Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I know you had a hard time narrowing your list down to just five books. In the end you chose books that are not only accessible but also your personal favourites.
Yes. There are books, like Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale or The Greatest Show on Earth, which give you evidence for evolution and are educational. But they weren’t inspirational to me in the way that these five books are. These are books that would be of benefit not only to the layperson but also to the working biologist.
I actually canvassed a lot of my colleagues, who are all evolutionary biologists, to get their ideas about what books to recommend. Most of them said they don’t read popular books on evolution, which I found kind of appalling. You can always learn stuff – nobody knows everything about evolution. Also, these books teach you how to write, how to promulgate your ideas and be a better educator. That’s part of our function as scientists, to communicate what we do.
I left aside more technical, textbook-type titles like The Selfish Gene by Dawkins and Adaptation and Natural Selection by George Williams, which is a bit of an arcane book. They’re inspirational to me as a scientist, but not so much as a scientist interested in communicating with the general public. It was a tough call. I had to leave out Carl Sagan. The good thing is that there is a plethora of books out there to educate the public about evolutionary biology. The bad thing is that the public doesn’t seem to be reading them, because 40% of Americans still reject evolution.
Your first choice, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Specifically, you’ve recommended the “annotated” version – a facsimile of the first edition – which is considered the best edition for general readers. Tell me why you chose it, when you first read it and why it inspired you.
The reason why I chose The Origin is because of all the books that have ever been written on science that are accessible to the layperson, this is the most important. It’s the one book you have to have read if you want to be considered an educated person. An educated person is someone who knows at least a little bit about the major disciplines in human endeavour. And in biology, this is what you need to know – not only historically but also contemporaneously, because Darwin was right, and still is right, about so many things.
I first read The Origin as an undergraduate. I’ve read it every year or two since then, so I must have read it 20 times. Each time I read it I get something out of it. I think it was Freud who said that, historically, there have been two great revolutions in human thought spurred by science over history. The first was the [Copernican] discovery that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. The second was the discovery that humans are just animals who evolved, like all other animals. And that was from Darwin.
To read The Origin properly, you must put yourself in the position of a Victorian reader – who is religious, who thinks humans have been specially created – and see how your worldview is turned inside out by these 500-odd pages of prose. You actually participate, when you read this book, in the revolution in humanity’s worldview, in its self-image, that took place in the latter part of the 19th century. The Origin came out 150 years ago, and it’s still readable, it’s still accessible.
Isn’t it quite hard to get through?
It is written in Victorian prose. But if you can read George Eliot or Jane Austen, I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with it. The difficulty comes with trying to unpack what he says about science in some places. His chapters on hybridism are pretty dire. Sometimes he gets deeply confused himself. He wasn’t right about everything, and that’s why I recommend the annotated version.
Yes, you mentioned that in the annotated edition there are margin notes that explain the hard bits.
There’s also another book that explains it in more detail. It’s called An Interpretative Guide to the Origin of Species by David Reznick, with an introduction by Michael Ruse. They’re trying to re-explain The Origin in modern prose. If you have trouble with The Origin, you might want to consult that. But I think the annotated version I recommend might be sufficient.
Do all biology students read the original Darwin?
No, they don’t. You’d be surprised how many evolutionary biologists haven’t read The Origin. Professionals! None of the biology students at the University of Chicago read it. I tried to make my undergraduates read it in class and they balked. They don’t want to read 500 pages of Victorian prose. So then I give them an abridged version, which is not really satisfactory. They don’t even like that. That’s what led me to write my own book. A lot of the evidence in the book is taken from Darwin, but it’s written in a way that makes it more accessible.
What I liked about reading Darwin was this strong sense of him as a working naturalist. He came up with this world-changing theory, but he did so by looking at pigeons. It’s the constant and very detailed observation of animals and plants.
He was definitely an inductive reasoner, building up the big picture from details. One thing people don’t realise about The Origin is that the rhetoric is magnificent. It’s built on anecdotes and details, all of which are carefully designed to one single end, and it gradually dawns on the reader that Darwin is right. What he’s doing is assailing you from all sides with evidence from different areas of biology – from animal breeding (to show that natural selection can work because artificial selection does), from geography, from embryology.
Jerry Coyne has been professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago for the past two decades. He specialises in evolutionary genetics and the origin of new species. He is a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and NPR. He is author of the book Why Evolution is True and writes a blog of the same name
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