Sunday February 15, 2009

Theory that shook the world

By LEE TSE LING

How did the man who single-handedly shapeshifted the way in which we look at the
natural world come up with his controversial ideas about evolution?

A HUNDRED and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin’s – take a deep breath now – On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in
the Struggle for Life was published in Britain.

The title page from a first edition On the Origin of Species. One
such copy sold for more than RM700,000 in New York recently. – Wikimedia Commons

In it was a revolutionary theory that stirred scientific thought and scandalised the nation: An
explanation for how the great variety of Earth’s species, man included, developed over time.
Evolution was the name of the game, and natural selection was the means by which it
operated to ensure the survival of the fittest and diversity of life on Earth.

The book’s publisher, John Murray, was initially pessimistic about demand for the English
naturalist’s magnum opus. As it turned out, he needn’t have been – the entire first run was
bought up by booksellers on the first day of its release.

Had you been alive around Nov 24, 1859, you could have picked up one of 1,250 first edition
copies for 15 shillings (approximately £30, or RM161, in today’s money). And what an
investment that would have been – in June 2008, a first edition sold at Christie’s, the auction
house in New York, for US$194,500 (RM700,200)! It was a lot of money to spend back then,
and a whopping lot to spend now for a popular science hardback. Just what is so remarkable
about The Origin of Species, as it is more simply known today, that has kept Darwin in print
and curious minds ever since?

To understand that, we need to know a bit more about the theory and the man himself.

Young Darwin

Two hundred years ago in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Charles Darwin was born the privileged
son of successful and wealthy parents: medical doctor Robert Darwin and Susannah
Wedgwood, daughter of renowned potter and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood.

The young Charles initially trained as a doctor, but as he was unable to stand the sight of
blood, he opted to join the clergy instead. So in 1827, he moved to Cambridge and began
reading divinity, the classics, and mathematics at Christ’s College.

During this time, he attended public lectures on botany given by Prof John Henslow and
cultivated an avid interest in travel and natural history. As if by fate, these three interests
came together in 1831 when, bitten by the travel bug and at Henslow’s encouragement,
Darwin embarked on an expedition to chart South American coastal waters as the companion
of Captain Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle.

Cartography being the point of the expedition, the Beagle often tracked back and forth
repeatedly along the course of its surveys, giving Darwin ample time to wander about on
shore and study native wildlife.

By the end of the five-year journey, Darwin had visited Brazil, Patagonia, Chile, Peru, and,
famously, the remote Galapagos Islands 1,000km west of the South American coastline,
where he made his most crucial discoveries.

A little bird told him

Well, several little finches, actually. While island hopping among the Galapagos, Darwin was
fascinated by the fact that although most of the islands were inhabited by finches, each island
had its own particular kind of finch. Some had larger beaks, some had smaller beaks, some
had shaper beaks – adaptations that enabled each kind, or species, of finch to successfully
find food on its particular island.
It was this diversity that kick-started his thoughts on evolution, and the specimens he
collected there were to become the main proof supporting his theory.

When the Beagle docked once more in England in 1836, Darwin went back to Cambridge for
a while before moving to London. Any thoughts he had of pursuing divinity further were
scrapped, and he began life as a scientist in earnest, endeavouring to make sense of his
findings.

Ironically, his research was to eventually put him at direct odds with the Church, leading one
anonymous clergyman to label him “the most dangerous man in England”.

Little did they know that Darwin himself was somewhat horrified that he no longer believed
in the Church-prescribed concept of immutable, or unchanging, species put on Earth by a
divine Creator, confiding to a close friend that “simply believing in evolution seems like
confessing to a murder”.

Scoop or be scooped

From the moment he returned to England in 1836, Darwin had been meticulously piecing
together evidence for his grand theory.

In 1845, an account of his travels was published as part of the expedition’s Journal of
Researches. It is here that he first broached his ideas on “adaptive radiation”, ie, the
diversification of a founding species into a variety of different species, as seen among the
Galapagos finches.
By this time, he had also identified natural selection as the driving force through which
gradual changes in organisms were favoured, ensuring the survival of the fittest of the surplus
of offspring produced in each generation.

But by as late as 1858, The Origin of Species was still a work in progress, and might have
remained so for much longer if a certain Alfred Russel Wallace had not been poking around
in our part of the world.

The dashing young naturalist had been collecting specimens in South-East Asia in 1854.
While here, he noticed a clear boundary between the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok,
with South-East Asian species occurring on the east side and Australasian species on the
west.

Based on this biogeographic divide, known today as “Wallace’s Line”, he came to pretty
much the same conclusions as Darwin, and outlined them in a paper entitled On the Tendency
of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. This, he generously sent to Darwin,
the leading authority on the subject at the time.

The result on Darwin was electric. On one hand, he respected Wallace’s achievement. On the
other, he respected his own even more. Acting swiftly, Darwin jointly presented his and
Wallace’s findings to the Linnaean Society in London (even then the world’s oldest active
organisation devoted exclusively to natural history, having been founded in 1788;
linnean.org).

At the meeting, Darwin took care to establish his earlier claim by also presenting a letter he
had written to botanist Asa Gray in 1857 detailing his thoughts on natural selection. A year
later, Darwin completed The Origin of Species.

The damage control worked and, from then on, the theory of evolution by means of natural
selection was associated with Darwin’s name alone.

When Darwin died in 1882, he was honoured with a burial at Westminster Abbey.

Darwin’s everyman contribution

Darwin’s achievement was not that he “invented” or “discovered” evolution. Rather, he was
the first person to produce a well-researched and structured argument supported by sound
evidence at a time when most conclusions about species diversity were armchair assumptions
or taken on faith.

The Origin of Species was also written in such a straightforward manner that even a non-
scientific audience could appreciate it. Drawing on information from other thinkers of the
time and his own observations, it was a summation of what was then known about natural
history, from which he spring-boarded to his own conclusions.

Whether or not one believes in creation or evolution – for while evolution can explain how
one organism changes into another over time, it can only hypothesise about the origins of life
itself (see ‘Battle of the ages’ on SM5) – Darwin’s achievement can be appreciated by
everyone as a humanist victory of scientific methodology and rational thinking over
pseudoscience.
His second contribution was to spotlight the miracle of Earth’s biodiversity and highlight the
need to conserve it.

According to evolution, every living creature is its species’ magnum opus, the one in a
million that beat the odds to win the right to survive; it is its species’ work in progress,
capable of changing to meet new challenges; and it is its species’ hope for the future,
containing within it the potential to become so much more. An entire world – our entire world
– would have to be created over before any living thing we see today could come into being
once more.

The extinction of any living creature therefore is the destruction of millions of years of craft,
and it brings us that much closer to our own extinction.

And considering we’re living in an age where mass extinctions are occurring more rapidly
than they ever have in recorded history, it’s a lesson we need to heed.