David Papineau
What Darwin Got Wrong
by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Profile Books, £20)
When Jerry Fodor says that Darwin is wrong, a lot of people will sit up and take notice. Fodor isn’t some religious crank, but one of the most respected figures in the academic world: a prolific author, professor of philosophy and founding father of the discipline of cognitive science. His reputation, however, is likely to be dented by this latest book. Fodor has a successful record as a controversialist, but in taking on Darwin he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Fodor isn’t the kind of thinker you would expect to oppose Darwinism. He has devoted his life to arguing that the human mind is a finely structured machine. His work straddles philosophy and psychology. As Fodor sees it, the human mind is best viewed as an innately structured digital computer. It may not be made of silicon chips, but it works in essentially the same way, with the help of a wide range of inbuilt “programmes” and “databases.”
Readers of the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement will know that Fodor has a variety of interests and an enviable prose style. What Darwin got Wrong displays his characteristic punchiness and fondness for a throwaway line. He may have a co-author in Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, but the prose bears Fodor’s stamp throughout. Presumably Piattelli-Palmarini, a biologist turned cognitive scientist, was brought in to add biological verisimilitude. In any case, the style and the biological facts may be fine, but the argument is no good.
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Philip Ball
The future of human space flight should become clear during October, with Nasa’s panel of experts due to report to the White House by the middle of the month. But the whole business has become very murky. The report was rumoured to have been submitted in early September, yet the White House denied receiving it. Its arrival is anxiously awaited, as it is expected to be sceptical about spaceflight programmes—upon which many jobs depend. Then again, there may be little cause for worry. Obama’s advisers are well aware of how popular these things are with the public.
Darwin centenary fatigue has not set in yet. Ongoing highlights include the Natural History Museum’s new Darwin Centre, feted as “the most significant expansion at the museum since it moved to South Kensington in 1881.” Darwin is also the inspiration for the Ballet Rambert’s new show, The Comedy of Change, which comes to Sadler’s Wells in November. Directed by Mark Baldwin, it draws on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection via courtship dances and extravagant visual display—anticipate plenty of peacock strutting.
Darwin is sometimes called biology’s Newton: a dubious accolade, given what an odd man Isaac Newton was. These oddities can be explored at the Royal Society on 6th October, in an event dauntingly titled: “Maths, the Universe and Everything: Inside the Mind of Isaac Newton.” In the evening Rob Iliffe, director of the Newton Project, will open up Newton’s perplexingly diverse musings on alchemy, religion and science. Did they form a unified worldview, or did he want to keep them distinct? Entry is free, but registration is required.
Gillian Beer
Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life
By Adam Gopnik (Quercus, £16.99)
Two men, born on the same day in different countries and circumstances: one a public figure and perforce a military leader, the other a natural historian brooding towards a theory that transformed thinking. Is there any significance to be found in their near-simultaneous births?
This present year, in which both Darwin and Lincoln are celebrated 200 years after 12th February 1809, has certainly tempted historians to seek out connections and counterfactuals. And it has also provoked Adam Gopnik to seek out their current significance. Do they each have purchase still? President Obama has claimed Lincoln as a model or forerunner in the search for a society in the US that will be equitable and open. Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been vindicated by the discovery of DNA and its consequences. But these affirmations do not register the extent of the meanings that each man has for his society and the world beyond.
Adam Gopnik finds the core of their powers in their eloquence—an eloquence that cannot be skimmed off from their ideas. The persuasive force of each man is at the heart of his achievement. And the key likeness between them, in Gopnik’s analysis, is their access to the resources of the English language and their powers of making fresh meaning: meaning that can even encompass contradictory outcomes. Each of them is, for instance, a liberal figure. But the burden of liberalism is its need to accept not only hope but catastrophe, and this bears heavily upon both men. Here, Gopnik defends the art of rhetoric—so often smeared as mere tricks—and places eloquence at the centre of liberal civilisation: “A commitment to persuasion is in itself a central liberal principle. New ways of thinking demand new kinds of eloquence. Our world rests on science and democracy, on seeing and saying; it rests on thinking new thoughts and getting them heard by a lot of people.”
Inevitably, other far less benign examples of the uses of persuasion will spring to mind. But Gopnik’s point—that telling and declaring must be a shared, responsive activity—is well made. It allows him to examine the language of The Origin of Species and of Lincoln’s speeches in often intricate detail, and to demonstrate how this language is profoundly implicated in the fabric of the lives the two men lived and the prophetic power of their ideas.
Both Lincoln and Darwin themselves, however, and the societies in which they lived remain curiously remote from each other. Here the nationality of the reader becomes important. For an American reader, the deathbed saying of Lincoln’s friend Stanton may be already familiar—and contested—territory. Did he say “Now he belongs with the ages” or “Now he belongs with the angels”? One can perhaps glimpse, as Gopnik puts it with his usual mix of velleity and straightforwardness, “just visible beneath the diaphanous middle of the references, the tracings of an ideological difference.” But this diaphanous quibble on angels and ages seems a slight structure on which to raise a pin, let alone a book. Lincoln was a politician, and more than that an executive: a president who made things happen through his actions. His language is part of his actions (he was by training a lawyer) but his powers exceeded his rhetoric.
Darwin, on the other hand, was a private man of science: an observer, a traveller, a writer whose intensely close scrutiny of the living world and the vanished world of the extinct found issue in his writing, and in that alone. Darwin’s writing is the ground of his achievement. Lincoln’s achievement was reached through more public means: through warfare and legislation.
Gopnik writes with charm and empathy. His summary sentences persuade and surprise: “If one word could sum up Lincoln’s character, it would be shrewd; if one word, Darwin’s, it would be sensitive.” His limber asides draw on our present day and he can call in Shakespeare or Galileo to make a point without change of register. This equable tone is very much part of the book’s own persuasion. We know this man. He speaks like a friend. He is the liberal voice—and it is a voice that recognises its own uncertainties.
Perhaps it was because of this civilised self-awareness that I found the chapters on Darwin immensely sympathetic, in key with the man described. But I also know far more about Darwin than I do about Lincoln—and I still found Lincoln a remote and puzzling figure when I had finished reading the work. Again, this may be a matter not only of personal ignorance but of history and nationality. Other people’s icons remain mysteries. But it may also have to do with the thorough presence of Darwin’s achievement in his words, whereas Lincoln’s achievement found other forms: “a faith in armed republicanism and government of the people.”
Adam Gopnik is intensely responsive to language that makes ideas live. As he writes of the Origin of Species, “it’s a book that makes the whole world vibrate.” At its best, his writing does that too. He is thoughtful, even dutiful, in recognising the contradictions and anxieties bequeathed to us by his two chosen heroes. He is unabashed in the face of those who scorn “great man” history, since what he seeks to show is the intimacy between the personal and the whole of a society. The happy chance that Darwin and Lincoln share a birth date may not bind them or their societies close. But it does here yield a number of striking insights into what we still demand of our forerunners. We want them to be like us, as well as to exceed us. Adam Gopnik well grasps the resentment as well as the acclaim that Darwin, and even Lincoln, still provoke.
David Herman
Attenborough: the great enthusiast
Sunday evening was a great moment to see two great old enthusiasts doing what they do best – and for taking in the death of a third. First, there was David Attenborough’s passionate tribute to Darwin, ‘Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life’ (BBC 1, Sunday, 1 February, now available on the iplayer). There may be more revisionist or highbrow accounts of Darwin (see Adrian Desmond’s article in the new issue of ‘Prospect’ for a terrific example), and I don’t know what Steve Jones would have made of being buried as ‘consultant’ in the closing credits. Nevertheless, this excellent documentary managed to mix a sense of Attenborough’s passion for geology and the natural world with Darwin’s story, to make a compelling hour of television. What was so moving was Attenborough’s lifelong enthusiasm, from schoolboy to old man now in his eighties. There will be no one to replace him.
There was just about time enough to change channels at the end for Sunday’s ‘South Bank Show’, to see the more youthful Melvyn Bragg introduce Nigel Wattis on the impact of Footlights on TV and radio comedy in Britain over the past half century. Melvyn Bragg has been producing and editing arts programmes since ‘Monitor’ in the 1960s, and yet this was as fun an hour of arts television as any he’s been involved with. The archive film and stills research was, as ever, superb and the talking heads were well chosen and illuminating.
Finally, the death, last Saturday, of Bill Frindall, the Bearded Wonder of ‘Test Match Special’, will have moved many. Cricket has always appealed because of its mix of sport, tradition and statistics, and Frindall was the embodiment of the obsessive counting which has drawn so many Englishmen to the sport. His own mix of passionate enthusiasm and benign omniscience won him the respect and admiration of many, many thousands of listeners. Read more »
Tom Chatfield
Darwin: ahead of his times in more ways than one
In a meticulously-researched essay for Prospect this month, based on his and James Moore’s groundbreaking book Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond argues that Darwin’s development of his theory of evolution was crucially catalysed by his personal and family commitment to the abolitionist cause. Based on new analyses of his letters, papers and private notes, Desmond paints a picture of Darwin that is far more complex than the traditional vision of an impartial scientist fighting against his society’s traditional beliefs (and his own innate conservatism). Behind the rational self-presentation was, Desmond argues, a shocked and deeply-felt aversion to those brutal realities Darwin had himself witnessed on his far-from-picturesque travels with the Beagle.
Perhaps most tellingly of all, Desmond’s account also teases out one of the saddest ironies of Darwin’s thought: that this brilliant advocate of the common humanity of all races was also, in his later years, resigned to the ethnic cleansings of colonial expansion as a matter of Malthusian inevitability. Still, if “Darwinism” was never as truly distinct from “social Darwinism” as advocates of the purity of his original theory might claim, it is nevertheless high time that, 200 years after his birth, we celebrate Darwin’s life and work as a moral as well as as a scientific triumph; and his youthful ambition for its humanitarian drive and compassion as much as for its clarity of insight.
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