Olivia Judson on "Creation"

Olivia Judson is a science writer and research associate at Imperial College London who has written excellent articles on biology and evolution for the NYT as well as the entertaining and informative book "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to all Creation". She seems to like the new movie on Charles Darwin, "Creation", in which the real life couple of Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany star as Darwin's wife Emma and Charles. Interestingly Bettany did a fine job playing a Darwin-like naturalist and doctor in the film "Master and Commander".

Darwin's relationship with his wife was admirable and interesting because although she was always devoutly religious and he increasingly was not, their marriage was largely warm and affectionate throughout their lives. In typical scientific fashion, he had drawn up a list of pros and cons before marrying her and decided the pros outweighed the cons. Emma who had taken piano lessons from Chopin provided marital stability while Charles labored over The Origin.

In the movie, I think Connelly is too attractive to play Emma but that's a relatively minor point. My greater concern was with the scientific accuracy in the movie and whether it might turn out to be overwrought and unduly dramatised. However Judson largely mitigates my fears.

Unlike most biographies of Darwin, its central event is not the publication of the “Origin,” but the death of Darwin’s adored eldest daughter, Annie, at the age of 10. She died in 1851 after nine months of a mysterious illness; at the time of her death, she was not at home, but in the English spa town of Malvern, where she had been sent for treatment.

Annie’s death is also the central event of this beautifully shot film. For “Creation” is not a didactic film: its main aim is not the public understanding of Darwin’s ideas, but a portrait of a bereaved man and his family. The man just happens to be one of the most important thinkers in human history.

Which isn’t to say that Darwin’s ideas don’t feature. We see him dissecting barnacles, preparing pigeon skeletons, meeting pigeon breeders and talking to scientific colleagues. He visits the London zoo, where he plays a mouth organ to Jenny, an orangutan; at home, he takes notes on Annie as a baby (Does she laugh? Does she recognize herself in the mirror?). He teaches his children about geology and beetles, makes them laugh with tales of his adventures in South America, and shows them how to walk silently in a forest so as to sneak up on wild animals.

At the same time, we see his view of nature — a wasteful, cruel, violent place, where wasps lay their eggs in the living flesh of caterpillars, chicks fall from the nest and die of starvation, and the fox kills and eats the rabbit.

But all this is merely the backdrop to the story of a man convulsed by grief.

Thus the movie really seems to focus on Darwin's relationship with his family and especially with his beloved and favorite daughter who unfortunately died an untimely death as a child. According to most accounts, this was a focal point in Darwin's conversion to being a non-believer and the movie seems to dwell on the pain and conflict that Darwin experienced during this event.

It's probably easy to forget that along with being one of the greatest minds in history, Darwin was also an unsually kind, modest and gentle soul and a devoted family man. Seems like this movie will do a good job of underscoring this fact as well as entertaining audiences with some of Darwin's scientific explorations.

YEAR OF CHARLES



Two hundred years ago this day, Charles Darwin was born. The vision of life that he created and expounded on transformed humanity’s perception of its place in the universe. After Copernicus’s great heliocentric discovery, it was Darwin’s exposition of evolution and natural selection that usurped human beings from their favoured place at the center of the universe. But far from trivializing them, it taught them about the vastness and value of life, underscored the great web of interactions that they are a part of, and reinforced their place as both actor and spectator in the grand ball game of the cosmos. Not only as a guiding scientific principle but as an all-encompassing element of understanding our place in the world, evolution through natural selection has become the dominant idea of our time. As the eminent biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it quite simply, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a theory that is now as good as a fact. Both evolution and natural selection happen. And both of them owe their exalted place in our consciousness to a quiet, gentle and brilliant Englishman...

...Read the rest of the post on my Desipundit blog

GREAT IS AS GREAT DOES

Comparing which historical figure was "greater" than another one is a titillating, entertaining and often ultimately futile exercise. Yet we love to indulge in it. I myself have done it before. Sometimes such a comparison can actually give us insights into history or personality; more often it essentially boils down to demonstrating personal preferences and likings.

With such a frequently flimsy rationale for comparing personalities, one had better come up with valid cases. Comparing Churchill and FDR is fine in this context, Newton and Einstein is probably a little unwarranted (considering that they lived in vastly different times). As Silvan Schweber has demonstrated in his recent beautiful book, Oppenheimer and Einstein is a worthy comparison.

But Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln?? Even an amateur would have a hard time thinking of such a pointless and disparate comparison. And yet we can always trust the mainstream media for a steady supply of sub-amateurish dilettantes who get paid for entertaining their own personal quirks and musings. In this case it's Newsweek which actually has managed to turn this comparison into a cover story. The reason for the comparison? A very serious one; it turns out that both Darwin and Lincoln were born on the same day...

There are other reasons many of which are trivial; the fact that both men were riddled with depression often in their life, were workaholics, harbored doubts about their religious convictions, and were compulsive scribblers. I am pretty sure that Newsweek would have found a hundred pairs of "great" people who share such events and qualities. With such a trite and pointless comparison, I myself don't want to spend more than a paragraph on it. But what I found curious was the article's conclusions. If "greatness" were defined in terms of impact and influence of ideas, Darwin is of course the hands down winner. Or so you would think. In fact the title of the article is "Who was greater?" and that should be an easy one. But this is America, and it's that fact that makes the article more interesting. To be fair, it is well-written. That's not the criticism. The criticism is that it seems to be written by someone who on a whim thought of writing about Darwin, and then because of no particular reason thought of writing about Lincoln, and then wanted to combine the two together in some ad hoc way. And the last line makes it clear what the author's goal was all the way along- "Answer- Lincoln"

Clearly Lincoln is enormously important for Americans, with polls regularly putting him at the top of the "greatest presidents" list (although the lists are always to be taken with more than a pinch of salt, especially considering that Ronald Reagan also usually makes it into the top 5). Lincoln abolished slavery and definitely belongs on the great Americans list. But Lincoln was not a complete slavery-hater all life, as weren't many of his predecessors and contemporaries. Although this might reflect the very different outlook on this practice during those times, it does call into question Lincoln's "greatness". However, it's worth giving him the benefit of doubt and noting that at least on a relative basis he was one of the most outspoken opponents of slavery during those times. But other facts also need to be considered. It has been argued by many humanists and historians that the Civil War was unnecessary for abolishing slavery. Many diverse figures including Freeman Dyson and Ron Paul have said for example, that England got rid of slavery by buying the slaves. Perhaps this attitude would not have worked with slave-happy Southerners in white America. But did Lincoln try? Did others try hard enough?

I am not trying to put a blemish on Lincoln's stature, but considering him great begs answers to these questions. He was definitely a wise, honorable and astute man. But that does not mean his achievements go down in history unquestioned.

Now Darwin. His theory had a great impact on the whole world. It answered perhaps the single most important question that we as human beings can ask ourselves; Who are we? Where do we come from? Darwin not only discovered the answer to this question but in the process also discovered an overriding theory of unparalleled elegance and all encompassing generality that explained our origins and our journey into the past and the future. What I personally find really astonishing about Darwin is how many of his predictions came to be true. Some of his ideas were discounted, but so many of them have stood the test of time and are in fact being corroborated every single day. That he could make these predictions in spite of the absence of any knowledge of genetics, hereditary mechanisms and intact human fossils is really extraordinary.

Newsweek dug itself into a ditch by trying to compare two very different and completely unrelated people. That should have made the answer to the question "Who was greater?" very simple. In terms of influence, Lincoln changed a country but Darwin changed the whole world and our future.

But emblematic of modern day America, the magazine in fact leans towards saying that Lincoln was greater. The main point here, not entirely unreasonable, is that Darwin's theory is greater than the man, while Lincoln's ideas could have come only from himself. However, "Darwin's theory" involved a truly enormous amount of field work, rumination, classification and ratiocination that Darwin individually did. Evolution and natural selection may have been discovered by others, but it would have taken long efforts by many to reach such a stage. Exceptional credit belongs to Darwin simply for thinking of so many things and weaving them coherently together.

On the other hand, slavery and mistreatment of minorities did not go away in America for another hundred years after the Civil War. Lincoln made a substantial difference in the short-term, but even he could not instantly eradicate perhaps the greatest evil this country has seen. On a practical basis Lincoln did not change the face of slavery in the United States. His importance seems more symbolic than substantial; a President who put his foot down and officially declared that one of the oldest human institutions which had been taken for granted for years had always been a great moral travesty.

But far and away, what is more telling for me is that if you take a poll and ask the general public "Who was greater?", they would side even more with Lincoln. And not just because he was their president, but because in no other developed country today are there as many public opponents of "Darwinism" as in the United States. The reasons are many; religious, political and in many cases, plain ignorance of the beauty and applicability of natural selection. But whatever the reasons are, this is what it is.

And that is the real tragedy of this comparison. Not the fact that the comparison is trite and superficial. Not the fact that you are comparing apples and oranges. But the fact that the magazine's conclusions will be mirrored in a greatly amplified manner by the general population of this country.

P.S. For all the complexities of comparison, ask me who I think was the greatest American president and I will say "F.D.R." without batting an eyelid. And before that, I think we will have to go back to Jefferson to find a truly great and important president.

IT'S DARWIN DAY

And one of my favourite Darwin stories, a simple one which when I read in Nobelist Konrad Lorenz's "The Waning of Humaneness" as a school-kid, left me especially touched because it seemed to strike a nice balance between dispassionate and objective scientific curiosity and humane action. Lorenz along with two others has won the only Nobel Prize for medicine ever awarded for animal behaviour studies, and was especially an expert on aggression. His book King Solomon's Ring is hands down the most delightful and interesting book about animals and their behaviour that I have ever read. He recalled the story thus:

On one of his typical specimen-hunting forays in South America, Darwin came across one of nature's quintessentially cruel spectacles- a wasp mercilessly stinging a spider. The spider would try to scurry away but the the wasp repeatedly would find it and sting it until it was doddering painfully and still trying to get away. The wasp nonetheless relentlessly continued its onslaught. For a naturalist, the fight was worth documenting to the end, one example among countless of nature red in tooth and claw. But Darwin did the humane thing; he drove the wasp away and ended the spider's misery.