Category: history of science

The colorful and erudite J.B.S. Haldane: my take and a new biography

August 15, 2020 • 10:30 am

UPDATE: Greg Mayer noted that Jonathan Weiner reviewed the new Haldane bio in the New York Times, also favorably. The link is below, and here’s one quote from Weiner’s review:

“A Dominant Character” is the best Haldane biography yet. With science so politicized in this country and abroad, the book could be an allegory for every scientist who wants to take a stand. “In the past few years,” Subramanian writes, “as we’ve witnessed deliberate assaults on fact and truth and as we’ve realized the failures of the calm weight of scientific evidence to influence government policy, the need for scientists to find their voice has grown even more urgent.” Haldane’s political principles were “unbending and forthright,” as Subramanian says, and his science illuminated all of life. In both these ways, for all his failings, he was “deeply attractive during a time of shifting, murky moralities.”

___________________

J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) was probably the most colorful character in the history of modern evolutionary biology. Son of a famous physiologist, he was precocious and brilliant, earning a First in both Greats (classics) and mathematics at Oxford. He went on to become one of the three people (along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright) to provide the mathematical underpinnings of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, in particular working out how genes would behave under natural selection.

But he made other substantial contributions, suggesting possible theories for the origin of life, becoming the first person to suggest that the gene for sickle-cell anemia was (in one copy) adaptive in areas where malaria was prevalent (he was right), and was also the first to estimate the mutation rate for a human gene.

He was also the first to notice a phenomenon I worked on much of my career: “Haldane’s rule.”  That generalization, which others named after him, was the observation that in crosses between different species, if only one sex of offspring was sterile or inviable (with the other being fertile or viable), it was almost invariably the heterogametic sex: the one that had unlike sex chromosomes. So in flies and mammals, for instance, where males are XY and females XX, if there’s an asymmetry in hybrid sterility or inviability, over 95% of the time it is the males who suffer. In contrast, in birds and butterflies, in which females have unlike sex chromosome and males like ones, it’s the females who suffer among hybrids. Haldane’s explanation for this phenomenon was wrong, but I took up the issue again since it laid fallow since 1922, when Haldane published a short paper on it. It was mainly my students and collaborators, however, who worked out the complete explanation, which has an important bearing on speciation.

Haldane was famous for being a colorful character. Eager to serve in the trenches in World War I, he rode a bicycle along the line, trying to provoke enemy fire. (He apparently knew no fear his whole life.) He was a ferocious drinker, and his student, John Maynard Smith, used to tell me stories about Haldane’s bibulous episodes. One was that, after a night in the pub, the engine of Haldane’s car caught on fire. He immediately urged everyone to douse the fire by urinating on it.

Haldane is also known for his (possibly apocryphal) reply to someone who asked him what one could infer about the creator from the nature of the creation. Haldane’s supposed reply, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” (Beetles are the most numerous of insect orders—Coleoptera—with over 350,000 species.)  My Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin told me that he once invited Haldane to Rochester (where Dick held his second academic job), and Haldane insisted on going shopping for underwear for his wife, Helen Spurway. Wearing his characteristic Indian clothes (Haldane had by then moved to India in protest of British policy in the Suez), Haldane embarrassed everyone by asking for black lace panties and bras in his loud, booming voice.

Haldane was also an immensely talented science writer and popularizer, erudite—remember, he had a First in Greats—with a light touch. With his terse prose, he could be considered the Hemingway of popular science. To get a flavor of his writing, read one of his famous essays, “On Being the Right Size,” which you can find free at the link.

By the way, when I graduated from Harvard, Dick gave me, as a graduation present, an aerogramme he’d received from Haldane in response to an invitation to lecture. You can read it for yourself, and see the diversity of J. B. S.’s interests:

Dick also told me that it was when Haldane was visiting Rochester that he noticed blood while defecating, the first sign of the colon cancer that eventually killed him. But even his impending death didn’t bother Haldane that much, and he wrote a really funny poem about his cancer and colostomy called “Cancer’s a funny thing.” You can read it here, but below are a few lines:

I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.

Yet, thanks to modern surgeon’s skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.

I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or to disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour. . .

. . .So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.

*In India there are several more
With extra faces, up to four,
But both in Brahma and in Shiva
I own myself an unbeliever.

I’ll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I’ve a very neat colostomy. . .

Note that Haldane consulted a doctor on his return from Tallahassee, which, as he noted in the aerogramme above, he was visiting after he came to Rochester.

Finally, Haldane was an intensely political animal. He was a Communist, joined the British Communist Party (often giving speeches against the government), and even supported the charlatan Trofim Lysenko and his Lamarckian theories of crop breeding, simply because Lysenko was touted by Stalin. This was a serious misstep for a scientist—especially an evolutionary biologist—but Haldane, disenchanted, eventually left the party. He moved to India in 1956 to join the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, and died in Bhubeneswar, where the aerogramme above was written. After his move, Haldane always dressed in Indian clothes, even when traveling to the West (he said “sixty years in socks is enough!”). Here’s a picture of him (left) with the famous statistician P. C. Mahalanobis:

Wikipedia gives several encomiums tendered by those who knew him or knew of his work:

Arthur C. Clarke credited him as “perhaps the most brilliant science populariser of his generation”.  Nobel laureate Peter Medawar called Haldane “the cleverest man I ever knew”. According to Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Haldane was always recognized as a singular case”; and to Michael J. D. White, “the most erudite biologist of his generation, and perhaps of the century.”

I’ve written too much already, as all I intended to do was highlight a new biography of Haldane that was favorably reviewed (by conservative Matt Ridley!), in the London Times. Reader Pyers sent me a transcript, adding, “You might be interested in a new book which is a biography of JBS Haldane. The headline in the review in the London Times sums him up perfectly: ‘The stupidity of a brilliant mind’.”

I’ll send a copy of the review if you’d like to see it.

There was an earlier biography of J. B. S. (that’s what his colleagues and students called him) by Ronald Clark, which is okay but very light on Haldane’s science. Click on the screenshot to go to its Amazon page:

And here’s the new biography (click to go to Amazon page), which came out July 28. The title is a double entendre, as in genetics “a dominant character” is a trait produced by a gene that gives full expression of the trait when the carrier has only one copy of the gene (polydactyly and attached earlobes are two such traits in humans).

Here is the evaluative part of Ridley’s review:

Subramanian does a masterly job of summarising a rich and rough life. He uses sharp analogies and arresting images. Haldane’s handwriting was like “ants somersaulting through snow”. His columns for the Daily Worker were like “razor blades in print”. He writes that in his thirties “the various streams of his experience pooled within the basin of his character”. Haldane would have approved. Look for a familiar analogy, he wrote in “How to write a popular scientific article”. But, both illustrating and contradicting the point, he also wrote “an ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument”.

. . . Subramanian summarises Haldane’s contribution as “an incandescent persona: the man who lifted the arras that hid the work of nature; the man who stepped down, into the everyday world, from his tower of ivory; the man who shrugged away convention and defied authority”. Haldane deserves a biographer who is eloquent, intelligent, fair, but unsparing and as good at explaining science as politics. Not an easy combination, but he has got one.

I’ll be reading the book, for it’s hard to get enough Haldane. I wish I’d met the man, but he died before I graduated from high school and began studying biology.

The number of species on islands

July 27, 2020 • 1:00 pm

by Greg Mayer

[The following is a trivial, and speculative, discussion about a small part of an important paper in the history of ecology and evolutionary biology.]

There are fewer species of any given group of plants or animals on an island than on an equivalent area of the mainland; and the larger the island, the more species there will be. These two general rules of natural history have been known since at least the 19th century, and are known under the rubrics that island biota are depauperate, and the species-area relationship, respectively. There have been many, not always mutually exclusive, explanations for these phenomena, and in the early 1960s they were on the minds of at least several biologists.

The most important resulting paper was Robert MacArthur and Ed Wilson‘s classic “An equilibrium theory of insular zoogeography.” This paper, together with the expansion of the ideas contained within it into a book-length monograph, The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967), were extremely influential in setting out the questions to be asked, and how to go about answering them, across many areas of ecology and evolutionary biology, not just the phenomena of island life.

MacArthur and Wilson (1963).

In the paper, MacArthur and Wilson proposed (among other things) that the number of species on an island resulted from a dynamic equilibrium between ongoing immigration and extinction of species living on the island, and that the relation of these demographic processes to various physical properties of islands led to the species-area relationship. They illustrated this relationship in two figures showing the relationship between the area of an island or island group and the number of species of land and freshwater birds occurring on that island or island group. One figure was for islands in and near the Sunda group, the other for the Moluccas, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Both figures are interesting, but the second one concerns us today.

Figure 2 of MacArthur and Wilson (1963).

For reasons relating to some research projects I’m pursuing during the pandemic, I was led to look closely at this figure, including the sources of the data as indicated in the legend of the figure: three papers by Ernst Mayr, and a book by James C. Greenway. I have a copy of Greenway’s book (both editions, actually), and Mayr’s 1943 paper is readily available online to anyone from SORA (a wonderful free repository containing vast swaths of the ornithological literature).

Neither of the two earlier papers are readily available, but the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Library scanned a copy of the earliest, and sent me a pdf (kudos to the staff of the Library there for working very hard during the pandemic to keep the scholarly literature available); and I happened to have a reprint of the other, a paper from the modestly obscure Proceedings of the Sixth Pacific Science Congress. Mayr published two papers in the proceedings, and I have reprints of both; the second is the one cited by MacArthur and Wilson.

Mayr (1940a).

 

Mayr (1940b).

The provenance of my copies is of interest. By looking at the stamps and annotations, you can see that the copies were originally in the library of the Bird Department of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which stamped them, and added the author and date notation at upper left. (Departments of major museums usually maintain libraries physically separate from the main library of the institution.) Reprints were the principal way in which scientific literature circulated in the 1940s, and it is most likely that the Bird Department obtained the copies shortly after publication, not when Mayr moved to the MCZ in 1953. As duplicates (and Mayr’s arrival may be why the Department had extra copies), they then passed into the possession of my friend and colleague Bob O’Hara; we were graduate students together in the 1980s, and he worked closely with Mayr. At some point, also in the 1980s, Bob gave them to me, and I penciled my name and a correction to the date of publication on them. (See Note on the date of publication below.)

So now we come to the matter at hand. I was trying to track down the actual numbers that went into MacArthur and Wilson’s Figure 2, and some of the data came from Mayr (1940b), the second of the proceedings papers. It’s a 20 page paper, with no table of species numbers by islands, so I was reading it carefully to find what numerical data I could. It’s all on page 202– species numbers for 11 islands or island groups that were included in Figure 2. And a little later, while copying the numbers on to a data sheet, I noticed a pencil mark next to the paragraph with the data. (It is the only mark in the paper, aside from those on the first page.)

A pencil mark highlighting species number data in Mayr (1940b).

The mark was not mine; and it would not be Bob O’Hara’s, who would not have been interested in the particular questions addressed by these data. So who would have been using the MCZ Bird Department Library’s copy prior to the 1980s to highlight data included in MacArthur and Wilson (1963)? It occurred to me, could it have been Ed Wilson himself?

Wilson was at the MCZ with Mayr, and would have had access to this copy. In their paper, he and MacArthur thank Mayr (and a few others) for “material aid and advice during the course of the study.” There is thus no question that they consulted Mayr, and used data from a number of Mayr’s papers and books (in Figure 1, as well as Figure 2). If they looked up the data themselves (as opposed to Mayr directly telling them the species numbers), then this particular copy, now in my possession, is a likely copy for them to have used, and Wilson is the likely person to have made the mark highlighting the data that was used. This then, is my speculative (and trivial) suggestion: that Wilson used this copy in the preparation of his and Robert Mac Arthur’s classic and influential paper.

MacArthur and Wilson’s (1963) Figure 2 plots data for 26 islands or island groups. In the cited references, I can find data for only 21 of them; I do not know where they got the data for Tonga, Kei, Tanimbar, Buru, and Ceram. Jurgen Haffer (2007:163), Mayr’s biographer (and himself an accomplished contributor to ornithological science) records the following interesting tidbit:

Mayr (pers. comm.) had copious data on island sizes, distances from mainlands or other islands, number of species, etc. When he tried to determine relations among all these figures he got into mathematical problems and turned this material over to a graduate student with mathematical abilities. However this student got sidetracked into other problems and this material was never exploited.

This account was recalled to Haffer by Mayr decades later, and what data was compiled, when it was compiled, and who the student was, isn’t known.

Haffer (2007: 170) also states that in the 1933 and 1940b papers Mayr “clearly discussed what became later known as the equilibrium theory of insular biogeography”, a claim that has been echoed by other authors. This is not quite correct. Mayr discussed a number of relevant factors contributing to the characteristics of island faunas in 1940b, and the paper is well worth reading and studying today. But he did not formulate in any clear way, even verbally, MacArthur and Wilson’s later theory.  (My very limited German does not allow me to properly assess the 1933 paper, but Mayr’s two 1940 papers in English seem to parallel closely the earlier paper in German.)

For example, Mayr (1940b:215) does note that on a smaller island, like in the island of Belize, a species will have a smaller “effective breeding population” and thus be vulnerable to extinction; this is a striking formulation, obviously influenced by theoretical population genetics (likely gotten from Theodosius Dobzhansky). But in discussing extinction on New Caledonia he is clearly discussing evolutionary events stretching over much of the Tertiary (i.e. tens of millions of years), and not the turnover in ecological time of insular populations contemplated by MacArthur and Wilson’s equilibrium theory. The latter has been demonstrated to occur over annual and decadal scales on, for example, smaller islands in the British Isles.

While not excluding the possibility of a MacArthur and Wilson style ecological equilibrium (because he does not consider the situation), Mayr is clearly discussing the origin and persistence (or not) of endemic forms (species, genera, even families) over evolutionary time. Mayr himself (quoted in Haffer, 2007: 163) offers a much more nearly accurate appreciation of his views, stating that his own ideas embraced the “basic thesis” of MacArthur and Wilson; he did not “clearly discuss” the equilibrium theory.

Note on the date of publication. The Sixth Pacific Science Congress was held in 1939, but the Proceedings were published later, from 1940-1943.  Greenway (1958), who knew Mayr well, cited them as 1941, and this may have been the source of my handwritten correction, but I cannot now recall. Haffer’s (2007) definitive list, based on Mayr’s own lists, cites them as 1940.

Greenway, J.C. 1958. Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. American Committee for International Wild Life Protection, New York.

Haffer, J. 2007. Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy: The Life and Science of Ernst Mayr 1904–2005. Springer, Berlin.

MacArthur, R.H. and E.O. Wilson. 1963. An equilibrium theory of insular zoogeography. Evolution 17:373-387.  pdf

MacArthur, R.H. and E.O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.

Mayr, E. 1933. Die Vogelwelt Polynesiens. Mitteilungen aus dem Zoologischen Museum in Berlin 19:306-323.

Mayr, E. 1940a. Borders and subdivisions of the Polynesian Region as based on our knowledge of the distribution of birds. Proceedings of the Sixth Pacific Science Congress 4:191-195.

Mayr, E. 1940b. The origin and history of the bird fauna of Polynesia. Proceedings of the Sixth Pacific Science Congress 4:197-216. (This paper was reprinted in Mayr (1976) but Mayr sometimes updated papers in that collection, and for my purposes I needed to see the original.)

Mayr, E. 1976. Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Mayr, E. 1943. The zoogeographic position of the Hawaiian Islands. Condor 45:45-48. pdf

A new Ken Burns series on genes and genetics

April 8, 2020 • 9:30 am

Both Matthew and reader Leon alerted me this morning to a new two-part series (four hours total) by Ken Burns, based on Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book The Gene: An Intimate History. You can watch the first episode (aired on PBS last night) by clicking on the screenshot below. I just learned about it, and haven’t yet watched it, but Matthew—who’s featured in it seven times—has, and has provided a brief précis below the screenshot. I’d recommend watching this at any time, but certainly now that most of us are housebound, searching for videos and other stay-at-home activities, it’s a good substitute for more mindless stuff.

The first episode is called “Dawn of the Modern Age of Genetics”, and has this summary:

Part One interweaves the present-day story of the Rosens, a young family on an odyssey to find a cure for their four-year-old daughter’s rare genetic disease, with stories of the exciting discoveries of the early pioneers in genetics. This episode also tracks the dark period in human history when a little genetic knowledge was used to justify terrifying human experiments.

And here’s Matthew’s take:

The first episode of this Ken Burns documentary The Gene: An Intimate History just aired on PBS in the US. It’s in two parts, each nearly two hours long. It’s based on Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book of the same name, and like the book, it mixes history and basic science with personal stories relating to human genetics, in this case looking at rare genetic diseases, and in particular Huntington’s Disease, a lethal and very unpleasant neuro-degenerative disease that hits people in their late 30s. The talking heads threading the various bits together include Mukherjee himself, Eric Lander and three friends of Jerry with whos readers of this site will probably be familiar: myself, Andrew Berry of Harvard and Steve Jones from UCL.

One of the most powerful sections—and certainly, if the Twitter response to the programme is anything to go by, the most surprising, for many viewers—is the part commented on by Andrew, which shows the links between the powerful US eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. My comments relate to various key historical moments in the story—this was recorded roughly 18 months ago. While I would take issue with the way some bits of the history are framed (to take just two examples, the significance of Photo 51 in the discovery of the double helix structure is, yet again, really over-played, thereby missing the key moment; and while there is a severe anachronism in the persistent use of the term ‘information’ prior to 1953, including the suggestion that Schrödinger used the term in his 1944 book What Is Life? [he didn’t mention it]), in general this is a very solid summary for the general viewer.

There is some really nice archival/reconstruction footage (especially of all those hairy scientists at the Asilomar Conference on recombinant DNA in 1974), and there is a very powerful thread which follows a British woman whose family has Huntington’s Disease, and who decides, in her late 20s, to take the test to see if she has the disease. Her motivation is both to find out the truth and, in the case of bad news, to be able to participate in the development of treatments.

Highly recommended! But be quick, it won’t stay up long. Non-US readers will need to use a VPN to convince the PBS servers that they are in the USA. . .

What I did for Darwin’s Birthday

February 14, 2020 • 9:30 am

by Greg Mayer

As Jerry noted at the time, this past Wednesday was Darwin’s Birthday. My evolutionary biology class met the previous day, Tuesday, and the first slide I showed for the day was the following.

The “click here” in the middle of the slide led to a performance of the Beatles’ song “Birthday”. (For copyright reasons, the video features the Beatles, but the sound is Paul alone in a post-Beatles performance.)

On Darwin Day itself, I watched Creation, a 2009 biopic about Darwin starring Paul Bettany as Charles and Jennifer Connelly as Emma. I did not see it at the time of its release, and it had some difficulty finding a U.S. distributor, ostensibly because Darwin and evolution were too controversial for the American public.

Jerry gathered a few reviews at the time, which were not terribly enthusiastic. I took a look at those reviews, one in the N.Y. Times by A.O. Scott, my favorite film critic, and one by Ryan Jay, another favorite critic. Both were also lukewarm on the film, Jay giving it his middling score of “Rent It”, with Scott being a bit more harsh:

It aims for a liberal-minded balance, at least on the thematic level. But at the same time the film traffics in the pseudo-psychological mumbo-jumbo that is the standard folk religion of the film biography, and undermines its interest in reason by dabbling in emotive pop occultism. Recoiling from the possibility that ideas themselves might impart tension and interest to this tale, Mr. Amiel [the director] and Mr. Collee [the writer] induce a kind of literary brain fever and reduce Darwin’s work to a symptom of his mental and emotional anguish.

I did not look at the reviews before watching the film, so the following comments are not “pre-influenced”. A

ll in all, I was disappointed. The production values are high, and some filming was even done at Down House. The level of production design accuracy was fairly high (e.g., the washroom with curtain in Darwin’s study). Parts of the dialogue I recognized as being taken from Emma’s and, especially, Charles’ letters. Bettany, as made up, does a fair Darwin impersonation, and I was charmed by Benedict Cumberbatch’s unexpected turn as Hooker. (Cumberbatch was largely unknown, at least to American audiences, at the time, and is buried in the credits.) But Connelly is given almost nothing worthwhile to do, wasting her talents; and Huxley (played by Toby Jones) is written as crankily aggressive, rather than as the erudite explicator he seems from his public writings.

And the plot seems quite muddled. The film centers on Darwin’s relationships with Emma and, even more so, on their daughter Annie, who died in 1851. But most of the action takes place several years later, with frequent flashbacks (some to the Beagle voyage), yet Annie is everywhere (except the Beagle). This may be a case of knowing a little being dangerous, as I kept trying to fit the various scenes into a coherent timeline, and only later realized that Annie is a ghost, or better, a symptom of Darwin’s hallucinations, in many, though not all, of the scenes. I don’t know if a naive viewer would be more or less confused than me by this.

Were I someone not versed in the history of evolutionary biology, I would thus give it a mixed review. But knowing some of the actual history, I found some of the themes of the film suffered from being, at best, misplaced in their emphases. The film shows Darwin as losing (most of) his Christian faith as the result of wrenching inner turmoil, leading to open conflict with Emma, with the death of Annie pushing him towards the edge of madness and final loss of faith. Darwin’s well-known ill health is portrayed as essentially psychosomatic, the result of guilt over Annie’s death and his loss of faith. And, his nagging internal torments delayed his work for many years. While there is a grain of truth in each of these elements, the resulting picture is distorted. Darwin did mourn the death of Annie; he did love Emma dearly, and fretted over their differences with regard to faith (see especially this); he knew that consanguineous marriages could lead to “weakness” in children; and he was ill. But he wasn’t nearly mad; his faith more nearly slipped away; he probably didn’t delay terribly long; and the child whose illness was vexing him at the time was not Annie (long dead), but little Charles (who died shortly after Darwin received Wallace’s letter from Ternate).

I searched for, and found two contemporaneous reviews from a more scientific/historical (as opposed to film criticism) perspective. The first was a review by Janet Browne, Darwin’s most authoritative biographer, and professor of the history of science at Harvard. As do the film critics, she takes a lukewarm view

The movie Creation gives . . . a fictionalized perspective. . .  Once one gets over the mismatch between the known historical record and the sentimental version of Victorian family life that is presented here, the film has some rather good sections. . . . [Darwin’s] love for his nine-year-old daughter Anne excessively dominates the plot. There are some delightful scenes, mostly in flashback again, followed by some stupid ones in which Darwin becomes so deranged by her death that he has nightmares (overly tinged with Henry Fuseli) and continuously hallucinates her presence. About ninety minutes into the film, the storyline goes haywire with Darwin vomiting, weeping, and hallucinating. The death of this daughter is presented as the emotional fulcrum of the film, bringing the religious differences of her parents to the fore and serving as a foil for drawing out Darwin’s doubts about publishing. Perhaps.

The other review was by James Williams, senior lecturer in science education at Sussex. His review is scathing. He notes the confusing chronology, details a number of errors and lapses, and laments that the actual events would have made for a better film. Some excerpts.

It promised so much, yet delivered a turkey! . . .

Granted, the film did give some excellent and accurate portrayals of events, but why deliver them out of sequence and why leave out some important details, yet include others? . . .

The film is set in 1858-59, seven years after Annie’s tragic death. Yet the filmgoer is left firmly with the impression that she is alive in 1858 and dies sometime in 1858/9. . . .

At least Alfred Russel Wallace (my personal hero) did get a mention – but only just. It was the receipt of Wallace’s letter by Darwin that prompted Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker to urge Darwin to write Origin, not a visit by Huxley.

Darwin was distraught by the letter he received from Wallace (accurate in the film), but what put pressure on him was not Annie’s health (she was already dead at this point remember) but the health of his newborn son Charles – who did actually die during the period of his receipt of Wallace’s letter – and the fact that children in the village were sick and dying. Just how Emma could be pregnant with Charles junior, at the same time as worrying about Annie’s health, defies biological understanding.

The film makers were determined to make Annie the focus of Darwin’s angst during the writing of ‘Origin’ and deemed this to be the dramatic ‘device’. When you look at the REAL story of how Darwin was almost forestalled and what was happening in his life during June/July of 1858 and through to the publication of ‘Origin’ in 1859 – there was drama enough without having to destroy historical accuracy.

The film is based (loosely, as Williams insists) on Annie’s Box, by Darwin’s great-great grandson, Randal Keynes. I recalled a paper by John van Wyhe debunking the hypothesis that Annie’s death ended Darwin’s faith.  (We have had a number of occasions here at WEIT to comment favorably on van Wyhe’s work, including his editing of Darwin Online, and Jerry was able to meet him on a visit to Singapore, while I did the same when I invited him to speak as part of our Darwin bicentennial celebrations.) The paper was from 2012; Van Wyhe and his coauthor, Mark Pallen, wrote

That Annie’s death caused great distress to her parents and family is beyond dispute. A week after her death Darwin penned a tender memoir of Annie, which was first published (in part) by his son, Francis, in The life and letters of Charles Darwin (1887) . . .  Darwin closed the memoir with a cry from the heart: ‘We have lost the joy of the Household, and the solace of our old age:—she must have known how we loved her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly wedo still and shall ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.’ However, it must be stressed that nowhere in the millions of written words by Darwin that survive did he ever indicate, directly or indirectly, that Annie’s death had anything to do with his loss of faith. Of course it would be naïve to restrict the evidence only to explicit statements. But first we must acknowledge that there are none. Furthermore, as we shall see, the balance of all surviving evidence that bears on his loss of faith suggests there was no connection with Annie at all. . . .

The suggestion of a sudden death knell for Darwin’s religious belief built on strong emotion stands in stark contrast to his consistent accounts of his loss of faith, which followed from an assessment of the evidence for Christianity and which took place at a‘rate:::so slow that I felt no distress’ (Barlow, 1958, p. 87). Yet Annie’s death was the most distressing event in Darwin’s life. No explanation for this dramatic contradiction has ever been provided. The time has come to bury the Annie hypothesis.

So, in 2009, it was perhaps defensible, or at least popular, to suppose the truth of the so-called “Annie hypothesis”, but van Wyhe and Pallen seem to have laid it to rest.

Another element of the film, though not quite as prominent, is Darwin’s “delay”. Van Wyhe has also addressed this in his paper “Mind the Gap”

In this essay it is argued that not only is there no evidence that Darwin avoided publishing his theory for many years, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against that interpretation. By re-examining the historical evidence, without presuming that Darwin avoided publication, it can be shown that there is no reason to introduce such a hypothesis in the first place. If we come to the evidence already believing that Darwin put it off, then vague and ambiguous passages will seem consistent with such a view. . . .

A fresh analysis of Darwin’s manuscripts, letters, publications and the writings of those who knew him intimately shows the story to be quite different from one of a lifetime of avoiding publication. It will be demonstrated that Darwin’s delay is a historiographical theme of quite recent date and unknown not only to Darwin and his contemporaries but also to generations of writers after them. Furthermore, this theme is not the product of the greater knowledge of Darwin produced by modern historical scholarship since the 1960s. Modern writers inherited Darwin’s delay from earlier writers who did not have access to the full manuscript corpus.

In fact, Darwin hardly veered from his original plans for working out and publishing his species theory in due course.

If you are a Darwin completist, you’ll want to see the film, but otherwise you can skip it. Its emphases seems wrong, perhaps to the point of no return; but I did enjoy some parts, and the segment conjoining Annie’s death, and the death of a young orangutan at the London Zoo, moved me near to tears. As Janet Browne concluded, “In my view the juvenile orangutan was outstanding.”

Browne, J. 1995. Charles Darwin: a Biography. Volume 1. Voyaging. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

Browne, J. 2002. Charles Darwin: a Biography. Volume 2. The Power of Place. Knopf, New York.

Browne, J. 2010. [Review of ] Darwin’s Darkest Hour [and] Creation. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84:671-674. gated

Wyhe, J. van. 2007. Mind the gap: did Darwin avoid publishing his theory for many years? Notes and Records of the Royal Society 61:177-205. Darwin Online

Wyhe, J. van, and M.J. Pallen. 2012. The ‘Annie hypothesis’: Did the death of his daughter cause Darwin to ‘give up Christianity’? Centaurus 54:105-123. pdf

A look at Darwiniana at Britain’s Royal Society

February 10, 2020 • 2:30 pm

Reader Bryan called my attention to this video from 2016 in which Brady and Keith, who “uncover science treasures”, visit the Council Room of Britain’s Royal Society. Among the treasures they examine are the famous portrait of Darwin that you’ve surely seen, and a nice scale model of H.M.S. Beagle.  As I noted in my Darwin lecture in Antarctica, the Beagle was very small: 27.5 m (90 feet) long and just 7.5 m (24 feet) across. That is tiny!

They then examine what appears to be a first edition of the four-volume account of the Beagle’s voyage (actually the voyages of two ships: the set is called The Narrative of the Voyages of H.M. Ships Adventure and Beagle), which includes the famous volume by Darwin known as The Voyage of the Beagle. This set was given to the Royal Society by Darwin and his captain, Robert FitzRoy.

Pity they didn’t look at a first edition of On the Origin of Species, for the Royal Society surely has that book as well.

Theological policeman? Some history of the Darwins

May 27, 2019 • 11:00 am

Here’s some interesting material on the history of evolutionary biology, posted with permission of Dr. Browne.

Last night I had dinner with several people associated with Harvard, among them Janet Browne, a renowed historian of science and a professor at the University. Janet is the author, among other things, of the definitive biography of Charles Darwin, a two-volume set that is both historically rigorous and dazzlingly readable (the Amazon sites for the books are here and here).

As I departed, I had one question that I wanted to ask her, which went something like this: “Tell me, Janet, in all your researches on Charles Darwin, delving deeply into every aspect of his life and times, what do you think was the most surprising or novel revelation you uncovered.”

She said, “Do you mind if it’s not Charles but Emma?” (Emma Wedgwood was Darwin’s wife.)

“Yes, of course,” I replied.

Janet said that Emma is classically characterized as deeply religious, with her faith being often cited as a major constraint on Darwin’s scientific career. For example, there has been speculation that Darwin delayed publishing his thoughts on evolution for fear of upsetting Emma with his “heresy.”  This theory speculates that he would have published his theory more than a decade before The Origin finally appeared in 1859 had he not been sensitive to his wife’s concerns.

In fact, Darwin’s theory was more or less complete by 1844, when he put together an essay outlining his ideas.  The delay would have been even longer had not he received, in 1858, a letter from A. R. Wallace laying out the same ideas—Darwin now had to publish to establish his precedence.

Janet said that while Darwin’s sensitivity to Emma’s beliefs may have played a role in delaying publication, this is a gross mischaracterization of Emma and religion. Emma was indeed devout and churchgoing, but of course this was in Victorian Britain, where it was the universal practice to attend church. But in reality, said Janet, Emma’s faith was less doctrinaire than supposed, and waned as she got older. (Darwin died 1882, while Emma lived on until 1896.)

Andrew teaches the history of science with Janet, and relates that, in class, Janet says that, contrary to widely held views of Emma as a dogmatic “theological policeman,” jealously guarding her husband’s eternal soul from scientific heresy, she was in fact much more liberal and enlightened. A measure of Emma’s sophistication can be seen from the fact that, before marrying Charles, she toured Europe and even took piano lessons from Chopin. To characterize her as a bible-thumping simpleton is to do her a serious injustice.  Darwin wrote that, “She has been my greatest blessing, and I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word which I had rather been unsaid.”

Emma Darwin

h/t: Andrew Berry

 

An Underground map of science

March 18, 2019 • 12:45 pm

I may have put this up before, but can’t be arsed to look it up. This map, first published in 2010, is worth seeing again, and of course we have a new generation of readers. Crispian Jago’s “Modern Science Map” first appeared on his website The Reason Stick, and can be seen in larger and clickable form here (clicking on each scientist takes you to his/her Wikipedia entry).   It’s been updated and is arranged  by field, and with the stops in temporal order. Crispian’s explanation:

500 Years of Science, Reason & Critical Thinking via the medium of gross over simplification, dodgy demarcation, glaring omission and a very tiny font.

The map of modern science was created to celebrate the achievements of the scientific method through the age of reason, the enlightenment and modernity.
Despite many of the scientific disciplines mapped having more ancient origins, I have restricted the map to modern science starting from the 16th century scientific revolution.

The map primarily includes modern scientists who have made significant advances to our understanding of the world, however I have also included many present day scientists who fuel a passion for, and advances in, science through communication and science popularisation.

Click on the screenshot below to go to the enlarged and interactive version. It’s a good try, but the “evolution” line would be more like an evolutionary tree than a single lineage. For example, I’m on the lineage two stops down from Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas didn’t inform mine at all, and one stop before evo-devologist Sean Carroll, who certainly would deny that I influenced him! I’m sure readers in other areas will have beefs, but you have to admit that this is a good try.

h/t: Juris