Biophilia for Beginners

Until my early twenties, I had never really thought about Darwin. I was halfway through a doctorate in biology by then, so in retrospect this seems like a glaring omission. Naturally, I had thought about Darwinism – or more accurately, I simply knew about it. Darwinism was at the centre of a scientific ‘theory of everything’ instilled early on by my parents, both professional biologists. There were very few childish ‘why’s’ in our household that couldn’t be answered by either Darwin or Newton. Laws of nature stood in for any conventional religion, with perhaps the advantage that they didn’t seem irrational or intrusive, so as I grew up, I never felt moved to reject them. Such was the happy upbringing that could produce a student of biology who had never given a serious second thought to what has been called ‘the greatest single idea in the history of thought’: that living species are not God-given and immutable but are capable of changing and evolving under the pressure of natural selection.

Fortunately, my consciousness was raised by a friend and mentor who took me to visit Down House, Darwin’s family home and now one of the most charming specialist museums in Great Britain. The house lies in a beautiful tract of Kentish countryside and we visited on a rare day of perfect English summer, green and golden hills rolling away on all sides. Romanticism aside, however, Down House truly brought Charles Darwin to life for me. Here was his ‘thinking path’, a tree-lined walk around the gardens where he paced and pondered daily. Here was the book-lined study where he spent eight patient years dissecting barnacles. Later, as I began to read the cumbersomely titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), its imagined author accompanied me like an affable, Victorian David Attenborough. Darwin’s masterwork has been in print for 150 years and is one of the most universally known, yet little-read, works of scientific literature. The book may look as oversized and unappealing as its title but it deserves to be read, not just taken for granted. Darwin’s personality seeps through the formal style of writing: he was a dedicated naturalist, a meticulous scientist, an enthusiastic polymath and, above all, a man who ‘thought big’ on a scale that modern scientists seldom have the time or the imagination to emulate. He also had a cultural intelligence to match his scientific one and was painfully aware of just how heretical evolutionary theory would sound in the 1850s. Anticipating denouncement and derision, he wrote his book as one long, pre-emptive plea for a fair hearing. It carefully restricts itself to observable facts and rational deductions, eloquently leaving the ultimate mystery of life to the theologians. More than a century on, with dogmatic unreason alive and well, such moderate good sense is refreshing. The book has many appealing leitmotifs, one of which is the wonderful community of gentleman scientists conjured up by the author. Many of the nineteenth century’s most notable zoologists, botanists, scholars and explorers were Darwin’s personal friends, since his studies of biology and geology during the voyage of HMS Beagle had won widespread respect from the scientific élite. The works of these friends (and indeed, of potential enemies) are generously praised throughout his book. Admittedly, he may have been on a conscious charm offensive, hoping to win over the great minds of his day with copious citations, but Darwin was no undiscerning toady. If he thought a particular authority was just plain wrong then he was happy to say so, albeit with exquisite courtesy (in a masterfully understated putdown, he ventures that ‘Huber’s statement [regarding honey bees] is not, as far as I have seen, strictly correct’). In the course of his writing, Darwin did more than just correspond with fellow-scientists; he also enlisted their help with his legendary ‘little experiments’. Even the most mundane practical science clearly enthralled him and he reports his results with infectious enthusiasm.

I do not believe that botanists are aware how charged the mud of ponds is with seeds: I have tried several little experiments, but will give here only the most striking case: I took in February three table-spoonfuls of mud from three different points, beneath water, on the edge of a little pond; this mud when dry weighed only 634⁄ ounces; I kept it covered up in my study for six months, pulling up and counting each plant as it grew; the plants were of many kinds, and were altogether 537 in number; and yet the viscid mud was all contained in a breakfast cup!

One can almost smell the excitement – and perhaps the pond-mud – in this single over-punctuated sentence. Why, you might reasonably ask, did Darwin care how many seeds might lurk in pond-mud? The answer is that he wanted to know how freshwater plants and animals might spread between isolated lakes: could the muddy feet of migratory birds be the answer? In pursuit of this idea, he also dunked dried duck’s feet in aquariums of embryonic water-snails (they stuck, much to Darwin’s gratification) and enlisted a local gamekeeper to wash the feet of his partridges. ‘I removed twenty-two grains of dry argillaceous earth from one foot of a partridge,’ he reports triumphantly, ‘and in this earth was a pebble quite as large as the seed of a vetch.’ In one memorably outlandish passage, Darwin even tested whether far-flying hawks might carry seeds around unwittingly, by consuming seed-eating prey. ‘Killed some sparrow . . .’ he wrote in one of his notebooks, ‘put in Oats, Canary seed, Tares, Cabbage & Clover – gave 3 birds to small S. African Eagle. (Bateleur): bolted them; threw up pellet in 18 hours (i.e. on morning of 16th) charged with seed: planted these seeds on 19th.’ Who could fail to be charmed by the image of the great man preparing a mezze of stuffed sparrows to feed to a convenient captive eagle? I cannot justly claim that the entire Origin is quite this entertaining. The book is not easy reading by today’s standards; there are some awfully prolix passages and one or two chapters that have not really stood the test of time. Darwin understandably struggled to explain heredity without any knowledge of DNA or chromosomes and, writing before the advent of plate tectonic theory, wrestled unsatisfactorily with fossils and global geography. Overall, however, his far-sightedness is breathtaking and the Origin really is remarkably readable by the standards of its day. It was certainly a best-seller in the 1860s – and not only because scandal sells like hot cakes. By the sixth edition, the author was persuading his publisher to halve the book’s price because working men’s associations were actually clubbing together to acquire communal copies. Darwin had a rare talent for accessible analogies and examples that would catch the imagination. Take a community of isolated dialect-speakers, he wrote, and pretty soon you will have a new language. It’s the perfect non-biological model for the evolution of species. Another clever strategy was to start out on his safest ground, devoting the first chapter to the evolution of domestic species. His audience would be familiar enough with cabbages and cattle, and there was nothing controversial about good old selective breeding. Yet what is selective breeding, if not a clumsy, abbreviated mimic of natural selection? Darwin had realized, for example, that the various breeds of domestic pigeon were all derived from a single wild ancestor: in fact, he found the birds an invaluable model for his ideas and became a familiar figure among local pigeon-fanciers. Having persuaded his readers that their friendly neighbourhood farmers, dog-lovers and pigeon-keepers had generated a great diversity of animals and vegetables in a mere few centuries, it was but a logical step to suggest that the natural world could do more and better with uncounted millennia at its disposal. Darwin’s huge respect for this natural world is the most engaging of his recurring themes, and even the most recalcitrant reader should find themselves fascinated by some of the weird and wonderful biology featured in the Origin. The weirder and more wonderful it looked, the more powerfully Darwin knew he must work to defend his theory against intelligent design. Thus we are encouraged to break down and examine the comb-building instincts of bees, the engineering of the human eye and the slave-making habits of certain ants. Have you ever really thought about slave-making ants? Well, Darwin had and he thinks that you should too. It is here that he is at his very best as an ambassador for natural history, his erudite enthusiasm equally effective whether preaching to the present-day converted or to the nineteenth-century sceptic. The biologist E. O. Wilson coined the term ‘biophilia’ to describe an inborn affinity that humans have with other forms of life and it has been remarked that Darwin’s central gift was an  extraordinary depth of biophilia. His writing vibrates with an instinct and admiration for the vast interconnectedness of nature: ‘There is grandeur in this view of life,’ to quote his memorable closing sentence. There is indeed – and there may be no better way to nurture the same sensibility in yourself than by reading On the Origin of Species. I urge you to try it. Our over-taxed planet needs all the biophilia it can get.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Catherine Merrick 2011