Archive for the ‘Charles Darwin’ Category
Darwin and me – one more time
As some of my posts might indicate, I’ve become a bit of a Darwin obsessive over the years, and I think I’m often more interested in personalities than ideas. I’ve even become quite protective of him, even though I have every reason to be pissed off by the privileges he benefitted from. Darwin was brought up amongst the ‘whig aristocracy’, his father being a wealthy doctor and a smart investor, closely associated with his wife’s Wedgwood wealth, and I really mean wealth. Basically, he inherited smarts as well as wealth. I only inherited smarts, but comparisons are odorous, I’m told.
So Darwin was born with ‘connections’, and lived in a large Shrewsbury estate with servants and plenty of land for hunting and collecting and an inheritance that included grandad Erasmus with his many intellectual and sensual pursuits. Some 150 or so years later, I lived in a rental purchase home in Elizabeth, a working class region north of Adelaide, South Australia, where I started my first job at 15 or 16 in a washing-machine factory. I’d recently left school after having been slapped very forcefully in the face by the headmaster for chewing gum while he was talking to me. I’ve had fantasies ever since of slicing his penis off, ripping his intestines out and observing his reaction. Sorry about that – but Edward II, the so-called ‘hammer of the Scots’, got away with doing that kinda thing to William Wallace… that’s the upper classes for you.
As a young man, Darwin was sent to Edinburgh to finish his education. He mostly studied medicine and the natural sciences, but he couldn’t cope with dissection, not to mention the Scots’ murder of the language, and after some family discussion he transferred to Cambridge. In both institutions, his family name and fame provided him with a number of intellectual connections, and that’s how he got the Beagle assignment. This was definitely the making of him as a naturalist, though his role was supposed to be that of a gentleman’s gentleman to Captain Fitzroy, who, as a Tory toff, didn’t much like the idea of being cooped up for some years in an almost embarrassingly tiny boat with a lot of unlettered sea urchins. The voyage lasted nearly five years and ultimately circumnavigated the globe. Darwin was 22 years old when it set out.
In my five years from the age of 22 I spent much of my time on the dole, having previously worked in two washing-machine factories, a factory that made mobile classrooms for over-crowded schools, a factory making metal pipes for various purposes, a foundry making metal baskets also for various purposes, and a stint as a nurse’s aid in an institute quaintly named The Home for Incurables.
So, after all that, at 22 I moved into a share-house with an art student of the same age, and a much older social worker (at 28!) who was openly homosexual and never wore clothes in the house. It was a very happy period for me, I began to write a regular diary and found myself on the fringes of an arty-farty crowd. My main literary influences then were, I’d say, two very different self-obsessives, Michel de Montaigne and Franz Kafka, and I began to take a little pride in my intellect.
In my 24th year I enrolled in a College of Advanced Education (CAE), an education facility created in the 70s and 80s, above high school but not quite a university, doing a thing called Communication Studies. A couple of essays I wrote caused enough interest that the head of the college invited me into his office and suggested that, with his help, I could be transferred to Flinders University, perhaps to study philosophy. On further questioning, though, he found that I was failing in at least one subject, mathematics, which I was more or less completely ignoring, and he changed his mind. I dropped out of the college at the end of my first year.
Over the next few years I moved from share-house to share-house and lived with a number of interesting characters. It was a carefree, easy-going time of reading, writing, and chit-chat. I lucked into a job as a kitchen-hand in a swank French restaurant and became quite interested in cooking, which raised my status among share-house comrades.
And then Darwin arrived back in England. He’d gained much self-confidence and something of a reputation, having sent off some intriguing fossil specimens from his labours in South America, and soon made contact with Charles Lyell, whose first volume of Principles of Geology he’d read on his travels, as well as his erstwhile associates Henslow, Sedgwick and Fox. He published his ‘Journal of researches’ in 1839, and subsequent geological and biological works earned him membership of the Geological Society and the Royal Society, and acquaintance with such worthies as William Whewell, Richard Owen and John Gould, and later with up-and-comers Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley, among many others. Also in 1839, at the age of 29, he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood.
At the age of 29 I started studies at Adelaide University, where I remained for nine years, shifting from subject to subject – a little philosophy, a very little biology, a major in French, and some months of teacher training, until finally, forced for financial reasons to get a factory job once more, at Rupert Murdoch-owned Griffin Press (now defunct), chucking unbound books onto a conveyor belt during the afternoon and attending university classes, very bleary-eyed, in the mornings. I earned enough to go full-time again and obtain a fairly useless but quite easy Honours degree in English, thus ending my university career, aged 38, as unemployable as before.
Into his thirties, married and with children in quick succession, Darwin became more and more interested, even obsessed, with the dangerous concept of the transmutation of species. Lamarck had been one of the first to broach the idea, with the publication of Philosophie zoologique in 1809, which was much ridiculed in British intellectual circles in the 1830s and 40s, including by Darwin himself, albeit with a difference. Lamarck may have missed the causal principles of transmutation (as did Darwin, since genes were unknown in his day), but the extent to which he ‘got it right’ is still debated. But Darwin was certainly on the trail of an evolutionary theory, as many of his notes show. The appearance, in 1844 of the controversial bestseller, Vestiges of the natural history of creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers (another very clever Scot), which Darwin and many of his natural philosophy friends devoured, taught him above all else how fractious the topic of species and their origins could be, and he was constitutionally averse to controversy. Having moved with Emma and his growing brood to a rambling country estate in Kent, courtesy of his wealthy family, he made a decision, of sorts, to narrow his biological focus to one particular class of Crustacean, barnacles – though he didn’t give up on his other species explorations and their human connections.
So, having finished with university, and being somewhat buoyed by the odd academic compliment on my writing abilities (though I received a bare pass and a screed of sarcastic comments from a philosophy lecturer for an overdue essay I wrote, methinks under the affluence of inkahol), I had the bright idea of writing to the editor of a local news-and culture rag, The Adelaide Review, offering my services as a journalist-writer of sorts. I made the letter très jazzy and up-beat, suggesting a number of possible topics, including something about my mis-spent youth in working-class Elizabeth. To my great surprise the editor called me more or less instanter, quoted with amusement some witty line I’d written, and asked me to send a piece on Elizabeth. It was published in the next issue, and I found myself a published writer, in miniature. I was rather nonplussed at how easy it had been. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Could I make my living as a writer somehow? The Adelaide Review piece was a one-off, I quickly realised, but maybe I could expand it into a memoir-novel of hijinks and wit, or what might pass for it. I had recently moved into a share-house with an older, twice-married woman (I’d been desperate to move out of a house I shared with another older woman whose interest in me I was unable to reciprocate), and we began a romantic liaison – again my cooking skills appeared to be key. I think, though, that I’d already written most of my Elizabeth novel by the time we became a couple. I suppose I should check my journals, which I never read.
So we were now in the mid 1990s, and, perhaps through the auspices of The Adelaide Review, my expanded writings about my Elizabethan childhood were sent to and accepted by Wakefield Press, and I was given a State grant to help me along. I bought my first computer and began to navigate that Great New Thing, the internet. The novel was completed in 1996, my fortieth year, but it was put through an exhaustive editing process, which I like to think, for vanity’s sake, was standard practice. It was published in late 1997, and for a brief period my life became public. I was written up in the The Advertiser’s Weekend Magazine, together with a full-page pic of my handsome dial, and I was interviewed on local TV and radio. Over the next week or two I received two dismissive reviews, one in Adelaide University’s weekly rag, On Dit, which was a real piss-off (private school kid, no doubt), and one tiny positive one, from somewhere. And so began and ended my public career as a writer.
So that’s it about me. Darwin ended his love-hate affair with barnacles in about 1849, his fortieth year, but his explorations and speculations re speciation continued apace. He’d also managed to father a large family. I’m not sure how this was done, having no experience in the matter. He suffered the death of his favourite child, Annie, from scarlet fever, and he suffered his own aches and pains – biliousness, flatulence – for which he tried the water cures that had become super-popular in mid-nineteenth century England, especially among the upper classes. They seemed to work for him, and his embarrassments aren’t so much mentioned into the 1850s (all this from Janet Browne’s bio). He grew and crossed various plant species, raised pigeons, and kept up a rich correspondence with breeders and fanciers throughout Britain, and overseas. He became particularly interested in how seeds could be dispersed over long distances, in sea-water, or in the feathers of birds, or even via the poop of any number of species. He worried, though, that he was unable to see the forest for the trees. He was building up a great load of possibly related information, for a thesis he clearly trembled over, but was driven by….
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 1995
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
Charles Darwin and me
Erasmus Darwin, senior, progenitor, from whom Charles got some ideas, and his big nose
It seems I should be quite an expert on Darwin by now – last year I read The Origin of Species for the third time, and I followed that up, at the end of the year, with his Voyage of the Beagle. I’ve even read the first 20 pages or so of The Descent of Man (not quite into it yet), and I’m currently reading, and have nearly finished, Janet Browne’s superlative (and I really do mean that) Charles Darwin – voyaging, the best biography I’ve ever read, of anyone. I’d venture to say that the intimacy with which she deals with just about every aspect of his public and private life is – not quite what only a woman could achieve, but something women generally do so much better than men. And this is only the first volume, leading up to his writing of The Origin. I’ll definitely be buying volume 2, Darwin – the power of place, in the near future. I should also say that Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the barnacle, which I read some 15 years ago, was totally gripping and memorable (except that I can’t recall too much of it now – not her fault, I’d be saying the same about any book after 15 years, sadly. Still, I must read it again…).
So just to further prove my soi-disant expertise, I’ve also read Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s biography, simply called Darwin, and which is described in the back-cover blurbs, as a tour de force, definitive, enthralling, rivetting, compellingly readable and more. I probably found it so at the time, but twenty or so years later I can’t remember a thing about it. And the same goes for David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin & natural selection, bought for me in 2008 by my closest friend, and read more or less immediately, I’m sure. All I remember about it is that I definitely read it, honest. I may even have written about it, and the other books mentioned here, in some of my earlier, long-forgotten blogs. And to round things off I’ve just been given, for my birthday, Matt Ridley’s most recent (2025) book, Birds, sex and beauty: the extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea. I really do love this stuff, honest again. I just this morning watched a video on octopuses and – well I wish I was young and magically proficient at scuba diving so that I could connect with these brilliant creatures.
But thinking about Darwin’s life, activities and achievements (compared to my own, haha), I can’t help thinking about free will and determinism, a long term interest of mine, about which I’ve written a number of times. Darwin was born into a very rich, science-minded family, including a somewhat notorious, larger-than-life grandfather, Erasmus (father of at least 14 children, some of whom were ‘legitimate’, a term I’ve always loathed), philosopher, poet, botanist, inventor, abolitionist and Lamarckian-style evolutionist (before Lamarck). He (Charles) was sent to a couple of Britain’s best universities, Edinburgh and Cambridge, where his family name gave him entrée to a world of intellectuals, leading to an offer to join The Beagle on its round-world voyage of scientific exploration. It was his class rather than any scientific knowledge he’d acquired that recommended him to Robert Fitzroy, the ship’s commander, who felt the need of a ‘gentleman’ to keep him company. But Darwin made the most of this opportunity, which effectively was the making of him as a natural philosopher. His geological researches, and the fossilised specimens he sent home, quite quickly raised his reputation among intellectual and scientific circles in Britain, including the geologist Charles Lyell, the polymath William Whewell, and even one of his own great heroes, Alexander von Humboldt.
So Darwin, in the 1840s, richly married, well-connected, member of the Geological Society and the Royal Society, was basically a privately funded researcher into all, or many, things biological and geological, and in correspondence with professors, cattle breeders, horticulturalists, bug collectors and the like, all the while worreting over the consequences of his increasingly dangerous ideas. And so again, vis-à-vis free will, had I been born in early nineteenth century England, I’d have been more likely, as a pint-sized skinny kid, to die of chimney sweeps’ carcinoma just as I reached my teens, than to have been cosseted and educated and sent as a gentleman’s gentleman on a voyage of exploration around the world. Which doesn’t, I should add, lessen my interest in and admiration for Darwin and his life’s work. I suspect I will indeed reread all those Darwin books I’ve mostly forgotten, and read new ones. In fact, I’m wondering if I’ve actually read Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s dangerous idea. I seem to recall, but I’m not sure….
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: voyaging, 1995
Various other Darwin biographies read by me, or not….
Darwin’s On the origin of species, some reflections
I’m just finishing off my third reading of On the origin of species, and hopefully I’m a little wiser. It’s likely I read it the first time, in Penguin Modern Classics, just to be able to say I’d read it – but unfortunately, nobody asked. Many years, perhaps decades later, I read it again, the same copy. I remember nothing about it, or the whys and wherefores. This time I’ve read it as part of the four-volume set, edited by James Watson, including The Voyage of the Beagle, which I very much enjoyed, and The Descent of Man and The expression of the emotions in man and animals, which I look forward to with some trepidation, due to the wealth of detail he presents, and the archaic language, which I struggle with.
The thesis that Darwin presents, so threatening and generally offensive to the much more religious world of his time, is natural selection, or descent with modification. In presenting the thesis he had to provide a multitude of examples, from his own observations and experiments, to those of colleagues in the ‘naturalist’ world, many of whom – no doubt the majority – were hostile to that thesis. For those of us who aren’t naturalists or biological scientists, or inhabitants of the 19th century with its often out-dated nomenclature, this makes for difficult, though often enlightening, reading. And I’m left impressed with the detail of his analysis, the work he did not only on cirripedes (barnacles) and pigeons, but various plants, beetles, ants and bees, amongst other beasties. Reading his Beagle book, with all its descriptions of the wildlife and geology (and the ‘savages’) of South America in particular, was good preparation for this third reading – just as The Origin will surely prepare me for The Descent of Man, though I’m still feeling a bit daunted, pre-embarkation. First I’ll finish reading Janet Browne’s biography, which is a joy.
I’ve been trying to process this wealth of detail, while being well aware that it’s only a fraction of what has since been discovered. Bats, as he notes, are able to inhabit, to carve out a niche for themselves, in islands far from other lands, due to their powerful flight systems, while other mammals are scarce in such isolated places, or are more unique in their anatomy. Island birds’ wings become vestigial due to a lack of predators and an abundance of ground vegetation, but why did they develop wings in the first place? Darwin hints at what we now know – that the Earth’s activity may have connected or separated today’s islands or continents, over a period of history far greater than was previously thought. His friend Charles Lyell’s geological observations were far from accepted at the time, though Darwin himself (doubtless influenced by the first volume of Lyell’s 3-volume Principles of Geology, which accompanied him on the Beagle voyage) found shell fossils in the mountain regions of western South America. Generally speaking, many of his researches raised more questions than answers, but those questions couldn’t be resolved by the accepted creationist model. Blended inheritance, from what I’ve read, tended to be his explanation for minute differences developing over eons, but this conjecture, I think, isn’t mentioned in The Origin.
Darwin’s thoroughness, the multitude of examples he presents, are the best sign of his realisation that what he was presenting was revolutionary – ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’, as Daniel Dennett termed it. Its impact, as we know, was massive, and somewhat negative at first, but it surely helped in the acceptance of the genetic thesis in the 20th century, and led to the greater scientific grounding of biology and biochemistry. Darwin’s doggedness, his unrelenting recognition of the importance of his theme, while recognising that so much more remained to be discovered, so many questions remained unanswered, gives the work a modern feel, though that’s often undermined by what we now consider archaisms, and the sense, accurate enough, that he was a wealthy amateur aiming his work at other wealthy amateurs (more or less exclusively male), who nevertheless held the future of science in their hands. The situation is better these days – somewhat.
Reference
James Watson, ed, Darwin: the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005
What’s with those Tierra del Fuegans?
Members of the Selk’nam people of Tierra del Fuego, with a slave trader, in 1889
We see the value set on animals even by the barbarians of Tierra del Fuego, by their killing and devouring their old women, in times of dearth, as of less value than their dogs.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
I once read an article arguing for changing the name of Darwin, the fascinating town at the top end of the Northern Territory, because, the argument went, Charles Darwin was too much of a racist to allow a town to be named after him. After all, he referred to Australia’s Aboriginal population, and other indigenous populations he encountered, as ‘savages’, and this was an ongoing insult to the considerable Aboriginal population of that northern town.
Fair enough, thought I, but what about all the other European-Australian place names, some referring to capital cities, prominent rivers, and whole states? The term ‘savage’ was used by Europeans to refer to indigenous populations everywhere, according to the widespread belief, up until the late 19th century, that ‘civilisation’ only occurred in Britain, Europe and some parts of Asia. If savagery and civilisation weren’t entirely dichotomous, they might represent a sliding scale, with savages having to climb up that scale, an incline largely opposed to their inclinations, in a process known as assimilation. The concept is far from dead in 2024.
But in 1824, 1844 and 1864 it was the bog-standard view. So why the fuss about the naming of Darwin (aka Larrakia)? I soon discovered that the author of the above-mentioned article (posted in Online Opinion, an Australian website run by a former right-wing politician) was a creationist. I’d been there before – a prominent creationist had taken me to task for writing favourably on Darwin – wasn’t I aware that he was an out-and-out racist? What about his writing on the Tierra del Fuegans? As if this somehow told against Darwin’s theories of species’ origins and for the creationist story.
So, having recently read The voyage of the Beagle, I’m a little more informed about the matter, but not much. My impression was that he met a small handful of the native inhabitants of this most southerly region of the South American continent, and was taken aback by their poverty of tools, clothing, language and such. There were also three natives of the region on board the Beagle, a fact about which I was confused, but it’s well explained in Josie Glausiusz’ excellent online essay ‘Savages and Cannibals’, linked below. Glausiusz, like myself, made light of Darwin’s dismissive account of ‘savages’ in her first reading of The Beagle, as typical of his time, and surely also his class, but a later reading caused rather more discomfort. I too preferred to focus on the positive, liberal aspects of Darwin’s observations, and I particularly noted a passage, also quoted in Glausiusz’ essay, describing his horror at the colonists’ extremely brutal treatment of the native inhabitants :
“Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?”
The passage, and the atrocities, brought to mind a childhood reading that had quite an impact – a big book that my mother bought for me one Christmas, a USA book called ‘The History of the West’ or something similar. It told, in great detail, the battles, the treaties and the many betrayals that were a part of the Anglo-European sweep westward to grab land from the ‘Indians’. The Sioux nation, the Cherokees, the Apaches – Geronimo, Cochise, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse – all came to life in my head, just as they were beaten, humiliated and/or slaughtered. It was an unforgettable bit of bedroom trauma for me.
But getting back to Darwin, even in his later Descent of Man he regularly used the term ‘savage’, and, as mentioned, some were considered more savage than others. Interestingly, his brief comments on Australian Aboriginals were generally complimentary, and he reserved his disdain for the fledgling nation’s ex-convicts, without appearing to have the slightest cognisance that they didn’t come from his massively privileged background. How many of Darwin’s class were ever sent to the Antipodes?
This idea of a kind of sliding scale from savagery to civilisation – a sort of guided evolution – began to fall apart, it seems to me, with the advent of a new form of social analysis, namely anthropology. The term was first used in the late 16th century, and was given something of a boost during the 18th century Enlightenment period. Immanuel Kant actually gave classes on anthropology, and wrote a treatise on the subject, without, of course, having done any work in the field. But it was a start, and through the 19th century, anthropology and sociology became increasingly recognised terms, and human culture became a serious object of study. Of course it still had, and in many cases still has, its biases, with the ‘superior’ culture analysing and defining the ‘inferior’ one, but the very richness and complexity of the cultures under analysis, and what anthropologists and other analysts have learned about their evolution in connection to particular environments, such as those found in Australia over the past 50-60 thousand years, has rendered the concept of ‘savagery’ both obsolete and ridiculous.
So Darwin, it seems, was a little slow to recognise these developments, and it’s likely that the exclusivity of his class upbringing didn’t help. I note too that this clubbishness was quite sexist as well as racist – ‘man’ is always the go-to term, as in The Descent of Man, but also in countless references to human evolution in The Origin. In his many examples of breeders and experimenters with plants and animals in the early chapters of The Origin, no women are mentioned. Perhaps they were all men, but I’m doubtful.
Which brings me back to the Tierra del Fuegans, and their supposed killing and devouring of their old women (though only ‘in times of dearth’, but it seems these times were quite common). Why not their old men too? Clearly, Darwin didn’t witness such behaviour, but newspaper accounts from the 1850s and 1860s (some from Australian papers) tend to confirm the difficulties faced by the inhabitants of the region, as well as ‘civilised’ visitors’. Here are some choice examples:
From Lyttelton Times (NZ), 1852 – ‘A Party of Missionaries starved to death’.
The ill-fated party landed on Picton Island towards the conclusion of the year 1850. From the first they seem to have been annoyed in some measure by the natives, and to have been hunted backwards and forwards from the little island to what may be called the mainland of Terra del Fuego [The article goes on to describe their desperate and vain attempts to remain alive].
From New York Times, 1855
On the 19th of November [1854], we first saw any of the natives, men and three women having landed from a canoe. We had just finished our boat and were ready for starting. The Indians having first received what could be spared to them of our clothes, etc., retired; and afterward returned with bludgeons, and insisted upon stripping us. Three attacked the Captain, and three the seaman, who having disabled two of them fled to the boat in which the boy already was. Unfortunately the captain received a blow which must have instantly killed him. The boy received two arrows in his jacket, but escaped unhurt….
After remaining some days, indeed several days, we ventured along the coast in our boat. At the end of about six weeks, we found the provisions all expended, and subsisted on such shellfish as we could gather among the rocks. After subsisting for some time in this way, a native canoe again hove in sight; being then quite destitute of any means of subsisting for a month at least, except raw shellfish, we gave ourselves up to the Indians, and having nothing to excite their cupidity, they behaved very kindly to us, and with them we have remained up to this present time, having never once seen a vessel…
From The Empire [Sydney], 1858
… when amidst excessive heat, a calm came on, and the ship lay perfectly quiescent in the water with her sails hanging listlessly to the mast, several canoes got alongside, and, as I have just said, flocked around us in moderate numbers. It was evident that many of them, if not all, had never seen a ship or strangers like us before…. I knew that, according to past accounts obtained from Jemmy Button, the natives were more numerous here than from whence we had come, and, also, that those on the north side were considerably more ferocious… Two of the oldest, with their hair all plastered over with some white substance, kept incessantly chattering ; and, indeed, they talked so fast and so loud, that they foamed at their mouths like the froth of an angry sea on a beach.
The stories go on, about astonished but sometimes murderous natives, in a region that clearly seems to have been a battleground for survival, between inhabitants and newcomers, but also among the inhabitants themselves, whose subsistence existence was dictated by their environment – though their language skills seem to have been impressive.
In any case I’ve found nothing to corroborate Darwin’s story about barbecuing old women – it’s more than likely an old husband’s tale. I might return to this issue – I’d like to learn much more about Tierra del Fuego’s inhabitants in the 21st century.
References
https://www.whatisemerging.com/opinions/savages-and-cannibals
Charles Darwin, coral reefs, bleaching and all that
a stony coral polyp
I’ve read a lot of stuff about, and by, Charles Darwin over the years – not only in various passing depictions and interpretations by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Steven Jay Gould, but whole books, such as James Moore and Adrian Desmond’s big biography, Darwin (1992), David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s egg (2007) and Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the barnacle (2003) – a real favourite. And I finished his Voyage of the Beagle only a few days ago, trying to get my head around the last sections, in fact the penultimate chapter of the book, in which he deals with ‘coral formations’. I seem to remember from one or more of those biographical books that he expanded his brief but dense – I mean complex – account in his Voyage, into what we might nowadays call a separate scientific paper [‘On the structure and distribution of coral reefs‘], and that his understanding of these formations was mostly correct, and ground-breaking. So for my sins I’m going to try to fathom these mostly undersea marvels, with the help of Darwin and others.
But before that, just one more thing about Darwin biographies. I’ve recently returned from a very pleasant holiday on Kangaroo Island, where we stayed at an ‘air b & b’ on the coast just outside of Kingscote, very comfy-cosy, and with a very varied lounge-room library. One book caught my eye – another Darwin biography, Charles Darwin: voyaging (1996) by Janet Browne. I read the first few pages and was – well, smitten might be the word. The comparison between Darwin’s social world and that of Jane Austen, one of my favourite authors, was brilliant and completely engrossing. Of course I didn’t have time to read much more, what with my own reading and all our excursions round the island, but I’m looking out to get myself a copy asap.
So Darwin starts out with the kind of basic but fresh wonderment that even I got in observing the rounded, rust-coloured boulders heaped up on the shore at Cape Willoughby, the eastern tip of Kangaroo Island. What were the processes….?
But Darwin, of course, went much further. Of reefs, he starts… ‘such formations surely rank high amongst the wonderful objects of this world’, and goes on:
We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.
So Darwin reflected on the ‘three great classes’ of coral reefs – atolls, barrier and fringing reefs.
Atolls, as he teaches me, are ‘ring’ islands, or sets of islands, encircling a central lagoon, and I have to quote, as Darwin does, a French adventurer’s exclamation from 1605:
C’est une merveille de voir chacun de ces atollons, environné d’un grand banc de pierre tout autour, n’y ayant point d’artifice humain.
I suppose they could also be called ‘reef islands’, and the ‘land’ or reef rings can extend to a diameter of many kilometres. I won’t be using Darwin’s descriptions for the following, as his antiquated language is headache-inducing, but atolls are apparently the ‘third and final stage of Darwin’s subsidence theory’, so I should put them in order.
With the first stage, the fringing reef, volcanic activity forms an island, rising up from the ocean, and corals, which I’ll attempt to describe later, begin to form, and they build up as the land formed by the volcano begins to subside. This is because the coral needs sunlight as a source of energy. The corals form a more or less circular fringe around the subsiding land.
In the second stage, with more subsidence, a kind of barrier – think of it perhaps as a kind of natural ‘moat’ – forms between the reef and the now almost submerged land in the centre.
In the case of an atoll, the land is wholly submerged. And yet, the coral seems to form islands around this central lagoon? Anyway, here’s how one presumably reliable source puts it:
The Deep Sea Drilling Project sought evidence of volcanic cores beneath coral reefs and found it. First, in 1952 at the Einwetok Atoll in the Marshall islands, and again, in 1960 at the Midway Atoll, teams found volcanic rock strongly supporting Darwin’s theory that coral reefs form around submerging islands. Today, Darwin’s theory is universally accepted as a means of explaining these reef formations.
However, as this source, linked below, puts it, not all reefs fit this pattern (and I’m thinking that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef surely doesn’t). Other reefs known as patch reefs and bank reefs are found in the Caribbean region.
But I want to get down to the real basics. Coral reefs are built by coral, or corals, or what? Micro-organisms? What is coral? I’ll start, and probably finish, with Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and reliable encyclopedia ever devised, but there are many other reliable sites, linked below.
Corals are tiny invertebrate animals, in the phylum Cnidaria (of which there are more than 11,000 species, including jellyfish and sea anemones). Generally they form colonies of individual polyps, long thin little creatures with tentacles. They can reproduce asexually to form colonies, and sexually by spawning – releasing a mix of eggs and sperm into the water, as most marine creatures do. For most of their lives they’re sessile (immobile), and these colonies of genetically identical individuals can number in the millions. Stony coral polyps produce a skeleton of calcium carbonate, essentially composed of calcium, carbon and oxygen (CaCO3). The stony coral we’re familiar with, Scleractinia to the cognoscenti, have been around for about 250 million years, from the Middle Triassic, but we can trace coral ancestry back much further, to the Cambrian, 535 million years ago. They were quite rare, though, until the Ordovician, 100 years later, and they were of a very different type from ‘modern’ corals. It seems that different coral types came and went, with a particularly massive disappearance due to the Permian-Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, which killed off 75% of all marine species.
So, a little more about their anatomy, before I go on to to coral bleaching, and current threats. I’ve mentioned the calcium carbonate skeleton, deposited by the polyps and also by the coenosarc, a layer of tissue that connects these polyps by secreting coenosteum, a stony material made of calcium carbonate in the form of aragonite (a more spongy and porous form). There’s also an extracellular matrix called mesogloea – it’s complicated!
Aragonite is also the material from which corallites are made. These are cup-shaped depressions into which the polyp can retract. The individual polyps and their housings can grow to form enormous colonies of very variable shapes and sizes:
Colonies of stony coral are markedly variable in appearance; a single species may adopt an encrusting, plate-like, bushy, columnar or massive solid structure, the various forms often being linked to different types of habitat, with variations in light level and water movement being significant.
It would be frankly ridiculous of me to go into much more detail, there’s way too much ground, or stone, or ocean, to cover. Better to focus on coral’s apparently self-imposed bleaching behaviour. When corals are stressed, usually due to the over-heating of reef waters, they expel a particular form of algae, known as zooxanthellae, from their tissues. Why they do this seems unclear, as the zooxanthellae provide food and photosynthetic energy essential for their growth and reproduction. It has to do with oxidative stress, apparently, and I’m sure they know what they’re doing. And perhaps ‘bleaching’ should be dumped as a term, because it surely gives the wrong impression. The pale skeletons that remain are not in any sense bleached, but….
Anyway, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef has suffered several mass bleaching events in the last few years, the most recent being earlier this year (2024), following the hottest year, globally, on record. Corals do recover from such events, gradually, but the strain on them is accumulating.
References
http://coraldigest.org/index.php/DarwinsTheory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral
https://www.barrierreef.org/the-reef/threats/coral-bleaching
Concerning the future, I suspect things might change…
As we’re just about to have an election in the UK I listened to a vox populi set of interviews, which seemed to take place in traditionally conservative electorates, about who should run the country over the next several years. There were complaints about everything being run down, too many immigrants, too many scandals, they shouldn’t have kicked out Boris Johnson, or they shouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near the Prime Ministership, no they won’t be voting Labour, no the Liberal Democrats are useless, I haven’t decided who I’ll vote for, might not vote at all… And there were plenty of complaints about the general neglect of their particular fraction of London, and plenty of images of abandoned and broken down homes and buildings.
By all accounts, the Tories are set to lose this election big-time, after 14 years of incumbency preceded by 13 years of Labour government. I’ve not been paying too much attention to UK politics, having left the place (Scotland in fact) for the balmy shores of Australia as a five-year-old. I was surprised to learn just this week that voting isn’t compulsory there, which I think is a shame. When a few years ago there was a vote in Scotland regarding national independence, I mentally sided with the ‘no’ vote, as I generally take a ‘together’ view over a ‘separated’ view. But then Brexit happened, which of course was a shambles.
I try to be impartial about politics, but of course I have my hobby horses, e.g. moving towards a bonobo humanity, and that involves change, very much. And the very word ‘conservative’ means wishing to conserve, to preserve, to maintain and so forth. Small government, reduced taxation, minimal involvement. Here in Australia, our former long-standing PM, John Howard liked to say ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. But this, of course, misses the point. Landlines were once an acceptable form of communication – I recall how sophisticated we felt when we had a phone connected in the early sixties – but now we all have ‘smart’ phones, which don’t seem to have made us smarter people. We came to Australia by ship, which now seems quaint. Elly Noether, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, had to work without pay, teaching only male students, and often surreptitiously, because it was widely accepted in the 1910s and 1920s that maths and physics were beyond the ken of women, and that wasn’t so long ago in my time frame (we’ll reach bonobo humanity in about 1000 years). Conservatism generally tends to face backwards, as culture moves forward.
Is it a fear of change? We all fear it, to different degrees. The interviewees were reluctant, mostly, to mention particular issues, though they all seemed to voice a general weariness and dissatisfaction with the current government. Immigration was mentioned a couple of times, and unions once. A different video presented a poll of voters’ main concerns heading into the election, and their dissatisfaction with the current National Health Service (NHS) came out well on top. So, low tax, low government revenue, cuts to the NHS, too bad.
I’ve often thought there’s something wrong or missing about current representative democracies, in which there are two major parties locked in combat for the support of the majority, and I’ve written previously about my issues with adversarial systems in general – for example in the law, in industrial relations, in politics, and even in the media, especially in the US. And with the rise of social media, a sort of bloated juggernaut of disinformation and abuse, the future doesn’t appear to look good for the kind of consensus approach to social issues I’ve always hoped for. The dog-eat-dog world of the USA is no example to follow – a broken system of mutual hatreds. ‘The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation’, according to inequality.org, Quelle surprise.
Could it be that, in the long long view, nation states will be in the rear-view mirror? Currently, complaints about immigration and ‘illegals’ are commonplace, but national borders, passports and visas are a recent phenomenon, and so many of us think we’re living in a ‘thousand-year reich’ or an eternal present. Of course I’ve no idea what the human planet will be like in a thousand years, but there’s nout wrong with speculating. And hoping. My hopeful expectation is that transnational and international activities and lifestyles will grow, and that both the local and the global will become more rather than less important. It will become increasingly clear that centralised control – powerful national government – is failing distant local regions with their specific issues requiring specialised local expertise. At the same time, more effective global communications will bring about better dissemination of knowledge and ideas, with ‘red tape’ being reduced or bypassed. Sounds a bit utopian I know…
And the human world will have become more bonoboesque. Not only with female dominance, but a reduction if not a complete dissolution of monogamy. Our scientific discoveries and enquiries will proceed apace, underlining what can be achieved through teamwork and collaboration as well as friendly rivalry between teams. Adversarial approaches will be greatly watered down, and elected representatives will work together for the best results, always allowing for input from the represented. Dictatorships will be almost a subject of ancient history… well perhaps not quite ancient, but history. Children will indeed be cared for communally, and a thriving and happy sexuality will be normalised. Education will be respected, and those doing the educating will be held in particularly high regard. An overwhelming proportion of leaders, in all areas – decision-making, research, education, group dynamics, sanctioning – will be female, though males will be well-treated, consulted and respected.
And if there are no nations? Freedom of movement and interaction will be greater than it is today, facilitated by increasingly improved telecommunications and transport. Language barriers will be reduced by effective translation algorithms. The mechanisation of food production will continue to advance, and housing will undergo a revolution corresponding to the dissolution of the nuclear family and a preference for more communal living. Diets will change as we focus more effectively, both on health and the biosphere we share with all other species. The human population will stabilise, as will its calorific intake. Inequalities will not, of course, disappear, but they will greatly reduce, as the community will insist on nobody being left behind or forgotten. Education and community participation will be the highest priority, as we know that exclusion will fuel resentment, ultimately leading to violence… But involvement in communal activities will be so highly prized that few would be willing to turn their backs…
Okay, okay, just kidding. In a thousand years, we might survive, but things’ll be much more fucked than they are today. I’m glad I’ll be outta here…
But then again…
References
Wealth Inequality
stuff on exaptation and Archaeopteryx
my photo of archaeopteryx, from London’s Natural History Museum
Through my various readings and researches, if they can be credited as such, I’ve from time to time come across the famous image of Archaeopteryx, a fossil (now the type specimen) of some sort of dinosaur-bird discovered in the early 1860s, and with some fanfare, I think, presented as proof of Darwin’s recently published thesis, On the Origin of Species (1859). Now, being an impoverished type, with an elementary scientific education, I’ve travelled little, and much of my reading has been from borrowed or scrounged titles, including the aforementioned work. However, a few years ago, due to a lucky and undeserved inheritance, I got to travel to London from my home in Australia, whereupon I paid a visit to the British museum. Wandering lonely as a cloud along the hallowed halls, I suddenly found myself face to face with the Archaeopteryx specimen so very occasionally but memorably depicted in the science texts previously perused, and I must say my heart skipped a beat. Not that I quite knew what all the fuss was about. It had something to do with missing links and flying dinosaurs and, as mentioned, confirmation of the controversial thesis.
Anyway a recent reading of the essay ‘Not necessarily a wing’, in Stephen Jay Gould’s Bully for Brontosaurus collection, has taken me back to Archaeopteryx, the first bird, as Gould calls it, though surely we can’t be certain about that. However the important point is that birds evolved from creatures that weren’t birds, and it likely wasn’t a sudden thing. As Gould describes it, arguments against Darwin’s theory, sometimes by evolutionists of a different stripe, questioned the development of features such as wings, and their usefulness before they were ‘developed’ enough to enable flight. Darwin responded with the concept of ‘functional shift’, more recently labelled ‘exaptation’, thanks to academic contributions from Gould himself, among others.
Wikipedia has it that ‘older potential avialans have [recently] been identified’. The term ‘avialan’, from Avialae (“bird wings”) ‘is a clade containing the only living dinosaurs, the birds, and their closest relatives’. In any case what’s more important is how flight developed in early dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx lived about 150 million years ago (the late Jurassic) and was about magpie-sized, but probably nothing like a modern bird in appearance. It had teeth, unlike modern birds, and a long bony tail, and various other features characteristic of dinosaurs. So it has been described as a transitional species. But what does this mean? Are we a transitional species? Isn’t every species transitioning in some way? (Add plug for transitioning to a bonoboesque humanity here).
What we can say is that Archaeopteryx was likely one of the first flying dinosaurs as well as the first bird or proto-bird, and we now have 12 separate fossils of the species. But of course discoveries continue. From Wikipedia,
… in recent years, the discovery of several small, feathered dinosaurs has created a mystery for palaeontologists, raising questions about which animals are the ancestors of modern birds and which are their relatives.
But let me return to this issue of exaptation – in this case, as regards wings and flight. Gould quotes from the 19th century dissenter vis-a-vis Darwin’s theory, St George Mivart, on the general problem:
Natural selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterwards become.
Mivart opted for a ‘comparatively sudden modification of a marked and important kind’, rather than incremental but still adaptive changes – that’s to say, changes naturally selected for, though not of course by any kind of design. But Darwin countered that these ‘sudden modifications’ smacked of the miraculous – ‘to admit all this is, as it seems to me, to enter into the realms of miracle, and to leave those of Science’.
Mivart worked hard to find large-scale modifications that might fit within an evolutionary framework, while at the same time Darwin had to work hard to show the adaptiveness of small-scale changes that might, over a long period, lead, for example, to flight. The organism would be gradually changed in terms of its hunting and feeding practices, for example, which would be incrementally selected for until the structural-anatomical changes led to an increasingly sustained ability to leave the ground for nutrition further afield and/or higher above ground.
Okay, this isn’t exactly what Darwin presents, which is change of function (functional shift – exaptation). I’m suggesting that the change itself would be so gradual as to be barely noticeable, functionally, except through the ‘compression’ of time afforded by our analyses of fossil records. However, unsurprisingly, analysts have been here before, as Gould’s essay tells us. In the case of insects, wing size compared to body size has been analysed carefully in recent decades, with respect to flight versus insulation or thermoregulation, and the results have favoured an exaptation model – first the advantages of thermoregulation, then as wings grew in proportion to body size, the advantages – and such advantages! – of flight.
The details here are complex almost beyond description – certainly beyond my ability to describe them – and we may perhaps never know whether Archaeopteryx is the direct descendant of modern birds or a cousin of that descendant. The Wikipedia article on the species is virtually book-length, with well over 100 references. The arguments run along similar lines regarding various human antecedents, with lumpers and splitters debating the position of Homo ergaster, Homo luzonensis et al. Gould points out, I think rightly, that evolutionary history is very bushy and human researchers are overly obsessed with finding direct, vertical lines of descent – ladders among the bushes, or transforming bushes into sets of ladders. The bushes themselves have their intrinsic interest and beauty.
References
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Not necessarily a wing’, in Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991
kin selection – some fascinating stuff
Canto: So we’ve done four blogs on Palestine and we’ve barely scratched the surface, but we’re having trouble going forward with that project because, frankly, it’s so depressing and anger-inducing that it’s affecting our well-being.
Jacinta: Yes, an undoubtedly selfish excuse, but we do plan to go on with that project – we’re definitely not abandoning it, and meanwhile we should recommend such books as Tears for Tarshiha by the Palestinian peace activist Olfat Mahmoud, and Goliath by the Jewish American journalist Max Blumenthal, which highlight the sufferings of Palestinian people in diaspora, and the major stresses of trying to exist under zionist monoculturalism. But for now, something completely different, we’re going to delve into the fascinating facts around kin selection, with thanks to Robert Sapolski’s landmark book Behave.
Canto: The term ‘kin selection’ was first used by John Maynard Smith in the early sixties but it was first mooted by Darwin (who got it right about honey bees), and its mathematics were worked out back in the 1930s.
Jacinta: What’s immediately interesting to me is that we humans tend to think we alone know who our kin are, especially our extended or most distant kin, because only we know about aunties, uncles and second and third cousins. We have language and writing and record-keeping, so we can keep track of those things as no other creatures can. But it’s our genes that are the key to kin selection, not our brains.
Canto: Yes, and let’s start with distinguishing between kin selection and group selection, which Sapolsky deals with well. Group selection, popularised in the sixties by the evolutionary biologist V C Wynne-Edwards and by the US TV program Wild Kingdom, which I remember well, was the view that individuals behaved, sometimes or often, for the good of the species rather than for themselves as individuals of that species. However, every case that seemed to illustrate group selection behaviour could easily be interpreted otherwise. Take the case of ‘eusocial’ insects such as ants and bees, where most individuals don’t reproduce. This was seen as a prime case of group selection, where individuals sacrifice themselves for the sake of the highly reproductive queen. However, as evolutionary biologists George Williams and W D Hamilton later showed, eusocial insects have a unique genetic system in which they are all more or less equally ‘kin’, so it’s really another form of kin selection. This eusociality exists in some mammals too, such as mole rats.
Jacinta: The famous primatologist Sarah Hrdy dealt something of a death-blow to group selection in the seventies by observing that male langur monkeys in India commit infanticide with some regularity, and, more importantly, she worked out why. Langurs live in groups with one resident male to a bunch of females, with whom he makes babies. Meanwhile the other males tend to hang around in groups brooding instead of breeding, and infighting. Eventually, one of this male gang feels powerful enough to challenge the resident male. If he wins, he takes over the female group, and their babies. He knows they’re not his, and his time is short before he gets booted out by the next tough guy. Further, the females aren’t ovulating because they’re nursing their kids. The whole aim is to pass on his genes (this is individual rather than kin selection), so his best course of action is to kill the babs, get the females ovulating as quickly as possible, and impregnate them himself.
Canto: Yes, but it gets more complicated, because the females have just as much interest in passing on their genes as the male, and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush…
Jacinta: Let me see, a babe in your arms is worth a thousand erections?
Canto: More or less precisely. So they fight the male to protect their infants, and can even go into ‘fake’ estrus, and mate with the male, fooling the dumb cluck into thinking he’s a daddy.
Jacinta: And since Hrdy’s work, infanticide of this kind has been documented in well over 100 species, even though it can sometimes threaten the species’ survival, as in the case of mountain gorillas. So much for group selection.
Canto: So now to kin selection. Here are some facts. If you have an identical twin your genome is identical with hers. If you have a full sibling you’re sharing 50% and with a half-sibling 25%. As you can see, the mathematics of genes and relatedness can be widened out to great degrees of complexity. And since this is all about passing on all, or most, or some of your genes, it means that ‘in countless species, whom you co-operate with, compete with, or mate with depends on their degree of relatedness to you’, to quote Sapolsky.
Jacinta: Yes, so here’s a term to introduce and then fairly promptly forget about: allomothering. This is when a mother of a newborn enlists the assistance of another female in the process of child-rearing. It’s a commonplace among primate species, but also occurs in many bird species. The mother herself benefits from an occasional rest, and the allomother, more often than not a younger relation such as the mother’s kid sister, gets to practice mothering.
Canto: So this is part of what is called ‘inclusive fitness’, where, in this case, the kid gets all-day mothering (if of varying quality) the kid sister gets to learn about mothering, thereby increasing her fitness when the time comes, and the mother gets a rest to recharge her batteries for future mothering. It’s hopefully win-win-win.
Jacinta: Yes, there are negatives and positives to altruistic behaviour, but according to Hamilton’s Rule, r.B > C, kin selection favours altruism when the reproductive success of relatives is greater than the cost to the altruistic individual.
Canto: To explain that rule, r equals degree of relatedness between the altruist and the beneficiary (aka coefficient of relatedness), B is the benefit (measured in offspring) to the recipient, and C is the cost to the altruist. What interests me most, though, about this kin stuff, is how other, dumb primates know who is their kin. Sapolsky describes experiments with wild vervet monkeys by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth which show that if monkey A behaves badly to monkey B, this will adversely affect B’s behaviour towards A’s relatives, as well as B’s relatives’ behaviour to A, as well as B’s relatives’ behaviour to A’s relatives. How do they all know who those relatives are? Good question. The same researchers proved this recognition by playing a recording of a juvenile distress call to a group of monkeys hanging around. The female monkeys all looked at the mother of the owner of that distress call to see what she would do. And there were other experiments of the sort.
Jacinta: And even when we can’t prove knowledge of kin relations (kin recognition) among the studied animals, we find their actual behaviour tends always to conform to Hamilton’s Rule. Or almost always… In any case there are probably other cues, including odours, which may be unconsciously sensed, which might aid in inclusive fitness and also avoiding inbreeding.
Canto: Yes and It’s interesting how this closeness, this familiarity, breeds contempt in some ways. Among humans too. Well, maybe not contempt but we tend not to be sexually attracted to those we grow up with and, for example, take baths with as kids, whether or not they’re related to us. But I suppose that has nothing to do with kin selection. And yet…
Jacinta: And yet it’s more often than not siblings or kin that we have baths with. As kids. But getting back to odours, we have more detail about that, as described in Sapolski. Place a mouse in an enclosed space, then introduce two other mice, one unrelated to her, another a full sister from another litter, never encountered before. The mouse will hang out with the sister. This is called innate recognition, and it’s due to olfactory signatures. Pheromones. From proteins which come from genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC).
Canto: Histowhat?
Jacinta: Okay, you know histology is the study of bodily tissues, so think of the compatibility or otherwise of tissues that come into contact. Immunology. Recognising friend or foe, at the cellular, subcellular level. The MHC, this cluster of genes, kicks off the production of proteins which produce pheromones with a unique odour, and because your relatives have similar MHC genes, they’re treated as friends because they have a similar olfactory signature. Which doesn’t mean the other mouse in the enclosure is treated as a foe. It’s a mouse, after all. But other animals have their own olfactory signatures, and that’s another story.
Canto: And there are other forms of kin recognition. Get this – birds recognise their parents from the songs sung to them before they were hatched. Birds have distinctive songs, passed down from father to son, since its mostly the males that do the singing. And as you get to more complex species, such as primates – though maybe they’re not all as complex as some bird species – there might even be a bit of reasoning involved, or at least consciousness of what’s going on.
Jacinta: So that’s kin selection, but can’t we superior humans rise above that sort of thing? Australians marry Japanese, or have close friendships with Nigerians, at least sometimes.
Canto: Sometimes, and this is the point. Kinship selection is an important factor in shaping behaviour and relations, but it’s one of a multiple of factors, and they all have differential influences in different individuals. It’s just that such influences may go below the level of awareness, and being aware of the factors shaping our behaviour is always the key, if we want to understand ourselves and everyone else, human or non-human.
Jacinta: Good to stop there. As we’ve said, much of our understanding has come from reading Sapolsky’s Behave, because we’re old-fashioned types who still read books, but I’ve just discovered that there’s a whole series of lectures by Sapolsky, about 25, on human behaviour, which employs the same structure as the book (which is clearly based on the lectures), and is available on youtube here. So all that’s highly recommended, and we’ll be watching them.
References
R Sapolski, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst. Bodley Head, 2017
https://www.britannica.com/science/animal-behavior/Function#ref1043131
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality
how evolution was proved to be true
The origin of species is a natural phenomenon
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
The origin of species is an object of inquiry
Charles Darwin
The origin of species is an object of experimental investigation
Hugo de Vries
(quoted in The Gene: an intimate history, by Siddhartha Mukherjee)
Gregor Mendel
I’ve recently read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s monumental book The Gene: an intimate history, a work of literature as well as science, and I don’t know quite where to start with its explorations and insights, but since, as a teacher to international students some of whom come from Arabic countries, I’m occasionally faced with disbelief regarding the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection from random variation (usually in some such form as ‘you don’t really believe we come from monkeys do you?’), I think it might be interesting, and useful for me, to trace the connections, in time and ideas, between that theory and the discovery of genes that the theory essentially led to.
One of the problems for Darwin’s theory, as first set down, was how variations could be fixed in subsequent generations. And of course another problem was – how could a variation occur in the first place? How were traits inherited, whether they varied from the parent or not? As Mukherjee points out, heredity needed to be both regular and irregular for the theory to work.
There were few clues in Darwin’s day about inheritance and mutation. Apart from realising that it must have something to do with reproduction, Darwin himself could only half-heartedly suggest an unoriginal notion of blending inheritance, while also leaning at times towards Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics – which he at other times scoffed at.
Mukherjee argues here that Darwin’s weakness was impracticality: he was no experimenter, though a keen observer. The trouble was that no amount of observation, in Darwin’s day, would uncover genes. Even Mendel was unable to do that, at least not in the modern DNA sense. But in any case Darwin lacked Mendel’s experimental genius. Still, he did his best to develop a hypothesis of inheritance, knowing it was crucial to his overall theory. He called it pangenesis. It involved the idea of ‘gemmules’ inhabiting every cell of an organism’s body and somehow shaping the varieties of organs, tissues, bones and the like, and then specimens of these varied gemmules were collected into the germ cells to produce ‘mixed’ offspring, with gemmules from each partner. Darwin describes it rather vaguely in his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, published in 1868:
They [the gemmules] are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms the new being; but they are likewise capable of transmission in a dormant state to future generations and may then be developed.
Darwin himself admitted his hypothesis to be ‘rash and crude’, and it was effectively demolished by a very smart Scotsman, Fleeming Jenkin, who pointed out that a trait would be diluted away by successive unions with those who didn’t have it (Jenkin gave as an example the trait of whiteness, i.e. having ‘white gemmules’, but a better example would be that of blue eyes). With an intermingling of sexual unions, specific traits would be blended over time into a kind of uniform grey, like paint pigments (think of Blue Mink’s hit song ‘Melting Pot’).
Darwin was aware of and much troubled by Jenkin’s critique, but he (and the scientific world) wasn’t aware that a paper published in 1866 had provided the solution – though he came tantalisingly close to that awareness. The paper, ‘Experiments in Plant Hybridisation’, by Gregor Mendel, reported carefully controlled experiments in the breeding of pea plants. First Mendel isolated ‘true-bred’ plants, noting seven true-bred traits, each of which had two variants (smooth or wrinkled seeds; yellow or green seeds; white or violet coloured flowers; flowers at the tip or at the branches; green or yellow pods; smooth or crumpled pods; tall or short plants). These variants of a particular trait are now known as alleles.
Next, he began a whole series of painstaking experiments in cross-breeding. He wanted to know what would happen if, say, a green-podded plant was crossed with a yellow-podded one, or if a short plant was crossed with a tall one. Would they blend into an intermediate colour or height, or would one dominate? He was well aware that this was a key question for ‘the history of the evolution of organic forms’, as he put it.
He experimented in this way for some eight years, with thousands of crosses and crosses of crosses, and the more the crosses multiplied, the more clearly he found patterns emerging. The first pattern was clear – there was no blending. With each crossing of true-bred variants, only one variant appeared in the offspring – only tall plants, only round peas and so on. Mendel named them as dominant traits, and the non-appearing ones as recessive. This was already a monumental result, blowing away the blending hypothesis, but as always, the discovery raised as many questions as answers. What had happened to the recessive traits, and why were some traits recessive and others dominant?
Further experimentation revealed that disappeared traits could reappear in toto in further cross-breedings. Mendel had to carefully analyse the relations between different recessive and dominant traits as they were cross-bred in order to construct a mathematical model of the different ‘indivisible, independent particles of information’ and their interactions.
Although Mendel was alert to the importance of his work, he was spectacularly unsuccessful in alerting the biological community to this fact, due partly to his obscurity as a researcher, and partly to the underwhelming style of his landmark paper. Meanwhile others were aware of the centrality of inheritance to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The German embryologist August Weismann added another nail to the coffin of the ‘gemmule’ hypothesis in 1883, a year after Darwin’s death, by showing that mice with surgically removed tails – thus having their ‘tail gemmules’ removed – never produced tail-less offspring. Weismann presented his own hypothesis, that hereditary information was always and only passed down vertically through the germ-line, that’s to say, through sperm and egg cells. But how could this be so? What was the nature of the information passed down, information that could contain stability and change at the same time?
The Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries, inspired by a meeting with Darwin himself not long before the latter’s death, was possessed by these questions and, though Mendel was completely unknown to him, he too looked for the answer through plant hybridisation, though less systematically and without the good fortune of hitting on true-breeding pea plants as his subjects. However, he gradually became aware of the particulate nature of hereditary information, with these particles (he called them ‘pangenes’, in deference to Darwin’s ‘pangenesis’), passing down information intact through the germ-line. Sperm and egg contributed equally, with no blending. He reported his findings in a paper entitled Hereditary monstrosities in 1897, and continued his work, hoping to develop a more detailed picture of the hereditary process. So imagine his surprise when in 1900 a colleague sent de Vries a paper he’d unearthed, written by ‘a certain Mendel’ from the 1860s, which displayed a clearer understanding of the hereditary process than anyone had so far managed. His response was to rush his own most recent work into press without mentioning Mendel. However, two other botanists, both as it happened working with pea hybrids, also stumbled on Mendel’s work at the same time. Thus, in a three-month period in 1900, three leading botanists wrote papers highly indebted to Mendel after more than three decades of profound silence.
Hugo de Vries
The next step of course, was to move beyond Mendel. De Vries, who soon corrected his unfair treatment of his predecessor, sought to answer the question ‘How do variants arise in the first place?’ He soon found the answer, and another solid proof of Darwin’s natural selection. The ‘random variation’ from which nature selected, according to the theory, could be replaced by a term of de Vries’ coinage, ‘mutation’. The Dutchman had collected many thousands of seeds from a wild primrose patch during his country rambles, which he planted in his garden. He identified some some 800 new variants, many of them strikingly original. These random ‘spontaneous mutants’, he realised, could be combined with natural selection to create the engine of evolution, the variety of all living things. And key to this variety wasn’t the living organisms themselves but their units of inheritance, units which either benefitted or handicapped their offspring under particular conditions of nature.
The era of genetics had begun. The tough-minded English biologist William Bateson became transfixed on reading a later paper of de Vries, citing Mendel, and henceforth became ‘Mendel’s bulldog’. In 1905 he coined the word ‘genetics’ for the study of heredity and variation, and successfully promoted that study at his home base, Cambridge. And just as Darwin’s idea of random variation sparked a search for the source of that variation, the idea of genetics and those particles of information known as ‘genes’ led to a worldwide explosion of research and inquiry into the nature of genes and how they worked – chromosomes, haploid and diploid cells, DNA, RNA, gene expression, genomics, the whole damn thing. We now see natural selection operating everywhere we’re prepared to look, as well as the principles of ‘artificial’ or human selection, in almost all the food we eat, the pets we fondle, and the superbugs we try so desperately to contain or eradicate. But of course there’s so much more to learn….
William Bateson
clever Charlie Darwin
A photo taken by me! King Charles seated in state in the Musuem of Natural History, London. It was a thrill to be granted an audience
I recently decided to reread Darwin’s Origin of Species, which was really reading it for the first time as my first reading was pretty cursory, and I could barely follow the wealth of particular knowledge he used for cumulative effect to adduce his theory. This time I’ve been doing a closer reading, and becoming increasingly impressed, and I’ve only read the first chapter, ‘Variation under Domestication’.
Darwin’s argument here of course is that domesticated horses, dogs, birds and plants have been artificially selected over long periods of time, and often unconsciously, to suit human needs and tastes. This might seem screamingly obvious today, and to a degree it was recognised in Darwin’s time, but because of an inability to take the long view, and also because of the then-prevalent paradigm of the fixity of species, breeders and nurserymen tended to under-estimate their own cumulative powers, and to claim, for example, that dogs and pigeons had always come in many varieties. Even Darwin was uncertain, and was willing to concede – writing of course before the advent of Mendelian genetics, never mind the revolution wrought by the identification and analysis of DNA as the molecule of inheritance – that in some cases the breeders might be right:
In the case of most of our anciently domesticated animals and plants, I do not think it is possible to come to any definite conclusion, whether they have descended from one or several species.
He was even prepared to concede that it was ‘highly probable that our domestic dogs have descended from several wild species’, while at the same time arguing that the breeding of dogs, in Egypt, other parts of Africa and Australia (where, in his Beagle travels, he observed dingoes, which he may have seen as semi-domesticated by the Aborigines) extended back far further in time than most people suspected. We now know that Darwin’s concession here was ‘premature’. The latest research strongly suggests that our domesticated dogs trace their ancestry to a group of European wolves dating from 19,000 to 32,000 years ago, and probably now extinct. That’s a time-frame Darwin would’ve baulked at, and it’s both funny and kind of tragic that this is something I’ve ‘discovered’ after 30 seconds of selective internet searching. There’s no doubt, though that Darwin’s bold but always informed speculations were heading in the right direction.
Particularly informed – and bold – were his speculations about pigeons. This is hardly surprising as he spent several years studying and breeding them himself. Interestingly, he started doing so because he’d become convinced that all the fancy pigeons then on show were most likely derived from one common species, the rock pigeon or rock dove (Columba livia), a view already held by some naturalists but few breeders. He devotes several pages in Chapter 1 to arguing his case, for example pointing out that the ‘several distinct species’ argued for by breeders can be crossed with complete success, that’s to say with no signs of sterility or more than usually defective offspring.
So, as with dogs, I decided to look up what the latest research was on the ancestry of English carriers, short-faced tumblers, runts, fantails, common tumblers, barbs, pouters, trumpeters and laughers, to name some of the pigeons Darwin mentions in the chapter, and was excited to find that a piece of research published as recently as 2013 has confirmed Darwin’s hypothesis. Cheaper and faster genome sequencing technologies have enabled researchers to sequence the genomes of many wild and domesticated birds, and they’ve found that all of the latter are clearly closer to C livia than to any other wild species. It only took just over 150 years for Darwin to be proven correct.
Close reading like this really does reap some fun rewards, and I’ll finish with two more examples. Darwin wrote of how in the world of breeding, quite a drastic change can be brought about in one breeding step, as in the case of the fuller’s teasel with its hooks. He goes on:
So it has probably been with the turnspit dog; and this is known to have been the case with the ancon sheep.
Not knowing wtf he was talking about, I irritatedly decided to look up these unknown creatures. The turnspit dog is a now-extinct breed, bred specifically from around the 16th century to provide the dogpower to turn meat on a spit, the only conceivable way of cooking large joints of meat in your average fancy household for a couple of centuries. The dog, or dogs, because the system worked better if you had two of them engaged in shift work, turned a wheel by running inside it, rat-like, until the meat was cooked. They were known to be long-bodied and short-legged, but details of how they were bred aren’t known, as they were apparently beneath scholarly consideration. They certainly weren’t seen as cuddly pets – if you treat creatures as slaves it heightens your contempt for then (cf Aristotle) – and they were even taken to church as foot-warmers. They’d disappeared entirely by the end of the 19th century.
It’s a dog’s life?
The ancon sheep was a short-legged type, apparently bred from a single individual in the USA in the late nineteenth century, its short legs having the singular advantage, to some, of curtailing its hopes of freedom by jumping the fence. The term ‘ancon’ has since been used by breeding researchers to describe strains of creatures arising from an individual with the same phenotype.
