Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Tell us about your first choice.
This isn’t Charles Darwin’s great work. The Origin of Species is the one we’re all taught so I hadn’t read this one until recently. It’s a fun read about a young man on an expedition finding things out. It’s as much about the journey as it is about evolution, but you can hear the idea gestating, the beginnings of the most amazing idea ever. The Origin of Species is a bit heavy going, but this is about the process of science, about him using his brain, the creative imaginative bit of science where he’s wondering why these fossils are here on top of the Andes. He sees Valparaiso destroyed by an earthquake erupting and is horrified by the brutality of nature – it’s as much a travelogue as anything else, but you can see how his mind is beginning to work. I wish I’d read it when I was younger – I’d have gone off a similar journey if I had.
Can he write?
Yes. It’s full of anecdotes and humour. I mean, he’s aware that he is an academic, and there are long passages about shale beds and geological formations that a travel writer might have left out, but he describes the meals he ate and the people he meets. You really get a feeling of his enthusiasm. It rips along.
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Tom Clarke is Channel 4’s science correspondent. A scientist turned journalist, he has covered energy and the environment in the frozen North, met some of the world's most endangered whales threatened by oil exploration in Russia’s Far East, and followed the growing pains of the UK’s landmark Climate Change Bill. In 2007 Tom reported and presented a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into the shadowy world of carbon offsetting. Most recently he was electrocuted (voluntarily) in Amsterdam in an attempt to explain an experiment designed to erase fearful memories.
Let’s look at some of your book choices, which are linked to that. Your first book is Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, which is the diary he kept of his extraordinary voyage.
In this book Darwin is writing as a much younger man than we meet later as a result of his great scientific achievements. But this was really the beginning of those achievements, as he was on this small wooden boat circumnavigating the planet and experiencing all the different cultures and all the different scientific data that were really new in those days. In South America he saw animals that science was only beginning to learn about.
This was on the Galapagos Islands.
Yes – there he recognised this great variety of clearly related forms, and, in the years that followed, he worked out how these species had arisen. His Voyage of the Beagle outlines that, and it is a great history book. It is also a great adventure book as well, as he witnesses volcanoes and earthquakes and different cultures and describes all of this in that mid-1800s terminology. Darwin is a great writer and an excellent observer so it is a good place to start understanding where we came from, and how we came to that understanding.
Is this what sparked off his interest in being a naturalist?
Yes, indeed. His father thought that it would be good for him to get into medicine and so forth. Actually, Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prominent British physician. In fact, he was an evolutionist, so evolutionary thinking was already in the family. And it was also very widespread in Darwin’s day. The problem was explaining it, and that is the problem that Darwin solved. His solution to that problem really began during this voyage of the Beagle, when he was exposed to the tremendous variety in the tree of life. He was beginning to grapple with this question of how do we explain this tremendous diversity in life itself, and what is our part in all of that?
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Tim White is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most famous for his work on early hominids in Africa, particularly the skeleton nicknamed “Ardi”, the oldest hominid skeleton ever found
