Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – June 25, 2006.

The 2006 Aspen Design Summit—and Some News.

I just got back from the 2006 Aspen Design Summit. Organized by AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), the Summit continued the long, distinguished run of Aspen Design Conferences. The theme this year was the application of design to the solution of social problems: education innovation, social entrepreneurship and sustainable community development.

What was I—a paleontologist, evolutionist, Darwin student—doing at the Aspen Design Summit? Everything! I spoke about Darwin—emphasizing his creativity. I met with leaders in the design world who understood my obsession with cornets—and were eager to learn more about my use of cornet design history to come to grips with the question of the degree that biological and material cultural evolution are similar—or different. (News Flash #1: While in Aspen, I learned from my colleague Ilya Tëmkin back at the American Museum of Natural History that our paper “Phylogenetics and Material Cultural Evolution” has been accepted for publication in the journal Current Anthropology; this is the first paper to be published utilizing my extensive numerical database on cornet design history. Ilya Tëmkin added his own experiences with the history of the psaltery, and his finely honed ability to apply the latest techniques of phylogenetic analysis developed expressly to analyze the evolutionary relationships of organisms—not musical instruments).

And I learned that designers are not just people who specify the layout of the artwork on cereal boxes. As I told everyone one evening at the “Darwin Dinner,” it was wonderful to mingle with a group of people where “intelligent design” meant smart people solving problems—and not just the latest version of creationism. And the problems designers are beginning to solve border on the monumental. I heard from one member of a team that is busy getting newly designed foot-driven pumps into third world agricultural communities. He told me of a woman he met on the Indian subcontinent whose life had been transformed when she acquired one of these pumps. Formerly she had spent long hours away from her children, using traditional techniques to get enough water for her land and family use. Her income is now $1500 a year—of which she spends $500.00, saves $500.00—and gives the remaining $500.00 away! She is in effect a $1500 millionaire.

The purpose of the Summit was to pool experiences and devise new ways for the design community to play a more active and increasingly vital role in improving the economic lives of the billions of people who subsist on less than $2 a day, facing food shortages and a critical lack of safe drinking water. It was just great to learn about the passionate commitment these smart people—many of them young, just starting out—are bringing to address some of the most intractable problems facing humanity today. Coupled with all the recent publicity about stars like Angelina Jolie (and of course Bono—the icon in such matters), maybe we are finally witnessing a turn away from the selfish, massive accumulation of personal wealth—though the Republican Party will of course be the last to hear about it.

My role was to speak about Darwin. I led a “Darwin Stroll” with a co-leader—designer Robert Blaich, who lives in Aspen and has been a prominent member of the design world for many years. Bob took us to one of the most beautiful places I have seen in my life: the “Maroon Bells,”—peaks 14,000 feet high (Aspen itself lies at about 7500’, and we were walking at the Maroon Bells at about 8500’; the bells really to look like bells, the way the formation is eroded). The Maroon Bells (and adjacent Pyramid Peak) are composed of a reddish, crumbly sandstone (we learned that every few years some rock climbers die trying to scale these gorgeous peaks—the rocks are just that treacherous).

We were walking along a pretty little lake, set like a tiny jewel at the foot of these amazing peaks. I was ecstatic—for just as Darwin had learned to decipher events in earth history from examining the sequence of layered rocks in a region, so we could plainly see the region’s history laid out before our eyes. The sediments of the Maroon Bells, full of hematite, the reddish iron mineral that gives the rocks their color, were deposited in waterways surrounding an ancestral pre-Rockies range of mountains. Those ancient mountains were eroded away to stubs, their sediments accumulating in enormous lakes; the sediments eventually hardened into rock—and were thrust up into the air once again to form the present day Rocky Mountains—and this ineffably beautiful little section—the “Maroon Bells.” I was reminded of James Hutton—the Scottish geologist who preceded Darwin—who said that he saw “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” when he looked at the evidence for the endless cycle of deposition, uplift, erosion, deposition, uplift, erosion…and on and on. We have a reconstruction of the famous “Hutton’s Unconformity” in the Darwin Exhibition (still in New York until August 20—when it will begin its travels to Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, London and San Diego); still only reachable by boat at “Siccar Point” in Scotland, this is the rock exposure that prompted Hutton’s realization that the earth is terribly old and continually dynamic.

But even better than the Darwin Stroll outdoors at the Maroon Bells (the high altitude was a challenge to many of us—who had only arrived within the last 24 hours—from places like New York, which of course is at sea level) was next evening’s “Darwin Dinner.” Last December, I had teamed up with famed New York City restaurateur Peter Hoffman at his Savoy restaurant to do what turned out to be Darwin Dinner # 1. Dorothy Dunn of AIGA attended that dinner—and started making plans immediately for Peter (and Matt Weingarten, who would have been working with Peter on that first Darwin Dinner had not the birth of his child intervened that evening!) to bring the production to Aspen.

Peter’s role, of course, was to set the menu, secure all the items, prepare the food, cook and serve it. It was an amazing meal: planked sockeye salmon, then a salad graced with slices of delicious buffalo meat, followed by squab (complete with head and feet!), ending with fruit and honey. Peter explained in the beginning that he was running a sort of evolutionary gamut from raw through cured, roasted and steamed. At the end of this fabulous repast, Peter talked about traditional ways of getting through the winter; how garlic is best when each bulb’s scape (the green stalk and bud) is hand cut—a method dispensed with (through selective breeding) in California—but clung to in the East. New York garlic is sweeter than California garlic!; and how a variety of wild strawberry discovered in the Rockies was crossed with another variety to yield a plant that produces fruit throughout the summer.

My job was to tell the Darwin story between courses. I took the diners through Darwin’s experiences on the Beagle, where he encountered three “clues”—patterns in Nature—that eventually led him to embrace the idea of evolution. There is design in Nature, seen as recurrent patterns. Darwin saw that extinct species are replaced by modern species belonging to the very same group (armadillos replaced the extinct giant armadillo known as Glyptodon); that living species of the same basic group replace one another in space—as you travel southward over the South American continent (Darwin especially had in mind the replacement of the common ostrich-like rhea by “Darwin’s rhea” in southern Patagonia); and that, on island groups like the Galapagos, slightly, but consistently, different forms—whether “varieties” or truly different species—replace one another from island to island. In the Galapagos, Darwin saw this pattern with both the local mockingbirds—and also (as pointed out to him by the islands’ Spanish governor) in the tortoises—which are likewise somewhat different on each island. (News Flash #2. Sadly, the Galapagos tortoise Harriet has just died at the Australia Zoo at the age of 176. Harriet is thought to have been the very same tortoise that left the Galapagos Islands in 1835 in the company of the young Charles Darwin. The ship’s painter Conrad Martens left the ship with a tortoise when the Beagle reached Australia. Thus very probably our last living link to Charles Darwin has just left this earth—very poignant indeed!).

Darwin also ate most of his evidence all the while he was amassing the case for evolution. He ate armadillos (he preferred them cooked without their shells—unlike the way the gauchos usually prepared them). He ate guanacos. He ate rheas and tortoises. Almost every species (not mockingbirds) that played such key roles in the development of his ideas also graced his dining table. So there was a lot of fun recounting these stories of Darwin eating his evidence! The Darwin Dinner was a big success!

Finally, News Flash #3. A really good aural “tour” of the Darwin Exhibition was aired recently on NPR’s “Studio 360.” You can listen to it at http://www.studio360.org/show.html

Niles Eldredge

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