The Dispersal of Darwin
On Charles Darwin, Evolution, and the History of ScienceDrawin’ Darwin Big Draw @ Skelton Grange
Caption with the photo: “Kids from Skelton Grange Environment Centre in Leeds sketched out their images of Darwin’s evolution concept. They then painted these ideas onto wooden shapes which were brought to life as an evolution archway, which now stands in the nature area of Skelton Grange.”
ART: Darwin’s rhea by Diana Sudyka
Artist Diana Sudyka (blog), who did the logo for The HMS Beagle Project and another painting of Darwin, now presents young Darwin in the watercolor “Darwin’s Rhea”:
Darwin's rhea by Diana Sudyka
REVIEW: “Darwin’s Darkest Hour” on PBS’s NOVA
I was sent a review copy of Darwin’s Darkest Hour (website/watch online), the two-hour docudrama from NOVA/National Geographic, which aired on PBS on October 6th. I watched it last week, and here are my thoughts.
Darwin (Ian Cusick) & his wife Emma (Frances O'Connor)
I’ve known about this Darwin film since late July, and had been looking forward to it for several reasons. One, I wondered how it would compare with the docudrama portions of the “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” episode of the series Evolution that aired on PBS in 2001. Two, having anticipated (and still looking forward to seeing) the film Creation (open in the UK and elsewhere, not in the US until December) featuring Paul Bettany as Darwin since at least September 2008, it was good to see another production looking at the same time period of Darwin’s life (the post-Beagle, Origin-writing 1850s). I of course cannot compare Darwin’s Darkest Hour to Creation, but I might have a comment or two based on reviews of Creation elsewhere.
Alfred Russel Wallace (Rhys Bevan-John)
Darwin’s Darkest Hour begins in March 1858 in Ternate (in present-day Indonesia). We see a man in his jungle hut, in a malarial fever, murmuring to himself “Malthus,” thoughts on human populations, “external pressures” as he jots down words onto paper. Before this scene ends, we see him preparing a letter to C Darwin Esq. This man, as we will find out soon, is Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalist and co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. It is this the delivery of this letter, from Wallace to Darwin, that becomes Darwin’s darkest hour. (For more on Wallace’s places of residence while collecting in the Malay Archipelago [Indonesia], see George Beccaloni’s essay “Homes Sweet Homes: A Biographical Tour of Wallace’s Many Places of Residence” in Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace, pp. 7-43.)
When Darwin receives the letter, then begins a whole dialogue between Darwin and his wife Emma about his having priority to the idea of natural selection. We are taken to defining moments during the voyage of HMS Beagle and through the pages of his transmutation notebooks via this dialogue (it is in this dialogue that some rather corny exchanges enter, for example, on being shown his Notebook D, Emma asks Darwin “for the devil?” – yes, we know Emma was religious, but seriously?). It seemed odd to me that, in the film, Emma becomes Darwin’s supporter for ensuring his priority, and only after she and Darwin sort it out (mentions of his essay of 1844, a letter to Asa Gray, etc.) is it something that needs to be brought to Charles Lyell (I enjoyed this figure in the film) and Joseph Dalton Hooker (I did not enjoy the actor chosen to play him), men of high scientific standing who decide to have materials from both Darwin and Wallace read before the Linnean Society.
Aspects of Darwin’s life that have become all too familiar are treated in this film: his wretched health, his dealing with the deaths of two of his children, the apparent conflict with Fitzroy over the literal interpretation of Genesis during the voyage. The death of Darwin’s daughter Annie in 1851 – which some believe was the final straw in pushing Darwin away from Christianity, and thus allowing Darwin to further explore his thoughts on transmutation, and others not, most notably in the blogosphere Mark Pallen – occurs in Darwin’s Darkest Hour as memories, while the death of a son (Charles Waring Darwin) in 1858, is treated fully. (The inaccurate order of historical events in Creation is the main critique of that film by science educator James Williams, whose review appeared on this blog.) The scene of young Charles’s funeral is intertwined with the scene showing the reading of Darwin and Wallace’s materials at the Linnean Society, which neither attended (Wallace because he was nowhere near London and Darwin because of the death of Charles Waring). I liked the back-and-forth of dialogue:
REVEREND INNES: “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. In the midst of life we are in death.”
JOHN BENNETT: Extracts from papers by Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace: Part One by Mr. Darwin, “On Variation under Domestication and on the Principles of Selection.”
REVEREND INNES: “Of whom may we seek for succor, but of Thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased.”
JOHN BENNETT: “Be it remembered, I have nothing to say about life and mind and all forms descending from one common type. I speak of the variation of the existing great divisions of the organized kingdom. Nature could effect, with selection, such changes slowly.”
REVEREND INNES: “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother, here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
JOHN BENNETT: “We know the state of the earth has changed, and as earthquakes and tides go on, the state must change. Many geologists believe a slow natural cooling…”
Extracts from a paper by Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type.”
“One of the strongest arguments which have been adduced to prove…”
Darwin and a son doing science
What I thought was nicely done is showing how Darwin’s family was heavily involved in his work at Down House, the domesticity of Darwin’s research. He was an unconventional father, very involved in the raising of his children, and at times his children became themselves scientific subjects. The scenes showing Darwin’s children assisting, or being attentive to, his various experiments on plants and bees were my favorite, especially – and this should be no surprise – the scene about the seed dispersal experiments. Yet Darwin had his butler Parslow shoot birds for him, unlike in the film. [See Endersby's recent article on Darwin, Hooker, botany, and sympathetic science.]
What I particularly liked about Darwin’s Darkest Hour is that it did not take one single stance on Darwin’s delay, the two-decade period in between Darwin beginning his research on transmutation and the publication of On the Origin of Species. It brings in a little bit of many views historians have proposed: that Darwin feared public scrutiny, that Darwin feared conflict with his religious wife, that Darwin simply wanted more time to make sure his theory was right (in response to negative reviews of Vestiges of Creation [1844]), etc. (see John van Wyhe’s article on Darwin’s delay). Brian of Laelaps thought this inability for the scriptwriter to stick with one storyline made the film difficult to follow.
I do agree with Brian that the appearance of the actor who played Darwin (Ian Cusick) should have changed with how Darwin’s appearance changed in real life, i.e., that Darwin, by the time he published On the Origin of Species, was balding and did not have the flowing hair of Cusick. Nice to see Wallace appear in the film, though I do not know if Darwin and Wallace met at the Linnean Society and Wallace being introduced to Lyell. I could not, however, believe in the actor portraying Fitzroy.
Although I felt I was being forced to watch Masterpiece Theatre, I do think Darwin’s Darkest Hour is an improvement from the docudrama portions of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” and could serve as a nice introduction to folks unfamiliar with Darwin’s life. Do check out the various resources on the film’s website, including a piece on Wallace by Sean B. Carroll, an interview with the scriptwriter, and the entire transcript.
Videos from Cambridge Darwin Festival
Videos of many talks from the University of Cambridge’s Darwin Festival last July are now available on YouTube. The list is here. One of the talks, for example:
I had the pleasure of meeting Jon Hodge at the ‘Darwin in the Field’ conference.
Forthcoming Darwin book for children: The Humblebee Hunter
The Humblebee Hunter
The Humblebee Hunter [Inspired by the Life & Experiments of Charles Darwin and his Children] is a forthcoming (February 2010) children’s book about Darwin that differs from others:
On a beautiful day the last thing Etty wants to do is sit inside baking honeycake. She’d much rather be outside. Who wouldn’t? And there’s no better person to better person to be outside with than Etty’s father, Charles Darwin. While many might be familiar with the story of Darwin’s theory of evolution, few of us have had the opportunity to see Darwin the family man-at home in England, doing what he loved best-walking, exploring, and observing. All the while he pursued the answers to his most persistent questions, and he often had a little bit of help. Deborah Hopkinson’s lyrical story of Charles Darwin at home with his children portrays a very human side of one of the most revered figures in the history of science. In doing so, she shows the natural affinity children have for the scientific process.
“MSU historian heads international project on 19th century scientist”
From Montana State University News Service (14 October 2009):
MSU historian heads international project on 19th century scientist
BOZEMAN — John Tyndall, one of the most influential scientists of the 19th century, would’ve been better known if his wife hadn’t accidentally poisoned him and demanded control of his letters and journals, says Michael Reidy, a Montana State University historian.
The National Science Foundation is ready to pull Tyndall out of the shadows, however, and Reidy is overseeing the effort.
The NSF recently awarded Reidy $580,000 for a three-year project to finish transcribing 8,000 Tyndall letters, publish them and hold an international conference. The project will involve graduate students and scholars from 12 universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Among those institutions are Harvard University and Cambridge University. Co-principal investigator is Bernard Lightman, professor of humanities at York University in Toronto. He has been studying Tyndall since the mid-1970s and invited Reidy to propose the project to the NSF.
“I couldn’t have picked a better colleague to work with,” Lightman said. “He knew how to articulate the point that we were trying to set up something new, an international collaborative correspondence project.
“For me, this is a project I can really sink my teeth into,” Lightman added. “Tyndall is relatively neglected next to Huxley and the other evolutionary naturalists, yet there is so much fabulous archival material to draw from to get a better picture of who he was.”
Reidy said, “It’s really cool. It reflects very nicely on our department, on our graduate program. It puts us at the center of all these other very well-known programs around the world.”
Tyndall was a contemporary of naturalist Charles Darwin, biologist Thomas Huxley and chemist/physicist Michael Faraday — all renowned British scientists of the 1800s, Reidy said. The letters they sent each other touched on topics still debated today, such as the professionalization of science, government funding of science and the relationship between science and religion.
Tyndall, one of the original agnostics, defended Darwin against his harshest critics and published numerous essays and books on the role of science in the Victorian culture, Reidy continued. Tyndall published significant works in electro-magnetism, thermodynamics, sound, glaciers, global warming and spontaneous generation. He invented the Tyndallization process for sterilizing food. He was the first person to describe why the sky is blue and the first person to describe the natural greenhouse effect. One of the first and greatest mountaineers, he set up research stations in the mountains and studied the movement of glaciers.
“Said simply, Tyndall stood at the intersection of some of the most important developments in science and society, and his correspondence touches on all of them,” Reidy wrote in a project summary.
Tyndall died at age 73 after his wife, Louisa Charlotte, accidentally switched the dosages of medications he took for insomnia and gastrointestinal problems, Reidy said. She was so upset that she demanded control of his letters so she could publish them. She never published any of them, however. The task was too daunting, and she refused to turn it over to anyone else.
“He became rather unknown because of that,” Reidy said.
Lightman said approximately 6,000 of Tyndall’s letters ended up in the Royal Institution of Britain, where Tyndall spent most of his career. The other 2,000 were archived in some 25 other locations around the world.
Graduate students will transcribe the letters by looking at digitalized versions of them, Lightman said. He added that the Royal Institution found a firm to put its Tyndall letters on microfilm. The letters were then digitalized. Letters at the other archives were photocopied and digitalized. When letters didn’t reproduce well, a student went to the Royal Institution to check the originals.
Reidy said Tyndall’s handwriting was “horrible.” Fortunately, in some cases, Tyndall dictated his letters to his wife who had better handwriting. Tyndall’s letters range from one sentence long to 25 pages.
The grad students will turn their transcriptions into Word documents that end up online, Reidy said. The researchers will publish a one-volume calendar of Tyndall’s correspondence and expect to publish 10 volumes in print and online. Sometime in 2012, they will hold an international Tyndall conference at MSU.
Publishing Tyndall’s letters is the main goal of the project, but it also creates a new model of graduate student training and research by placing grad students at the center of the project, Reidy said. At MSU alone, the NSF grant will involve two or three graduate students a year for three years and one postdoctoral researcher. Besides transcribing letters, the grad students will incorporate their findings into master’s theses.
The end result should be an international community of Tyndall scholars, Reidy said.
She just can’t get interested…
Tonight I watched my review copy of Darwin’s Darkest Hour from NOVA/National Geographic. I will hopefully post my thoughts tomorrow, but I just wanted to share my wife’s Facebook status this evening:
hubby’s watching a British Darwin flick and I just can’t get interested.
That’s my life.
Havin’ some fun in the cold
100_3207, originally uploaded by darwinsbulldog.
I hate the cold. I hate snow. But at least someone close to me doesn’t feel that way. This is my son Patrick having some fun running around our front yard as I was putting some fake cobwebs on our porch.
Another Charlie’s Playhouse Giveaway
There is a contest on the blog Jolly Mom to win a Giant Timeline Floor Mat (evolution education tool) from Charlie’s Playhouse. Enter by October 23rd for the chance to get a cool Christmas gift for your kid or a friend’s kid. The timeline in action:
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