Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – February 13, 2006.

Darwin Day in Milan, Italy

Greetings from Milano--not far from Torino, where the Winter Olympics are currently going great guns.

I have been here to participate in Milan's "Darwin Day"--held this past weekend primarily at the Natural History Museum--the largest museum of its kind in Italy. Darwin turned 197 on February 12--and in keeping with the spirit of working things up in anticipation of the bicentennial of Darwin's birth in 2009, a party kicked off by the opening of our Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, interest is intensifying in "Darwin Days" throughout Italy and other countries--including (I am glad to say) the United States.

I gave two talks during the program--one celebrating the life and work of evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, who died last year at age 101. His last book has just been translated into Italian, and we were marking the occasion. Ernst (along with his contemporary Theodosius Dobzhansky) was instrumental in restoring the importance of geographic isolation in our understanding of the dynamics of the evolutionary process. Darwin had written in the Origin (1859) that although isolation was "no doubt important" in evolution, he was inclined to think that the broad surface areas of continents was more important in the generation of new species. This was a change from his earlier thinking, sparked by his experiences in the Galapagos and what botanists and zoologists later told him about the systematics of the different plants and animals on the different islands in that famous chain. Evidently, in his seach for a truly general theory of evolution, Darwin felt that the greater number of species on continents than on island chains--together with the difficuty he had in seeing how isolation would work on uninterrupted stretches of continental areas--Darwin felt it necessary to back off from his earlier views on the importance of isolation. Dobzhansky (in his Genentics and the Origin of Species, 1937) and Mayr (in his later Systematics and the Origin of Species, 1942) finally re-established the importance of isolation in all situations leading to the emergence of new species. Their work--along with the insistence of paleontologist Geogre Gaylord Simpson (in his Tempo and Mode in Evolution--1944) that the fossil record preserves true signals, or patterns, in the evolutionary history of life--enabled me and Stephen Jay Gould to propose the theory of punctuated equilibria (I'll be posting .pdf files of these papers soon on this website--Eldredge, 1971; Eldredge and Gould, 1972).

The next day I spoke on "What Darwin Saw"--a subject of blogs to come, as I return to the narrative of the Darwin Exhibition.

Interestingly, the Mayr event was picketed by students advocating"cultual pluralism"--meaning, in this case, anti-evolutionism/creationism. Never before a real problem in Italy, Great Britain and other European nations, creationism and intelligent design are now very much in the picture over here. The Italian government has banned the teaching of evolution up to age 15--which not coincidentally is the maximum age of compulsory education in Italy.

I will be leaving soon for Cambridge University--where I shall be working with Darwin scholar David Kohn on some of Darwin's oldest notes--seeking to shed further light on the origin of Darwin's evolutionary ideas: What he saw, what he knew, and what he made of it--when. Very exciting... and the subject of a future blog!

Niles Eldredge

Previous Blog ::: Blog Index (main) ::: Next Blog