Posts Tagged ‘Charles Darwin’
on civilisation, savages, clothing, sex and bonobos
I’m a great admirer of Charles Darwin. I’ve read On the Origin of Species three times now. I’ve read his Voyage of the Beagle, and a number of biographies – Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Janet Browne’s two-volume work, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, and Charles Darwin, the Power of Place, as well as Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle and David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. Not that I’m showing off or anything…. I also have a copy of The Indelible Stamp – four volumes in one, the Voyage, the Origin, the Descent, and the Expression of the Emotions. I’m currently about a third of the way through The Descent of Man, but…
In spite of all that I know about this driven, timid, well-born, sensitive, fatherly, loyal, reclusive, internationally-connected, obsessive genius, his revolutionary impact on biological science, and the Victorian-era context of his life, I still find myself wincing at his regular use of the word ‘savage’ to refer to certain types of human, especially in The Descent. It is of course, a very much discarded term today, and I’m quite aware that I wouldn’t have winced had I been reading the book in the late 19th century.
So I’ve been thinking about what exactly made certain humans ‘savages’ in the minds of your typical Victorian gentleman. And to me, the primary feature of the ‘savage’ was clothing, or the lack thereof.
Think of clothing in upper-class Victorian society. Top hats, frock coats, or great-coats in winter, waistcoats and ties or cravats, stiff-collared shirts, high-waisted trousers, sometimes with suspenders, and of course a good solid pair of boots. Certainly their clothing had to be of a quality that distinguished them from their servants, of which Darwin had many over the years.
And then, I almost forgot, there also existed another, generally lower class of Victorian, known mostly as ladies, though courser terms were sometimes used. Their clothing was more layered and complex, involving corsets and crinolines, petticoats, bustles, bows, furbelows and lace trimmings, and finished off with jewellery of various kinds – necklaces, brooches, medallions and such, all of which required servants for dressing and maintenance. Surprisingly enough, these ladies and gentlemen sometimes produced children, which generally required something like an archaeological excavation on the part of the male. Then again, a more plausible explanation is that these children were carried to upper class couples by storks.
So, imagine how shocked some of these more adventurous, voyaging gentlemen would have been on encountering the inhabitants of darkest Africa, Tierra del Fuego, Australia, New Zealand, and the many scattered islands of the Pacific and elsewhere, and finding that their inhabitants were almost as unclothed as – animals! Wild animals, even.
I haven’t done much voyaging and exploring outside of books. When I first learned of native Americans I pictured many feathers, in head-dresses and skirt-like garments, with muscular bodies naked apart from dots and dashes of paint, or woad or whatever. I also pictured – and saw on our TV screen – skilled horse-riders, bow-and-arrow sharp-shooters, strong and silent types, with cool, unsmiling expressions. They never seemed to have anything to smile about, to be sure.
It was also clear that these various peoples had their own languages, rituals, and skills, tools and inventions adapted to survival and thriving in an environment they’d become familiar with over thousands of years. In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes the Aboriginal people he encounters in Australia:
They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at 30 yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practiced archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some degrees higher in the scale of civilisation than the Fuegians.
Of course Darwin couldn’t help but make comparisons with his own ‘civilisation’. Some could speak English and make astute observations, but they were a bit weak on housing and land cultivation. He presumably wasn’t aware that when the first fleet of convicts and guards tried to cultivate the land at Sidney Cove they were seriously unsuccessful, the soils being nowhere near as fertile as those in England, and totally unsuitable for English-style crops. Only the arrival of the Second Fleet, and a slow general understanding that they needed to adapt to vastly different environmental conditions, prevented catastrophic loss of life. Nor did he recognise that the semi-nomadic lifestyle of Australia’s native population was an intelligent and hard-earned adaptation to local conditions over tens of thousands of years.
So, Darwin described these natives as ‘partly clothed’. What does this mean? The earliest photographic images were taken decades after the beginning of white settlement, but women were generally depicted bare-breasted, unlike the highly civilised women of today, and men’s genitalia were hidden under pouches tied with strings. Was this always the case, before civilised whities caught a glimpse? We’ll never know. It does seem that the taste for decoration, expressed largely in clothing by my culture, was also a part of native cultures, through face and body painting, especially for ceremonial occasions.
And with all this near-nakedness, what about sex? Well, it’d be way too time-consuming and effortful to look into the sex lives of all the peoples that Darwin and the Victorians would deem to be savages, so why not focus on the land that recently came to be known as Australia? Well, unsurprisingly, given the vastness of the continent, the huge variety of its landscapes and environments, the large number of language and cultural groups living in isolation from each other, the story is one of diversity and complexity – not a free-for-all, but not standard Victorian monogamy either.
It’s been claimed, and I think proven, by anthropologists and historians that Australia has been inhabited for some 50,000 years by these native peoples. What wouldn’t we give to travel back all those years to see what those early arrivals were up to. For that matter, what was human life like in the region of Kent 50,000 years ago? Presumably colder than down south, with very different megafauna to deal with. And the reason why things changed so much in the north, in Europe, especially in the last five to ten thousand years, is explained, at least partly, by books such as Who we are and how we got here, by David Reich, and The WEIRDest people in the world: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. Waves of interaction, often brutal, from the east, brought not only rape and pillage, but new weaponry and skills, technology and tactics – and whole new approaches to culture, with, in the last thousand years or more, eastern Confucian patriarchy and middle eastern Islamic patriarchy reinforcing western Catholic patriarchy, forces which women, at least in the last century or so, have just begun to fight off.
And so to bonobos, those fabulous but insufficiently appreciated close relatives of ours, unhampered by clothing or religion, unjudged by puritanical ideologies, unwed but far from unloved. Judged by human standards, bonobos are paedophiles, sluts, studs, poofs, lezzos, straights, queers, nymphos, ambisexuals and all the rest, yet the only threat to their community is humanity….
What more needs to be said?
References
Charles Darwin, The voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin, The descent of man
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
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.
how did life begin? part 1 – Greenland rocks, warm little ponds and unpromising gunk
the basics of the Miller-Urey experiment: sparking interest
Jacinta: Well, we need an antidote to all that theological hocus-pocus, so how about a bit of fundamental science for dummies?
Canto: Sounds great, I just happened to read today that there are three great questions, or areas of exploration for fundamental science. The origin of the universe – and its composition, including weird black holes, dark matter and dark energy – that’s one. The others are the origin of life and the origin of consciousness. Take your pick.
Jacinta: I’ll choose life thanks.
Canto: Not a bad choice for a nihilist. So life has inhabited this planet for about three and a half billion years, or maybe more, while the planet was still cooling from its formation…
Jacinta: Isn’t it still doing that?
Canto: Well, yes of course. An interesting study conducted a few years ago found that around 54% of the heat welling up from within the earth is radiogenic, meaning that it results from radioactive decay of elements like radium and thorium. The rest is primordial heat from the time of the planet’s coalescing into a big ball of matter.
Jacinta: Gravity sucks.
Canto: Energetically so.
Jacinta: You say three and a half billion years or more – can you be a bit more specific? Are we able to home in on the where and the when of life’s origin on this planet?
Canto: Well, that would be the pot of gold, to locate the place and time of the first homeostatic replicators, to wind back history to actually witness that emergence, but I suspect there would be nothing to actually see, at least not on the time-scale of a human life. I think it’d be like the emergence of human language, only slower. You’d have to compress time somehow to witness it.
Jacinta: Fair enough, or maybe not, it seems to me that the distinction between the animate and the inanimate would be pretty clear-cut, but anyway presumably scientists have a time-frame on this emergence. What allows them to date it back to a specific time?
Canto: Well, it’s an ongoing process of honing the techniques and discovering more bits of evidence, a bit like what has happened with defining the age of our universe. For example, you’ve heard of stromatolites?
Jacinta: Yes, those funny black piles that stick out of the water and sand, somewhere in Western Australia? They’re made from really old fossilised cyanobacteria, right?
Canto: Well, that’s a start, they’re rather more complicated than that and we’re still learning about them and still discovering new deposits, all around the world, both on the shoreline and inland. But the Shark Bay stromatolites in WA were the first to be identified, and that was only in 1956. More recently though, there’s been an entirely different discovery in Greenland that’s raised a lot of excitement and controversy…
Jacinta: But hang on, these stromatolites, they say they’re really old, like more than 3 billion years, but how do they know that? As Bill Bryson would say.
Canto: Well, good question Jass, in fact it’s highly relevant to this Greenland discovery so let me talk about radiometric dating, using this example. Greenland has been attracting attention since the sixties as a potential mineral and mining resource, so the Danish Geological Survey was having a look-see around the region of Nuuk, the capital, in the south-west of the island. The principal geologist found ten successive layers of rock in the area, using standard stratigraphic techniques that you can find online, though they’re not always easy to apply, as strata are rarely neatly horizontal, what with crustal movements, fault-lines and rockfalls and erosion and such. Anyway, it was his educated guess that the bottom of these layers was extremely old, so he sent a sample to Oxford, to an expert in radiometric dating there. This was in about 1970.
Isua rocks, Greenland. Oldest rocks discovered, showing plausible traces of 3.8 billion-year-old life
Jacinta: And doesn’t it have to do with radioactive isotopes and half-lives and such?
Canto: Absolutely. Take uranium 238, which if you’ve been watching the excellent recent ABC documentary you’ll know that it decays through a whole chain of, from memory, twelve nuclides before stabilising as an isotope of lead. That decay has a half-life of 4.5 billion years – longer than the life of this planet, or at least the life of its crust. So it’s a matter of measuring the ratio of isotopes, to see how much of the natural uranium has decayed. In this case, the gneiss, the piece of bottom-strata rock that was analysed, had the highest proportion of lead in it of any naturally occurring rock ever discovered.
Jacinta: So that means it’s likely the oldest rock? Aw, I thought Australia had the oldest. This is terrible news.
Canto: No time to be parochial when the meaning of life is at stake. May I continue? So this was an exciting discovery, but more was to come, and it’s continuing to come. The geological team were inspired to continue their explorations around the Godthaab Fjord in Greenland, and found what are called ‘mud volcanoes’, pillows of basaltic volcanic lava that had issued out into the seawater. These were again dated at about 3.7 billion years old, and this strongly suggested the existence of warm oceans at that time, with hydrothermal vents such as those recently discovered to be teeming with life…
Jacinta: Right, so that might be pushing the age of life back a few hundred million years, if it can be verified, but it still doesn’t answer the how question..
Canto: Oh, nowhere near it, but I’ve just started mate. May I continue? Not surprisingly this region is now seen as a treasure trove for those hunting out the first life forms and trying to work out how life began. It was soon found that the Isua greenstone to the north of Nuuk contains carbon with a scientifically exciting isotopic ratio. The level of carbon 13 was unexpectedly low. This is generally an indication of the presence of organic material. Photosynthesising organisms prefer the lighter carbon 12 isotope, which they capture from atmospheric or oceanic carbon dioxide. But the finding’s controversial. Many are skeptical because this is the period known as the ‘late heavy bombardment’, with asteroids crashing and smashing and vaporising and possibly even sterilising… and they haven’t discovered any fossils.
Jacinta: So, photosynthesis, that’s what created the great oxygenation, which created an atmosphere for complex oxygen-dependent organisms, is that right?
Canto: Well, that was much later, and it’s a vastly complex story with quite a few gaps in it, so maybe we’ll save it for future conversations…
Jacinta: Okay, fine, but couldn’t one of those asteroids have brought life here, or proto-life, or the last essential ingredient…?
Canto: Yes, yes, maybe, but you’re distracting me. May I please continue? Where was I? Okay, so let’s look at the various theories put forward about the origin of life – and it will bring us back to Greenland. You’ve mentioned one, called panspermia. That’s the idea that life was seeded here from space, maybe during the heavy bombardment…
Jacinta: Which isn’t an adequate explanation at all, because where did that life come from? I want to know how any life-form anywhere can spring from the inanimate.
Canto: Yes all right, don’t we all smarty-pants? One of the most interesting early speculators on the subject was one Charles Darwin, who wrote – very famously – in a letter to his good mate Joseph Hooker in 1871, and I quote:
It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.— But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.
Now this was pretty damn good speculation for the time, and a couple of generations later two biologists, Aleksandr Oparin of Russia and John Haldane of England, independently developed a hypothesis that built on Darwin’s ideas.
Jacinta: Oh yes, they had this idea that if you added a bit of lightning to the early terrestrial atmosphere, which was full of ammonia or something, you’d get a lot of organic chemistry happening.
Canto: Well I think the ‘or something’ part is true there – their idea was that there was a lot of hydrogen, methane and water vapour in the early atmosphere, and that, combined with local heat caused perhaps by lightning, or volcanic activity or some sort of concentrated solar radiation, the combo created a soup of organic compounds, out of which somehow over time emerged a primordial replicator.
Jacinta: So far, so vague.
Canto: Okay, I’m just getting started. The Oparin-Haldane hypothesis was highly speculative, of course. The point being made was that this key event was all that was needed for natural selection to kick in. This replication must have been advantageous, and of course over time there would’ve been mutations,with the mutants competing with the originals, and the winners would’ve been the most efficient and effective harvesters of resources, and there would’ve been expansion and more mutations and modifications and so forth. And out of that would come the first self-sustaining homeostatic environment, the proto-cell, within which more sophisticated machinery for processing resources could be developed…
Jacinta: Okay so you’ve more or less succeeded in dissolving the boundary between the animate and the inanimate before my eyes, but it’s still pretty vague on the details.
Canto: In 1953, Stanley Miller took up the challenge of his supervisor, famous Nobel Prize-winning biologist Harold Urey, who noted that nobody had tested the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis experimentally. Miller created a mini-atmosphere in a bottle, using methane (CH4), hydrogen, water vapour and ammonia (NH3), and after sparking it up for a while, he managed, to the amazement of all, to produce amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Surely the first step in producing life itself.
Jacinta: Ah yes, that was a famous experiment, but didn’t it turn out to be something of a dead end?
Canto: Well, yes and no. It has been replicated with different mixtures and ratios of gases, and amino acids, sugars and even traces of nucleic acids have been generated, but nothing that could be described as a primordial replicator. But of course this work has got a lot of biologists thinking.
Jacinta: But this was 60 years ago. That’s a lot of thought without much action.
Canto: Well, what has since been realised about the experiments of Miller and others is that they create an enormous complexity of organic molecules in a rather uncontrolled way, a kind of chemical gunk similar to what might be created when you burn the dinner. The point being that when you burn the dinner – which is something necessarily organic like a dead chook, or pig, or tragically finless shark or whatnot…
Jacinta: Or a pumpkin, or Nan’s rhubarb pie..
Canto: Yeah, okay – you get this messy complexity, all mixed with oil and vinegary acids and shite – you get this break-down into gunk, and that’s easy. What’s hard is to go in the other direction, to build up from gunk into a fully fledged chicken, or a handsomely finned shark. And that’s what these experiments were trying to do, in their small way. They were creating this primordial-soup-gunk and hoping, with a bit of experimental help, to spark life into it, and basically getting nowhere. The problem is essentially to do with randomness and order. How do we get order out of random complexity? It’s easy to go the other way, for example with explosions and machine guns and such. We see that everywhere. But building the kind of replicating order that you find even in mycoplasma, the smallest genus of bacteria, from scratch, and by chance – well, that’s mind-bogglingly improbable.
mycoplasma, one of the simplest life forms – but try making one from scratch
Jacinta: So we have to think in terms of intermediate stages.
Canto: Yes, well, there are big problems with that, too… But let’s give it a rest for now. Next time, we’ll discuss the RNA world that most biologists are convinced preceded and helped create the DNA world we live in.
N B – This piece owes much to many, but mainly to Life on the edge: the coming of age of quantum biology, by Jim Al-Khalili & Johnjoe McFadden
reveries of a solitary wa*ker: wa*k 2
bulldog Tommy about to land a bookish blow
The Darwin book continues to be a rollicking good read, I’m into the post Origin period, where shit hits the fans and Darwin’s fans, led by that young Turkish bulldog Tommy Huxley, shovel shit on the opposition, captained by soapy Sam Wilberforce and the brains of high Anglicanism, Dicky Owen – the most gifted naturalist of his age, to be fair. What’s fascinating is that the Origin precipitated the last great politico-religious struggle in England, a very drawn-out affair which crossed the Atlantic and continues in the US to this day, but in England it has been a slow-acting poison to conservative Anglicanism. Liberal Anglicanism, essentially a bridge to atheism, has swallowed natural selection with a sort of diffident, dumb grace, flexible as to their god’s ever-changing plan. As a semi-student of history though, I can well understand Darwin’s own diffidence about publicizing his theory. It was bad enough for the time, had it been a century earlier (impossible of course given the eighteenth century state of knowledge) he would absolutely have been martyred for it. As it was, during the couple of decades between formulating his theory and going public, the public, especially the disaffected Chartist ‘rabble’, had become increasingly keen for a weapon to strike down the High Clergy and the swanningly civilised aristos, and apes for ancestors, monkeys for uncles, even gorillas for girlfriends, fitted the bill perfectly. Darwin, of course, presented his case as dispassionately as humanly possible, with nary a mention of human descent, and afterwards kept his head down in Downe, obsessing over pigeons and orchids and sexual selection (actually chipping away very effectively at the god-did-it argument), while Tommy Huxley, Joe Hooker and co fought the good Darwinian battle in the big smoke with consummate derring-do (don’t believe a word of this by the way, as if you would). Darwin was anything but a fighter – he had vomiting fits at the very thought of confrontation – but in his oddly reclusive way he was always the leader, because unlike many of his supporters, even the closest ones, he knew he was right. His aim, his obsession, with all his apparently arcane researches, was to keep adding to the mountain of evidence.
There are many intriguing things about Darwin. He was vain but genuinely humble, highly-strung and emotional but profoundly analytical, a hypochondriac and yet a real invalid for stretches of his life, and of course a revolutionary who hated revolutionaries. As a young, footloose, disgustingly well-heeled intellectual, he could think of nothing better than to make a pleasant living as a naturalist-clergyman, like many a gentleman among his family’s connections. By his career’s end, the naturalist-clergyman was becoming a relic, probably more due to his own productions than to any other cause.
The founding father of eugenics, atheism, Nazism, bestiality and please don’t get me started
And this leads to a consideration of his most profound impact, outside the confines of science, what makes him the most controversial and contested, and in some circles reviled, figure of the past two hundred years, and that is his, and his theory’s, complete denial of human specialness. A specialness which is at the heart of the Abrahamic religions, without which not.
This recognition of human relatedness to other species, the bringing of humans back to the pack, wasn’t an anti-Christian urge by any means, it was more a result of his obsessive interest in solving the problems of adaptation and basic survival of creatures such as barnacles, earthworms and pigeons. This obsession gave him great respect for the sometimes barely fathomable complexity and ingenuity of even the most ‘basic’ life-forms. He saw human complexity as a continuation of that adaptive process, but biologists and many other scientists were, at that time, unable to shake off notions of human exceptionality. Owen, Wallace, Luis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Charles Lyell, St George Mivart and others of Darwin’s time, all had qualms about, or simply rejected outright, the implications for humanity of Darwinian natural selection, and these represented the scientific mainstream, essentially. Darwin himself was able to weather the storm through the support of strong allies such as Hooker and Huxley, his own ability to avoid and deflect controversy, his inaccessibility at Downe, his long-suffering but profoundly loyal wife, and his habit of retreating into the messy fine detail of his studies. He also, through voluminous correspondence – he would’ve loved the world of email and Facebook – built up a huge network of scientific boffins, breeders and farmers, with whom he was unfailingly polite and charming while exploiting their specialist knowledge. So he was able to adapt very well to the challenges thrown at him.
eeek
I’m writing here as if delivering a lecture, and I do wish I could reach more people. I don’t have too many contacts with a penchant for science, or for history, but then I don’t have many contacts. But enough complaining (mea culpa after all), I note that the vaccination controversy drags on, with too many people standing on their ‘right’ to not vaccinate their children, which shows up the problems with the rights concept, which I’ve always considered artificial but a useful fiction which has helped to build a more humane global society, and speaking of globalism the battle to save the lives of Australians under the death penalty is almost over, but we should continue the battle to the end because it’s a bad law and national sovereignty be damned, and that should be the same for any national under any national or state law. Which makes me wonder, I’m not a lawyer, but what would happen if an Australian citizen was charged with a capital offence and sentenced to death in the notorious US state of Texas? Maybe they only kill US citizens, that’d keep them out of international trouble, but what we need to keep working on is an international code of ethics and an international law and I do think we’re creeping towards it slowly slowly.
capital punishment – green doesn’t do it, red does, and yellow’s moving away