The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time

It is a very good account of the incredibly important work on evolution done by the Peter and Rosemary Grant on Daphne Major island in the Galapagos. This is the study that demonstrated real time evolution of birds among the group initially studied by Charles Darwin. Those observations by Darwin helped shape is conception of natural selection, and the more recent work by the Grants is a modern day demonstration that Darwin was right.

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is available on Kindle for 1.99. It is audible enabled.

Years ago, I realize that most of Darwin’s arguments, in On the Origin of Species, are underlain by evidence Darwin would have observed prior to setting foot on the Galapagos Islands. This includes fossil evidence from mainland South America, bio-geography in that region and on the Falklands, other observations, and material in the literature, some of which he was carrying with him.

It is not that the Galapagos didn’t matter. They mattered a great deal, as a natural laboratory of evolution. And it is not clear to what degree Darwin had realized his own theory before, during, and after his Galapagos visit. But, reading whichever version of The Voyage of the Beagle you like, that Darwin’s post hoc reconstruction of the ontogeny of his own reasoning starts out long before the Beagle closed in on Valparaiso, on the Pacific Coast.

Origins of Darwin’s Evolution: Solving the Species Puzzle Through Time and Place is a refreshing look at Darwin’s voyage incorporating this perspective.

From the Publisher:

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin presented his evidence for evolution and natural selection as its mechanism. He drew upon his earliest data gathered during his voyage on the HMS Beagle, which included collecting mammalian fossils in South America clearly related to living forms, tracing the geographical distributions of living species across South America, and sampling the peculiar fauna of the geologically young Galápagos Archipelago that showed evident affinities to South American forms. By the end of the voyage, he came to the realization that instead of various centers of creation, species evolved in different regions throughout the world. However, except for some personal ponderings, he did not express this revelation explicitly in his notebooks until shortly after his return. Over the years, he collected more evidence supporting evolution, but his early work remained paramount: it became the first paragraph of On the Origin of Species and encompassed three separate chapters, as well as later appearing in his autobiography.

Many discussions of Darwin’s landmark book give scant attention to this wealth of evidence and today we still do not fully appreciate its significance in Darwin’s thinking. In Origins of Darwin’s Evolution, J. David Archibald explores this lapse. He also shows that Darwin’s other early passion, geology, proved a more elusive corroboration of evolution. On the Origin of Species dedicated only one chapter to the rock and fossil record, as it appeared too incomplete for Darwin’s evidentiary standards. Carefully retracing Darwin’s gathering of evidence and the evolution of his thinking, Origins of Darwin’s Evolution achieves a new understanding of how Darwin crafted his transformative theory.

This is a well written, relatively short, monograph that that emphasizes the role of Historical Biogeography in Darwin’s thinking, by an experienced and well informed American paleontologist, who also wrote Extinction and Radiation: How the Fall of Dinosaurs Led to the Rise of Mammals and Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era.

For more on Darwin click here and here.

Theological ideas about the origin and history of life are very much the same today as they were in the mid 19th century. There were and there are young Earthers and there were and there are those who did not care about the Usher young-earth chronology but have God’s hands on the levers of biological creation and history. A careful analysis would probably reveal differences between Paley’s Natural Theology and Behe’s intelligent design but both are Intelligent Design theories and the differences between them … and this is critically important … are not related to which one is more correct. Both are way incorrect. They are both unfixably wrong. Irreducibly wrong maybe. They are both made up, religiously motivated, and politically motivated. They would both ultimately become constructions of anti-science rhetoric more so than they had ever been religious doctrine.

The history of change in scientific theories should be considered much more complex and dynamic. Pre-Darwinian evolution is probably understudied. Darwinian theory consisted of multiple ideas related to each other to varying degrees. “Darwinism” is the idea of common descent, but it is also the idea of Natural Selection. The former is an assertion about what the history of life looks like, the latter a mechanism for change. “Darwinism” is a theory about branching, or speciation, of life forms, something that we probably take more for granted today than in an age where the prevailing culture was linked to a theology in which all species were made within a few days time as we see them today, more or less. I recommend Ernst Mayr’s short book One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Questions of Science) for a quick read on the complexity of Darwin’s theories.

Meanwhile, other aspects of the science related to evolution subsequent to the Origin have been very dynamic. The mechanism of inheritance and the role of mutation and population genetics were only vaguely, and in many details incorrectly, understood by Darwin and his contemporaries. I find it interesting that starting some time in perhaps the 1970s or a bit later, many people including geneticists but also various science writers and others have attributed to our understanding of DNA a much greater power than it has earned. Even before DNA was figured out, this was true. The “Synthesis” was all about imbuing Darwinian Theory with newly understood genetics and some cool math to finish off the central theories of life and evolution, and thus understand everything (I oversimplify but not much). But there was a lot more to know, it turned out. With the realization that the DNA molecule is the place where inherited information is stored, and that it is a double helix, and so on, we could now aspire to understand life at the most basic level and in all its details and expressions. Well, it’s been a few decades and we are still discovering new and important things about how DNA works, and the connection between complex ecology, evolutionary histories, and behavior on one hand and DNA on the other is a gap that grows wider, not narrower. The Human Genome Project was going to advance our understanding of human biology including development, disease, mechanism, all of it. But the day after the sequence was published we did not know a lot more than before, but we certainly had a lot more interesting questions to pursue.

Granted, I’m characterizing and lampooning a public view of science more than what scientists actually thought. But not really. Geneticists will not want to hear this, but they have long associated their work with words like “truth” and the work of morphlogists or other scientists with terms like “conjecture” and “indirect evidence” and have had a hard time dealing with he fact that truth comes along with a lot of … conjecture and uncertainty, rethinking after some “conjectural” field disproves your overly neat theory, and so on.

But that is a bit of a digression. My main point is that despite the shortcomings of the egos of those involved in the cognate set of genetics related fields of research, the process of understanding the mechanisms of inheritance has expanded and changed the Darwinian body of theories and continues to do so in ways that no theological revelation or understanding has affected any of the religious ideas about the origin and history of life. Biogeography, ecology, the investigations of the deep sea, experimental work on the origin of life, and of course behavioral biology are also major players in reshaping Darwinian Theory.

Very little of Darwin has been thrown out. Less Darwin has been thrown out than Newton, considering that everything Newton did with mechanics was at least a tiny bit wrong. (Yes, I know, that is an absurd comparison on most levels, but still interesting to think about.) Most of what has become known since The Origin has related to, been informed by, modified but not destroyed, and built on that which is in The Origin.

I suspect the first 150 years of The Origin is just the beginning. As it were.

Oh, and Abe Lincoln too.

For Darwin’s birthday, I want to discuss the uses of the terms “Darwinism, Darwinian, and Darwinist.” Many have written about this and many don’t like any of those words, some seem to equally dislike all three. A couple of years back, writing for the New York Times, Carl Safina said,

Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.

By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.”

I don’t fully agree. Darwin proposed, discussed, and integrated into his theories of evolution the idea of inheritance. Yes, Gregor Mendel independently demonstrated an atomistic theory of inheritance and worked out key features of that process, essentially creating the concepts of “gene” and “allele” as we often use them today. Having said that, Mendelian inheritance turns out to be a very incomplete picture and more often than not is inadequate in real use. The difference between what we now know about inheritance and what Darwin needed to develop much of his evolutionary thinking isn’t really all that large. Darwin certainly did address developmental biology, in that he understood that life forms underwent changes within the lifetime that were controlled by the same factors that shaped any feature of those organisms. And so on.

In particular, Safina states that the term “Darwinism” puts too much emphasis on the contributions of one person and one book and one theory. But Darwin wrote more than one book on Evolution, and he proposed more than one theory. Mayr says there were five theories and makes a reasonable argument for that. Darwin even foresaw, though he did not develop, higher level behavioral theories such as kin selection.

Safina goes on to note that “We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism” and otherwise warns against the “ism”-ish nature of a word like “Darwinism” reminding us of Marxism, capitalism, Catholicism, and racism.

Before I go any further, I want to strongly agree with Safina and others who have eschewed the term “Darwinism” but not for most of the reasons stated. Darwin was a key figure in defining evolution, and for the most part, the “evolution” we know of today is Darwin’s evolution plus, not a form of evolution that required the overthrow of Darwin’s ideas. Newton was wrong. We can use the word “Newtonian” to refer to a subset of physics that work like Newton said they worked but only on a very limited scale. Newtonian mechanics does not describe how the universe, or reality, or matter and energy work. Newtonian physics changed from a theory of everything (dynamic and physical) to a mere approximation that is fundamentally flawed. Copernicism, as it were, more so. Darwinism (to use that term for just a moment) is still at the core of modern evolutionary thinking.

The reason to eschew the term “Darwinism” is for that final reason mentioned above: isms are sucky. So I’m fine with that. But evolution as we know of today is a Darwinian thing to a much much greater degree than physics as we know of it today is Newtonian (or for that matter, even Einsteinian!).

So, I’m happy to be a “Darwinist” but I’d prefer to use the term “Evolutionary Biologist.”

There is another term that people have elected to toss out for similar reasons: Darwinain. That is an error, and most biologists who would happily agree with Safina (and me) in avoiding Darwinism use Darwinian all the time. The term Darwinian refers to one part of Darwin’s body of theory: Selection. We say that during neurogenesis, neurons over produce and over connect, and then, over time, undergo culling based on use. Neurons that are used are retained, those that are not go away. It is said to be a Darwinian process, because it is a selection process in which over production is followed by selective retention or survival. There are other examples of Darwinian process that occur in biology, and of course, they happen outside of biology and the term is often used, including but not limited to the nefarious idea of Social Darwinian process.

And now, for your reading and listening pleasure, a few Darwinian blog posts:

A podcast celebrating Darwin’s birthday. The first part is great but the part with me starts at 15:10.

A few essays focusing on Darwin’s Voyage on The Beagle

• Bon Voyage HMS Beagle
• The Voyage of the Beagle
• Darwin Crossing The Atlantic
• Charles Darwin and the Rain Forest
• Darwin Gets his Wellies Wet
• South America on Five Dollars a Day
• Bugs (Darwin)
• Darwin South of the Tropics
• Darwin and The Gauchos
• Fossil Quadrupeds
• Rheas and the Birth of Evolutionary Theory
• Elephants and Horses

photo of Darwin by kevinzim

To exemplify this, I’ve put together a list of several of Darwin’s print publications with their publication dates:

• 1839 Journal of researches into the geology and natural history of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle. Known to us as “The Voyage of the Beagle”
• 1842 The structure and distribution of coral reefs.
• 1844 Geological observations on the volcanic islands visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
• 1846 Geological observations on South America.
• 1846 “Note on sandstone and query on coral reefs” contribution to a book
• 1851. Geology (book section)
• 1851 A monograph of the sub-class Cirripedia, with figures of all the species. The Lepadidæ; or, pedunculated cirripedes
• 1851 A monograph on the fossil Lepadidae, or, pedunculated cirripedes of Great Britain.
• 1854. The Balanidae, (or sessile cirripedes); the Verrucidae.
• 1855 A monograph on the fossil Balanidae and Verrucidae of Great Britain
• 1857 Geologia (book section)
• 1859 On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life

There are other items on his publication list, including small contributions to various books, and some letters, not listed here. The nature of publications in the mid 19th century was different from what we see today, so it is hard to define what is a publication and what is not. For the present purposes I’ve excluded Gould’s monographs on birds, which make very heavy use of Darwin’s field descriptions. These were published between 1838 and 1841. I’ve also excluded two book chapters (in books written by others) on methods.

Some of these works are clearly about geology, others clearly about biology. Assume that the first item on this list, “The Voyage” is about half geology and half biology. This assumption underestimates the amount of geology and divides a lot of stuff that is not in either of the two categories, but a rough estimate is suitable. This list ends with the first edition of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species…” in 1859. The following graph shows the cumulative word count of writings (given the above caveats and adjustments) for geology vs. biology. I’ve added a rough estimate of Darwin’s contributions to Gould’s bird monographs.

Notice that geology dominates in Darwin’s writings up until the origin. Thereafter, most of Darwin’s published works are biological and not geological (not counting reprinted or new editions of geological or biological publications) so over time the Biology line would overtake the geology line. But up to this point, Geology dominates.

The leftmost part of this graph, where biology seems to surpass geology, I’m sure, would reverse if I spent more time classifying the verbiage in The Voyage.

Darwin may well have become the world’s greatest biologist, but he started out as a notable geologist and made contributions to that field that lasted. Had he not written The Orign or any later biological work, and never published anything significant on Evolution, Darwin would today be a somewhat obscure but important geologist known to those who study South American geology, volcanic islands, and coral reefs.

Read by Greg Wagland:

This work, unsurprisingly, offers invaluable insights into the life and times of Charles Darwin, his personality and the formative influences that made him what he was, for here we have his own words and ‘voice’ at the close of a prodigiously productive career. He tells of his childhood, his student days at Edinburgh and Cambridge, his love of beetles, shooting and geology and of his grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. He talks at some length about his meetings with the great scientific men of the age, his attitudes to his critics, to religion and of his theories of evolution. He also discusses his scientific methods and the background to the publication of many of his works including ‘The Origin of Species’ and ‘The Descent of Man’, and how he came to join ‘The Beagle’ as naturalist. This is an indispensable work for any student of Darwin, of evolution and conceivably, creationism. It is undoubtedly the autobiography of a great man.Greg Wagland reads The Autobiography of Charles Darwin for Magpie Audio. Note: This is the version authorized and edited by his son, Francis. Francis Darwin and Charles’ wife Emma censored and excised some passages, in part to limit references made to his home life.

Here’s the audiobook.

Here is a list of several of Darwin’s first publications with their publication dates:

• 1839 Journal of researches into the geology and natural history of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle. Known to us as “The Voyage of the Beagle”
• 1842 The structure and distribution of coral reefs.
• 1844 Geological observations on the volcanic islands visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
• 1846 Geological observations on South America.
• 1846 “Note on sandstone and query on coral reefs” contribution to a book
• 1851. Geology (book section)
• 1851 A monograph of the sub-class Cirripedia, with figures of all the species. The Lepadidæ; or, pedunculated cirripedes
• 1851 A monograph on the fossil Lepadidae, or, pedunculated cirripedes of Great Britain.
• 1854. The Balanidae, (or sessile cirripedes); the Verrucidae.
• 1855 A monograph on the fossil Balanidae and Verrucidae of Great Britain
• 1857 Geologia (book section)
• 1859 On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life

There are other items on his publication list, including small contributions to various books, and some letters, not listed here. The nature of publications in the mid 19th century was different from what we see today, so it is hard to define what is a publication and what is not. For the present purposes I’ve excluded Gould’s monographs on birds, which make very heavy use of Darwin’s field descriptions. These were published between 1838 and 1841. I’ve also excluded two book chapters on methods.

Some of these works are clearly about geology, others clearly about biology. Assume that the first item on this list, “The Voyage” is about half geology and half biology. This assumption underestimates the amount of geology and divides a lot of stuff that is neither between the two categories, but a rough estimate is suitable. This list ends with the first edition of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species…” in 1859. The following graph shows the cumulative word count of writings (given the above caveats and adjustments) for geology vs. biology. I’ve added a rough estimate of Darwin’s contributions to Gould’s bird monographs.

Notice that geology dominates in Darwin’s writings up until the origin. Thereafter, most of Darwin’s published works are biological and not geological (not counting an reprinting or new editions of geological or biological publications) so over time the Biology line would overtake the geology line. But up to this point, Geology dominates.

The leftmost part of this graph, where biology seems to surpass geology, I’m sure, would reverse if I spent more time classifying the verbiage in The Voyage.

Darwin may well have become the world’s greatest biologist, but he started out as a notable geologist. Had he not written The Orign or any later biological work, and never published anything significant on Evolution, Darwin would today be a somewhat obscure but important geologist known to those who study South American geology, volcanic islands, and coral reefs.

What could have been a major showdown between Lyell and Darwin turned out much differently. By the time Darwin had returned from The Voyage (See all Books on Travelogues) (of the Beagle) Lyell and others were aware of Darwin’s new models of reef formation. If Lyell was going to have a negative reaction to Darwin’s revisions of his (Lyell’s) work, that reaction was significantly reduced by the delay between first hearing that there was a revision and meeting up again with young Charles. As I understand it, Lyell was quite happy to have his work overturned.

But there was conflict, and the conflict continued for decades and indirectly or directly engaged everybody who was anybody in the field at the time. David Dobbs writes:

Today the main argument about coral reefs is how to save them. But in the 1800s, the question of how coral reefs arose, known as the “coral reef problem,” ranked second only to the “the species question” in ferocity. In many ways it reprised the evolutionary debate, engaging many of the same people and ideas. It provided both an overture and a long coda to the fight over Darwinism. The coral reef problem did not concern the origin of species or humankind’s descent. Yet it reiterated the evolutionary debate’s vexing questions about the importance of evidence, the proper construction of theory, and the reliability of powerful abstractions.

The “Coral Reef Problem” is funny (“funny strange” not “funny haha”) because it was so important at the time, with a high public as well as professional profile, but is largely forgotten about today. There is not a chapter in our high school biology, earth science, or history books on the coral reef problem. It is also interesting to me that everyone at the time had one or two things way wrong, with these missing pieces worked out only in the middle and latter parts of the 20th century, yet when those issues were solved there was not any sort of nostalgic redux of the original debates.

Until now, of course. David Dobbs (quoted above) wrote the book “Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (See all Marine Life Books)” chronicling this story. Since this is a big interest of mine, I’ve devoured the book, written about it here, and David and I even did a Bloggingheads.tv conversation about it.

Here’s the Bloggingheads TV Interview with David and me:

And now, David is providing on his blog a series of stand-alone excerpts from the book for your enjoyment. The first one is here. Personally, I think you should buy the book to support David and his excellent science journalism, but while you are waiting for it to arrive in the mail or be downloaded to your kindle, you can whet your appetite.