The power of Darwin compels you to doubt him about sex differences

Evolution is true but our evolutionary explanations are always evolving and expanding in their complexity, or at least they should be encouraged to, when evidence supports it.

I've found, however, that compelling stories about human evolution, especially those penned by Darwin, are too often preferred by scientists over others or over complexity.  I think scientists are especially protective of evolutionary stories that preserve certain macho conceptions of masculinity and that are porn-adjacent. So it's no surprise that these stories dominate pop culture's understanding of human evolution.

Everyone knows all about sexual selection.  (Now before I go through it, briefly, you need to promise you'll read the rest of this blog post. I know from actual experience with readers and listeners in the classroom, that lots of folks will mistake this upfront explanation of the idea that I'm about to critique for my endorsement of this stuff. They'll read this part then tune out by the time I get around to critiquing it. Please don't fall for that.)

Okay, right. Everyone knows all about sexual selection. Males compete with other males for sex with females. Winners get sex. This ratchets up, in their descendants, whatever physical attributes got them to win that sex that sent those attributes into the future. And, as arbiters of what's sexy and what's worthy of sex, females decide which male traits get shot into the future, ratcheting up over time what they thought was so sexy in those winners that they had sex with. Didn't you know? Where have you been? Evolution is a game in which the winners get sex and the losers get nothing. It's like Survivor and The Bachelor had a baby that got in a time machine, went back to England in the 1860s, and buddied up with Darwin.

Sexual selection is the dominant evolutionary explanation for why men are taller than women. Men are tall because their tall winning ancestors won the sex. Over time this pulled men's height above the average height of women. That men are taller on average than women is taken to be legitimate evidence for this explanation.

And we're all supposed to be totally cool with that automatic explanatory power of sexual selection. After all, it's Darwin's "second great idea" and he was so forward thinking by giving agency to females!

So many of us who don't research  sexual selection, directly, but who teach human evolution courses feel like we really have no choice but to carry on like this. It's canon. And we're supposed to be grateful that females got the power of choice! See? It's not *all* about males bashing each other apart for opportunities to have sex. It's okay! And sometimes it's about males being beautiful and doing beautiful things to attract females! So get on board, people... human evolution is evolution, too! We're not special. We're just like birds and fruitflies. Humans need to embrace sexual selection as a "force" in our understanding. Get with the program.

I sure did. Sexual selection for big competitive males is what I've been teaching countless students for years and years. But, over those years it became an increasingly bizarre thing.  I stopped growing when I got my period and that's when all the boys, who didn't get periods, kept growing. My period seemed to be the evolutionary reason I'm shorter than the average man. When you think about menstruation, ovaries, puberty, never growing tall enough to touch the rim, not that you have a chip on your shoulder or anything about that, then Darwin's ideas about male competition seem, suddenly, ridiculous.

This is a great time to quote Sarah Hrdy:

“Compared with Darwin’s exquisitely detailed observations of barnacles, coral reefs and orchids—even the emotional development of  his own children—this consummate naturalist’s observations of women and other female primates were curiously cursory.”

And then in late 2016, after years of my teaching and being and increasingly doubting, Jerry Coyne got mad at PZ Myers for his understanding of evolutionary complexity and bias in evolutionary stories, specifically about sexual selection explaining  human height differences. So, I piped up and it's all documented here.

Then, I got to work, because the Coyne thing suddenly made it clear to me how powerful and influential this story is. It was suddenly very important that I do something about it.

The first thing I did was rant about it in the Washington Post, who gave it a clickbait title, which probably drove away the people I was primarily speaking to.

And then I did a lot of reading about how skeletons grow. I sent a paper about it to Evolutionary Anthropology in the summer of 2018. Four reviewers saw the first version. Two of the four disliked it greatly. The other two disliked it less, and so it miraculously got "major revisions" rather than a rejection. Some of the major blowback was against my focus on "proximate" processes (like skeletal growth and hormone effects) which are not "evolutionary" to the minds of some reviewers and many people out there. One reviewer actually wrote that "the estrogen explanation is not evolutionary" to which I can only cry out to the universe: then what is it, magical?

The two mad reviewers dropped off in the second round and three new ones were added, totalling the anonymous reviewers to seven. By this time I had found a paper by some heavyweights and in a heavyweight journal to back up my approach that eschews the "proximate" versus "evolutionary" convention, passed down from Ernst Mayr.

link to paper

Without Laland et al. to cite in revisions, I think my paper would have been rejected. That's how entrenched Mayr's convention is, to my mind. I wouldn't have been permitted to work outside of it, not yet at least. I'm grateful to the reviewers and the editor-in-chief who pushed me to improve the paper, like that and in countless other ways. It was published yesterday.

link to paper; Open access (free) link to paper

By this point, if you haven't heard me talk about this (which has been great fun where they've invited me into their lovely groups to do so), then you're wondering what the paper says. It says a lot about estrogen, ovaries, and periods. (It also says a lot about pelvic differences... so it says a lot about vaginas, uteruses, and clitorides too, which is a whole other ball of wax.) But I'm too pooped from all the activity around the Twitter thread I posted yesterday to write too much more here on the Mermaid's Tale today. So, for now, I'll link to Twitter and to where someone unrolled that thread.

HEY SEXUAL SELECTION!
You think you are the reason why men are taller than women, but if you want to remain the star of this story, then...
THE OVARY’S IN YOUR COURT.
I wrote a paper that you can’t ignore.https://t.co/oGQNu6yXcl
A (delighted) thread.

— Holly Dunsworth (@HollyDunsworth) May 2, 2020

If you hit a paywall at the journal where the paper lives, just download the pre-print for free here: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/soc_facpubs/37/

I think my beloved former Professor Jeffrey Kurland from those glory days at Penn State would have hated this paper at first! But, if he weren't up in heaven now, we'd be yelling and yelling together, and it would be so much fun yelling together, and he'd at least entertain these ideas, and he'd think up brilliant ways to take the work further. And I so wish he were here with us now, but he will always be.

Evolution, to Engels--and a kind of lesson for us all?

We tend to think of Friedrich Engels as Karl Marx's pal, co-author, supporter--and financial benefactor.  That's all true.  But he was also perhaps a better synthesizer of ideas, and certainly a more approachable author.  A core aspect of their economic idea was that, through historic processes, the nature of societies evolve, from simple states of our early human forebears ultimately to come to rest as communism.  I am no expert but I think that since there would then (they thought) no longer be opposition or competition, history would, so to speak, come to an end.  At least the uninterrupted history of unfairness, conflict, strife, and governments that oppressed their people. A good discussion of Engels' life can be heard in a recent broadcast/podcast presented recently on BBC Radio.

That Beeb program went over many things about Engels that are familiar to anthropologists, among others.  But it ended by referring to a work I'd not known of, a partly unfinished book on science called The Dialectics of Nature, which is available on line or as a pdf.  The latter has an Introduction by JBS Haldane, one of the early 20th century's founding evolutionary geneticists, and a political leftist.

Engels. (One of many versions on the web)

Engels discusses the various sciences as existed at the time (1883).  Haldane points out some errors that were known by his (Haldane's) time, but Engels' book is a surprisingly deep, broad review of science at his time.  I do not know how Engels knew so much science, but apparently he did.

Although Engels never completed it, the book was written only about 25 years after Darwin's Origin of Species, which to Engels was highly relevant to his views on society.  But he went much further! He viewed essentially everything, not just human society, as evolving phenomena.  While with various errors based on what was known at the time, he recognized astronomical change, geological evolution, and biological evolution as manifestations of the fundamental idea that things cosmic were not Created and thereafter remaining static, as prevailing biblically-derived views generally held, but had beginnings, and then changed.  Engels applied his ideas to inanimate physical phenomena as they were then understood, as well as to life itself. In essence, his view was that everything is about change, with human society as just another instance.

Engels was looking for what we might call universal 'laws', in this case concerning how systems change.  This would be a major challenge, by science, to the theologically based idea that once Created, worldly things were mainly constant.  Engels noted that the classic Greeks had had a more 'modern' and correct view of the dynamics of existence than western Europe had developed under the reign of the Church.

Engles' book shows how grand thinking had led to, or could be made consistent with, the social thinking by which Marx and Engels could believe that sociocultural evolution was similarly non-static.  If so, they claimed to see how societal dynamics would lead to future states in which the rather cruel, relatively primitive nature of nation states in his time would evolve to a fairer, more egalitarian kind of society.  But Dialectics of Nature shows that Engles was thinking very broadly and 'scientifically', in the sense of trying to account for things not just in terms of opinions or wishes, but of natural forces, and the resulting dynamics of change.  He wasn't the only one in his time who thought that the idea of an evolutionary process enabled one to predict its outcome--as seemed to be possible in physics and chemistry.

I am no Engels scholar, and I had no idea he was so knowledgeable about science as it stood at his time, nor that the idea of evolutionary change that he and Marx applied to society was, in a sense, based on the finding, in their view, of similar kinds of change in the physical cosmos.  This in a sense, conveniently made the extension of the theory to society seem quite logical, or perhaps even obvious, and as noted above, many were speculating in similar ways.  Marx and Engels scholars must be aware of this, but when I was exposed to these theories as an anthropology graduate student decades ago, I did not know of this connection between social and physical dynamics and evolution.

These alleged connections or similarities do not make the Marxist conclusions 'true', in the sense of scientific truth.  The idea that geology and species evolve may seem similar to the idea that societal structures evolve.  But just because two areas have some sort of similarity, or change over time and space, does not mean they have the same causes.  Human culture involves the physical aspects of a society's environment, but culture is largely or mainly about human interactions, beliefs, kinship, and so on.  There is no necessary physically causal or deep connection between that and species evolution or the growth and erosion of mountain ranges.  A planetary orbit, a hula hoop, and an orange are all more or less 'round', but that does not establish connections between them.

At the same time, Engels worked at the height, one might say, of the idea that there were universal 'laws of Nature'.  Darwin informally likened evolution to planetary motion, with law-like properties, and in some of his writing (e.g., about barnacles) he seems to have believed in a kind of selective inevitability--some species being, essentially, on the way to a terminal end found in related species (terminal, at least, as Darwin saw them in his time).  This may not be as benighted as it may seem.  Biologists still debate the question of what would happen if you could 'rewind the tape' of evolution, and start over.  Some have argued that you'd get the same result.  Others vigorously oppose this sort of belief in predictable destiny.

Given the ambience of science in the 19th century, and in the legacy of the 'Enlightenment' period in Europe only a century or two before, it is not surprising that Engels, wanting society also to be constrained by 'laws' or forces, and hence to be predictable if not leading to inevitable causal effects, would see parallels in the physical world.  Many others in that general time period in Europe had similar law-like ideas about societies. It is, at the very least, interesting that Engles tried to make his social ideas be as reflective of natural laws as are the orbits of planets.

What about us, today?
It is easy to look back and see what was 'in the air' in some past time, and how it influenced people, even across a spectrum of interest areas.  In this case, evolutionary concepts spanned the physical, biological, and social sciences.  We can see how very clever, insightful people were influenced by the ambient ideas.

So it's easy to look back and discern common themes, about which each person invoking them thought he was having specific, original insights.  But that's us looking back at them.  What about us in our own time?  How much might we, today, be affected by prevailing views--in scientific or societal affairs--that are 'in the air' but may not be as widely applicable as some argue that they are?  How many of our prevailing views, that we of course think of as modern and better than the more primitive ones of the past, are similarly just part of the ambience of our times, that will be viewed with patronizing smiles at our naiveté?  Does going with the flow, so to speak, of current tides make us see more deeply than our forebears--and how much is it just that we see things differently?

How can we know?

From Darwin's own thoughts. Part IV.

Here is the fourth, and final installment of annotated quotes from Charles Darwin's autobiography (my comments in blue):

"As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction, and not for a long time with any intention of publishing."

Darwin realizes that humans must have evolved, too.  There was no reason, from what he could observe, to except us.  But he knew the dangers of saying so!  We are still under some societal pressure to disavow evolutionary theory, not unlike his days.  Denial is all around us....

"My strength will then probably be exhausted, and I shall be ready to exclaim "Nunc dimittis.""

That means something like 'Enough--time to go!'

"My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use.  The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Darwin bemoans his intellectual narrowness.  He elsewhere (as we've seen) refers to books or poetry he no longer reads or once liked.  How many of us are pressured to be technophilic workaholics, letting some of the deepest pleasures of life pass us by?  Take heed!

"....the 'Origin of Species  is one long argument from the beginning to the end, and it has convinced not a few able men."

"On the favourable side of the balance, I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully."

A lesson might be not to fall into just accepting fads or what is selling these days, but to pay attention, for yourself, to the nature of what you are studying.

"This has naturally led me to distrust greatly deductive reasoning in the mixed sciences. On the other hand, I am not very sceptical,— a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science."

He means observe the world as it is, don't just accept theory or speculative ideas uncritically.  In not being skeptical he may mean that he believes there are truths out there, generalities or theories, that can be accepted if there is supporting evidence.

"So that here a belief— if indeed a statement with no definite idea attached to it can be called a belief— had spread over almost the whole of England without any vestige of evidence."

One can identify fads (like 'Big Data' or 'precision genomic medicine' or other 'omics?) that feed the System.  But maybe closer, clearer, more patient thinking and observing could serve our impatient results-counting generation well instead.

"Lastly, I have had ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread."

Ah, to be wealthy!

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

My afterthoughts:
So, why did I extract and post these bits by Darwin?  I think he gives us a lot to think about.  This is not just about particular facts, or even the idea of evolution which was, in fact, 'in the air' despite Darwin's denial.

We might not have had the same exact theory today, as Darwin proposed it.  We have vastly more data, an understanding of inheritance, and even much better ideas about species distributions (for example, we know about continental drift).  We have more subtle understanding of the roles of natural selection and chance (genetic drift).  We have much more information on the complex nature of genetic control on our traits.  A century and a half of research, framed by the notion of evolution has framed our investigations themselves.  But the central idea of evolution stands without doubt among scientists.  Nothing diminishes Darwin's patience, observations, experiments, persistence, dedication to using detail to build a general picture, and, by no means least of all, his honor.

Careerist pressures are today often, if not largely, antithetical to the personal traits that worked so well for Darwin.  So, aside from seeing the thoughts of one of the most insightful of all scientists, there are lessons for our own time in Darwin's reprise of his life.

From Darwin's own thoughts. Part III.

This is the third installment of my annotated selection of pithy quotes from Darwin's autobiography (my comments in blue):

Darwin and Wallace both felt inspiration, or a vital explanatory link, in Thomas Malthus' book:
"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement 'Malthus on Population,' and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species."

Darwin's reflections on his theory of evolution and his most important work:
"The solution, as I believe, is that the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature."

"This shows how necessary it is that any new view should be explained at considerable length in order to arouse public attention."

"Though considerably added to and corrected in the later editions, it has remained substantially the same book....It is no doubt the chief work of my life."

"It has sometimes been said that the success of the 'Origin' proved "that the subject was in the air," or "that men's minds were prepared for it." I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species."

Darwin was most elaborating and saw deeply, but actually, there were ideas floating around, as Wallace (but also others, too) proves.  This undoubtedly affects ideas we think about today, too, but we can find our like-thinking contemporaries--or predecessors--by web-searching (if we want to).

"Another element in the success of the book was its moderate size; and this I owe to the appearance of Mr. Wallace's essay; had I published on the scale in which I began to write in 1856, the book would have been four or five times as large as the 'Origin,' and very few would have had the patience to read it.

I cared very little whether men attributed most originality to me or Wallace; and his essay no doubt aided in the reception of the theory."

Darwin, ever the generous man.  But his societal advantages guaranteed his preeminence, and he was more thorough.  Wallace's ideas were more group- than individual-oriented, and may have some merit although Darwinites take pleasure in scorning them.  And nobody can refer to most of Darwin's books as other than quite long!

"Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the 'Origin,' as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class. No notice of this point was taken, as far as I remember, in the early reviews of the 'Origin,' and I recollect expressing my surprise on this head in a letter to Asa Gray.

Darwin relied on embryological data and ideas from his predecessors, particularly von Baer  in Germany.

"Towards the end of the work I give my well-abused hypothesis of Pangenesis. An unverified hypothesis is of little or no value; but if anyone should hereafter be led to make observations by which some such hypothesis could be established, I shall have done good service, as an astonishing number of isolated facts can be thus connected together and rendered intelligible."

Darwin is right about his idea of Pangenesis (the idea that each part of the body emits particles that he called 'gemmules' that congregate in the gonads and contribute to the gametes) being of 'little or no value', and indeed it was very much like the Lamarckian view he sneered at.  But what is the role for free speculation in science?  Darwin's speculating was pretty clear, since there was no data supporting 'gemmules' or 'pangenesis'.  Yet, as long as they are clearly  marked as guessing, can intelligent guessing stimulate creative thought?  Is it better, or worse, than just saying "we have no idea how this works...."?

From Darwin's own thoughts. Part II.

This is part two, a continuation of my annotated selection of quotes from Charles Darwin's autobiography (my comments in blue):

"In July I opened my first note-book for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years."

Again, evidence of such patience!  And the result shows why one need not, perhaps should not, rush to publish.

(By Charles Lyell, the distinguished senior geologist and close Darwin friend): ""What a good thing it would be if every scientific man was to die when sixty years old, as afterwards he would be sure to oppose all new doctrines." But he hoped that now he might be allowed to live."

Keeping new and fresh while getting old?  Rarely!  Make your mark while you can....

"Our fixing ourselves here has answered admirably in one way, which we did not anticipate, namely, by being very convenient for frequent visits from our children."

Keeping priorities about what means most in life.

"I have therefore nothing to record during the rest of my life, except the publication of my several books."

On his very extensive many-years' work on barnacles:  
"Nevertheless,  I doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time."

The question and how he mused about it:
"It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me. But it was equally evident that neither the action of the surrounding conditions, nor the will of the organisms (especially in the case of plants) could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life— for instance, a woodpecker or a tree-frog to climb trees, or a seed for dispersal by hooks or plumes. I had always been much struck by such adaptations, and until these could be explained it seemed to me almost useless to endeavour to prove by indirect evidence that species have been modified.

I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions."

Darwin the observer, not the rusher to conclusions!

"I soon perceived that selection was the keystone of man's success in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some time a mystery to me."

Yes, agriculture has done it--changed species' traits--but how does it happen in Nature?

From Darwin's own thoughts. Part I.

I have just been re-reading Charles Darwin's autobiography.  He wrote it with his son's encouragement shortly before the great man passed away in 1882, and was first published in 1887.  I think he wrote it to tell his children and so on about his famous life.  Yet as famous as he had become, he is as modest as one would expect from that exemplar of the best of humanity.

I encourage anyone in the life sciences, who doesn't presume to think s/he already knows everything, to read it, for reasons I'll suggest below.  It has various versions, as his son Francis edited it a bit, redacting some personal family-related  comments (these were later restored, but are unimportant here). You can find it here.

I thought that some of the things he said would be worth posting on a site like this.  Darwin was right about many things, and even he was wrong about others (as, indeed, he himself freely says).  But it is his thinking, his perspective, standards, reasons, and outlook that are important.  So what follows are some quotes that I chose (easy to find by searching the ebook), with my reflections separated in italics and in blue.  (Because there are many pithy quotes, I've split this into four successive posts):

"To my deep mortification my father once said to me, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

Darwin was an idler as a privileged young gentleman, but, to our great benefit, circumstances grabbed his attention and serious side. And he explains it thus:

"Looking back as well as I can at my character during my school life, the only qualities which at this period promised well for the future, were, that I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.


I mention this because later in life I wholly lost, to my great regret, all pleasure from poetry of any kind, including Shakespeare."

Darwin more than once admitted, or even bemoaned, his narrow focus and neglect of some of the finer things in life.  Yes, he was successful, but this could be a lesson for us all: keep a balance!

"I almost made up my mind to begin collecting all the insects which I could find dead, for on consulting my sister I concluded that it was not right to kill insects for the sake of making a collection."

Even Darwin saw the evil in killing other living things just to gawk at them.  We do it routinely, even including mammals (mice, etc.), but to salve our conscience (for those who have one) we get IRB approval first, to keep their suffering under at least some constraint and prevent our suffering from lack of a project to do.

"This was the best part of my education at school, for it showed me practically the meaning of experimental science."

He observed rather than simply conjectured, and his patience and eye for detail and for identifying the critical variables were at the root of his success.

"...but to my mind there are no advantages and many disadvantages in lectures compared with reading."

Ooops, professors!  Some of us do need to hear a message live and have it explained.  Darwin, though, had the drive, and patience, to study a subject in great detail.  How many of us have that?

"At this time I admired greatly the 'Zoonomia;' but on reading it a second time after an interval of ten or fifteen years, I was much disappointed; the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given.

....in after years I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense."

He reasoned in his own way, and did't really suffer by his non-numerical abilities.  Maybe he was not misled by math's oversimplification and rigidity?  Maybe we rely far too much on the latter, as a safer and quicker course to 'results', than patient, deeper thinking?

"During my last year at Cambridge, I read with care and profound interest Humboldt's 'Personal Narrative'."

"...science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them."

If he was anything, it was a patient, careful sponge for detail.  And reading stimulated his original thinking.

"I heard that I had run a very narrow risk of being rejected, on account of the shape of my nose! He was an ardent disciple of Lavater, and was convinced that he could judge of a man's character by the outline of his features; and he doubted whether any one with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage."

Here he's talking about having almost been rejected for the voyage that became the basis of his life's work by Fitzroy, the captain of the Beagle.  Beware of hoaxes even in science!  We see unwarranted speculative conclusions being asserted almost every week in the news media, and even in journals (though there, couched in dense professorialized terms!).

"The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important, as reasoning here comes into play."

"Everything about which I thought or read was made to bear directly on what I had seen or was likely to see; and this habit of mind was continued during the five years of the voyage."

Again, his integrative detail-sponging patience and reasoning.  No rush to conclusions (or to print).  Indeed, he waited for 25 years before publishing his ideas on evolution, and only did so then when he was prompted by Alfred Russel Wallace's discovery of the same ideas.  

"The sight of a naked savage in his native land is an event which an never be forgotten."

(Here he's writing of being in Tierra del Fuego.  But he did not think of such people as inferior, as his experience later makes clear)

"Nor must I pass over the discovery of the singular relations of the animals and plants inhabiting the several islands of the Galapagos archipelago, and of all of them to the inhabitants of South America."

We know how important that set of observations was!  The islands are still under close observation.

"But I was also ambitious to take a fair place among scientific men,— whether more ambitious or less so than most of my fellow-workers, I can form no opinion."

"...I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame."

Ambition, yes--but egotism and show-boating, never: no rushing to the news media, no spin doctors!

"The rhythm of existing things"

Here are some idle thoughts triggered by a chance discovery.

Modern evolutionary science is credited, in almost all textbooks, as having grown from a general change of worldview.  The old, static view that went back to the Bible and to the worldviews of ancient Greece and Rome, was displaced by a process-based view of nature.  Rather than a series of ad hoc events dictated by God, or the idea that the world was static, we realized that things changed over time.

Charles Lyell

In the early 19th century, the geologist Charles Lyell, following on some recent British predecessors, advanced the 'uniformitarian' theory of geology, displacing ad hoc, catastrophist kinds of views of the geological processes like the building of island chains, lifting and erosion of mountains, change in coastlines, and so on.  Rather than sudden events, or events ordained by God, forces we can see today can be extrapolated back into the dark depths of history.  Individual events are unique, but the process is the same, and we can extrapolate it into the future, too.

Darwin was profoundly affected by Lyell and if any one thing characterizes Darwin's contribution to the world it was the application of uniformitarianism to life:  life was an historical process, not a series of sudden creation events.  This view of slow, continuity was absolutely fundamental to Darwin's thinking, as he stressed time and time again.

The idea--nowadays the assumption--that processes here today were perforce operating in the past, has been considered to be one of the founding legacies of the 19th century science largely due to Lyell and Darwin and many other less prominent figures.

But how accurate is that view?  In around 170 AD, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, was musing about the nature of life.

Pass in review the far-off things of the past and its succession of sovranties without number.  Thou canst look forward and see the future also.  For it will most surely be of the same character, and it cannot but carry on the rhythm of existing things.  Consequently it is all one, whether we witness human life for forty years or ten thousand.  For what more shalt thou see?

Marcus Aurelius

It cannot but carry on the rhythm of existing things.  It had to be.  The context of Aurelius' thought had to do with keeping human affairs during one's own lifetime in perspective.  We're not classicists and aren't able to mine the classical literature for other such musings, though it's not surprising that most basic thoughts were raised by those sage ancestors.  But the idea of history as a steady stream seemed obvious to Marcus Aurelius, as it seems obvious to science today.  Indeed, this may be the more remarkable because we often blame the stodgy Middle Ages on fundamentalistic Biblical Christianity.  But ideas of uniformitarianism were not new.  Given that Christian scholars knew very well the deep reaches of human history, it is rather surprising to us that uniformitarianism had so patchy a history and that the 19th century awakening to it seemed, as told by subsequent historians at least, so transforming.

Treatments we're aware of (the Wikipedia entry for 'uniformitarianism', e.g.) credit this concept to the 18th century when the term itself was coined.  They do not go back to the ancients, and indeed, it was only in reading Marcus Aurelius for his general philosophy of life that we stumbled inadvertently across his version.

Evolutionary ideas, crude and terse, were widespread if not dogma to the Islamic scholars of the middle ages, as we've mentioned in previous posts.  So the interesting question is the way new facts being discovered, such as collections of specimens from global travelers, somehow led to the revival of these ancient ideas at a time when we -- that is, Darwin -- had the methodological framework to make the ideas more rigorous.  For every thing there is a season, or a cycle of seasons.

Yes, when it comes to human ideas, there's nothing new under the sun.....and indeed that quote is itself from Ecclesiastes:

What has been will be again,
   what has been done will be done again;
   there is nothing new under the sun. 

Which antedates Marcus Aurelius by quite some time.

Of course, we can't let ourselves get carried away by uniformitarianism. The important point is the belief in general that Nature is orderly: it has properties or 'laws' by which it works, and the idea is that these are universal and unchanging. Gravity doesn't take days off, and wind and water always erode rock.

On the other hand, what makes life the way it is, is specifically the unique events of mutation and adaptation.  It is only by becoming different that life evolves.  Humans are the result of continuing, fundamental processes, but we are the result of unique events involving those processes.  Worms and oaks are not heading towards a human state.

Indeed, what is unique under the sun, is life itself!  Uniformitarianism says that the geological processes have continuity.  Mountains don't arise spontaneously out of a momentary blip in physical processes.  But life did arise that way, as far as we know.

So we need to recognize the importance of continuity, but also of difference.

The Darwins at Malvern: the Water-Cures

We are on holiday in Worcestershire in the UK this week.  (By luck we are staying at one of the nicest B&B's we've ever found, the Old Country House in Mathon.  It's lovely, in a stunningly beautiful part of the country, with a lovely proprietress.  If you've ever got an inkling to make a pilgrimage to Malvern, where Darwin came to take the waters, and where he brought his 10 year old daughter, Annie, when she was very ill, this is the place to stay.)

E.g., a well-dressed well in Wyche.

We wandered through Malvern in an English spring rain, the town that drew so many people "to take the waters" (from the hills, not the rain!) in the 1800s.  The water here has been used for cures, and bottled for drinking for a very long time.  A lesser known tradition practiced around here is "well-dressing", an ancient tradition started in the 12th century.

...in the 12th and 13th centuries the Holy Well was dressed annually with offerings, probably on August 5th, in thanks to St Oswald for water cures there. In 1615 there was a national drought, but as Malvern`s springs kept flowing they "were (well) dressed as a token of gratitude for a plentiful supply of water" (Malvern Advertiser 1870). 

We passed a long row of hotels built in the 1800s to accommodate all the people who came to town for the waters.  Including Charles Darwin, who spent several months here taking water treatments at Dr Gully's Water Cure Establishment.   This involved wrapping the poor patient in cold water-soaked sheets, much dumping of ice-cold water over the head, brisk walks in the countryside, and lots of  consumption of the famous Malvern water.  The woman at the little museum in Great Malvern told us that of course people's health improved, they were away from the polluted cities, eating well and doing exercise, perhaps for the only time in their lives. (In any case, as any honest doctor will tell you, most patients will get better on their own, treatment or no treatment.)  Darwin himself was pleased with his therapy, and continued it for a while when he returned home.

When his dearest daughter, Annie, fell ill in 1851, Darwin brought her to Malvern, where Dr Gully was sure he could cure her. After a week she seemed to be improving, and Darwin left her to return home, confident he'd soon return to Malvern to find her quite recovered, but instead he was summoned back within a fortnight because she was getting worse.  He went alone, as his wife, Emma, was heavily pregnant and unable to travel.

Annie Darwin's gravestone

Annie died several days later, and Charles and Emma Darwin were heartbroken, never fully recovering from her loss.  Darwin went home to Emma the day after Annie's death, leaving his brother and sister-in-law to fill in for them at Annie's funeral.  She is buried in the graveyard of the little church in Malvern, where, we were told, her grave is almost always surrounded with flowers.  However, and we think appropriately, there is no fanfare, no special markings, no souvenir hawkers besides this very modest memorial.  Annie really does rest in peace.

Montreal House, Malvern

It is somewhat ironic, however, that she does this in a churchyard.  This doubtlessly gave comfort to Emma, who was a serious believing Christian, but for Charles any remaining doubts about the Christian version of God died with Annie.  Her painful and pointless death served no purpose, and she had done nothing to be taken at so young an age.  Darwin wanted to believe in things which, if they had no Purpose, at least made sense.  Evolution did.


Charles stayed at Montreal House, one of the hotels in that long row of such establishments on Worcester Road in Malvern, now bearing a plaque commemorating that fact.

But, in fact it was more than Darwin that drew us to this part of England.  It was the Victorian age poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who spent her childhood at a place called Hope End, not far from Malvern and close to the Old Country Farm where we are staying.  She grew up here, and though she like Annie was plagued with an illness, it had nothing to do with Annie's disease, nor with the spas or water-cures.

However, it's late, we're tired, and that story is for another day.