Posts Tagged ‘Darwin’
the little life of just another reader
Reading and writing have been my mainstays, FWIW, and worth is the word, they seem to, or seek to, plug the many holes in my ego. Reading, of course takes me away to many places, and back to many times, that I can’t access physically. I’ve always been too poor to do much extensive travelling, and too timid to actually meet and converse with interesting people, so I converse, sort of, with books. Sometimes having terrible, exhausting arguments with them, other times brought to tears.
I limit myself to six books at a time, though usually one, or maybe two, grab my attention to the detriment of others, sort of. At the moment it’s the second volume of Janet Browne’s totalling gripping biography of Charles Darwin, The power of place. What a fascinating, admirable, complex character he is, how richly brought to life by Browne’s writings and researches. At the moment I’m reading of his new-found fascination with orchids and their pollination. It seems that he developed this interest partly to take his mind off the endless controversies surrounding his Origin of species, but, not surprisingly, he soon found that their pollination by particular insects supported what came to be known as co-evolution, a whole new field of evolutionary studies.
And yet, reading about this extraordinary and complex bloke (his Descent of Man is on my six-book list, somewhat neglected at the moment), who is still vilified today, and not just by creationists, I still get annoyed at all his upper-class advantages. Not his fault of course, but connections handed him his trip on the Beagle, his marriage to a member of the super-rich Wedgewood family, his university education at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and so forth. At least his life provides a good argument against libertarianism.
So the other four books on the six-book list are Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (I have a policy of making at least one book a work of fiction) and Lost connections by Johann Hari – these two books I’m completely ignoring at present, for no good reason – and the other two books, which I’ve brought with me to my exile in the Adelaide Hills, Kingdom of fear by Hunter S Thompson (apparently the ‘S’ is necessary when referring to him) and Shattered lands by Sam Dalrymple.
I bought Shattered Lands the other day at Shakespeare’s Books here in Blackwood, because I couldn’t resist the bookshop’s name, and once inside, I’d feel guilty if I didn’t buy. I also assumed, correctly, that Sam was the son or close relative of William Dalrymple, a writer often recommended to me by a friend, but whom I’ve never read. So I was influenced but didn’t want to be too influenced. Another influence on the purchase was Anna Reid’s Borderland, so informative about a land exotic to me, Ukraine. Shattered Lands promised to tell stories about a world equally exotic, in time rather than place – the British Raj.
In speaking of this to my once-wife, Sarah, she looked up William Dalrymple, and I was shocked but not surprised. Get this, from Wikipedia:
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1965 as the youngest son of Major Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet (1926–2018), Lord Lieutenant of East Lothian from 1987 to 2001, and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle; through this line of descent he is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, both being great-great-grandchildren of William Keppel, 7th Earl of Albemarle. He is a great-nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf. His brother Jock was a first-class cricketer. Dalrymple, the youngest of four brothers, grew up in North Berwick on the shores of the Firth of Forth. He has described his childhood as being old-fashioned and “almost Edwardian”. Among his forebears is a Mughal princess who married a Dalrymple ancestor.
I, too, was born in Scotland. My father was an unskilled labourer, and sometime amateur boxer, the last of a number of male children to a Dundee shipwright – a reasonably classy occupation. That’s all I know of that side of the family, and I’ve never been much interested in tracing ancestry. My mother was a Stewart, and her father, a coal-miner, was Daniel Stewart, hence I’m named Stewart Daniel Henderson. The Stewarts came over the channel with William the Bastard in 1066. They were Stewards then, but changed ‘d’ to ‘t’ when given swathes of land in Scotland for helping William to slaughter the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. Then, when one branch of the ever-branching Stewart family looked like becoming Kings of Scotland they changed their name to Stuart, further removing them from the Stench of Stewardship. And those Stuarts went on to…
To cut a long story short, with a bit of trimming and tweaking, I could’ve/should’ve/would’ve been the current monarch of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and life just isn’t fair.
So, where was I? Kingdom of fear is the first book by this author I’ve read, and likely the last. I suppose I chose it because the reading group I’m with have dealt with Ken Kesey’s One flew over the cuckoo’s nest and Kerouac’s on the road, and I though I’d continue a bit with the hobo libertarian stuff of the USA, which is sometimes entertaining, and often food for thought for a non-libertarian such as myself. At least it’s more appealing than right-wing libertarianism, which really is the pits.
Thompson’s political views chime fairly well with my own, though he’s a bit long-winded about it all, and it of course is all set in the gun-toting US of A, which I’ve just about had enough of. At the same time it’s much more familiar to me than the Burmese-Indian and Hindu-Moslem clashes of the 1930s and beyond, which have me constantly referring to maps to locate Gujarat, Rawalpindi, Kanniyakumari and the like. And the Hindu caste system is surely one of humankind’s greatest grotesqueries.
So that’s all. I’m nowhere near the end of any of these books, but I’m generally enjoying where they take me, especially the Darwin stuff. The Indian stuff too, as my history reading has generally had a western bias, understandably enough.
References
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The power of place, 2002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dalrymple
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands, 2025
Hunter S Thompson, Kingdom of fear, 2003
Nietzsche and Darwin and science and philosophy
When I was young, living in Elizabeth, a newly-built working-class town north of Adelaide in South Australia, I was able to avail myself of books of all kinds on our home shelves – novels, histories, encyclopaedias and the like. It was only much later that I had cause to wonder – where did all these books come from? I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life (he later, after my mother left him, told me I need only read one book – the Bible). My mother read very few. I had two older siblings – two and three years older – but surely all these books didn’t come from them.
Among them were a few works of philosophy which I skimmed my way through, puzzled and occasionally impressed, I think mostly by the author’s chutzpah. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche, and the titles were Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist. Much of the writing involved seemingly pithy little aphorisms – sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes confusing, and occasionally liberating for an anti-authoritarian adolescent, as I most definitely was at the time. In The Antichrist, for example, Nietzsche got stuck into ‘Saint Paul’, which tickled my fancy in spite of my not knowing much about Nietzsche’s target. The naughtiness of it all was quite a thrill to me.
So my none-too-reliable guess is that I was fifteen or sixteen when this skimming took place, but it certainly stuck in my mind. Meanwhile I continued my reading, particularly from the library close by, from which, often on the recommendations of my older brother’s university friends, I borrowed and read pretty well the whole oeuvre of Thomas Hardy, as well as other 19th century Brits – Dickens, the Brontes, Austen, George Eliot, and writers we’d studied at school – George Orwell, Albert Camus, and, from Camus, the Roads to Freedom trilogy of Jean-Paul Sartre. All this would’ve been in those mid-teen years, the couple of years after I’d left school due to being smacked in the face by the headmaster, for no good reason.
So all of this is preliminary. Years later, I happened to read something very scathing that Nietzsche had written about George Eliot, surely one of the best novelists of the Victorian era. On looking into the matter I learned that he had never read Eliot and was responding simply to a remark made about her by someone he knew. Oh dear. Whatever opinion I had of Nietzsche was definitely dented.
So, flash further forward, and after being apprised, over the years, of some misogynistic remarks by Nietzsche, my interest in him was pretty well dead. That is, until a recent conversation with an intelligent female friend caused me to try reappraising my reappraisal. I checked my admirably voluminous bookshelves (I’m not even sure where all those books came from either) and found I had two Nietzsche paperbacks with my name written on the inside cover over 40 years ago – Thus spake Zarathustra and a two-in-one volume, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. I’m pretty sure I never read this second book all those years ago, but for my sins I’ve just read The birth of tragedy. I found it more or less completely incomprehensible, and somehow irrelevant.
So I’ll present a comparison, odorous though it might be. The birth of tragedy was Nietzsche’s first published book, in 1872, when he was in his twenties and a very youthful professor in Ancient Greek philology. As it happens I’m now reading another book, published in 1871, on a very different topic – Charles Darwin’s The descent of man. Darwin never obtained a professorship, but he did okay for himself, being a scion of the aristocracy, and, to be fair, an indefatigable researcher. Clearly, both authors felt strongly that they had an important message to impart to the world. So let me quote from both authors.
First, a more or less random passage from Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy – and, to be fair, this is, by all accounts, far from his best work, and he himself dismissed it in his later years. Yet I feel its esoteric nature is fairly typical:
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded out and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?” [the quote is from Schiller].
F Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967, pp 37-38
So, the above passage was written, or published when Nietzsche was about 27 years old. The next passage was from a book published in 1871, when Darwin was 62, and very much an established ‘natural philosopher’, revered and reviled world-wide.
The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. The behaviour of a dog when returning to his master after an absence, and, as I may add, of a monkey to his beloved keeper, is widely different from that towards their fellows. In the latter case the transports of joy appear to be somewhat less and the sense of equality is shewn in every action. Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god. The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various superstitions and customs.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: in J D Watson, ed. Darwin, the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005, pp 679-680
I’ve excluded the notes from the Darwin extract, but just about every page of his book is annotated with references to contemporary writers and analysts of various species, their behaviours, anatomies and so on. The extract from Nietzsche is of course a translation, so that carries problems, which I haven’t the nous to explore. It could be argued that Nietzsche’s extract is ‘philosophical’ while Darwin’s is ‘scientific’, which certainly tempts me to try to explain, or at least explore, the difference. I remember, from my philosophical readings of the eighties, one philosopher, it might’ve been Max Black, arguing that most analyses of ‘problems’, whether within ourselves or in the world, start as philosophy and end as science – to put it a bit crudely. In that respect I think of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, which I’m sure seemed incredibly insightful at the time, and I recall being quite impressed with it as a young person. We experience everything through our senses, but how do we know they’re reliable? We can’t check with others, as they have the same sensory equipment as ourselves – equally unreliable – or reliable. The ‘noumenal’ world is supposedly inaccessible to us all, if it exists. What has happened since Kant’s time is a much greater access to the phenomenal world, from the 13 to 14 billion-year old universe, to quarks, neutrinos and such. And nobody’s talking much about noumena, if they ever were. Scientists now would surely say that Kant’s noumenal world is, and always, was, unprovable. Nice try, Manny. And yet it does raise interesting questions about individual perception and reality.
Another interesting point I would make about Darwin/Nietzsche is that, though their subject matter could hardly be more different, at the time they would both be considered philosophers – at a stretch. In 1867, William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin, and Peter Tait, published Treatise on Natural Philosophy, essentially treating of what was known about physics at the time. The modern term ‘scientist’ was only just coming into general use towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s Nietzsche published a book bearing the English title The Gay Science (the German title was Die frohliche Wissenschaft), which is regarded (by Wikipedia) as one of his more positive books (nout to do with logical positivism), promoting science and skepticism, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s no science at all in The Birth of Tragedy. You might say that he was still weaning himself from Greek philology at this time, and expatiating on his personal response to ancient Greek drama.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make with these two extracts was that they have so little in common with each other. Their preoccupations were poles apart. Darwin’s work was rooted in the world of solid academic and upper-middle class connections, and the gathering of data, whereas Nietzsche is all flightiness and abstract conjecture. I must admit I found little of the bite and the dismissiveness in The Birth of Tragedy that haunt my memories of reading Nietzsche, probably because it was his first published work, but I also found nothing that inclines me to read more of his stuff. And yet, there’s The case of Wagner, which I’ve heard is a demolition job of the notorious anti-semite, though there’s a related work, Nietzsche contra Wagner, published shortly afterwards, that really does the job.
So I was planning to do a more close analysis of the above-quoted passages, but it all seems a bit much. Darwin’s material speaks for itself, I think. It took humans a long time to get to the stage of careful and objective analysis of their environment, in terms of time and space, structural complexity, wave-molecular interactions, life from non-life and so on, and we’re still learning, and discovering. Nietzsche’s work, though this may not be the best example, is more poetic and personal, and considering his fate, it’s hard not to sympathise. Nietzsche, I note, seems very quotable (you can find dozens of quotes from him online), as he was very fond of trying to capture something deep and meaningful in a sentence. Darwin is pretty well the exact opposite, yet surely his influence has been greater. However, in spite of The Birth of Tragedy, I’m prepared to give poor Friedrich another go, kind-hearted soul that I am.
The Gay Science perhaps…
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, trans Walter Kaufman 1967.
Charles Darwin, The descent of man [sic], 1871
stuff on sexual selection, and our humanity
As perhaps mentioned, I’ve started reading The descent of man, or to be accurate, I started reading it a while ago, then stopped, what with all the other pleasurable and thought-provoking reading I’ve been doing. In fact one of those books is Matt Ridley’s Birds, sex and beauty: the extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea, to give its full title, and it’s maybe a bit of a spoiler, because I’ve heard that The descent contains a section on sexual selection, that ‘strangest idea’ aforementioned, an idea that, as Ridley tells me, was found more questionable than general evolution by many scientists of his time, and even afterwards. Wallace, who developed his evolutionary theory independently of Darwin, and became a close associate afterwards, was quite skeptical, along with most of Darwin’s other backers, and Ridley, quite rightly I think, points to the reason. Evolution was obviously a rather serious assault on religion – and is still felt that way – whereas sexual selection was an assault on patriarchy, though many of its detractors may have been oblivious of the fact. Patriarchy’s so insidious that many people still think it’s normal! Duh…
So what exactly is sexual selection? Well, just about everyone points to the obvious case of the peacock, with his extravagant tail feathers. Can such a stunningly colourful but ungainly mass to drag around you be anything but a hindrance? It’s kind of exhausting just to look at them. Can a peacock actually fly? Well, yes, but certainly not like an eagle. And how does it sneak up on its prey? Does it only eat blind mice? Actually they’re omnivores, but probably easier to be veggo with all that get-up. And of course they can be prey as well as predators, and you should be able to guess the rest – one minute you’re a mate, next you’re dead meat. It’s just a matter of getting things in the right order.
So sexual selection is about males so impressing females, whether by looks, dancing displays or some other spectacle, that the female offers herself happily, or complacently, to him. And males are often in competition with other males for the honour, the point being that it’s the female who sexually selects. This type of selection goes on in species of birds, fish (eg guppies), insects (eg fruit flies), mammals (eg elephant seals) and reptiles (eg most lizards). It also goes on in humans (eg party hardcore, referenced below), but not generally for the purpose of reproduction. As for bonobos – well, that’s another story, and it’s complicated, much as with humans.
So what about humans? We like to think we’re too complex and sophisticated for that sort of categorisation, and anyway, we in the WEIRD (non-Catholic) world don’t connect sex so tightly with reproduction. Even so, when we do decide on reproduction, we surely, male and female, do it on the basis of having selected, more or less mutually, the best partner available. This is of course a best-case scenario – we can be fooled, perhaps by our hormones, into being convinced that this person will be the best father/mother for our child/children, not to mention a variety of other scenarios which result in pregnancy. If we think of sexual selection in terms of pairing rather than pregnancy, it may be that neoteny, the preservation of youthful characteristics, including by artificial means – make-up, cosmetic surgery, mode of dress and so forth – has played a role, but this doesn’t appear to be a scenario in which only the female does the selecting. Certainly it’s less clear ‘who’s zoomin who’, if anyone. Darwin, I think wisely, considered sexual selection in humans has worked in both ways, with hairlessness in females being selected for by males, and males’ reduced hair ‘going along for the ride’ to some degree (also because of ‘genetic correlation’, though Darwin didn’t know about genes, and so could not consider genotype-phenotype examples), while reduced sexual dimorphism and, in contrast, the greater difference between the voices of adult males and females, are being selected for by their opposites. The reduced sexual dimorphism argues for greater monogamy (compare gorillas). Even so, females may in general be selecting for height, muscularity, and deeper voices. I give up.
Seriously, the scenario is complex for humans, which is to be expected. From Wikipedia:
In a study measuring female attraction to males with varying levels of masculinity, it was established that women had a general masculinity preference for men’s voices, and that the preference for masculinity was greater in the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle than in the non-fertile phase. There is further evidence from the same study that in fertile stages of the menstrual cycle, women also had a preference for other masculine traits such as body size, facial shape, and dominant behavior, which are indicators of both fertility and health. This study did not exclude males with feminine traits from being selected, however, as feminine traits in men indicate a higher probability of long-term relationship commitment, and may be one of several evolutionary strategies.
I don’t want to think too much about male dominant behaviour being indicative of fertility or health – especially mental health – but this finding that the menstrual cycle affects female preference seems just too ‘beyond our control’ for my liking, which isn’t to say it’s not true. As other sources have pointed out, there’s a sort of more-or-less understandable ‘muddle’ between selecting for ‘tough guys’, in both physical and emotional senses, or for caring-and-sharing softies who’ll be reliable providers – they hope. But isn’t that typical of women – they can never make up their effing minds.
Clearly, though, there are two strategies that are more or less blindly operating in humans. A video by ‘Brainstorm’, linked below, puts it neatly:
Sexual selection is an extremely powerful tool to explain much of evolutionary change in behaviour in animals – in humans it becomes a bit more complicated – we’re neither clearly a tournament species [males fighting for dominance (e.g gorillas)] with huge extremes re sexual dimorphism, nor are we sexually identical in behaviour, aggression or life expectancy… we do see dimorphism in bone structure, muscle mass and levels of aggression…
These male-female differences are not extreme, and we might just be able, with work, to make them less extreme. Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually work toward this. The sexual dimorphism among bonobos is minimal, and it would make sense, given their society, that it is diminishing, though we have no substantial evidence that this is so. Humans, of course, still have a way to go, given all the warfare and violent confrontations that are still occurring.
Anyway, once again, vive les bonobos. We have so much to learn…
References
Charles Darwin, The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, 1871
Matt Ridley, Birds, sex and beauty, 2025
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