my last post (in Sept, as I did not post in October), I briefly mentioned a new
book by David
Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New
History of Life. Its focus is on later developments in the science of
evolution, but it does pay some attention to Darwin. Now that I have had a
chance to read at least these and related parts of the book, I can say once
again that the myths about Darwin continue. For a science that is supposed to
offer insights into the origins of life forms, evolutionary theory is
preciously ignorant of its own origins.
Quammen treats evolution as if it
were Darwin’s own theory. In discussing Darwin’s early Notebooks (before he
came up with natural selection), Quammen refers to evolution as “his theory.”
Like every other writer, he presents Darwin as if he had a blank mind when he
went on his Beagle voyage, as if he came
up with evolution all on his own. Yes, Quammen acknowledges that Darwin had
predecessors, including his own grandfather, Erasmus, but he regards them as
figures who may be dismissed, not having accomplished too much except for their
wild speculations about evolution. He gives them all short shrift, leaving us
with no details of what they actually did accomplish. They did more than engage
in wild speculation.
Quammen faults Erasmus Darwin for
having “offered no material mechanism” for his evolutionary ideas, but that is
not what the earlier Darwin should be remembered for. Erasmus Darwin admitted
he did not know the cause of evolutionary change, but he could still see it
happening. What Darwin grand-père did
was to present enough evidence for a general theory of evolution to make it a
reasonable hypothesis to pursue. The scandal of science was that other
scientists would not acknowledge what a good job he did at this, his grandson
Charles never admitted it, and historians of science today are still loathe to
deal with it.
Towards Charles Darwin, Quammen
is extremely generous. Even though Darwin got a lot wrong, it is not his fault,
as he did not have the advanced knowledge from later genetics, molecular
biology, and more. He did not even know how heredity works. Referring to
Charles, Quammen says, “He did the best he could, which was exceedingly well,
with the evidence he could see.” But this is even more true of Erasmus who had
less information to work with than his grandson did. In Erasmus’s day, it was
not even settled whether extinction was a fact of life and the age of the earth
was still hotly debated. Yet Erasmus could see enough evidence to make
evolution a credible hypothesis. Quammen doesn’t get Erasmus’s accomplishment
at all.
The biggest shock of Quammen’s
book is that he completely omits Robert Chambers whose book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,
published 15 years before Charles Darwin’s Origin
of Species, really put evolutionary theory on the map. Chambers did this by
proving that evolution was more probable than the idea of special creation. He
assembled almost all the same evidence that Darwin was privately working on
without publishing his conclusions. (Darwin wrote two preliminary unpublished essays
in 1842 and 1844; the second one was completed in May, several months before
Chambers anonymously published Vestiges
in October.)
Chambers saw what Darwin saw: A
large pattern of evidence made evolution the better explanation for what was
going on. Here is just some of the evidence Chambers presented: the fossil
record, incomplete as it was, supported the idea that life forms were evolving
and, just by the way, man was a late arrival (which did not make mainstream
scientists happy); the commonality of structure in various organic beings
(Chambers gave an example, also used later by Darwin, of the bone structure in
a human hand being similar to that in a bat’s wing); the existence of
intermediate forms and gradations, which Chambers often called links (though he
became infamous for suggesting that spontaneous combustion played a role, he
loved to emphasize how gradual evolution was); the fact that nature’s potential
for variation could be seen in artificial selection or breeding; and the
startling resemblance of the embryos of many different adult animals, as if
they all had the same common ancestor.
Small wonder then that so many
young scientists were favorably inclined towards the development hypothesis, as
it was known, as a result of Vestiges;
ten editions had come out before Origin
appeared. Quammen falsely claims that Darwin’s book all on its own “converted a
generation of scientists to the idea of evolution.” The conversion process had
actually begun earlier with Chambers’s book. Quammen fails to give credit where
it is due and bestows credit where it is exaggerated.
Chambers is still overlooked by
most writers, and Quammen joins this grand tradition of erasing a Darwin
competitor from history. Vestiges
came out in 1844 and, by 1847, most scientists, including Darwin, had figured
out Chambers was the author. He was working class and that could not be
tolerated in science which was dominated by the upper classes. He was also
holistic in his approach to evolution, which meant that he did not see mankind
as the be-all and end-all of nature. That human beings are part of a whole and
are related to other parts of the whole should make us more humble. That is not
a lesson western scientists wanted to learn.
Chambers offered a far more
humane version of evolution than Darwin who was obsessed with ranking organisms
(“groups subordinate to groups” appears throughout Origin) and with upholding the idea that the dominant species
become ever more dominant. Western scientists tend to study nature to learn how
to become more dominant and controlling. That was not Chambers’s goal, except
that he was after any information that could improve the well-being of the
lower classes.
There is a reason why people like
Chambers are erased from history and it does not speak well for the inhumanity
that constantly recurs in science.
The rest of Quammen’s book is
quite fascinating. He has a great story to tell about new discoveries in
molecular biology, horizontal gene transfers, and evolution among bacteria
proceeding by absorption and not by natural selection. He would replace
Darwin’s tree metaphor with the idea of a web. And then another curious
omission on his part. Quammen never tells his readers that Erasmus Darwin chose
the web as the best way to describe what happens in nature. “Life’s subtle woof
in Nature’s loom is wove,” he wrote. And not just one web, but many webs: “webs
with webs unite” and “the living web expands.” In this sense, Erasmus saw
further ahead than Charles and he did it with much less evidence.
© 2018 Leon Zitzer
