Showing posts with label Darwin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darwin. Show all posts
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Why do races look different?
These are illustrations for a book proposal, showing the differences between European and North American barn swallows. Female European swallows prefer males with longer tail streamers, and have selected for males with streamers that are longer than is aerodynamically optimal. In contrast, North American female swallows don't care much for long tails, but prefer their males bright orange below. As a result, American barn swallow males have shorter tails but brighter bellies than their European counterparts. In the Descent of Man, Darwin first proposed this idea of the arbitrariness of female mating preferences as an explanation for most of the racial variation within humans.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Arms races as analogies
What is progress in evolutionary terms? An absolute increase
in complexity, perhaps? Many biologists (myself included) would say that
natural selection has no foresight; that organisms don’t evolve adaptations in
anticipation of what is to come. This is different from denying that evolution can
often take predictable directions, such as increasing the size of weapons, or
the complexity of communication. As Dawkins and Krebs proposed in a brilliant
paper [1], arms races are situations in
which one can predict a kind of evolutionary progress through escalating
conflict. Measured purely in terms of evolutionary fitness, the fastest antelope
isn’t an improvement on its ancestors, because all its contemporaries are also
faster, and so are their predators. Just like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, everyone is
effectively running as hard as they can to stay in the same place relative to
everyone else in the evolutionary race to survive and reproduce. However in
absolute terms, arms races can cause progress in the sense that today’s
antelope and cheetah are faster than their ancestors.
For historians (including evolutionary biologists), the notion of an arms race is a compelling framework for explaining and predicting the consequences of conflict. In AnimalWeapons: The Evolution of Battle, Doug Emlen makes a very convincing case that evolutionary arms races are often strongly analogous to those in human warfare. Although much of his book addresses the more obvious parallels in weapon evolution – increases in antler or battleship size as conflicts escalate – there is also a fascinating discussion of asymmetric arms races, in which one side is attacking, and the other defending. I particularly enjoyed the parallels between army ants and Assyrians attacking the highly evolved and elaborate fortresses of termites and the city of Lachish respectively.
Just as human history involves arms races of attack and
defence, the rest of biological history is rife with asymmetric arms races –
most dear to my heart, those between parasites and hosts. Viruses constantly
evolve new ways to invade our immune systems, while we both evolve and invent
ways to defend ourselves from infection.
Cuckoo:Cheating by Nature, just published by Nick Davies, is all about this kind of arms race, but in this case, both parasites and hosts are birds. As Davies discusses beautifully, brood parasitic birds, which manage to “trick” other birds into bearing the entire burden of childcare, are some of nature’s ultimate cheats. The arms race idea applies because it’s evolutionarily costly to rear someone else’s children at the expense of one’s own, and host birds are under strong selection to detect and deter parasitism, such as recognising and rejecting a foreign egg. This selects for egg forgeries on the side of the parasite, which in turn selects for better discrimination by hosts, and sometimes, to making eggs with more independently varying signatures so that they are harder to forge [2]. The result of this mimicry arms race is eggs with remarkably diverse colour and pattern signatures in two unrelated bird lineages.
Cuckoo:Cheating by Nature, just published by Nick Davies, is all about this kind of arms race, but in this case, both parasites and hosts are birds. As Davies discusses beautifully, brood parasitic birds, which manage to “trick” other birds into bearing the entire burden of childcare, are some of nature’s ultimate cheats. The arms race idea applies because it’s evolutionarily costly to rear someone else’s children at the expense of one’s own, and host birds are under strong selection to detect and deter parasitism, such as recognising and rejecting a foreign egg. This selects for egg forgeries on the side of the parasite, which in turn selects for better discrimination by hosts, and sometimes, to making eggs with more independently varying signatures so that they are harder to forge [2]. The result of this mimicry arms race is eggs with remarkably diverse colour and pattern signatures in two unrelated bird lineages.
Cuckoo is a tale
of the finest scientific passion and skilful detection that goes beyond presenting
a masterly overview of brood parasite research to painting a personal and
highly inspiring account of behavioural ecology at its best. Nick Davies is one
of the giants in this field of biology that tries to explain why animals have
evolved to behave the way they do. He is a giant because of the simple elegance
of his experiments. Much of science, including evolutionary biology, is
tools-driven. Astronomers discover new things with improved telescopes, and
biologists are now experiencing a similar revolution with increasingly
affordable genomics. Davies has the rare ability to design experiments that
require little more than a pair of binoculars, and possibly, a painted balsa
wood model, to unearth secrets that would otherwise remain as unanswered
questions. I’ll let you read the book to find out how exactly how he does this,
because he would make it come alive better than I ever could.
Animal Weapons is just as riveting, but in a very different way. The scope of this book is broader, and Emlen takes more conceptual risks. One of the main ideas Emlen proposes is a novel precondition necessary for weapons arms races to escalate: namely, the importance of duels. If fighters are constrained to a one on one confrontation, the best fighters reliably win, so there is an arms race to evolve bigger, better weapons. In the absence of a duel, say, in a scramble of ardent male horseshoe crabs or in battles with guns instead of swords, this tight correlation between an individual fighter’s abilities and the chances of winning breaks down, so extreme personal weapons are unlikely to evolve. Interestingly, this idea comes from military history, a subject that is skilfully interwoven into the entire book, with illuminating results. Briefly, the reasoning behind this is that large weapons are costly, and thus an honest signal of fighting ability (an idea developed in another fun book, The Handicap Principal) [3]. Once large weapons become honest signals, they act as deterrents to inferior combatants because it is cheaper for both sides to avoid a fight with a known conclusion. This second function would select for extra large weapons because extra large signals would be more daunting than just slightly larger ones, even if the latter would still help you win a fight. So given the existing ingredients for an arms race, with an excess of males duelling for defensible resources, the increasing selection pressure to evolve bigger weapons faster should case the arms race to accelerate. A second novel idea is the prediction that in symmetric arms races that constrain members of the same species and sex to a duel, the race will accelerate towards the end.
While both authors use their passion and personal experience to introduce the broader implications of arms races, the two books are an intriguing contrast in tone and content. Animal Weapons, as the title implies, is largely about escalating conflict between members of the same sex and species. This is consistent with Doug Emlen’s childhood fascination with arrowheads and his brilliant scientific work on how and why male beetles evolve and develop such a diversity of horns (or other ways to gain a mate). Just like the increasingly enormous and elaborate weaponry in the book, American hyperbole may have been subjected to a similar arms race to impress. Emlen’s writing is infectiously engaging in its sincerity, and like the subject matter, it is certainly forceful. In contrast, Cuckoo is full of English understatement, while still managing to bubble with humour and enthusiasm like a pair of twinkling eyes in an otherwise impassive face. The arms races it deals with focus specifically on trickery and detection, sneak invasion and defence, rather than on the broader theme of battle, be it duel or siege, in nature or culture.
Both books are especially worth reading because they bring
alive the personalities and passions of their authors in ways that few popular
science books succeed in doing. Any aspiring scientist should want a window
into how both these top scientists think, and anyone else will simply enjoy biology
at its best. By best, I mean a deep love of natural history and an abiding
sense of curiosity that fuel the skill and dedication needed generate and test
ideas to explain how and why the living world works the way it does. These
people love what they do and both books are full of endearingly
self-deprecating anecdotes and personal insights. For instance, Davies often
writes of identifying with the birds he has watched with fresh joy every year,
and observes that like the territorial reed warblers he studies, he prefers to
have his own patch when doing fieldwork. This led to an almost sleepless night
when a warden told him an old man had been spotted searching for nests in his
beloved patch, till he realised with relief the next morning that the “old man”
must have been himself. A characteristic Emlen anecdote (some of the funniest
are lurking in the footnotes) is all action and adventure, including one about getting
covered in hundreds of minuscule ticks while valiantly collecting howler monkey
poo miles from camp in a daily struggle to keep some very precious dung beetles
fed.
Another very engaging aspect of both books is their constant
reference to history and art. Davies writes often of personal sources of
inspiration, which include poetry and art that make him see nature in a new
light. He pays a special tribute to Eric Ennion, a self-taught and superb bird painter,
and his account of how Edgar Chance, a Victorian gentleman, worked out the
natural history of cuckoo parasitism is more thrilling than any detective
fiction. Emlen writes of unearthing old arrowheads or Mayan with the same deep
empathy for how others saw the world, and Animal
Weapons is full of interesting military history.
Reading both books made me think about how biologists apply
the notion of arms races in evolution, and which arms races they choose to
focus on. To borrow the very useful framework from Dawkins and Krebs,
evolutionary arms races can come in four broad flavours, each with predictably
different outcomes. Cuckoo is largely
about asymmetric arms races between species. The asymmetry refers to what
Dawkins calls the “life-dinner principal”. A hare that doesn’t run fast
enough loses its life, whereas a fox just loses its dinner. Animal Weapons touches on this type of
race, but is largely about symmetric arms races within species, such as
duelling males fighting for the chance to mate, and escalation results in the
evolution of extremes.
Similarly, a cuckoo
chick that doesn’t manage to convince hosts to take care of it loses its life,
whereas duped host parents lose some children, but live to breed another day. It may not be too surprising to see hosts "lagging" in the arms race against brood parasites.
There are two more categories of arms race that these books don’t
focus on. Symmetric arms races within species, essentially what Darwin referred
to as his “Principal of Divergence” [4], and causes the phenomenon
modern biologists call character displacement. No one really focuses on this
category as an arms race, possibly because it encompasses most of ecology, and
is too loose and broad to be useful. More interesting, and alluded to in Cuckoo, are asymmetric arms races within
a species. Parent-offspring conflict [5], for instance, or conflict
between genes inherited from fathers and genes inherited from mothers [6]. A particularly delightful
example is a fairly recent paper by David Haig, proposing genomic imprinting
for infant sleep as a way for paternally inherited genes to delay inter-birth
intervals so that mothers invest more than is optimal for their genes on the
current child [7].
I suspect my personal attraction to arms races is due to the
irony inherent in a process that produces such beauty, complexity and diversity
from conflict. Like anything historical, much of evolution occurs because of
chance, such as a meteor colliding with the earth, or a few finches colonising
a new island. The really compelling thing about natural selection is that it
explains the non-chance side of evolution – the exquisite fit between form and
function. And natural selection gets most interesting not when organisms are
adapting to the physical environment, but when the environment consists of
other organisms, be they siblings, parents, predators or parasites, because
they co-evolve. In other words, an arms race ensues. To butcher Darwin’s almost
biblical concluding paragraph in the Origin
[4],
“from the war of nature…endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.”
Postscript: I did some experiments in Zambia and found that little bee-eaters, African hosts of another deadly brood parasitic bird, are also remarkably maladapted when it comes to avoiding parasitism.
1. Dawkins,
R. & Krebs, J. 1979 Arms Races Between and Within Species. Proc. R. Soc.
B-Biol. Sci. 205, 489–511. (doi:10.1098/rspb.1979.0081)
2. Spottiswoode, C. N. & Stevens, M.
2010 Visual modeling shows that avian host parents use multiple visual cues in
rejecting parasitic eggs. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 107,
8672–8676. (doi:10.1073/pnas.0910486107)
3. Zahavi, A. & Zahavi, A. 1999 The
Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. OUP USA.
4. Darwin, C. 1859 On the origin of
species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in
the struggle for life. 1st edn. London, UK: Murray, John.
5. Trivers, R. L. 1972 Parental investment
and sexual selection. In Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871–1971
(ed B. Campbell), pp. 136–179. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
6. Haig, D. 2004 Genomic imprinting and
kinship: how good is the evidence? Annu. Rev. Genet. 38, 553–585.
(doi:10.1146/annurev.genet.37.110801.142741)
7. Haig, D. 2014 Troubled sleep Night
waking, breastfeeding and parent–offspring conflict. Evol. Med. Public
Health 2014, 32–39. (doi:10.1093/emph/eou005)
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Human cooperation from violence?
If you think that we live in a more violent world than our predecessors, you would be agreeing with almost 300 people recently surveyed by the psychologist and writer, Steven Pinker. You would also be wrong. At a talk in the Harvard Law School, Pinker presented convincing evidence for a secular decline in violence across millennia, centuries, decades, and even years. He then attempted to answer two questions: why don't most people perceive that violence has declined, and why has it declined?
An earlier version of Pinker's ideas on violence can be found in one of his articles. Most of the talk is in it: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge206.html#pinker He is now planning a book on the subject, with the potential title "The Better Angels of Our Nature".
Pinker presented three broad explanations for the secular decline in violence. Firstly, that Hobbes was quite right about life being "nasty, brutish and short", and that modern centralised states with a monopoly on violence function as Leviathan. Secondly, that technological advances have increased the number of positive-sum games, also known as win-win situations. Trade, for instance. Thirdly, that increasing ways to spread empathy, via fiction or journalism, for example, have helped to create the philosopher Peter Singer's "expanding circle". Humans are less violent now because more and more people (and sometimes animals) are included in an "in group" they can identify with.
The next day, Sarah Blafer Hrdy, renowned feminist sociobiologist, gave an equally synthetic talk on her latest book, Mothers and Others, that elaborates on the latter two of Pinker's explanations for declining human violence. Unlike Pinker, who is focusing largely on modern humans, and asking why we are so much more peaceful than ever before, Hrdy is interested in the evolutionary origins of human cooperative tendencies that far exceed those in other living apes.
I won't go into all the evidence that Hrdy presented in her talk, and in her book, but will outline her main ideas. At the moment, and ever since Darwin's Descent of Man in 1971, the predominant explanation for human cooperation is between-group conflict. The notion that our ancestors evolved to work together so they could defeat neighbouring tribes or families is apparently almost dogma amongst anthropologists.
In contrast, Hrdy contends that inter-group competition is not a sufficient, and probably not even the predominant force selecting for cooperative tendencies. Instead, she proposes that humans, unlike other apes, became extra good at sharing and reading each others minds and emotions because of communal child care. This probably sounds rather unconvincing when stated like that, but there are good arguments for taking Hrdy seriously.
All living great apes have rudiments of empathy and what philosophers like to call "theory of mind"-- kinowing that others can have thoughts different from your own. Humans, by the age of two, far outstrip captive-reared great apes in these mental abilities necessary for cooperation. Since great apes have rudiments of these abilities, we can assume that early humans did too. The question is, what caused strong selection in favour of increasing these abilities?
Cooperative breeding, a situation where some individuals forgo reproduction to help others rear offspring, has evolved independently in several species of insects, birds and mammals, and many times within primates alone. In other words, it's not hard to evolve into a cooperative breeder. Cooperative breeding also tends to evolve when the environment is harsh or unpredictable. The Pleistocene environment our ancestors lived in certainly was unpredictable, and Hrdy proposes that the lineage leading to humans evolved cooperative breeding.
Now we have some neural and genetic hardware for cooperative traits, and a novel communal rearing environment. As a result of being reared by multiple individuals instead of just Mum, offspring would develop mental abilities that had only existed as genetic potentials in the past. Natural selection cannot favour traits that are coded in DNA but aren't expressed in an individual's behaviour. So by exposing variation in capacities for empathy, cooperative breeding made it possible to also select for expanding these capacities, because the youngsters best able to persuade others to care for them, would be most likely to survive and pass on their abilities to engage with others.
One of the lovely things about this model, is that it provides a clear example of how intertwined "nature" and "nurture" are in evolution. Without some genetic capacity for empathy and social engagement, there would be no way for a novel rearing environment to extend the expression of such traits, and no way for the information to be passed to subsequent generations. Without the novel rearing environment, there would be nothing to select on or for genetic variation in the capacity to feel empathy.
Although Singer, Pinker and Hrdy have argued strongly for empathy being crucial for being nice to others, one could also point out that it is jolly useful in competitive contexts too. What better way to manipulate and deceive others for your own ends than to be able to read their minds and feelings? While humans, honeybees and meerkats are superb examples of cooperative breeding, conflict does occur within groups. Like most new technologies, cognitive tools such as theory of mind or empathy arguably extend our abilities to be both more cooperative and more competitive.
An earlier version of Pinker's ideas on violence can be found in one of his articles. Most of the talk is in it: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge206.html#pinker He is now planning a book on the subject, with the potential title "The Better Angels of Our Nature".
Pinker presented three broad explanations for the secular decline in violence. Firstly, that Hobbes was quite right about life being "nasty, brutish and short", and that modern centralised states with a monopoly on violence function as Leviathan. Secondly, that technological advances have increased the number of positive-sum games, also known as win-win situations. Trade, for instance. Thirdly, that increasing ways to spread empathy, via fiction or journalism, for example, have helped to create the philosopher Peter Singer's "expanding circle". Humans are less violent now because more and more people (and sometimes animals) are included in an "in group" they can identify with.
The next day, Sarah Blafer Hrdy, renowned feminist sociobiologist, gave an equally synthetic talk on her latest book, Mothers and Others, that elaborates on the latter two of Pinker's explanations for declining human violence. Unlike Pinker, who is focusing largely on modern humans, and asking why we are so much more peaceful than ever before, Hrdy is interested in the evolutionary origins of human cooperative tendencies that far exceed those in other living apes.
I won't go into all the evidence that Hrdy presented in her talk, and in her book, but will outline her main ideas. At the moment, and ever since Darwin's Descent of Man in 1971, the predominant explanation for human cooperation is between-group conflict. The notion that our ancestors evolved to work together so they could defeat neighbouring tribes or families is apparently almost dogma amongst anthropologists.
In contrast, Hrdy contends that inter-group competition is not a sufficient, and probably not even the predominant force selecting for cooperative tendencies. Instead, she proposes that humans, unlike other apes, became extra good at sharing and reading each others minds and emotions because of communal child care. This probably sounds rather unconvincing when stated like that, but there are good arguments for taking Hrdy seriously.
All living great apes have rudiments of empathy and what philosophers like to call "theory of mind"-- kinowing that others can have thoughts different from your own. Humans, by the age of two, far outstrip captive-reared great apes in these mental abilities necessary for cooperation. Since great apes have rudiments of these abilities, we can assume that early humans did too. The question is, what caused strong selection in favour of increasing these abilities?
Cooperative breeding, a situation where some individuals forgo reproduction to help others rear offspring, has evolved independently in several species of insects, birds and mammals, and many times within primates alone. In other words, it's not hard to evolve into a cooperative breeder. Cooperative breeding also tends to evolve when the environment is harsh or unpredictable. The Pleistocene environment our ancestors lived in certainly was unpredictable, and Hrdy proposes that the lineage leading to humans evolved cooperative breeding.
Now we have some neural and genetic hardware for cooperative traits, and a novel communal rearing environment. As a result of being reared by multiple individuals instead of just Mum, offspring would develop mental abilities that had only existed as genetic potentials in the past. Natural selection cannot favour traits that are coded in DNA but aren't expressed in an individual's behaviour. So by exposing variation in capacities for empathy, cooperative breeding made it possible to also select for expanding these capacities, because the youngsters best able to persuade others to care for them, would be most likely to survive and pass on their abilities to engage with others.
One of the lovely things about this model, is that it provides a clear example of how intertwined "nature" and "nurture" are in evolution. Without some genetic capacity for empathy and social engagement, there would be no way for a novel rearing environment to extend the expression of such traits, and no way for the information to be passed to subsequent generations. Without the novel rearing environment, there would be nothing to select on or for genetic variation in the capacity to feel empathy.
Although Singer, Pinker and Hrdy have argued strongly for empathy being crucial for being nice to others, one could also point out that it is jolly useful in competitive contexts too. What better way to manipulate and deceive others for your own ends than to be able to read their minds and feelings? While humans, honeybees and meerkats are superb examples of cooperative breeding, conflict does occur within groups. Like most new technologies, cognitive tools such as theory of mind or empathy arguably extend our abilities to be both more cooperative and more competitive.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Comfort on the Origin
Creationists have been handing out free and glossy new copies of the Origin of Species in universities all over North America. This is apparently a cunning scheme to entice students into reading a 50 page introduction linking Darwin and his evolutionary ideas to Hitler. For the really funny bits, jump to "Solving Life’s Most Important Question" on pg41 and continue reading from there.
The august author of this thrilling introduction is none other than Ray Comfort, made famous by a short video in which he (in all seriousness) extols the domesticated Dole banana's divine design. This video has kept many undergraduate evolution classes entertained, particularly as Mr. Comfort's enthusiasm extends to descriptions and demonstrations of how "the banana" has been perfectly designed for "ease of entry into the human mouth", with a "non-slip surface". The fact that bananas in general, and Dole bananas in particular, have been bred and genetically modified by humans to acquire all these handy characteristics had escaped Mr. Comfort's notice (he has since apologised for the oversight). With such stunning credentials, Comfort is just the man to introduce Darwin's Origin. After all, he has all the necessary faith at his fingertips. If you aren't familiar with the Dole banana debut, here's a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4
The 50-page Comfort introduction is available online:
http://www.livingwaters.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=383
So is a rather feeble rebuttal by America's National Center for Science Education:
http://www.dontdissdarwin.com/analysis.php
The Comfort introduction begins with a laughably banal section on Darwin's life, swiftly followed by an attempt to clarify Darwin's religious beliefs. No one, least of all Darwin himself (in his writings) is at all clear what Darwin's religious beliefs were, except that they changed rather often, and depended a lot on who he was writing to. A few quotes out of context doesn't shed much light on how Darwin defined a deity or his beliefs. Besides, what possible bearing does Darwin's religious beliefs at different points of his life have to do with evidence for evolution and natural selection?
After his little foray into Darwinian biography, Comfort attempts to explain how DNA constitutes evidence against evolution. The irony of this as a first salvo is almost painful, because the recent developments in genomics are arguably the best and most overwhelming evidence that all living things inherited their genetic code from a common ancestor. Living things simply have far more genes in common than anyone had imagined before they had genomes to compare. Every new genome adds hundreds and thousands of examples of the same genes, duplicated or tweaked slightly to serve new or modified functions, all coded in the same four DNA "letters".
Recognising this fact, Comfort suggests that an intelligent designer would know when something works, and use that design feature repeatedly, so of course lots of genes should be shared. There are two glaring counter-examples to this claim. Firstly, the genome (and natural diversity in general) abound with examples of convergence-- different solutions to the same functional problem. For instance, genetic changes conferring pesticide resistance have evolved independently in more than one species or population of pests. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence of unintelligent, suboptimal design in biology. For instance, genomes are full of DNA that seems to exist simply because it's good at persisting and replicating -- rather like computer viruses. Why would an intelligent designer add that?
Comfort trots out the beloved creationist argument that all this superb genomic complexity could never have come together by chance. Well who, other than creationists, tries to claim that? The whole point of evolution by natural selection, is cumulative change over time. Richard Dawkins is eloquent on this particular topic, so I won't belabour it.
Sadly, all the NCSE had to "rebutt" the notion that genomes arrived suddenly out of nothing, is that "This is not a scientific view of evolution", and "almost all scientists understand that complexity is not a problem for evolution". That's rather like saying the Pope understands that condoms are not a problem for Catholics. Rather than a claim that relies on faith, a sentence or reference with a decent counterargument would have sounded more scientific.
From DNA, Comfort moves to fossils. Why, he asks in separate sections, are there no good transitional forms, and why are there missing links? Those sound like the same question to me, and the answer is that there are plenty of transitional forms. Besides, the standard biologists' quip is that a new missing link only creates two more. And there is no good reason to expect transitional forms in the fossil record to look intermediate between the most closely related species still alive. You might expect the human ancestor to look half human half chimp -- Comfort seems to. But just look at birds. No one would have expected transitional forms in the ancestry of birds to lead to dinosaurs, but that is what the fossil record demonstrates, in abundance.
Admittedly, the fossil record isn't perfect, and events like the Cambrian Explosion are unusual. That doesn't mean that the Cambrian Explosion contradicts evolutionary theory. To quote an eminent evolutionary biologist, JBS Haldane, what the creationists really need is "fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian".
Finally, we get to "The Evolutionary Process" itself. Comfort trots out the usual creationist stand that microevolution (changes within species), is acceptable, and distinct from macroevolution (between species). As Darwin takes pains to emphasise in the Origin, there isn't really a point in time when you can stab a finger at a two varieties and say "look, separate species". Species are categories that we can define with hindsight, when populations have diverged enough to be reproductively isolated. Saying yes to evolution within but not between species is simply a retreat into a "God of the gaps" argument.
Mutations. Comfort seems to think that Darwin was au fait with the term, when the rudiments of genetics weren't incorporated into the evolutionary synthesis till the early 1900s. Yes, adaptation by natural selection does not require mutations to occur in the direction that favours the adaptation. That's the beauty of natural selection. It's a sieve, it keeps the variants (thanks to mutations and other processes like sex) that work, and the rest fail to replicate themselves. The variants don't have to be created in any directed way.
Evolution's Difficult Questions. This should make evolutionists quake in their boots. The first salvo is a devastating return to the notion of "irreducible complexity", the notion that you can't get to something as complex as an eye through little steps, because every bit of the structure has to be there for it to be of any use. A similar argument inferring design is far more eloquently expressed by Paley, one of Darwin's favourite writers when Darwin was reading theology at Cambridge. What Darwin did was to find an unconscious designer in the repetitive sieving algorithm of natural selection. The fact is, both poster children of irreducible complexity, the eye and, more recently, the intricate molecular motor known as the flagellum, have been repeatedly squished by evidence of transitional forms that do benefit the organism that has them.
Vestigial Organs. According to Comfort, these constitute evidence against evolution because it is "devolution". If Comfort had actually read and understood the book he is attempting to introduce, he should have noticed that evolution is not a directed or progressive process with a goal. Devolution is evolution.
Another Thought. This paragraph arguing for an intelligent designer because humans, intelligent as we are, still can't create something from nothing, is somewhat sudden. It also follows ironically on the heels of one of the best arguments against an intelligent designer. Why would an intelligent designer leave bits and pieces of useless vestiges in his creations?
And now for something completely different. Really from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. Darwin's "Unsavory" Views. One wonders why Comfort even bothered with the inverted commas, he means it so literally. Criticising Darwin for the more unfortunate outcomes of "Social Darwinism" is like saying Jesus was evil because of the crusades. Darwin was unfortunate enough to have the movement named after him, but that is hardly a personal connection. Comfort also accuses Darwin of racism. By today's standards, all Victorians were racist. Darwin was an abolitionist, vehemently opposed to slavery, and he also viewed humans as a single species, something that was under great debate at the time. Comfort talks about not finding evidence that Darwin thought blacks and whites should be treated differently. He cunningly avoids mentioning that during the Beagle voyage, Darwin was appalled by the ill-treatement of a slave, and argued with his captain about this.
Charges of sexism come next on the list. Victorians were, by and large, sexist by today's standards. The brevity of this paragraph suggests a distinct lack of evidence, but Comfort does dredge up one of my favourite Darwin quotes "better than a dog anyhow", which is in the "Marry" column of a list Darwin compiled while deciding whether or not to marry. But to get back to the point, racism and sexism don't follow from evolution or natural selection.
His Famous Student. A long paragraph devoted to Hitler. Hurrah. As with the accusation of Social Darwinism, we have a spectacular leap from the person who proposes an idea, to an example of something nasty that has picked up bits of that idea. Hitler doesn't quote or mention Darwin by name in Mein Kampf. We could just as easily accuse Plato of proposing the notion of "ideals", and inspiring Hitler to create an ideal race.
The Hit List. "Just as he did with evolution, hitler [sic] also used Christianity for his own evil political ends." That is actually what Comfort writes. Why, then, is he only lambasting Darwin, and not every person involved in creating and modifying the Bible?
Darwin and Atheism. In addition to repeating a variety of misunderstandings, Comfort appears to view science and religious belief as democratic processes. He cites the depressing figures from a 2007 Newsweek poll, where "48 percent said God created humans in the present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so, and another 30 percent believe God guided the process—so 78 percent attribute creation to God. only 13 percent believe in naturalistic evolution." Therefore, concludes Comfort, evolution is not true, and the creator wins. ???????
Possibly aware that readers are flagging at this point, Comfort adds "... please stay with me. I deeply care about you and where you will spend eternity."
Solving Life’s Most Important Question, is how Comfort tries to help us spend eternity in the right place. Would you like "the original Mona Lisa" or a parachute if you had to jump out of a plane? Apparently the plane is life, death is hell, the Mona Lisa is atheism, and a parachute is Christianity. "does that help you connect the dots?", asks Comfort. No.
The Leap. Assuming that one believes in an Old Testament God, this attempt at cross-questioning your conscience a la Spanish inquisition is positively pant-wetting. Well, if you thought that was frightening, things get better. We are told of "Little Jessica", a brutally raped and murdered 9-year old girl. "How do you react?", asks Comfort. Apparently any outrage you feel is a result of God's outrage, which is "evidence of his goodness." (italics Comfort's). I am surprised that Comfort doesn't even try to use evolution, atheism and Darwin as punchbags for all this outrage he's generated.
I'm rather surprised that Comfort's Almighty God is such a frightful Old Testament bogeyman. The next sections are titled "Instant Death", "Let's See" (how hopeless other major religions will be at saving you from hell), and "Back to the Plane", in which Jesus is stuck in to rescue us sinners from a very nasty crash. "Do it Today", urges Comfort. "Do it right now". Hang your faith on "Lord Jesus Christ" has you would hang your body on a parachute. Good luck.
The august author of this thrilling introduction is none other than Ray Comfort, made famous by a short video in which he (in all seriousness) extols the domesticated Dole banana's divine design. This video has kept many undergraduate evolution classes entertained, particularly as Mr. Comfort's enthusiasm extends to descriptions and demonstrations of how "the banana" has been perfectly designed for "ease of entry into the human mouth", with a "non-slip surface". The fact that bananas in general, and Dole bananas in particular, have been bred and genetically modified by humans to acquire all these handy characteristics had escaped Mr. Comfort's notice (he has since apologised for the oversight). With such stunning credentials, Comfort is just the man to introduce Darwin's Origin. After all, he has all the necessary faith at his fingertips. If you aren't familiar with the Dole banana debut, here's a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4
The 50-page Comfort introduction is available online:
http://www.livingwaters.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=383
So is a rather feeble rebuttal by America's National Center for Science Education:
http://www.dontdissdarwin.com/analysis.php
The Comfort introduction begins with a laughably banal section on Darwin's life, swiftly followed by an attempt to clarify Darwin's religious beliefs. No one, least of all Darwin himself (in his writings) is at all clear what Darwin's religious beliefs were, except that they changed rather often, and depended a lot on who he was writing to. A few quotes out of context doesn't shed much light on how Darwin defined a deity or his beliefs. Besides, what possible bearing does Darwin's religious beliefs at different points of his life have to do with evidence for evolution and natural selection?
After his little foray into Darwinian biography, Comfort attempts to explain how DNA constitutes evidence against evolution. The irony of this as a first salvo is almost painful, because the recent developments in genomics are arguably the best and most overwhelming evidence that all living things inherited their genetic code from a common ancestor. Living things simply have far more genes in common than anyone had imagined before they had genomes to compare. Every new genome adds hundreds and thousands of examples of the same genes, duplicated or tweaked slightly to serve new or modified functions, all coded in the same four DNA "letters".
Recognising this fact, Comfort suggests that an intelligent designer would know when something works, and use that design feature repeatedly, so of course lots of genes should be shared. There are two glaring counter-examples to this claim. Firstly, the genome (and natural diversity in general) abound with examples of convergence-- different solutions to the same functional problem. For instance, genetic changes conferring pesticide resistance have evolved independently in more than one species or population of pests. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence of unintelligent, suboptimal design in biology. For instance, genomes are full of DNA that seems to exist simply because it's good at persisting and replicating -- rather like computer viruses. Why would an intelligent designer add that?
Comfort trots out the beloved creationist argument that all this superb genomic complexity could never have come together by chance. Well who, other than creationists, tries to claim that? The whole point of evolution by natural selection, is cumulative change over time. Richard Dawkins is eloquent on this particular topic, so I won't belabour it.
Sadly, all the NCSE had to "rebutt" the notion that genomes arrived suddenly out of nothing, is that "This is not a scientific view of evolution", and "almost all scientists understand that complexity is not a problem for evolution". That's rather like saying the Pope understands that condoms are not a problem for Catholics. Rather than a claim that relies on faith, a sentence or reference with a decent counterargument would have sounded more scientific.
From DNA, Comfort moves to fossils. Why, he asks in separate sections, are there no good transitional forms, and why are there missing links? Those sound like the same question to me, and the answer is that there are plenty of transitional forms. Besides, the standard biologists' quip is that a new missing link only creates two more. And there is no good reason to expect transitional forms in the fossil record to look intermediate between the most closely related species still alive. You might expect the human ancestor to look half human half chimp -- Comfort seems to. But just look at birds. No one would have expected transitional forms in the ancestry of birds to lead to dinosaurs, but that is what the fossil record demonstrates, in abundance.
Admittedly, the fossil record isn't perfect, and events like the Cambrian Explosion are unusual. That doesn't mean that the Cambrian Explosion contradicts evolutionary theory. To quote an eminent evolutionary biologist, JBS Haldane, what the creationists really need is "fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian".
Finally, we get to "The Evolutionary Process" itself. Comfort trots out the usual creationist stand that microevolution (changes within species), is acceptable, and distinct from macroevolution (between species). As Darwin takes pains to emphasise in the Origin, there isn't really a point in time when you can stab a finger at a two varieties and say "look, separate species". Species are categories that we can define with hindsight, when populations have diverged enough to be reproductively isolated. Saying yes to evolution within but not between species is simply a retreat into a "God of the gaps" argument.
Mutations. Comfort seems to think that Darwin was au fait with the term, when the rudiments of genetics weren't incorporated into the evolutionary synthesis till the early 1900s. Yes, adaptation by natural selection does not require mutations to occur in the direction that favours the adaptation. That's the beauty of natural selection. It's a sieve, it keeps the variants (thanks to mutations and other processes like sex) that work, and the rest fail to replicate themselves. The variants don't have to be created in any directed way.
Evolution's Difficult Questions. This should make evolutionists quake in their boots. The first salvo is a devastating return to the notion of "irreducible complexity", the notion that you can't get to something as complex as an eye through little steps, because every bit of the structure has to be there for it to be of any use. A similar argument inferring design is far more eloquently expressed by Paley, one of Darwin's favourite writers when Darwin was reading theology at Cambridge. What Darwin did was to find an unconscious designer in the repetitive sieving algorithm of natural selection. The fact is, both poster children of irreducible complexity, the eye and, more recently, the intricate molecular motor known as the flagellum, have been repeatedly squished by evidence of transitional forms that do benefit the organism that has them.
Vestigial Organs. According to Comfort, these constitute evidence against evolution because it is "devolution". If Comfort had actually read and understood the book he is attempting to introduce, he should have noticed that evolution is not a directed or progressive process with a goal. Devolution is evolution.
Another Thought. This paragraph arguing for an intelligent designer because humans, intelligent as we are, still can't create something from nothing, is somewhat sudden. It also follows ironically on the heels of one of the best arguments against an intelligent designer. Why would an intelligent designer leave bits and pieces of useless vestiges in his creations?
And now for something completely different. Really from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. Darwin's "Unsavory" Views. One wonders why Comfort even bothered with the inverted commas, he means it so literally. Criticising Darwin for the more unfortunate outcomes of "Social Darwinism" is like saying Jesus was evil because of the crusades. Darwin was unfortunate enough to have the movement named after him, but that is hardly a personal connection. Comfort also accuses Darwin of racism. By today's standards, all Victorians were racist. Darwin was an abolitionist, vehemently opposed to slavery, and he also viewed humans as a single species, something that was under great debate at the time. Comfort talks about not finding evidence that Darwin thought blacks and whites should be treated differently. He cunningly avoids mentioning that during the Beagle voyage, Darwin was appalled by the ill-treatement of a slave, and argued with his captain about this.
Charges of sexism come next on the list. Victorians were, by and large, sexist by today's standards. The brevity of this paragraph suggests a distinct lack of evidence, but Comfort does dredge up one of my favourite Darwin quotes "better than a dog anyhow", which is in the "Marry" column of a list Darwin compiled while deciding whether or not to marry. But to get back to the point, racism and sexism don't follow from evolution or natural selection.
His Famous Student. A long paragraph devoted to Hitler. Hurrah. As with the accusation of Social Darwinism, we have a spectacular leap from the person who proposes an idea, to an example of something nasty that has picked up bits of that idea. Hitler doesn't quote or mention Darwin by name in Mein Kampf. We could just as easily accuse Plato of proposing the notion of "ideals", and inspiring Hitler to create an ideal race.
The Hit List. "Just as he did with evolution, hitler [sic] also used Christianity for his own evil political ends." That is actually what Comfort writes. Why, then, is he only lambasting Darwin, and not every person involved in creating and modifying the Bible?
Darwin and Atheism. In addition to repeating a variety of misunderstandings, Comfort appears to view science and religious belief as democratic processes. He cites the depressing figures from a 2007 Newsweek poll, where "48 percent said God created humans in the present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so, and another 30 percent believe God guided the process—so 78 percent attribute creation to God. only 13 percent believe in naturalistic evolution." Therefore, concludes Comfort, evolution is not true, and the creator wins. ???????
Possibly aware that readers are flagging at this point, Comfort adds "... please stay with me. I deeply care about you and where you will spend eternity."
Solving Life’s Most Important Question, is how Comfort tries to help us spend eternity in the right place. Would you like "the original Mona Lisa" or a parachute if you had to jump out of a plane? Apparently the plane is life, death is hell, the Mona Lisa is atheism, and a parachute is Christianity. "does that help you connect the dots?", asks Comfort. No.
The Leap. Assuming that one believes in an Old Testament God, this attempt at cross-questioning your conscience a la Spanish inquisition is positively pant-wetting. Well, if you thought that was frightening, things get better. We are told of "Little Jessica", a brutally raped and murdered 9-year old girl. "How do you react?", asks Comfort. Apparently any outrage you feel is a result of God's outrage, which is "evidence of his goodness." (italics Comfort's). I am surprised that Comfort doesn't even try to use evolution, atheism and Darwin as punchbags for all this outrage he's generated.
I'm rather surprised that Comfort's Almighty God is such a frightful Old Testament bogeyman. The next sections are titled "Instant Death", "Let's See" (how hopeless other major religions will be at saving you from hell), and "Back to the Plane", in which Jesus is stuck in to rescue us sinners from a very nasty crash. "Do it Today", urges Comfort. "Do it right now". Hang your faith on "Lord Jesus Christ" has you would hang your body on a parachute. Good luck.
Friday, October 16, 2009
A Brick Ark?
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes starts with a side-splittingly funny, clever retelling of the Noah's Ark story (by one of the stowaway species) that is well worth reading if you have any sense of humour at all. The remainder of this book comprises a series of much darker, rather depressing Ark-themed short stories, such as the tale of a hijacked cruise ship. However, I highly recommend this book, simply for its first short story, which is a gem.
http://www.julianbarnes.com/bib/history.html
"This Brick Ark: Celebrating the Museum of Comparative Zoology's First 150 Years and the Beginning of the Next 150", is a lecture I attended, by Dr. James Hanken, Director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His talk title made me wonder what the "Ark" can mean to different people. Harvard's massive collection of valuable zoological specimens is obviously worth saving, and arguably, it has always been under threat because of financial and spatial constraints. The museum is also a brick building. Ironically, a quick Google search revealed that "The Brick Ark" is also a Bed and Breakfast run by earnest Christians in Indiana. I suppose what these two uses of "Brick Ark" have in common, is the notion of providing a "safe haven".
Most of this post will be about the talk, which I found enjoyably, and somewhat surprisingly historical. Hanken is a biologist by profession, and it was heartening to see how much time he devoted to the fascinating people responsible for establishing the MCZ. In particular, the talk focused on Louis and Alexander Agassiz, father and son, and the first two directors of the MCZ. Some of the more interesting titbits included Louis Agassiz's insatiable ambition to make the MCZ an unbeatable institution. This was illustrated by some amusing quotes, including the dilemma over what to name the museum. The Museum of "Natural History" seemed too fuddy- duddy. Agassiz's personal favourite (because it encapsulated all his interests), "Comparative Zoology, Embryology and Palaeontology" was, he admitted, "too long". So the museum was, and still is, of "Comparative Zoology", a name that emphasises Agassiz's vision of the broad, synthetic research in the institution he founded.
Agassiz founded the MCZ in 1859, the very year that Darwin's Origin was published. Ironically, Agassiz also believed staunchly in the fact that every species was "a though of God", and vehemently opposed any notions of transmutation (now known as evolution). He stuck to these views till the end of his life, and expressed his ideas most vehemently in his 1851 Essay on Classification. Although these two eminent scientists maintained a gentlemanly correspondence, Darwin did privately confide in his bulldog, Thomas H. Huxley, "I entirely agree with your remarks on Agassiz's Essay on Classification: it is all utterly impracticable rubbish". And when the Origin was published, Darwin politely sent Agassiz a first edition, which Agassiz didn't think much of.
In a somewhat uphill and ultimately doomed attempt to persuade his fellow biologists, and researches in his own MCZ of the impossibility of transmutation, Louis Agassiz launched many expeditions to collect specimens that would disprove Darwin. His last, the Thayer Expedition to Brazil, 1865- 1866, brought back heaps of new species, which, ironically, provided evidence supporting the notion of descent with modification from a common ancestor. Incidentally, the Thayer Expedition also included the young William James, arguably the founder of modern psychology, who appears to be the only person who didn't have a ball in Brazil.
Louis Agassiz's great contribution, in addition to founding the MCZ and finding funding for it, was to organise the public displays of stuffed animals by their geographic distribution -- something which no other museum had done. To Agassiz, the fact that one found sloths in South America and not elsewhere, was evidence that each species had been created separately according to a divine plan. Darwin and his followers also shared this interest in where different forms are found, because to proponents of transmutation, it was striking that species classified in the same group tended to be found in the same place -- as though they had all been modified from a shared ancestor. As Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection enthused upon visiting the MCZ, "It is surely an anomaly that the naturalist who was most opposed to the theory of evolution should be the first to arrange his museum in such a way as best to illustrate that theory, while in the land of Darwin no step has been taken to escape from the monotonous routine of one great systematic series of crowded specimens arranged in lofty halls and palatial galleries, which may excite wonder but which are calculated to teach no definite lesson."
Louis Agassiz's tremendous contributions in founding the MCZ have earned him a place along former Harvard presidents in the room where Harvard's faculty meetings are held. In fact, he is one of a handful honoured with two likenesses in that room -- a portrait and a bust. Also a great geologist, Agassiz is known for being the first to present a scientific case for an ice age. This reputation for geology and anti-Darwinian notions led to quite a few jokes about Agassiz sticking his head into the ground when the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 came along, and Agassiz was the only one of four great biologists to topple from his pedestal on the Stanford Zoology building.
In keeping with his father's rather unfortunate attempts to disprove Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, the second director of the MCZ, also spent much of his life attacking a Darwinian theory-- that of how coral atolls are formed. To this end, Alexander also launched a great many expensive expeditions, and he even had massive metal replicas of coral reefs on display in the MCZ. Although Alexander died believing that he had succeeded, Darwin's atoll formation scenario still stands today.
The MCZ's subsequent directors were also colourful men. All of them struggled to fit an ever-increasing collection into limited space, with limited funds. One of the most influential, Thomas Barbour, was disturbingly fond of discarding bits of the collection in order to make space. Hanken's main message, was that in spite of changing political, economic and intellectual times, the MCZ has remained true to its founder's vision in persisting as a relatively small institution with a disproportionately large impact on the synthetic study of zoology.
Looking at the newly refurbished hall of mammals, I felt unusually grateful for the current financial crisis, which scuppered plans to move the MCZ's public displays across the river to a fancy new museum in a fancy new science park. There is something delightfully evocative about seeing musty old stuffed animals in the very brick building where they were first displayed. One can almost smell and see Agassiz's vision of a museum that would show people just how marvellous the earth's collection of living things is. Unlike previous museum events, this evening's reception was restrained and vegetarian-- a very small, and rather fitting price to pay for keeping the animals of the MCZ in this Brick Ark.
Links of possible interest:
Future Harvard Natural History Museum events:
http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/lectures_and_special_events/index.php
Wallace's exquisitely expressed essay on the MCZ:
http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S401.htm
Darwin Correspondence Project:
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2430.html
http://www.julianbarnes.com/bib/history.html
"This Brick Ark: Celebrating the Museum of Comparative Zoology's First 150 Years and the Beginning of the Next 150", is a lecture I attended, by Dr. James Hanken, Director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His talk title made me wonder what the "Ark" can mean to different people. Harvard's massive collection of valuable zoological specimens is obviously worth saving, and arguably, it has always been under threat because of financial and spatial constraints. The museum is also a brick building. Ironically, a quick Google search revealed that "The Brick Ark" is also a Bed and Breakfast run by earnest Christians in Indiana. I suppose what these two uses of "Brick Ark" have in common, is the notion of providing a "safe haven".
Most of this post will be about the talk, which I found enjoyably, and somewhat surprisingly historical. Hanken is a biologist by profession, and it was heartening to see how much time he devoted to the fascinating people responsible for establishing the MCZ. In particular, the talk focused on Louis and Alexander Agassiz, father and son, and the first two directors of the MCZ. Some of the more interesting titbits included Louis Agassiz's insatiable ambition to make the MCZ an unbeatable institution. This was illustrated by some amusing quotes, including the dilemma over what to name the museum. The Museum of "Natural History" seemed too fuddy- duddy. Agassiz's personal favourite (because it encapsulated all his interests), "Comparative Zoology, Embryology and Palaeontology" was, he admitted, "too long". So the museum was, and still is, of "Comparative Zoology", a name that emphasises Agassiz's vision of the broad, synthetic research in the institution he founded.
Agassiz founded the MCZ in 1859, the very year that Darwin's Origin was published. Ironically, Agassiz also believed staunchly in the fact that every species was "a though of God", and vehemently opposed any notions of transmutation (now known as evolution). He stuck to these views till the end of his life, and expressed his ideas most vehemently in his 1851 Essay on Classification. Although these two eminent scientists maintained a gentlemanly correspondence, Darwin did privately confide in his bulldog, Thomas H. Huxley, "I entirely agree with your remarks on Agassiz's Essay on Classification: it is all utterly impracticable rubbish". And when the Origin was published, Darwin politely sent Agassiz a first edition, which Agassiz didn't think much of.
In a somewhat uphill and ultimately doomed attempt to persuade his fellow biologists, and researches in his own MCZ of the impossibility of transmutation, Louis Agassiz launched many expeditions to collect specimens that would disprove Darwin. His last, the Thayer Expedition to Brazil, 1865- 1866, brought back heaps of new species, which, ironically, provided evidence supporting the notion of descent with modification from a common ancestor. Incidentally, the Thayer Expedition also included the young William James, arguably the founder of modern psychology, who appears to be the only person who didn't have a ball in Brazil.
Louis Agassiz's great contribution, in addition to founding the MCZ and finding funding for it, was to organise the public displays of stuffed animals by their geographic distribution -- something which no other museum had done. To Agassiz, the fact that one found sloths in South America and not elsewhere, was evidence that each species had been created separately according to a divine plan. Darwin and his followers also shared this interest in where different forms are found, because to proponents of transmutation, it was striking that species classified in the same group tended to be found in the same place -- as though they had all been modified from a shared ancestor. As Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection enthused upon visiting the MCZ, "It is surely an anomaly that the naturalist who was most opposed to the theory of evolution should be the first to arrange his museum in such a way as best to illustrate that theory, while in the land of Darwin no step has been taken to escape from the monotonous routine of one great systematic series of crowded specimens arranged in lofty halls and palatial galleries, which may excite wonder but which are calculated to teach no definite lesson."
Louis Agassiz's tremendous contributions in founding the MCZ have earned him a place along former Harvard presidents in the room where Harvard's faculty meetings are held. In fact, he is one of a handful honoured with two likenesses in that room -- a portrait and a bust. Also a great geologist, Agassiz is known for being the first to present a scientific case for an ice age. This reputation for geology and anti-Darwinian notions led to quite a few jokes about Agassiz sticking his head into the ground when the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 came along, and Agassiz was the only one of four great biologists to topple from his pedestal on the Stanford Zoology building.
In keeping with his father's rather unfortunate attempts to disprove Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, the second director of the MCZ, also spent much of his life attacking a Darwinian theory-- that of how coral atolls are formed. To this end, Alexander also launched a great many expensive expeditions, and he even had massive metal replicas of coral reefs on display in the MCZ. Although Alexander died believing that he had succeeded, Darwin's atoll formation scenario still stands today.
The MCZ's subsequent directors were also colourful men. All of them struggled to fit an ever-increasing collection into limited space, with limited funds. One of the most influential, Thomas Barbour, was disturbingly fond of discarding bits of the collection in order to make space. Hanken's main message, was that in spite of changing political, economic and intellectual times, the MCZ has remained true to its founder's vision in persisting as a relatively small institution with a disproportionately large impact on the synthetic study of zoology.
Looking at the newly refurbished hall of mammals, I felt unusually grateful for the current financial crisis, which scuppered plans to move the MCZ's public displays across the river to a fancy new museum in a fancy new science park. There is something delightfully evocative about seeing musty old stuffed animals in the very brick building where they were first displayed. One can almost smell and see Agassiz's vision of a museum that would show people just how marvellous the earth's collection of living things is. Unlike previous museum events, this evening's reception was restrained and vegetarian-- a very small, and rather fitting price to pay for keeping the animals of the MCZ in this Brick Ark.
Links of possible interest:
Future Harvard Natural History Museum events:
http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/lectures_and_special_events/index.php
Wallace's exquisitely expressed essay on the MCZ:
http://www.wku.edu/~smithch/wallace/S401.htm
Darwin Correspondence Project:
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/darwinletters/calendar/entry-2430.html
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Darwinian drama
This year, Darwin would have been 200, and his "Origin of Species", a 150 years old. Hurrah. There have been a plethora or conferences, books, paraphernalia and, most recently, films celebrating (and cashing in) on these glorious anniversaries.
With the mountains of scholarship devoted to documenting Darwin's eventful life, and his own copious written records, from meticulously catalogued notes on earthworms to moving letters about his favourite child's last days alive, one would think that it would be easy to find something both accurate and engaging to dramatise. What one does not expect, is an unfortunate hybrid of Hollywood and hallucination-- both on the parts of Darwin and the creators of "Creation", one of the most recent Darwin films.
"The Creation" opens with a sentence claiming to present how the Origin came to be written. However, it barely mentions the dramatic events surrounding the arrival of Wallace's letter, which, by independently presenting Darwin's theory of natural selection, precipitated a joint reading of their ideas at the Linnean Society, and, soon afterwards, the Origin. Nor does it even mention Charles Lyell, author of books that contributed greatly to Darwin's formulating natural selection, and one of Darwin's closest friends, who advises him to publish before he is scooped.
Instead, "Creation" explores Darwin's reaction to the death of his favourite daughter, and his crisis of faith, which threatens a happy marriage with his first cousin, Emma. These are interesting themes to explore, especially as the current polarised debates pitting religion against evolution tend to obscure the fact that many people find different and nuanced ways to reconcile the two, and that Darwin was by no means an evil and evangelical atheist. Unfortunately, one is plunged into a one-sided and melodramatic demonstration of Darwin's mental agonies over the cruelty of nature, his loss of faith and the death of his favourite child, Annie, at the age of 10. By sheer force of repetition, these horrors become surprisingly saccharine and soporific. I rapidly found myself drowned in such a torrent of flashbacks and flash-forwards that it was tricky to know when and where anything was happening -- in Darwin's mind or in his life? Before Annie's death or after? Staged scenes of "nature red in tooth and claw", such as a fox killing a rabbit about 3 feet from Darwin and his whispering brood were so improbable they were funny rather than moving, while shots of Emma staring, pained, at her raving husband for the umpteenth time got positively tiresome. It would help if some of the acting was, at least, convincing, but it isn't. As a result of all this agonising improbability and confusion, "Creation" isn't just historically inaccurate, it is dramatically hopeless.
My friends and I emerged from "Creation" stunned and wondering if it were, perhaps, a creationist spoof. To our surprise, there are actually reports that American creationists fought to repress its release in their country. They don't know what they are missing. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6173399/Charles-Darwin-film-too-controversial-for-religious-America.html To paraphrase Darwin badly, there is an irony in this view of (Darwin's) life, with its several creations, having been originally breathed into a few fancies or into one; and that, whilst society has gone cycling on according to the fluid laws of humankind, from so interesting a beginning endless forms most silly and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
In contrast, "Darwin's Darkest Hour" by NOVA is less original, but makes good use of some of the more dramatic moments in the history of how the Origin came to be written, and presents quite a few important historical and scientific points clearly and accurately. For instance, we learn that Darwin did not have a eureka moment when he set foot on the Galapagos, but that back in London, an ornithologist named John Gould presented Darwin with his own specimens reclassified, so that birds Darwin had labelled warblers and blackbirds were actually 13 closely related species of what we now know of as Darwin's finches. This information, combined with Gould's news that Darwin's three mockingbird varieties, each collected from a separate island, were distinct species, made Darwin question the immutability and separate creation of species. If all the finches were formed via special creation, why would such closely related forms so close together in space look so different? And why would a Creator bother to make slightly different mockingbirds for three similar little islands in the same archipelago?
"Darwin's Darkest Hour" also shows evidence of careful research and an attempt to be accurate and balanced. A lot of the props are clearly designed to reflect the Darwin home, from Darwin's copious letter-writing, to his frequent games of backgammon with his wife, and his plant experiments in both greenhouse and drawing room. Both films present Darwin the experimenter, but whereas Darwin in "Creation" is generally retching over dead pigeons, the NOVA Darwin also has blessed (and historically documented) moments of good health, during which he conducts experiments on seed dispersal or bee instinct with his children. One gets a real sense that Darwin was a rather fun father to have, who inspired and deserved the devotion and admiration of all his children. "The Creation" attempts to portray Darwin as Dad, but gets so caught up trying to emphasise his love for the dead Annie, one gets the false impression that he barely noticed his other children.
The only real truck I have with NOVA's dramatisation is the relationship between Emma and Charles. It might as well be taking place in New York today. The couple were close, true, but Emma is unlikely to have masterminded the entire scheme to rescue Darwin's scientific priority after Wallace's letter appears in 1858. Anyone watching "Darwin's Darkest Hour" would be left imagining that Emma was so dynamic, supportive and positively bossy, that she reminded Darwin of his 1844 essay on natural selection and urges him to write to his good friends Lyell and Hooker, asking them to publish this together with Wallace's letter. Although Darwin did indeed write to these friends, and they did indeed excerpt his essay to be read to the Linnean Society together with Wallace's letter, it is unlikely that Emma would have orchestrated the entire effort. That said, perhaps one could allow for a little dramatic licence if an unrealistically young, svelte, feminist Emma makes the whole film more palatable to modern audiences. Charles is also surprisingly glamorous, but Henry Ian Cusick does an excellent job of conveying Darwin's many conflicting emotions without making him a complete nut.
In short, I would recommend that anyone who isn't familiar with the Darwin story watch the NOVA film, and that anyone who is not a creationist trying to poke fun at Darwin or the possessor of a very strong stomach should avoid "Creation".
Creation:
Darwin's Darkest Hour: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darwin/
With the mountains of scholarship devoted to documenting Darwin's eventful life, and his own copious written records, from meticulously catalogued notes on earthworms to moving letters about his favourite child's last days alive, one would think that it would be easy to find something both accurate and engaging to dramatise. What one does not expect, is an unfortunate hybrid of Hollywood and hallucination-- both on the parts of Darwin and the creators of "Creation", one of the most recent Darwin films.
"The Creation" opens with a sentence claiming to present how the Origin came to be written. However, it barely mentions the dramatic events surrounding the arrival of Wallace's letter, which, by independently presenting Darwin's theory of natural selection, precipitated a joint reading of their ideas at the Linnean Society, and, soon afterwards, the Origin. Nor does it even mention Charles Lyell, author of books that contributed greatly to Darwin's formulating natural selection, and one of Darwin's closest friends, who advises him to publish before he is scooped.
Instead, "Creation" explores Darwin's reaction to the death of his favourite daughter, and his crisis of faith, which threatens a happy marriage with his first cousin, Emma. These are interesting themes to explore, especially as the current polarised debates pitting religion against evolution tend to obscure the fact that many people find different and nuanced ways to reconcile the two, and that Darwin was by no means an evil and evangelical atheist. Unfortunately, one is plunged into a one-sided and melodramatic demonstration of Darwin's mental agonies over the cruelty of nature, his loss of faith and the death of his favourite child, Annie, at the age of 10. By sheer force of repetition, these horrors become surprisingly saccharine and soporific. I rapidly found myself drowned in such a torrent of flashbacks and flash-forwards that it was tricky to know when and where anything was happening -- in Darwin's mind or in his life? Before Annie's death or after? Staged scenes of "nature red in tooth and claw", such as a fox killing a rabbit about 3 feet from Darwin and his whispering brood were so improbable they were funny rather than moving, while shots of Emma staring, pained, at her raving husband for the umpteenth time got positively tiresome. It would help if some of the acting was, at least, convincing, but it isn't. As a result of all this agonising improbability and confusion, "Creation" isn't just historically inaccurate, it is dramatically hopeless.
My friends and I emerged from "Creation" stunned and wondering if it were, perhaps, a creationist spoof. To our surprise, there are actually reports that American creationists fought to repress its release in their country. They don't know what they are missing.
In contrast, "Darwin's Darkest Hour" by NOVA is less original, but makes good use of some of the more dramatic moments in the history of how the Origin came to be written, and presents quite a few important historical and scientific points clearly and accurately. For instance, we learn that Darwin did not have a eureka moment when he set foot on the Galapagos, but that back in London, an ornithologist named John Gould presented Darwin with his own specimens reclassified, so that birds Darwin had labelled warblers and blackbirds were actually 13 closely related species of what we now know of as Darwin's finches. This information, combined with Gould's news that Darwin's three mockingbird varieties, each collected from a separate island, were distinct species, made Darwin question the immutability and separate creation of species. If all the finches were formed via special creation, why would such closely related forms so close together in space look so different? And why would a Creator bother to make slightly different mockingbirds for three similar little islands in the same archipelago?
"Darwin's Darkest Hour" also shows evidence of careful research and an attempt to be accurate and balanced. A lot of the props are clearly designed to reflect the Darwin home, from Darwin's copious letter-writing, to his frequent games of backgammon with his wife, and his plant experiments in both greenhouse and drawing room. Both films present Darwin the experimenter, but whereas Darwin in "Creation" is generally retching over dead pigeons, the NOVA Darwin also has blessed (and historically documented) moments of good health, during which he conducts experiments on seed dispersal or bee instinct with his children. One gets a real sense that Darwin was a rather fun father to have, who inspired and deserved the devotion and admiration of all his children. "The Creation" attempts to portray Darwin as Dad, but gets so caught up trying to emphasise his love for the dead Annie, one gets the false impression that he barely noticed his other children.
The only real truck I have with NOVA's dramatisation is the relationship between Emma and Charles. It might as well be taking place in New York today. The couple were close, true, but Emma is unlikely to have masterminded the entire scheme to rescue Darwin's scientific priority after Wallace's letter appears in 1858. Anyone watching "Darwin's Darkest Hour" would be left imagining that Emma was so dynamic, supportive and positively bossy, that she reminded Darwin of his 1844 essay on natural selection and urges him to write to his good friends Lyell and Hooker, asking them to publish this together with Wallace's letter. Although Darwin did indeed write to these friends, and they did indeed excerpt his essay to be read to the Linnean Society together with Wallace's letter, it is unlikely that Emma would have orchestrated the entire effort. That said, perhaps one could allow for a little dramatic licence if an unrealistically young, svelte, feminist Emma makes the whole film more palatable to modern audiences. Charles is also surprisingly glamorous, but
In short, I would recommend that anyone who isn't familiar with the Darwin story watch the NOVA film, and that anyone who is not a creationist trying to poke fun at Darwin or the possessor of a very strong stomach should avoid "Creation".
Creation:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)