Ideas about species change had become a fascination by the mid nineteenth century. Bestselling books such as the anonymously published and scientifically sketchy , Vestiges of the Natural history of Creation , showed there was an appetite for evolutionary explanations.
As an undergarduate at Cambridge, Darwin was part of a scientific community. He was influenced and inspired by John Stevens Henslow , his botany professor.
His strong interest in geology was cultivated through his fieldwork with Adam Sedgwick , and the work of geologist Charles Lyell shaped and influenced his ideas. By the time Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage he was well known in the scientific world for the all the specimens that he had sent back. He was then engaged for many years with a host of scientific experts, helping him to identify and classify what he had found.
He was not alone, nor did he have all the answers. He constantly sought advice. Read more about how Darwin wrote Origin of species and what Darwin read. After the Beagle voyage, Darwin spent a short time in Cambridge organising the specimens he had collected and then became part of scientific society in London.
When he moved to Down House in the Kent countryside in , he is often portrayed as a recluse, frequently ill and avoiding people. It is true that he moved to Down partly to escape the pressures of London and that he suffered periodically from an unexplained illness that stopped him working.
But Down was much more than a family home: it became his scientific laboratory, peaceful writing place and a new social centre for invited guests. Scientific colleagues frequently visited Down to dine and sometimes stay overnight. As for Mr. Darwin often went to London in the forty years he was at Down to stay with his brother Erasmus and, later, his daughter Henrietta.
While in London, he arranged meetings with scientists such as the chemist Edward Frankland for advice on the work he was doing on insectivorous plants in the mids. With the ready access that London provided to a network of people, he also pursued good causes.
For example, in , he met with many scientific friends in London to put together a relief fund for Thomas Henry Huxley, who was struggling financially. And in , he played an important role in the controversy over vivisection , lobbying physiologists, politicians and organisations concerned about animal welfare to come to a compromise, which minimised animal suffering but did not impede important scientific research.
Darwin was also well networked through the postal service. Although he spent a lot of time at Down, letters were coming in from all over the world in response to his published work and his own letters. In the late s, he produced a questionnaire on the expression of emotion and used his extensive network of correspondents to seek replies from the most remote parts of the world on a diverse range of different peoples.
So Darwin was far from reclusive, he was extremely social in writing and in person. And his research could not have been conducted without a network of friends, colleagues and experts.
However, by living at Down he was able to control far more closely which people he saw and when he saw them. Read more about what it was like to visit the Darwins at Down , Darwin's involvement in the vivisection controversy , and Darwin's questionnaire on expression.
By all accounts, Down House the Darwin family home was a lively and boisterous household. In reminiscing about Darwin, his daughter Henrietta wrote:. He always made us feel that we were each of us creatures whose opinions and thoughts were valuable to him, so that whatever there was best in us came out in the sunshine of his presence.
LL 1: Letters, notes and pages from his Experiment book reveal Darwin to be a very present father, and show a great family effort in some aspects of his work.
Darwin and Emma had ten children seven survived to adulthood. But evolutionary paleontology "jumps together" beautifully with evolutionary explanations of biogeography, morphology, genetics and the like; creationist paleontology wretchedly flies apart from creationist accounts of such collateral phenomena.
Evolution, and evolution alone, succeeds in binding together the dizzyingly complex phenomena of life within a common theoretical structure while simultaneously providing scientists with the conceptual tools to expand the boundaries of empirical knowledge. Allow miraculous explanations into science, and creationism's abject failure to offer any adequate consilience would still mark it as an intellectual dead end. The secular skeptics of natural selection form a more heterogeneous group, and, perhaps inevitably, Ruse's engagement with them lacks the momentum that drives his discussion of creationism.
In many cases, as Ruse concedes, critics are responding, understandably if unfortunately, not to Darwin's core ideas but to the ideological uses to which evolution has been put: "Some dreadful stuff has been fobbed off under the umbrella of evolution, and even when it is not that dreadful, some very shaky assumptions have been incorporated.
Despite well-documented abuses, Ruse argues persuasively that "there is no good reason to think that. Ruse's defense of natural selection against critics within evolutionary biology is sure-handed but is neither as decisive nor as satisfying as the rest of the book. The introduction laments that "well-qualified and articulate evolutionary biologists. This assertion is overblown and unfair. The late Stephen Jay Gould, one of Ruse's main targets, took great pains to insist that he wanted to restructure and extend Darwin's vision, not replace it.
Ruse provides little reason not to take Gould at his word or to conclude more generally that like-minded biologists are any less committed to a rational explanation of the living world than their more selection-minded colleagues.
Fortunately, Ruse does not expand on this inflammatory line of argument. It is there, no doubt, more to tweak the noses of friendly adversaries than to launch a blistering assault on enemies, but any wink of his eye will probably be lost on readers unfamiliar with his long career as a polemicist.
In the heart of the book he does acknowledge that biologists such as Gould and Richard Lewontin raise legitimate issues about the limits and restrictions on natural selection. Concessions made, Ruse then draws dexterously on scientific evidence and evolutionary logic to argue that the points made against robust selectionist thought are not nearly as telling as the critics like to think, and so no good reason exists for a significant refurbishment of current orthodoxy.
No reader, no matter what his or her sympathies, will finish Darwinism and Its Discontents without finding something, and perhaps much, to dispute—and Ruse clearly enjoys a good debate too much to want anyone to nod in dull assent to all of his points. In his determination to vanquish all critics of uncontaminated Darwinian thought, he does not distinguish as clearly as he should between his opponents. His targets take Gould and Gish on the extremes are all "anti-Darwinians" only in the same way that oak trees and chimpanzees are nonmembers of the genus Homo.
Although Ruse's targets are a ragtag bunch, the core logic he uses to defend Darwinism contains a powerful and compelling coherence. We see that evolution works worst when elevated to the status of a secular religion or otherwise subordinated to the service of extrascientific commitments. And that is certainly not true of Darwinism. For Ruse, pragmatic to his bones, this is the ultimate point:. Stephen C. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. Wells, Icons of Evolution, pp.
This and other Marx Brothers quotations are available online here. New York: Free Press, , pp. The passage quoted by Darwin is on p. Jane M. Press, Frederick B. Michael K.
Richardson, J. Hanken, M. Gooneratne, C. Pieau, A. Raynaud, L. Darwin, Charles. Kohtaro Fujihashi, J. McGhee, C. Lue, K. Beagley, T. Taga, T. Hirano, T. Kishimoto, J. Laissue, B. Chappuis, C. Abstract available online here. Loren G. Randal Bollinger, Andrew S.
Barbas, Errol L. Bush, Shu S. Steven R. Bruce G. Carninci, J. Ponting, P. Alan Cooper, et al. Chambers, A. John Harshman, E. Braun, M. Braun, C. Huddleston, R. Bowie, J. Chojnowski, S. Hackett, K. Han, R. Kimball, B. Marks, K. Miglia, W. Moore, S. Reddy, F. Sheldon, D. Steadman, S. The maintenance of that ecosystem of microbes is essential to human health, which is one reason why the over-use of antibiotics can be a bad thing.
Most antibiotics tend to be broad range. We now understand that we humans, along with most other creatures, are composites of other creatures. Not just the microbiome living in our bellies and intestines, but creatures that have over time become inserted in our very cells. Every cell in the human body contains, for instance, little mechanisms that help package energy. Those are called mitochondria. We now realize that those mitochondria are the descendants of captured bacteria that were either swallowed by, or infected, the cells that became complex cells of all animals and plants.
Likewise, 8 percent of the human genome, we now know, is viral DNA, which has come into our lineage by infection over the last million years or so. Some of that viral DNA is still functioning as genes that are important for human life and reproduction. CRISPR is an acronym for a gene-editing tool discovered in the last years that is very powerful and inexpensive.
With it, scientists can now edit genomes, delete mutations or insert sections of new genes. It promises a lot of wonderful medical possibilities and a lot of really troubling moral and societal choices. But how far does it go? Does it go to the point where wealthy people will be able to choose designer children, whose genomes have been edited to make them smarter or stronger?
These are, to put it mildly, really difficult ethical propositions. But it is something that has always existed in nature. Microbes were using CRISPR to protect themselves and to edit their own genomes before it was ever discovered and put to use in a laboratory by some really brainy humans. Simon Worrall curates Book Talk.
Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor. All rights reserved. Your book opens with Charles Darwin making a little sketch in a notebook. Put us inside that moment and explain how the image of the tree of life has altered over the centuries. The British research lab at Porton Down has been much in the news recently because of the Skripal affair.
Take us inside this top-secret facility and talk about the strange case of NCTC 1. Share Tweet Email.
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