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Mark Parascandola, "Evolution: More fallout from the Darwin thesis -- from barnacles to standing up straight" (2003)
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Mark Parascandola, "Evolution: More fallout from the Darwin thesis -- from barnacles to standing up straight" (2003)
"The Washington Post" Sunday, July 20, 2003, Page BW08; http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A5624-2003Jul17¬Found=true
Evolution
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More fallout from the Darwin thesis -- from barnacles to standing up straight. <p>
Reviewed by Mark Parascandola
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Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page BW08
We the Omega
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From our privileged vantage point, the evolutionary process resembles a steady march toward the ultimate crowning achievement: the human race. But modern science tells us that evolution does not move with any more will than does a subatomic particle. Nature does not aspire or wish or plan. Rather, it is blind, directionless and random. In Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? (Harvard Univ., $29.95), philosophy professor Michael Ruse skillfully dissects our age-old habit of looking for purpose in the natural world. Greek philosophers, Christian theologians and Oxbridge dons alike have been smitten with nature's inventiveness. Gazing in awe at our body parts -- eyes, thumbs, ears -- they reasoned that these devices must be the handiwork of an intelligent Creator. Then, in the mid-19th century, "a young barnacle expert by the name of Charles Darwin" proposed that biological innovation could be explained by a process of natural selection, whereby those that lacked the right stuff were cruelly eliminated from the herd. Since then, Ruse notes, biologists have struggled to rid themselves of any lingering "theological odor." But Ruse's reassuring message is that we need not resist the temptation to seek direction and purpose in biology. Indeed, "biology as we know it today would be dreadfully impoverished without a perspective that asks 'what for.' "
The underlying agenda here, as in Ruse's two previous books, is to demonstrate that science is not wholly free of human values. We see purpose in biology because we impose it in the questions we ask and the explanations we seek. Yet Ruse worries that modern science, in its quest to remain objective and valueless, has become jaded. In the book's final pages, he calls for a return to a secular "theology of nature" that "appreciates the complex, adaptive glory of the natural world, rejoices in it, and trembles before it."
Grand Designs> <b>
> <p>For those troubled by the wickedness and pointlessness of natural selection, "evolution still often sounds like bad news," laments Georgetown professor John Haught. The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way, insists Haught in <b>Deeper than Darwin<b>:The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution (Westview, $26). In a previous book, God After Darwin, Haught hailed evolutionary biology as a "great gift to theology." If his creationist colleagues failed to recognize it as such, it is because they have been reading those poetic biblical passages too literally. After all, isn't a God who allows his creation to mold itself far more admirable than one who micromanages the hereditary lineage of every bug and worm? But Haught has a bone to pick with contemporary neo-Darwinians too, namely Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for they have committed the sin of pride -- when they begin to hold forth on "the ultimate nature of things." Haught insists that nature must be read on multiple levels, some of which are outside the realm of science. He goes on to argue that religious thought can give meaning to the universe on a more primitive level.
Sacred symbols and myths may come closer to describing what is "really" going on at the most profound depths. Haught also makes much of how the story of the universe follows a progressive narrative trajectory. (Michael Ruse would reply here that it unfolds like a story merely because we tell it like one). But Haught's account is frustratingly vague about how exactly religious thought will enhance our understanding of the universe. In fact, he proudly defends this vagueness, proposing a kind of uncertainty principle under which clarity must be sacrificed in exchange for depth. "Readings of the universe that move us most deeply, or that mean the most to us personally, must inevitably be unclear."
Crusty the Natural Historian> <b>
> <p>While <i>Deeper than Darwin <i>may prove inspirational to the converted, it is unlikely to win over any nonbelievers. While Darwin's bold theory has been fashioned into a springboard for all sorts of speculative philosophizing, Rebecca Stott's Darwin and the Barnacle (Norton, $24.95) reveals the man as an extremely cautious and meticulous scientist, perhaps too much so. By 1844, at the age of 35, Darwin had sketched out a draft of his grand theory, but he did not speak publicly about it until the publication of his On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859. During the intervening years, he spent much of his time immersed in an ambitious and exhaustive effort to classify "all the [barnacles] in the whole world."
Stott's thesis is that Darwin's affair with the barnacle was not an irrelevant detour but was vital to his scientific and professional advancement. Her wide-ranging narrative follows Darwin's life from his university days to the publication of Origin of Species. Along the way we learn about his search for relief from abdominal pains in Dr. James Gully's Water Cure, his daily life at Down House with an expanding family, the slow death of his beloved daughter Annie, and the risks of investing in railroad stocks in the 1850s. Meanwhile, the financially solvent Darwin spent most of his waking hours peering into a microscope, tediously dissecting barnacle specimens, and corresponding with natural scientists and collectors around the world.
While Darwin's biography is well-trodden ground, Stott has constructed a uniquely engaging story around the barnacle. Darwin was not the first to suggest that all species evolved from primordial sea creatures. However, previous authors, including Charles's grandfather Erasmus Darwin, were mocked for their undisciplined speculation. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of Erasmus, "Darwinizing was all surface and no content, all shell and no nut, all bark and no wood."
But Darwin demanded rigorous empirical proof to support his theorizing. The barnacles, "all aberrants in one way or another" yet "brilliantly adapted to their surroundings," demonstrated how one particular species could produce profound variation. Darwin's four volumes on the barnacle won him the prestigious Royal Society Medal in 1854. His growing international standing and "elaborate global epistolary web" of barnacle contacts, Stott maintains, shaped the public reception of Origin of Species. At the same time, Stott attributes an unlikely degree of cunning to Darwin, portraying the delay in the book's publication as a carefully timed, strategic move. Instead, as her story illustrates, the events of a busy, sometimes tragic life, along with Darwin's own fears and self-doubt, were likely co-conspirators in keeping the species manuscript locked away in a desk drawer for so many years.
Bipedal Disorder?> <b>
> <p>The habit of walking on two feet is one of the defining characteristics of being human (though we share the honor with the flamingo and the ostrich, among others). In <b>Lowly Origin: Where, When and Why Our Ancestors First Stood Up<b> (Princeton Univ., $35), zoologist Jonathan Kingdon explores the roots of this curious behavior. In the past, the topic has served as a "theater for intellectual daring." Depending on whom you ask, bipedalism emerged to free up the arms to carry babies and food, to allow for a more distant line of vision, to keep the body cool or for phallic display and intimidation. But Kingdon, who spent his childhood among the thickets of Tanzania, has little patience for the surmising that occurs at "intellectual hothouses" thousands of miles from the African continent.
Instead, he maintains, this momentous transformation can only be understood through intimate familiarity with the geography and climate within which it occurred. Our ancestors did not suddenly decide to stand up; before walking could become habit, a host of anatomical changes were required. Kingdon hypothesizes a missing link: the "East Coast Ground Ape." Among the rich forests of the eastern coastline, now Mozambique and Tanzania, food would have been plentiful but close to the ground, and the primate inhabitants would have spent much of their time squatting on two legs, using their arms to forage for food. In turn, this behavior would have forced changes in the upper body, backbone and pelvis to relieve the ape's top-heavy anatomy. That these changes improved balance on two legs "would have been an almost accident bonus, an anatomical by-product."
While Kingdon admits that his ground ape is largely "an artifact of my imagination," he uses geology, anatomy, paleontology, personal experience and his own artful drawings to construct a persuasive argument. Ultimately, however, the greatest obstacle to understanding our evolutionary heritage is not scientific but psychological. "We are hostages to an iconic history in which two legs are not only the mark of our uniqueness but an automatic antithesis to four." If we are to bridge the gap between our ancestors and ourselves, Kingdon insists, we must see ourselves in the face of an ape, literally. He places his own self-portrait next to his drawing of a chimp to illustrate the striking similarity, "except that I have very hairy eyebrows." Perhaps nature has not progressed that much after all. •
Mark Parascandola is a historian and philosopher of science living in Washington, D.C.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
