Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – February 21, 2006.

Cambridge, England—Darwin's Treasures

Greetings from Clare Hall of Cambridge University. I will be here the next several weeks poring over some of the thousands of letters, diaries, field notes, and handwritten manuscripts of Charles Darwin collected and preserved in the magnificent Cambridge Library (well, it is magnificent on the inside at least).

I am working with renowned Darwin scholar, historian and botanist David Kohn—who has devoted his professional life to studying Darwin. Today I get to try my hand (under David's expert guidance) of actually transcribing some of Darwin's handwritten notes onto my computer—the better to read them easily, of course, but also so eventually they may be added to our Darwin Digital Library of Evolution (see the separate entry on this project on this website—with links to it and related sites)—where they will then be searchable. (Want to know when Darwin first used the term "natural selection"?—just go to the site and search for "natural selection").

It may seem strange that, with all the work we have done to put on the Darwin Exhibition (see separate entry—the exhibition, I am delighted to report, has been extended to August 20th in New York), why would we be doing even more research on Darwin? The short answer is that research like this always raises more questions. I have become entranced with Darwin—more so than ever before—as I see the roots of my own work very clearly now, going back through the likes of George Simpson, Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky—all the way back to Darwin himself. I can now see at least in outline form how Darwin, by setting on the most general form of his theory, "cherry-picked" a subset of his ideas—leaving out some themes that, from my paleontological perspective, did not deserve to be dropped—phenomena such as "stasis" (the typical lack-of-change seen in most fossil lineages), etc.

So it only natural to wonder how Darwin's own ideas evolved. I devoted the middle section of my book Darwin. Discovering the Tree of Life (Norton, 2005—for details, see separate entry on this website) to this issue. And in the American Museum exhibition Darwin, we use specimens of fossils and living species that Darwin saw while on the Beagle that (as he later himself recalled) led him to the idea of evolution in the first place. But we want to know more about how this all happened, so we are poring over his notes and correspondence to probe these issues even deeper.

As a paleontologist, I am already something of an historian—of life itself—and there are parallels in approaches to be found in doing human intellectual history. But fossils don't come with notes stuck to them—and it is so wonderful (thrilling, actually)—to hold a sheet of paper (often with watermarks—with actual dates on them—hadn't realized before that watermarks sometimes have dates!) and read Darwin's handwriting (often not as difficult to do as I had initially feared). Much of what he has to say—discussions of igneous rocks, specimen lists, etc. etc. is irrelevant to our specific search. But the mind must remain alert for the occasional goodie—when Darwin wonders aloud (on paper!) what the significance of this geological observation, or specific fossil, might be for the broader picture taking shape in his mind.

We've had good results so far—which eventually I'll share in these blogs down the line. Much more work to do first, then we'll have to consolidate and organize our thoughts before broadcasting our conclusions. But this sure is fun!

Niles Eldredge

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