The Red Notebook

Charles Darwin set great store in modesty. In September, 1845, he wrote to his great friend Joseph Dalton Hooker:

I have never perceived but one fault in you, & that you have grievously, viz modesty;—you form an exception to Sydney Smith’s aphorism, that merit & modesty have no other connexion, except in their first letter

A classic example of the pot praising the kettle for its blackness, if ever I heard one. Throughout his correspondence, Darwin is quick to chastise himself for being immodest when deriving pleasure from favourable comments about his work. He seems positively embarrassed even to refer to them. It’s a particularly British and particularly Victorian trait—and, in Darwin’s case, it was totally genuine. He frequently downplayed the revolutionary nature of his Theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, and the amount of work that had gone into it. A couple of years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, he wrote to his American friend Asa Gray:

I thank you for your impression on my views. Every criticism from a good man is of value to me. What you hint at generally is very very true, that my work will be grievously hypothetical & large parts by no means worthy of being called inductive; my commonest error being probably induction from too few facts.

Grievously hypothetical? Too few facts? Darwin had spend the preceding 20 years amassing thousands of facts in support of his theory.

Darwin’s modesty was still going strong (with his detractors being given the benefit of the doubt) towards the end of his life when he wrote in his autobiography:

My views have often been grossly misrepresented, bitterly opposed and ridiculed, but this has been generally done, as I believe, in good faith. On the whole I do not doubt that my works have been over and over again greatly overpraised.

All of which makes the oft-quoted, wonderful first eight words of the closing sentence of ‘On the Origin of Species’ so remarkable:

There is grandeur in this view of life…

Finally Darwin allows himself a moment’s pride! His view of life has grandeur: a word meaning both magnificence and nobility. There is nothing shameful about evolution; it is something capable of inspiring awe. In more modern parlance, Darwin might have said:

My theory is awesome…

And he would be right. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection was—and remains to this day—totally awesome. Every creature on this planet, every animal, plant, fungus and bacterium, living or dead, is descended from a common, ancient ancestor. There is nothing special about mankind; we are just one fascinating species amongst the millions of other equally fascinating species that have evolved over billions of years on Planet Earth. We are not above Nature; we are part of Nature.

Happy 200th birthday, Mr Darwin. Thanks for all your hard work. And thanks for putting us in our rightful place.

An interesting short video spotted by my butler on the Daily Telegraph website (which has absolutely nothing to do with the story it accompanies):

Postscript: More on the Times website

BBC: Scotland ‘inspired’ Darwin’s work

BBC: Darwin’s help from Welsh journey

Mid Devon Star: County marks Darwin’s Devon connections

My maternal grandmother came from Shropshire, you know. As did Darwin. He and I must practically be cousins.

Mind you, as Darwin showed, aren’t we all?

It just occurred to me that President Obama might well choose to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of his predecessor Abraham Lincoln with some sort of speech or press release.

Wouldn’t it be rather nice if he took the opportunity to observe that Lincoln was born on exactly the same day as Charles Darwin, and to go on to give a ringing presidential endorsement of the Theory of Evolution by means of Natural Selection? Just a fantasy, maybe. But it would be rather nice.

Do it for science, Mr President. I dare you!

Daily Mirror (my butler reads it): Darwin and ape on new £2 coin

The 200th birthday of Charles Darwin is being celebrated with a new £2 coin featuring the great scientist and an ape.

Excellent news. But I feel I should point out that the Mirror should have said that the great scientist will appear with another ape. Or two, if you count Her Majesty on the reverse side. Darwin and the Queen, let us not forget, are also apes.

Who says the Royal Mint never never made any sense? [Made any sense—do you see what I did there?]

On this date in 1868, Charles Darwin wrote to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society:

Sir,

I beg leave to acknowledge the receipt of your letter in which you announce to me that the Yorkshire Philosophical Society has done me the honour of electing me one of the Honorary Members of the Socety [sic]; and for this honour I return my most sincere acknowledgements.

I beg to remain,

Sir,

Your Obedient and Obliged Servant,

Charles Darwin

Nice one, Yorkshire! I am suddenly extremely proud of my adoptive county.

See also: Darwin in Ilkley

My dad at the British Open Golf Championship, 2008.

Today is my dad’s 74th birthday. When I phoned him this afternoon to wish him a happy birthday, I pointed out that, as of today, he has overtaken Charles Darwin: Darwin only made it to 73, you see. I think dad could have done without that particular snippet of information.

It’s funny, though: whenever I think of the elderly Charles Darwin—the one who wrote the earthworms book—I always think of him as a really old man. But I don’t think of my dad as old (and neither does he); I just think of him as my dad—a man who went out into the snow today and came second in this weekend’s competition at his local golf club.

Perhaps I shouldn’t think of Charles Darwin as an old man, either. His mind was every bit as astute when he was 73 as it was when he was researching and writing On the Origin of Species.

Steve Jones is a wonderful chap: a great science communicator with a marvellously dry sense of humour. I won’t hear a word said against him. Even when he goes on about human evolution being over (an example of overstating one’s case to get one’s point across if ever I heard one).

But now Prof. Jones is saying that he wishes people would forget about Charles Darwin.

Prof. Jones doesn’t really want us to forget about Charles Darwin. He wants us to concentrate on Darwin the scientist, not Darwin the man. He also wishes for an end, he says, to the squabbles about the social, moral, legal, political, historical, ethical and theological implications of his work.

Does biology really need such a cult of personality? he asks. No, of course it doesn’t.

But it’s both naive and plain wrong to suggest that people shouldn’t debate—and even squabble about—the social, moral, legal, political, historical, ethical and theological implications of Charles Darwin’s (or any other scientist’s) work. Science has implications on society. These implications need to be discussed by the whole of society—not just scientists.

True, people tend to squabble a good deal more about Charles Darwin than about any other great scientist. But that’s because Darwin’s science had and still has such profound implications on society.

Besides, science needs great and interesting figures to inspire future scientists. And historians need great and interesting figures to study. And ordinary people need great and interesting figures to find, well, great and interesting. And you don’t get much greater and much more interesting than Charles Robert Darwin.

By all means celebrate Darwin’s science, but let’s not forget the man behind it to.

Sir David Attenborough contemplates a tangled molecule.

Last night’s Darwin bicentennial special on the BBC by Sir David Attenborough was every bit as good as we all knew it would be. You know where you stand with Sir David: a landmark television event is almost a given. We shouldn’t take such things for granted, but we do.

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life was wonderful, one-hour documentary in which Sir David brilliantly summarised Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection. But it was also a deeply personal programme, in which Sir David took us to his childhood geological haunts near Leicester, reminisced about learning to categorise fossils at Cambridge University, showed us his own copy of the sixth edition of On the Origin of Species bought second-hand when he was 18 years old, and drew on archive footage from his classic nature series. He even got to sit in Darwin’s study in Down House. As the greatest science communicator since (and possibly including) Darwin, he had every right to be there.

You might argue that Darwin’s great theory is worthy of a 52-week series of documentaries—and you would be right—but the one-hour format worked brilliantly: Sir David explained Darwin’s thinking, and the modern-day evidence that supports it in a single sitting. The viewer was able to see the whole picture, and understand the whole argument, without getting bogged down in details.

But the real reason we didn’t need a 52-week series of documentaries to explain Darwin’s great theory is that we have already had more than 50 years’ worth of wonderful documentary series courtesy of Sir David—every single one of which has celebrated nature’s grandeur as explained by Charles Darwin.

Darwin famously claimed that On the Origin of Species had been one long argument; Sir David Attenborough’s half-century body of work has been one long celebration of Darwin’s wonderful theory. By anyone’s standards, it is a magnificent achievement.

Charles Darwin with spectacles hung from his neck.

Rageoss 2.02 has a nice piece on how stupid it is that image libraries can still claim copyright on photographs of Charles Darwin—a man who, let us not forget, died 127 years ago.

The photograph accompanying the article (right) was one I had seen before, but I had only ever seen it more closely cropped. The uncropped version finally resolved a small mystery for me: I have often wondered about the purpose of the slender chord which appears around Darwin’s neck is a couple of photographs. I had wondered whether there might be a monocle or magnifying glass on the other end. It turns out I was almost correct. The uncropped photograph quite clearly shows a pince-nez hanging from Darwin’s neck.

Darwin was a specky four-eyes!

Charles Darwin took justifiable pride in his powers of observation. In his autobiography written towards the end of his life, he wrote:

On the favourable side of the balance, I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.

Yet even Darwin’s legendary attention to detail occasionally let him down. Such as the time recorded in his Beagle Diary, when he managed to travel an entire day with gauchos in Patagonia without realising that the people wearing chaps weren’t all chaps:

The Spaniards, whom we some time since thought were Indians, have been employed hunting for us & have generally bivouacced near the coast. — They offered to lend me a horse to accompany them in one of their excursions; of this I gladly accepted. — The party consisted of 9 men & one woman; the greater number of the former were pure Indians, the others most ambiguous; but all alike were most wild in their appearance & attire. — As for the woman, she was a perfect non descript; she dressed & rode like a man, & till dinner I did not guess she was otherwise. —

Apparently, Charles Darwin didn’t have much of an eye for the ladies.

Letter to New Scientist:

Sir/Madam,

Compare and contrast:

“Nobody is arguing – yet – that the tree concept has outlived its usefulness in animals and plants… [I]t is still the best way of explaining how multicellular organisms are related to one another” [Graham Lawton, New Scientist, 24 Jan 2009].

“Darwin was wrong: cutting down the tree of life” [New Scientistcover, 24 Jan 2009].

I appreciate you need to hype up your headlines to sell more deadtrees, but I expected better of New Scientist – especially just oneweek after your own editorial vowed to strive to avoid sexing upheadlines in future. Do your marketing people think they’ve identifieda gap in the creationist market or something?

I presume, in future, whenever you show a clade diagram in one of yourarticles, its caption will come with the disclaimer, “Please Note:This is wrong”.

More science, less marketing hype please.

Richard Carter, FCD
The Friends of Charles Darwin
http://friendsofdarwin.com/
Charlie is our Darwin

I think so too!

*sigh*

The latest edition of New Scientist (my butler reads it) contains a very interesting, albeit irritating article entitled Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life, which asserts that, what with horizontal gene transfer and hybridisation and all that malarkey, life’s genealogy should not be represented, as Darwin said, by a tree, but rather by a convoluted web.

I say bollocks to that.

Yes, the history of life on Earth is indeed far more complex than even Darwin could have imagined. Life really isn’t that simple. It never is. Newton’s Laws of Motion are a wonderfully elegant set of equations that explain the motions of the heavens. They also, to Einstein’s great regret, happen to be flawed. But they were still good enough to get us to the sodding moon. Rutherford’s model of the atom is, we now realise, wrong, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to explain to young would-be scientists than fuzzy blobs which don’t seem to be able to make up their minds whether to be waves or particles. Such horrors are best held in reserve for unleashing on unsuspecting undergraduates. (I write from bitter personal experience.)

Darwin’s tree of life is still a pretty good approximation of the genealogy of species—whatever that word means in this hopelessly complex genetic age. It’s a useful metaphor that even young children can understand. It makes a great T-shirt and a damn fine fridge magnet.

Hands off our tree! Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There’s an amusing piece on the BBC News website about the auctioning earlier this week of a letter written by an elderly Charles Darwin, in which he complains, “I am tired to death with writing letters; half the fools throughout Europe write to ask me the stupidest questions.”

It’s little insights like these which make the Darwin Correspondence Project by far the best way we have of getting inside the great man’s head. If I had my way, they would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, 21 July, 1861:

I was very glad of your P.S. on the state of your country; one values a private note far more than a dozen public letters. After carefully reading Olmstead’s last Book I never doubted the North would conquer the South. But then what is to follow? From Olmstead & Russell’s letters in Times, I cannot believe that the South would ever have fellow-feeling enough with the North to allow of government in common. Could the North endure a Southern President? The whole affair is a great misfortune in the progress of the World; but I sh^d not regret it so much, if I could persuade myself that Slavery would be annihilated. But your president does not even mention the word in his Address.— I sometimes wish the contest to grow so desperate that the north would be led to declare freedom as a diversion against the Enemy. In 50 or 100 years your posterity would bless the act.— But Heaven knows why I trouble you with my speculations; I ought to stick to Orchids.

The president in question was Darwin’s twin, Abraham Lincoln; his address was before a special session of the United States Congress on 4 July 1861.

The North, it turned out, could indeed endure a Southern president. How much more surprised (and, I presume, pleased) would Darwin have been to learn that the South would one day accept a black president?

Charles Darwin aged 43, with his eldest child, William.

Browsing, as I often do, through Darwin Online yesterday, I came across this famous photograph of Charles Darwin with his eldest child, William. It is the only photograph that exists showing Darwin with a member of his family.

Looking at the picture, it suddenly dawned on me that this is the only photograph I can remember seeing in which Darwin appears to be smiling. It’s not exactly a toothy grin, but it’s certainly a smile: the smile of a contented and proud father, perhaps. It’s also a slightly enigmatic smile, not entirely unlike that of the Mona Lisa.

Reading the caption to the photo, something else dawned on me: Charles Darwin aged 43… That’s my age! This is what Charles Darwin looked like when he was the same age as me!

All I can say is that he scrubs up rather well. But I have more hair.

I just sent the following email to a journalist at the Observer:

Simon,

In your piece Darwin’s theory turned bosses into dinosaurs in today’s Observer, you re-quote the oft-quoted Darwin quote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

I wonder if you have an original source for this quote. I have never been able to track one down. A search for the phrase ‘responsive to change’ yields zero hits on both the Complete Works of Darwin and Darwin Correspondence Project websites.

I suspect Darwin never said any such thing.

Regards,

Richard Carter, FCD
The Friends of Charles Darwin
http://friendsofdarwin.com

In fact, I’m pretty damn sure Darwin never said any such thing—even though the quote appears all over the internet (in particular, in stories about economics). If anyone out there knows the original source for the quote, please cite it in the comments.

Postscript: The marvels of RSS and FriendFeed! Minutes after I ask for an original source for the quotation, I receive several answers in the comments. Then Michael Barton points me to this amusing photo:

Evolution misquote at California Academy of Sciences cc Colin Purrington
“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Etched into the floor and attributed to Charles Darwin. Note to self: check quote attribution before etching big quote onto expensive stone floor. [Thanks to Michael Barton's point to www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/09/darwin.myths.]

We’re all familiar with the trials of modern travel: the hustle and bustle, the lost luggage, the unseemly scramble at baggage reclaim. Things were so much different in Darwin’s day. Here he describes his first ever railway journey to his wife, Emma:

My journey up was dull enough— I was altogether disappointed with the railroad— it was so rough & so much plague with the many changes.— At Birmingham, I heard a head-man scolding furiously a guard for something he had done— he ended with the remark—not particularly consolotary to me, who had no very clear idea, where they had hurried my luggage,—”& that is the reason, we lose so many things every day.”— It was raining hard, when we reached London, & the scramble for the luggage was glorious;—two or three poor old ladies, I suspect, died broken hearted that same night.— poor old souls they appeared greatly agitated.

Digital Chosunilbo: What If Darwin Invested in Stocks?

If Charles Darwin was born again and invested in stocks, which shares would he have favored?

A new study speculates that based on his Theory of Evolution, which points out that only organisms that endlessly strive to change have a chance of survival, perhaps Darwin would have invested in companies that persistently seek new growth engines.

Titled “What if Darwin Invests in Stocks,” issued by Woori Investment and Securities on Monday, a principle like natural selection is at work in the stock market as well. This principle can be called “market selection.”

*sigh*

I really dislike stuff like this: Darwin being used as a metaphor for stuff that has nothing to do with the natural world.

But the writer of the article might be interested to learn that Darwin did invest in stocks—including those of companies which literally sought ‘new growth engines’: Charles Darwin invested in the new-fangled railways.