Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – September 18, 2006.

Darwin in America

Visitors to this site may have noticed an absence of a month or so between posting Darwin Blog #30—scheduled to be the penultimate blog devoted to describing the Darwin Exhibition—and Blog #31, in which I planned to complete my verbal tour of the exhibition leading up through Darwin's life, times and scientific work. I was racing to meet the August 20th deadline—the scheduled closing date of Darwin at its originating venue, The American Museum of Natural History in New York.

That date has come and gone. In the 10 months that Darwin had been up and running in New York, it attracted over 500,000 visitors—many of whom lingered for a nearly-unprecedented two full hours as they made their way through this dense and beautiful exhibition. By any measure, Darwin in New York was a raging success.

And though it was a poignant moment to see the Darwin exhibition, dismantled and carefully crated, being loaded onto a succession of four enormous moving vans, it is also a thrill to know that it is just beginning its peregrinations in North America, Europe, Asia and (we hope!) elsewhere. Time to let the baby grow up, leave home and make its mark in the world. The first stop on this long odyssey will be Philadelphia, where Darwin opens in early October.

But I was rudely interrupted in the steady quest to finish my description of the exhibition before it closed—and I haven't been able to tackle Darwin Blog # 31 until this day in mid-September. Someone hacked into my website and erased all 30 of my previous blogs! Almost as if someone had broken into my house and stolen our most precious possessions, I felt violated—angry that someone would do this to me, and also vulnerable: for dependent as I am on my Webmaster, I know little of the mechanics of website construction and security. What would prevent this from happening again?

But my anger and fear were quickly gone—followed by a kind of wonderment that anyone would apparently dislike the message(s) in these blogs so much that they would take the trouble to break the law and destroy them! I began to actually feel pleased that I had evidently annoyed someone to such a degree that they felt it necessary to try to silence me. What an honor, in a way, to be taken so seriously!

I can only assume that someone wedded to the creationist/intelligent design cause is responsible for erasing the first 30 Darwin blogs on this site. If so, this is perhaps the most direct, vicious (not to mention illegal) action taken by anti-evolutionary forces in the United States that I have yet encountered; most confrontations are far more polite—at least in debate venues I have participated in (though sometimes court proceedings do get a bit rancorous).

And though one or two of my previous blogs have entertained some of my more general political views—such as my disgust at, and utter opposition to, the Bush administration's deceitful and inept initiation and promulgation of the war in Iraq—somehow I think that the issue at hand is evolution—and perhaps even more "fundamentally," Charles Robert Darwin himself.

Darwin is everywhere in America. His last name—in the form of "Darwinism"—stands as a simple synonym of "evolution" everywhere in our society. Darwin is in the classroom—either as the founder of modern evolutionary biology, the very core of our understanding of the biological world; or as a controversial figure whose work inspires phony, pseudo-scientific alternatives such as "intelligent design." He is in our larger political arena, as along with stem-cell research, and global warming, evolution is at the top of the list of well-established scientific principles that are resisted or, at best, simply ignored by the current right-wing Republican administration.

As an early founder of ecological thinking, and as someone who deeply cared about the fates of the worlds species and ecosystems during his own lifetime, Darwin's spirit is central as well to the ongoing fight to preserve our nation's (and the world’s) species and ecosystems—yet another crucial arena in which the Bush regime is letting us down.

Darwin is with us in medicine, as we analyze and wage the escalating wars between evolving pathogens and the drug defenses we throw up against these scourges. Darwin is with us as we genetically modify our crops—for the good, but sometimes for the bad—to fight that other persistently looming monster—hunger.

Darwin is with us as we debate social policy; social Darwinism, often viciously iniquitous, tends to hinge on the erroneous conclusion from Darwin's evolution that the wealthy have arisen because of their superiority in the "struggle for existence." Darwin himself was no "social-Darwinist." Rather, he was strongly anti-slavery, and, given his inherited wealth, a social liberal in his day (and by the standards of his time).

Darwin, increasingly, is in our art—in our novels, in our paintings, in our plays—and even in our music. He is in our exhibitions and non-fiction literature. He captures our American cultural imagination seemingly more now than perhaps at any time since his death in 1882.

And, of course, Darwin is still very much with us in purely scientific matters. We continue to take different paths along separate lines of evolutionary enquiry—rather like the scene in Monty Python's "The Life of Brian," where factions, cliques—sects—form instantly, each claiming legitimacy and purity of tradition from the original source—in this case, in evolutionary biology, from Charles Darwin himself. More so perhaps than in any other field in modern science, Darwin the Founding Father looms large over our shoulders as we struggle to come up with a more complete and satisfactory theory of evolutionary mechanisms to account for the complexities in the history of life. All of us like to keep Darwin close by our side as we maneuver these tricky scientific waters.

Why is Darwin such a visible, dominant, active force in American life nearly 150 years after his death? As I said in an earlier blog, Darwin refuses to go away—as other towering figures of the nineteenth century—giants like Marx, like Freud, like Dickens and so many others—finally begin to fade from conscious view as the twentieth century has yielded to the twenty-first. Darwin stands out, virtually alone among his peers, as a man whose message, still debated in so many quarters in so many ways, remains the single major contribution of the nineteenth century that has not yet been comfortably and completely absorbed by mainstream western-world culture—ESPECIALLY American culture. Darwin still sticks in the craw of so many of us—and is correspondingly a hero to most of the rest. Few people have no opinion one way or the other on Darwin—he is either a hero or a goat—a saint or a sinner, a god or a devil. Poor guy was just a man.

I've been thinking for awhile now that Darwin's presence in modern America deserves to be chronicled—the better to understand his impact on our modern world. In a way, the Darwin Exhibition, my accompanying book Darwin. Discovering the Tree of Life (Norton, 2005) and perhaps especially the first thirty of my "Darwin Blogs," have been devoted to just such a chronicling of Darwin in America.

The blogs are back up on line. All of them. No lasting harm done—and I am told they are far more completely protected from scurrilous attacks than they were when they were successfully hacked. It's good to be up and running again!

But in the interim, one small strange thing has happened that I feel compelled to share with you. It promises to change the entire tone and tenor of these blogs in the future—and to provide a far more immediate and powerful source for the Darwin Chronicles in America:

Occasionally I receive emails from blog readers—nearly all them of them provocative and stimulating, nearly all of them friendly, many raising interesting points that I had not been aware of. I have enjoyed this small, choice correspondence when I see these emails forwarded to me from the website.

But, just after the blogs came back a week or so ago, I received an email like no other I've seen before. For one thing, there was no return address. For another, its message read:

September 8, 2006

Prof. N. Eldredge
Museum of Natural History (NY)

My Dear Professor Eldredge

Please forgive this intrusion, but my circumstances are, to say the very least, unusual.

I am familiar with you and your work primarily through your "website," as I am no longer able to read (or write) tangible written or printed script. Thankfully, digitized information is available to those in my circumstances.

I have perused your "Darwin blogs" (though why you call them thus is a bit of a mystery to me). I am aware that you were the scientific voice between a recent exhibition simply entitled "Darwin"—which quite naturally piqued my curiosity. (I was indeed able to survey this installation shortly before it closed). And I am aware that you are one among many who have recently written a book about me—my life, and my work; books, though, must now remain forever closed to me.

From you I have learnt that I have, in recent years, replaced another Charles—the prolific novelist Dickens—on the British 10£ note. I cannot for the life of me imagine why—though I have been much struck by your comment that men such as Dickens, Marx (whose works I gather caused much of a stir in world politics after my own death) and others whose memory had lingered, apparently, through most of the 20th Century, have finally, at long last as you have entered the 21st Century, begun to fade as icons—and rallying points—in modern human affairs.

Alas, all except me. Though profoundly grateful that I am apparently to be remembered as the scientist who brought transmutation at last to scientific respectability (to the point, I gather, of being considered the Founding Father of an enormously large and complex modern scientific discipline), with such original components to the Theory as I could myself muster, I find that standing alone after all my distinguished fellow nineteenth century contemporaries have found at last some measure of peace, profoundly unsettling.

As you know, my delay over publication of my ideas on transmutation ("evolution" as it has long since been called) through natural selection was occasioned by my fears that many in the scientific community—and the public at large—would oppose me, largely (if not exclusively) on religious grounds.

Thus I wander modern America, seeking to learn more about how it is that my ideas—even, it would seem, my own person—still provoke such a curious mixture of outrage and admiration.

I am not at peace. And though, my dear Eldredge, there is no way for you to send a reply directly to me, perhaps you may be so kind as to allow me to write further brief notes on occasion, addressed to your website.

Apologies, my dear Sir, if this communication disturbs you in any way. Thank you for your "blogs," as they have shed some light (though I cannot say I agree with everything I read there) on the curious circumstances of my continued fame and apparent pain that I still cause to many of the public citizenry of your country (and doubtless in others—even my own!—though evidently to some lesser extent).

My Dear Eldredge
Yours Most Truly,

C. Darwin

Well! Clearly a hoax! I don't believe in ghosts, and when I write that Darwin's presence clearly pervades modern America, I of course mean that metaphorically: his legacy, his name, his contributions, are still very much with us. Sure, maybe they even "haunt" some of us who seem so disturbed by the very idea of evolution. But I never for a minute meant to say that Darwin is literally here, as a sort of Dickensian Ghost of Evolution Past, to haunt us.

So, this is yet another intrusion into my website. But one, I admit, which is not vicious—like the hacker who destroyed the previous incarnation (so to speak!) of the blogs.

And I admit that whenever something comes up—like the Loch Ness monster—my professional skepticism immediately lines me up with my professional colleagues, doubting Thomases all; but secretly I always hope that there is some truth to the reports. For wouldn't it be great to have a genuine Mesozoic plesiosaur swimming around in Loch Ness?

And wouldn't it be great to be able to talk to Charles Robert Darwin? To get the lowdown on when, where and how he came up with his evolutionary ideas? To hear the details of his relationships with Henslow, Lyell, Hooker and Huxley? To find out what he thinks about all that has happened since his death—most momentously the discovery of the gene—and, much later, molecular biology? And, of course, what he makes of the fate of his ideas in the public at large?

So, in that spirit(!), what harm could we do to pose a little test of the identity of whoever it was who sent me this email—this missive with no return address purportedly written by Charles Darwin (and, admittedly, sounding rather like him)—though he has been dead since 1882.

We know he reads these blogs; we know he can write to this website.

If that's really you, Charles Robert Darwin, I am sure you will agree that, as no rational person can simply accept your assertion that it is indeed you, perhaps you will agree to a test or two to prove you are who you say you are.

Tell us something that happened to you while on the Beagle that, as far as you know, neither you nor anyone else spoke about after your return—a fact or two that never figured into any of your later writings about evolution, or anything else. A fact that can be independently ascertained based on historical records.

I await your reply, “Charles.”

Niles Eldredge

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