In an interview on 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 19^th 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. He didn’t have much of a fossil record, so he doesn’t talk a lot about fossils, but he does talk about vestigial organs. And all that comes together to point to one ineluctable conclusion – that evolution happens and probably by natural selection.

All the details are carefully chosen from a much larger series of details that Darwin never published. The Origin was supposed to be an abstract for a much larger book, a bit of which still survives and is called The Red Book. He wasn’t going to write The Origin as it stands, but he was forced to because he had competition. Alfred Russel Wallace had come up with the same idea. So Darwin wrote it quickly – otherwise it would have been even longer.

It’s the evidence that convinced people more than anything else. You can’t just say, “This is my theory about how things work” and have it persuade people without supporting data. That’s why Darwin was such a success and Alfred Russel Wallace wasn’t. Wallace published a short note in 1858, and that was it. Darwin supported his theory with all these details. It’s just magisterial. He spent years writing to naturalists, to breeders, to obscure people in different corners of the world and collecting all this stuff. Then he built it into an edifice which changed the world. We’re still feeling the repercussions of it today, particularly in America where people absolutely refuse to believe it, simply because it goes against their religious beliefs.

Darwin has this nice line in the conclusion, about how “no one now objects” to gravity but when Isaac Newton first proved its existence, Leibnitz said it was an “occult” force and subversive of religion. I guess it takes a long time for people to accept these things.

That was part of his rhetorical strategy as well. If you read the famous last line of The Origin, he goes back to the idea of planets cycling around each other and around the sun according to the law of gravity, and compares that to his law of natural selection causing evolution.

But for some reason it has taken people longer to accept evolution than gravity.

Evolution was not rejected because there is anything wrong with it. It was rejected because it went against people’s religious beliefs. There is no other way to understand it. If you look across countries of the world, you see a dramatic negative correlation between the degree of religiosity and the acceptance of the theory of evolution. The more religious the country is, the less willing they are to accept Darwin. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, France and Norway, with high degrees of Darwin acceptance – up to 80-90% – have low degrees of religiosity, 10-20% (defined as “Do you pray every day?”) That suggests to me that people are conditioned to reject evolution because of their preconceived religious beliefs. If we didn’t have religion in this world, there would be no controversy. Evolutionary biology would be something as broadly accepted as the germ theory of disease.

In an interview on Prehistoric Man

Your next choice is a natural progression. This is Charles Darwin’s more controversial book, On the Origin of Species.

This is a classic in science. It is the explanation for how we got here. In other words why evolution occurs. And it is an interesting title because it is On the Origin of Species. Many people mistakenly think it is “The Origin of the Species”. But, in fact, Darwin says virtually nothing about human evolution until the very end of this book. And even then he only says, “Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” That is it – then he drops the topic, saving it for a later book.

But, of course, the scientific public and the general public immediately got the implications in 1859. What he had done was to provide an explanation for how evolution occurred, and this was natural selection. This was Darwin’s great insight and what that did was to provide the explanation of how and why all of life was linked together. It wasn’t until 1871 that Darwin published his book on human evolution. But even in 1871 there still was virtually no fossil evidence for human evolution. That’s where we now differ so much from the state of affairs in the 1870s. Now we have a tremendous amount of paleontological data about how we evolved.

For you personally, how have these two books helped with your work?

They provide an historical context and, importantly, these books provide a foundation for thinking about the past. We see this because they integrate disciplines that in those days weren’t all even called the disciplines we call them today. We have the geological sciences. Darwin drew heavily upon the geologists of the day to understand time. We have the biological sciences. Darwin was himself a great naturalist who tried to understand how organisms work. And we have the social sciences and the anthropological science. Darwin saw all these cultures that (in those days in the early to mid-1800s) had not yet been as altered or changed as they are now. We have here the integration of the earth sciences, the biological sciences and the social sciences that is crucial to understanding where we come from.

In an interview on Favourite Science Books

You have chosen five science books which you describe as having an elegance of thought which is science writing at its best. Let’s start with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859.

Yes, and it keeps selling. It is one of the most important books written, and I always urge people to read it. The book is more than just the theory of evolution. It’s an exploration of how the entire natural order works. And without understanding how the natural order works, you can’t understand environmental issues or how to solve them.

It is disturbing to me how many environmentalists have never read it. It explains the natural order better than anyone else ever has. It addresses biodiversity long before the word was invented, and climate change, and has some fundamental messages that we need to understand, such as the fact that everything that happens changes everything else. It is a starting point for understanding how everything works. Towards the end of the book Darwin says, “There is a grandeur in this view of life.” And there is. It is so magnificent the way it works.

Is Darwin readable?

Oh, Origin of Species is very readable. It muses on a lot of things, and progresses in the way that a good mind thinks. He will take on a very complicated idea by talking about a very simple observation in a neighbour’s farm. It’s always making the point that things are observable. And Darwin was a wonderful writer. He wrote in a very simple, honest way, talking about the heath in Staffordshire and running across an area where there were fir trees. He very clearly lays things out, and he lets the elegance of the natural order he is talking about shine through. It is the wholeness of his ideas and the completeness of his vision that make it readable.