February 12, 2009
Category: Books
After careful reflection, I'd say it is worth reading The Origin of Species. Biology doesn't erase it's past, as I thought. It just forgets to cite it.
The Origin is biology's hub -- all the routes that the science has taken since seem to pass through it. This, I think, is partly because Darwin had such a complete vision of the living world, and partly because his ignorance of some areas was so great that he had to hedge his bets, and mention everything in just in case.
The book is so rich that I could have written about entirely different subjects in each post.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 8:30 AM • 13 Comments
February 11, 2009
Category: Books
So, what is there left to say? Not much. As its title suggests, the fourteenth and final chapter of the origin, 'Recapitulation and Conclusion', mostly restates things that Darwin has already said, often several times.
This relentless piling, sorting and re-arranging of evidence can make Darwin seem a little OCD, like an intellectual version of Wall-E. But he also knows that beneath all the case studies, there's a logical core to evolution by natural selection, even if he can't put it in an equation. Darwin brackets this chapter by showing that, if you accept the most basic evidence the living world puts before your eyes, evolution follows as surely as a lever moves a stone.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 8:30 AM • 2 Comments
February 9, 2009
Category: Books
From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups.
Isn't that a good sentence? It's the first of this chapter. There's music in the way the Biblical ring of "From the first dawn of life", falls towards the swallowed repetition of "groups under groups", which itself mirrors and explains the descending degrees of resemblance that gives the sentence its scientific filling.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 9:55 AM • 5 Comments
February 6, 2009
Category: Books
Back when I started this, I remarked that one of the reasons I hadn't read the Origin was that I couldn't imagine it being essential to a grasp of contemporary science. Regarding evolution, I think you could still make a case for this. But in other ways, that statement shows that you really shouldn't opine on topics you know nothing about.
Specifically, I'm talking about ecology (by which, just to be clear, I mean the study of the interactions of living things with each other and their environment, rather than 'nature' or 'environmentalism'). It's been said that all European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Well, all ecology is a series of footnotes to Darwin.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 10:05 AM • 2 Comments
February 4, 2009
Category: Books
When the Origin was published, the idea that species were not fixed entities had been in the air for some time, thanks to Lamarck, Robert Chambers, anonymous author of the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus.
But unlike those men, Darwin put all the different pieces together into a coherent whole. How was that? Chapter 11 of the Origin, 'Geographical distribution', gives some hints.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 7:09 AM • 2 Comments
February 2, 2009
Category: Books
We left Darwin in a troubled frame of mind. The fossil record seemed to offer little support to his theory (then again, it offered little support to any other theory). By the time we reach the end of chapter 10, 'On the geological succession of organic beings', he's feeling far more chipper:
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Posted by John Whitfield at 9:15 AM • 11 Comments
January 31, 2009
Category: Books
Thomas Kuhn -- the one philosopher of science that even ignorami like me have heard of -- said that during periods of 'normal science', researchers only take on problems that they know they can solve. 'Paradigm' is an overused word, but it's a measure of the paradigm-shifting nature of the Origin that in much of it, such as in chapter 9 'On the imperfection of the geological record', Darwin flies blind.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 1:30 PM • 5 Comments
January 29, 2009
Category: Books
George Bernard Shaw, according to a comment left on a previous post, thought that many people gave up on reading the Origin because, convinced of Darwin's argument, they wearied of him making his points over and over again.
But I disagree. It's not seeing Darwin restate his case that's tiring. It's seeing him return, like a dog to its vomit, to questions that he admitted in chapters one and two couldn't be answered.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 8:45 AM • 6 Comments
January 27, 2009
Category: Books
Science is fun. Now, I know that someone telling you a thing is fun is usually a guarantee that it isn't. And I know that people who tell you science is fun usually do so in strained and pleading tones, and expect you to believe them because they have spiky hair and can play the harmonica. But it's true.
To see what I mean, read chapter 6 of the Origin, 'Instinct'. Despite, or because of, having its share of 'are you sure about that?' moments, it's a delight, because it shows Darwin doing the most fun thing in science: mucking about with reality, sometimes called experimentation.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 6:30 AM • 8 Comments
January 23, 2009
Category: Books
Up until now, our route into the theory of evolution by natural selection has been all downhill. One thing has led effortlessly to another, with Darwin giving the occasional nudge to steer things in the right direction. Not any more. If it's human interest you're after -- doubt, sweat, anxiety -- then chapter 6 of the Origin, 'Difficulties on Theory', is the one you've been waiting for.
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Posted by John Whitfield at 8:40 AM • 9 Comments
John Whitfield is a London-based freelance science writer. He writes mostly about evolution, ecology and conservation; his work has appeared in Nature, Science, Scientific American, Seed, New Scientist and others.
