I remember reading Finding Darwin’s God awhile back.  The first half of the book was an excellent defense of evolution and critique of creationism.  The second half of the book was a poor defense of god belief.  I remember thinking that if Miller had only applied the logic from the first half of his book to the second half, he would be an atheist.

Miller was one of the star witnesses on the side of science in the “intelligent design” case in Dover, Pennsylvania a couple years ago.  He’s now come out with a new book, Only a Theory.

“Darwin’s God” that Miller refers to is evidently a supernatural creator that Darwin implies exists in the final sentence of Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Miller sees an overall god-intelligence in the universe, but not the day-to-day micromanaging of evolution that Intelligent Design advocates allege.  This god is supposedly the First Cause and set nature’s laws in motion–including genetic mutation, natural selection, and heredity; in other words, evolution–and then stepped back and let the universe run itself.  So, this god works through unguided evolution to create new species.

What Miller didn’t tell us during his talk was that by the end of his life Darwin had become an agnostic.  In other words, Darwin himself had lost Darwin’s God.

One of the reasons Darwin abandoned the all-powerful, all-loving Christian god was because of the cruelty he saw in nature. After Miller’s lecture I spoke with him and asked him how he, a Catholic, could reconcile the cruelty in nature with the idea of a loving god.

I first asked why God couldn’t have made all creatures vegetarians, so that some animals wouldn’t have to painfully and cruelly kill and eat others.  Miller said that that would mean that God would be stepping in and interfering with the natural evolutionary processes that he had set in motion.  (Evidently God avoids miracles these days.)

I then asked Miller about painful human birth defects where the child dies very young.  Why couldn’t God have arranged it so that all genetic mutations were neutral or beneficial mutations?  His answer was the same: that would mean that God would be stepping in and interfering with the natural evolutionary processes that he had set in motion.

It seems that Miller understands the theological problem with a god who has to constantly intervene in his creation.  He once stated “[I]f God purposely designed 30 horse species that later disappeared, then God’s primary attribute is incompetence.  He can’t make it right the first time.”  (“Educators debate ‘intelligent design’ ” by Richard N. Ostling, Star Tribune, March 23, 2002, p. B9.)

It seemed to me that this god wasn’t of much use.  “So in other words,” I said, “this world operates exactly the way we would expect it to operate if there were no god.”  Miller agreed, citing retired Vatican astronomer George Coyne, who said that the universe doesn’t need God.

Again, I asked him how he was able to reconcile the problem of natural evil with a loving god.  He said that he was able to do so, but he didn’t provide details as to how.  I told him I have never been able to do it.

Other people were waiting to talk with Kenneth Miller, so we parted company, agreeing to disagree.

As I walked back to my car, I thought: Miller has all but admitted that there is no actual evidence for a god, and that certainly a god wasn’t involved in the daily process of evolution.  And yet Miller believes in a god.  This must mean that he believes on a basis other than evidence.  In other words, on faith.  Evidently the belief came first and the rationalizations second.

Miller was raised by Roman Catholic parents and is “coincidently” a Roman Catholic himself.  Of all the varieties of god belief he could have chosen, he “just happened” to pick the one he was raised with.  Indoctrination has trumped evidence.  To me, this seems like a very unintelligent design.

August Berkshire is the vice president of Atheist Alliance International, past president of Minnesota Atheists and member of the board of Camp Quest of Minnesota.

I was reading today about the problems facing the Theological Evolutionists. They accept the science of evolution yet hold on to their faith that an active creator designed the process of evolution to lead to Man. Bart Klink’s essay at Infidels.org spells out their quandary. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Had the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago missed the earth, it’s likely that our little branch on the tree of life would never have developed, since the end of dinosaur dominance made it possible for our small mammal ancestors to flourish. How are such chance contingencies in the history of life compatible with the alleged providence of a Creator?

If we step outside of our chauvinistic inclination to look at evolution as a process with humans as the teleological result of its process, the unfolding story of life’s continual divergence makes even more sense. As Klink illustrates, we are but a small twig on a minor branch of the Tree of Life and not necessarily its crown.

In biology, we know that the whole of the aviary are descendants of common ancestors within the mighty dinosaurs. Prior to the great meteor crash on what is now the Yucatan peninsula, the antecedents of modern birds had already begun to fan out from their common ancestry with coelurosaurs (a group which includes velociraptors.)

For the layperson looking at dinosaurs, this relationship is easier to see in the modern raptors such as eagles, owls, falcons and hawks. These magnificent birds have the temperament of what we think of as keen hunters demonstrating the truism that nature is “red in tooth and claw.” The raptors hunt and eat and participate in Dawkins’ “evolutionary arms race.”

But what of the pretty little flutterers that stop by your bird feeder to chirp and nip at the seeds you leave for them? These are perhaps a bit more difficult to visualize as sharing common ancestry, relatively recent common ancestry, with the slashing and flesh-ripping velociraptors depicted in Jurassic Park.

Crows ripping at the flesh of a dead squirrel on the ground? Yes, they are living from meal to meal and cawing their warnings to each other, much as the more vicious dinosaurs of our imagining. The budgie in your cage, playfully bobbing and primping in front of a mirror? It is harder to imagine such a cutie as the descendant of the mighty hunters of 65 million years ago. Nonetheless, it is a survivor of evolution.

Most of the problem that people have in accepting evolution is the popular notion that is often falsely ascribed to Charles Darwin, a phrase he only temporarily accepted. “Survival of the fittest” conjures images of nature constantly at war for food and sex, a battle between predator and prey and suggests that adaptability involves the continual development of “bigger, faster and stronger” predators and the concomitant “bigger, faster and stronger” prey.

“Survival of the fittest” did not originate with Darwin. It was coined instead by philosopher Herbert Spencer and applied by “Social Darwinists” to describe a condition of raw power in economics, unfettered by regulation or oversight. Evolution, properly understood, does not entail survival of the fittest. It is not a matter of the fastest, the strongest and smartest proceeding to the next generation. It is a matter of populations surviving well enough to continue until they eventually face extinction.

Small birds find various niches to fill. The budgie and the robin survive because there is enough of the food energy that they can use to last through successive generations, and all they need to pass on their genes is to reproduce in great enough numbers that their predators can’t overwhelm and destroy their species. Malthus’ essays on population and economics are said to be prime inspirations for Darwin’s ideas on natural and sexual selection. A species which can outnumber and outlast its competition will continue, if it can adapt to changes in the environment.

When the great rocks collided with the Earth at Chicxulub, (and possibly others at the same time in Ukraine and in the Indian Ocean,) a mass extinction ended the reign of the dinosaurs, the large beasts who ruled as the number one predators on land for 160 million years. It ended the reign of the plesiosaurs in the oceans. It left open, after Earth’s recovery, niches for new forms to arise from the common stock shared by dinosaurs and birds, and here we are in the modern age feeding sparrows and chirping birds outside of our windows.

The smaller birds survived because the massive disasters left for them room to build their populations. Out of the ashes of the K-T extinction arose new plant life, new forms of food for the taking by hungry birds. (To return to Jurassic Park for a moment, Ian Malcolm explains “Life finds a way.”) The massive disaster also likely made it possible for mammals to diversify and embiggen, and transform to the point where arose humans smart enough to make and fill bird feeders.

The quick answer to Bart Link’s question I quoted above is that the meteors colliding with earth at the K-T Boundary was a deus ex machina, that the dinosaurs had finished their role in paving the way towards the eventual development of man. The big bad rocks were the Hammers of the God(s) and a necessary step for Theistic Evolution.

That answer is unsatisfying to me for the simple reason that it really adds nothing but a violation of Occam’s Razor. It’s an unnecessary addition to the point of inquiry. Evolution takes advantage of catastrophes, and often the fit to survive are not the biggest, strongest nor the fastest; just the ones who make it through.  I am happy that the meteors struck, because if not for their destruction there would have been no key lime pie and no humans to eat it.  There would have been no birds calling outside my window on a Sunday morning to wake me.  I just don’t think they were intentional.

Consider the lowly bird. It’s outside my window. Consider the mighty T. rex. Its bones are in a museum.

New footage shows rare rhinos in Indonesia: WWF

New infra-red footage released Thursday captures hitherto unseen images of elusive Javan rhinos, the most endangered mammal in the world with less than 60 individuals believed to remain alive.

Terra Daily

Danger Lurks Underground For Oak Seedlings

Scientists trying to understand why oaks are starting to disappear from North American forests may need to look just below the surface to find some answers.

Purdue University researcher Robert Swihart found that pine voles, small rodents that live underground, prefer oak roots to those of other commonly growing seedlings. The study identifies the rodents as a possible factor leading to high oak mortality rates that are threatening the resource base of the hardwood industry.

Terra Daily

Enzyme behind cancer spread found

Cancer metastasis, where the cancer spreads from its original location, is known to be responsible for 90% of cancer-related deaths.

Institute of Cancer Research scientists have found that an enzyme called LOX is crucial in promoting metastasis, Cancer Cell journal reports.

BBC News

Chimps craft ultimate fishing rod

Scientists believe they have solved the mystery of why some chimpanzees are so good at catching termites.

A team working in the Republic of Congo discovered that the chimps are crafting brush-tipped “fishing rods” to scoop the insects out of their nests.

BBC News

On Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’

In addition to being the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, 2009 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of his fundamental work, “On the Origin of Species.” As with many original sources, it is known mostly by reputation. Few people who are not biologists read Darwin in the original. But his writing can still offer surprises, insights and pleasures, and it can be sampled here, with selections by prominent scientists of their favorite passages and discussions of why these passages are important.

New York Times

Darwin’s Wake Splashed Artists, Too

The artist stands in the distance, gazing up at the striated chalk cliffs on the coast of Kent, England. His family is gathering shells in the shallow tidal pools of Pegwell Bay that, with the receding waters, have a look of barren desolation. The sky is an unearthly yellow from the glowering late light of an autumn sun. Above, Donati’s Comet leaves a trail that would not be seen for another two millenniums.

New York Times

DNR unveils new Critical Habitat license plate designs

Minnesota nature lovers will soon have additional ways to support critical habitat in the state by selecting one of four new-design license plates.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Minnesota Department of Public Safety will choose four plates from among eight different image options with a goal of having them available for purchase later in the year.

Minnesota DNR

Call Him Pikachoo Man

For better or worse, inflatable leather fetish goods maker Obsidian Design bring us this: Pikachoo.

The handmade inflatable latex rubber outfit is easy to inflate and deflate — apparently! Obsidian says that it’s easy to breath through the Pikachoo head, and vision is made possible through the character’s mouth.

Kotaku

104 Ways to Hilariously Ruin the Watchmen Movie

We know the Watchmen movie isn’t going to be 100% faithful to the book, and that’s OK. But what sorts of stuff could Zack Snyder have inserted that would have ruined the entire thing?

Gizmodo

PROJECT>PIECE TOGETHER FOR PEACE

Flash animation of the arrangement, Tangram style, of Earth’s land masses into 12 animals.

Graflex Directions

Paul Simon – If It’s Magic (Celebrating The Music Of Stevie Wonder)

Pop queen Shakira back to her roots

To travel with multi-million-selling pop star Shakira is to travel behind tinted windows, on private planes and on Shakira time – always at least an hour behind schedule and always stopping for autographs and photos. It involves long waits while she has hair and make-up touch-ups before emerging from cars, planes and buildings.

But at the centre of the superstar entourage is a young Colombian who is disarmingly friendly and passionately eloquent about education.

BBC News

He Was Also Right

Newton was wrong, too.  If astrophysics had relied on Newton and Einstein not corrected Newton, space exploration would be a dicey game indeed.  We would never be able to find our way around.

On Tangled Up in Blue Guy, I often post a “Friday 419″ piece. Today I will talk about a different kind of scam.  Magazines and newspapers are selling you copies of their publications with the shocking revelation that Darwin’s work was not completely accurate, based on new knowledge gained since his time.

We are not shocked by inaccuracies in Darwin’s works of description.  We would be, instead, shocked if he had gotten everything completely correct.  He described the processes of natural and sexual selection based on the knowledge to which he had access.  Did you know that he had not even known about “genes?”

There are other things he got wrong as well, but some science bloggers took great trouble to explain why a recent spate of pop science articles were just plain inane.

John S. Wilkins had a go with “Darwin was wrong…ish“:

The targets journalists I wish to attack here are those of New Scientist, Newsweek, The Telegraph, and the media release writers for Texas A&M University. And some of the scientists and philosophers whose comments are reported therein are equally guilty. But not wanting to spoil my own nest I shall leave the readers to work out who I mean…

Jason Rosenhouse at Evolution Blog:

Part of Abbie’s point was that when science journalists hype some small advance as a fundamental change in our view of the world, it is usually scientists themselves who pay the price for the irresponsible reporting. She could have asked for no better illustration of her point than the cover of the current issue of New Scientist magazine.

The cover sports a big green tree with the words “Darwin Was Wrong.” I hope they sell a lot of magazines with that load of tripe, since they certainly were not thinking about the generations of school kids and church-goers who will now be treated to that cover in every creationist power point presentation between now and the Rapture. How many people do you think will actually read the article to discover what it was, precisely, that Darwin got wrong?

Larry Moran at Sandwalk:

I happen to believe that the science of evolutionary biology has moved on since 1859, and I happen to be a proponent of evolutionary processes that Darwin new nothing about. Nevertheless, proclaiming that “Darwin was wrong” is a different story. That’s an egregious example of journalistic hype and it’s unacceptable in a magazine like New Scientist.

The main article is Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life. The author is science journalist Graham Lawton.

The essence of the story is that the early history of evolution is probably characterized by a net of life and not a traditional tree. The “net” metaphor is due to many example of lateral gene transfer.

Evolutionary Novelties:

1. It is an oversimplification to say that Darwin was “wrong” on this point. It is not a clear cut case of right or wrong. Instead, the facts as we understand them today are more complex than what Darwin envisioned, or could have envisioned (given he didn’t know about DNA).

2. The primary, most general implication for the history of life is not changed. Darwin’s tree of life posits common ancestry of all life. This is the central scientific fact that anti-evolutionists rebel most against (because they don’t want to admit we are all related to slime-molds, etc). In fact, the new observations about biology continue to reinforce Darwin’s history-changing insight that all life shares a common ancestry. Yes, we share a common ancestor with a chimp and a fungus, get over it.

PZ Myers on Sharon Begley’s piece:

This is just wrong on evolution:

Water fleas pop out helmets immediately if mom lived in a world of predators; by Darwin’s lights, a population of helmeted fleas would take many generations to emerge through random variation and natural selection.

It misses the whole point. The population of water fleas have a genetic attribute that allows the formation of spines under one set of conditions, and suppresses them under others. This gene regulatory network did not pop into existence in a single generation! If it did, then Begley would have a big story, evolution would have experienced a serious blow, and we’d all be looking a little more carefully into this ‘intelligent design’ stuff. The pattern of gene regulation was the product of many generations of variation and selection; only the way it was expressed in a phenotype experienced a shift within a single generation.

All right, so the newsies got it wrong.  Is it a big deal in the scheme of things?  I would say so.  Evolution itself is confusing enough as it is, and most people don’t understand it.  That’s why it is easy for creationists to make headway in the political realm.  They take stories such as these, and make hay not over the science itself, but the misunderstanding of science.  Uncommon descent was quick to jump in with a “See we have been right all along and Darwinism is doomed.”  Here’s Paul Nelson:

While Darwin argued for a single Tree — probably the most powerful image he introduced into biological perception — he was always cagey about the structure of its root. Life was “originally breathed ['by the Creator,' added in the 2nd edition of the Origin] into a few forms or into one” (1859, 490). There’s a world of (inferential / phylogenetic) difference, however, between divinely created first life and naturally arising first life, when the single most important question in the latter scenario concerns the probability of abiogenesis. “A few forms” that independently evolved (say) ribosomal structure, versus a single origin for the ribosome, would entail radically different consequences for phylogenetic reconstruction.

Move the red bead of the probability of abiogenesis down its wire, away from zero and towards one, and funny things happen to the structure of the monophyletic tree of life. The tree comes apart from the bottom, and the fracturing process rapidly climbs up into the branches.

And Abbie Smith at ERV catches John West using the cover:

West just plastered this New Scientist cover on the screen and read a line or two from it. I asked him about this during the Q&A, and he responded appropriately– its a web/net of life at the beginning, not ‘one’ LUCA. So I was like ‘So why did you say DARWIN WAS WRONG if you knew the information in that article was decades old?’ He just dirped on stage, I told everyone to go online to read the article. He tried to dirp back ‘Or go on your BLAGS LOL!’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, we talked about this weeks ago. Idiot.’

Darwin was wrong and he was right.  He first published 150 years ago, so it is not strange nor is it unheard of for an understanding of evolution or of any scientific concept to be modified as people work and study and explore.  These pop articles were put out so that magazines and newspapers had something sensational to “scoop,” to grab attention in the growing frenzy over Darwin’s birthday.

Are they scamming us?  They may not believe it, and they may even be sincere in thinking that they are publishing “news.”  But they are publishing misleading, sensational claims and making money from it while we pay an additional price in the general understanding of science.

Are they scamming us?  You tell me.

St. Paul Proclamation

Quiche Moraine will also be out in force for the local Darwin Day party at the Bell Museum:

Darwin Day Party
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 7 to 9 p.m.
Bell Museum Auditorium
$10/free to museum members and University students

The speakers will present in the auditorium from 7 to 8 p.m. Birthday cake and refreshments are served after the presentations.

Celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday! Part of a world wide celebration, the Twin Cities’ version is at The Bell Museum of Natural History this Thursday night. Join in the fun with cake, drinks and presentations by U of M scientists and educators. They will present funny, outrageous and controversial rapid-fire, media-rich presentations about Darwin and evolution. From the big bang to the human genome, hear the newest research and controversy on evolution and Darwin.

Minneapolis

See additional details and more about the genesis of the event here.

We’re also very happy to say that we all live in a metro area that recognizes the importance of Darwin’s ideas. A big thanks to Minnesota Atheists for arranging the proclamations from both of the Twin Cities.

And finally, if all the local Darwin doesn’t satisfy your Darwin Day cravings, you can find much more at the Blog for Darwin blog swarm event.

The Great Leap Forward for Energy Metabolism

Abiogenesis has been a sticking point for naturalists and creationists in the argument over the necessity for a creator. Biologists are often careful to point out that evolution and natural selection begin where abiogenesis sets the table, and I disagree on that. I have maintained that the process of abiogenesis was a matter of a continuum of change in chemistry over a period of millions of years way back about 4 billion years ago and that the whole process wavered back and forth over some threshold before natural selection, adaptation and flow among proto-life and life finally took hold.

It was all an evolutionary process, as various means of energy metabolism proved stronger and more successful than others, leading to a strategy that allowed self-sufficiency and the maintenance of individual self-contained cells that we would all agree are living. The definition of “life” is fuzzy, so much so that the argument belongs as much to philosophers of science as it does to biologists.

So when did life begin? We will never be able to pinpoint a fossil or genetic “first life,” but we can say a few things about what is common to all life here and now. Cells have membranes to contain all of their functioning parts, filter those molecules that should enter from those that should stay outside. Cells have DNA, which provides the framework for the proteins and organelles which make up the cells. Cells have RNA, which carries the message from the DNA through the cytoplasm to determine the characteristics of the organelles within the cytoplasm. This, of course, is a very general description.

Cells also contain mitochondria, and this is one of the puzzles of early evolution. Mitochondria are symbiotic, originally a form of self-sufficient bacteria, which when integrated with eukaryotic cells, gain and provide benefit to the host cell. Mitochondria have their own set of DNA, and this DNA provides the basis for some of its key structures, and the unique tools that the mitochondria use to convert sugar into the energy it shares with its host.

As a symbiotic feature, mitochondria have safe homes inside the cells, and they pay rent by using the Krebs Cycle to provide much more energy than the hosts would be able to produce without them. Mitochondria are perhaps the most successful example of how cells work in tandem to assure mutual survival. Mitochondrial DNA is also passed, in sexually reproducing life, through the female’s DNA line, which yields data on lineage. This is unique and helpful, but not the issue in this post. I only mention it here because this is the way that mitochondria have entered the vernacular. I am sure that my readers are aware of the “Mitochondrial Eve,” a woman who lived on the order of 200,000 years ago and is thought to be the ancestor of all humans now alive.

My question remains on the origin of the mitochondrial integration with eukaryotic cells. A recent commenter made the claim that evolution can’t explain how mitochondria came to be included in the cellular structure of eukaryotes, and I did some checking. Guess what I found with a quick search through PubMed? Don’t sweat it too much, cause I’ll just blurt it out. I found a paper from 2001 that explains the likely integration. I just wish creationists wouldn’t get so cocky, because it is so easy to burn down their strawmen.

The paper I found is The Origin and Early Evolution of Mitochondria. The chief authors are Michael W. Gray, Gertraud Burger and B. Franz Lang. ¹

Here is the abstract:

Complete sequences of numerous mitochondrial, many prokaryotic, and several nuclear genomes are now available. These data confirm that the mitochondrial genome originated from a eubacterial (specifically α-proteobacterial) ancestor but raise questions about the evolutionary antecedents of the mitochondrial proteome.

Recent debates about eukaryotic cell evolution have been closely connected to the issue of how mitochondria originated and have evolved [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. These debates have posed such questions as the following: Did the mitochondrion arise at the same time as, or subsequent to, the rest of the eukaryotic cell? Did it originate under initially anaerobic or aerobic conditions? What is the evolutionary relationship between mitochondria and hydrogenosomes (H₂-generating and ATP-producing organelles that are found in eukaryotes lacking mitochondria)? Is the amitochondrial condition in these organisms a secondary adaptation or is it evolutionarily primitive – or, in other words, did any organisms diverge from the main line of eukaryotic evolution before the advent of mitochondria? Whereas the issue of how the eukaryotic cell arose remains controversial [8,9], current genomic data do allow us to make a number of reasonably compelling inferences about how mitochondria themselves originated and have since evolved.

Now, I have a confession to make on this paper. Because I am not a trained biologist, I only understood portions of the study. I read through it and ran into many concepts with which I am not familiar. So why would I write about this?

I wanted to point out that an important pathway leading to the emergence of eukaryotes from their prokaryotic ancestors includes the integration of mitochondria, and in this study, the authors examined the relationships between the genomes of yeast and mitochondria to show how this integration likely occurred. Examination of genomic sequences has become nearly as important as the study of fossils into determining the early pathways of evolution, and it will likely assist biology in answering these questions to a degree that paleontology can’t match.

I don’t mean to say that examining genomes can replace paleontology. I mean that they are complementary tools of science.

Further, since we all as eukaryotic beings carry mitochondria in all of our cells (even sperm cells carry a tiny fragment of mitochondrial DNA), we have an answer to the creationist objection, “Were you there?”

We can answer, “Yes, we were there. Almost. We were there sometime shortly after abiogenesis.” Yes, it was likely some hundreds of millions of years after life passed the abiogenesis threshold once and for all, but in the geological timeframe, it was a very short time indeed.

Okay, so today is Charles Darwin’s birthday. The claim is that natural selection only earned its wings once the first cell arrived and began its differential reproductive success. This “natural selection” thing and the publication of On the Origin of Species are well worth celebrating, because although there had been sketches and inklings prior to Darwin’s formulation, there was no serious explanation for how evolution could work. Darwin broke the ice, so to speak, and encouraged biologists to explore natural means of species creation.

This is why we celebrate Darwin. His work was not the beginning of the idea of evolution, and more importantly his work was not the end nor the summit of evolutionary thought. We celebrate because he took the first steps of serious investigation into the pathways of evolution. He showed us the tools that we could use to explore our common heritage in a way that provides answers—and questions.

This geologist was the Newton of biology. Just as our understanding of physics has grown immensely since Newton, so to our understanding of biology has bloomed since Darwin. His was the seed that led to the flowering and the study of such tools as genomics. Funny that he wasn’t even aware of genetics, but there you have it. And so do we.

1. Genome Biol. 2001; 2(6): reviews1018.1–reviews1018.5. Published online 2001 June 5.

   PMCID: PMC138944

   Copyright © 2001 BioMed Central Ltd
   The origin and early evolution of mitochondria
   Michael W Gray,¹ Gertraud Burger,² and B Franz Lang²

   ¹Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4H7, Canada

   ²Département de biochimie, Université de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3J7, Canada

   Correspondence: Michael W Gray. E-mail: M.W.Gray@dal.ca
   Corresponding author.

   Michael W Gray: M.W.Gray@dal.ca

Charles Darwin didn’t. He was, in fact, pretty uncomfortable with the idea of changing the world.

Darwin was actually a lot like the people I do like to write about. He had his pet obsessions that he pursued at length, but his real work started when the world intruded on those obsessions in a way he couldn’t ignore. And it was work—no single moment of brilliant insight that solved everything, but years of doggedness.

I doubt that Darwin would be comfortable with the idea of Darwin Day, either, but I think it’s a great idea. I particularly like the way I’ll be spending it. An evening of science and art seems like just the right way to celebrate Darwin’s achievements.

Why? Well, the science part is obvious, I think, particularly considering that all the speakers at the event will be talking about how understanding evolution helps us to understand our world. Art is harder to explain but just as important. This particular art is meant to communicate the understanding of evolution, but I think it also communicates something important about what science is.

In some ways, art and science scratch the same itch. We appear to have a need, we humans, to break off little chunks of the world and illuminate them to the best of our ability. We need to dissect, to ruminate and to share what we’ve discovered. We can do that in art, with line and color, with myth and metaphor. We can do it in science, teasing apart reality from perception and uncovering the hidden.

The tools are different, but the impulse is the same. So is the fact that it’s never satisfied. Satisfying, yes. Satisfied, no. People may stop trying to make a living at art or science, but they don’t really stop doing either. Stopping would require learning entirely new ways to relate to the world.

A few weeks ago, ScienceBlogs and Seed asked people about the rightful place of science. I could talk about its place in the public square, but I think much of that will take care of itself if we recognize the true place of science.

The true place of science is sitting on top of that little human itch, scratching, providing relief, but always uncovering new questions to be answered, generating a new itch.

As much as anything else, Darwin’s legacy is the example of a life lived scratching that itch. Others could have discovered the same things he did. He didn’t do it by heroics but by work. He did what anyone could have done. He did what we all can do.

And that’s worth celebrating.

We’re partying all over the world!
A year ago March, Richard Dawkins was in town as a guest of Minnesota Atheists. That was the first I heard about making the anniversary of Darwin’s birth (200 years ago) and publication of his book (150 years ago) into a time of celebration. Dawkins said Britain was already gearing up—taking this opportunity to educate as well as to have fun with science. I wondered what my hometown would be doing to celebrate evolution. Whatever it was, I wanted to be a part of it.

PZ Myers thought it was a cool idea.
March flowed into April and spring. Nobody I talked to knew of anybody who wanted to think about an evolution party. I knew one scientist who would, so I called PZ Myers. He said, “Great! Let’s talk.” I visited him in Morris in May for a delightful afternoon walking around the campus, talking science, art and evolution. We both love the Bell Museum’s science-for-the-people series, Café Scientifique, and thought it would be the perfect venue for Darwin Day. PZ holds the Café in Morris, too. So we decided we’d do a presentation of art and science and evolution in both locations. (The Morris event will be held February 24.)

Talking evolution with insight, humor—don’t forget outrageous sex!
Shanai Matteson and Don Luce at the Bell Museum expanded the evening to include other scientists, who will present rapid-fire, media-rich presentations about Darwin and evolution with good storytelling and controversy. If you haven’t heard some of them speak before, you are in for a treat:

• Dr. Mark Borrello, history of science
• Dr. Sehoya Cotner, professor of biology
• Dr. Greg Laden, biological anthropologist
• Dr. PZ Myers, evolutionary biologist
• Dr. Keith Olive, particle physicist

Mitochondrial Eve by Lynn Fellman
Party Details
Where: The Bell Museum of Natural History (map and parking information)
When: Feb 12 from 7 to 9 p.m.
Cost: $10/free to museum members and U of M students
There will be a cash bar, and cake will be served.

Before and after the presentations, you’ll want to see Frans Lanting’s North American premier of “LIFE: A Journey Through Time.” On display in the Bell’s gallery, these large-format photographs interpret the evolution of life on Earth. Also displayed are my DNA Portraits.

Do us all a favor and bring along someone with 19th-century thinking. A little cake, a little vodka and hearing some great storytelling may just be the thing to kick them into the 21st.

Lynn is a Minneapolis artist and blogger, as well as an interviewer for Atheists Talk radio and one of science’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders. For Lynn’s interview with Don Luce, the curator of the exhibits, and Greg Laden, one of the guests, a podcast is available.

Charles Darwin believed that no matter who thought of an idea first, it was really the first person to articulate it clearly and convincingly who should get the credit for it. Darwin believed that Wallace’s version of natural selection, published together with Darwin’s version of natural selection, was much better stated and more logical than his own. He also felt somewhat pressured to write The Origin (which is considered his quintessential work by most) in the short time he wrote it in (several decades!?!?) because he really had a lot more to say than space (600 pages) allowed.

These facts reveal, I’m sure, that Darwin was a total dork!

But how do we know all these things? Because he tells us in his autobiography, which is a truly delightful read. Darwin’s autobiography is one of a handful of writings that I’m recommending to you in order to do your part in celebrating, through the reading of the original texts, Charles Darwin’s two hundredth birthday.

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born within minutes of each other on Sunday, February 12, 1809. February 12 is therefore Darwin Day as well as some form of presidential holiday for Americans. I find it interesting that there is a substantial amount of hype regarding Darwin’s 200th birthday but almost none regarding Lincoln’s birthday. Interesting but virtually inexplicable.

Anyway, my purpose here and now is to make a few recommendations to you as to what you should read from the Charles Darwin canon. This is not from the perspective of True Darwin Scholarship. Technically, I’m not a Darwin scholar, so I would not know how to recommend the more erudite approach to this literature, and if you are a Darwin scholar, then you certainly don’t need my advice. I’m not suggesting this from the perspective of an educator in the life sciences, either. Rather, I’m suggesting specific readings (in a specific order) because I believe that this approach will captivate you and provide the most meaningful sampling of Darwin’s work with the least effort on your part.

And it will be some effort, because Darwin was writing two centuries ago and they talked funny back then, and modern English speakers (not to mention non-English speakers) may have a hard time relating to the style. But I’ve taken this into account as well, and my specific suggestions are designed and presented to smooth the process.

You should begin with a book called The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. If you go back to the original publication of this book, you won’t find it mentioned by this name in the early manuscripts for a couple of reasons. The clear distinction between the names of books vs. series vs. other published entities was not maintained in Victorian England in the same exact way it is now, and this volume underwent a complex and confusing history of publication, having started out as part of a different, larger work. But today, modern publishers have smoothed over all the early strangeness, and you can go to the bookstore, or Amazon.com, or wherever, and find a book called The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin and read it. (Example: The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches (Penguin Classics)
. Also, you can also read my extensive blogging about The Voyage here.)

Don’t bother trying to find the most original version. Read any version you can lay your hands on, but any recently published version will likely be one of the revised editions. You want the revised edition, and you want to make sure to read the footnotes when you read the book (much of the revision is in the footnotes). Always read the footnotes when reading Darwin.

The Voyage (the book) starts before the voyage (the voyage) itself and chronicles Darwin’s travels over a five-year period. Because it is written retrospectively, Darwin’s experiences are to some degree placed in the broader context of Darwin’s later research and writing but not to the extent that you will find annoying.

You will learn a lot of things about Darwin, like his attitude towards slavery; his eye for ethnography; the fact that he was, above and beyond all else, a geologist rather than a biologist; and so on. Read it in a leisurely fashion. Skip around if you like. That won’t damage the story too much. By the time you are done with the book, even if you’ve really only focused on two-thirds of it or so, you’ll be totally accustomed to the nature of the language, and you will have learned a lot about Darwin, boats, the nineteenth century, and South America.

The next book you should read is Darwin’s monograph, Coral Reefs. You will not easily find a copy of this, but you can read it online. You can also skip around a bit with this volume. Let me tell you why I think you should read this book. Then you’ll know how to approach it. You can probably get everything you need out of this book in about an hour or two of perusal, once you know what you are looking for.

Darwin was a total geology nerd and, prior to his voyage, was only beginning to become recognized by his British colleagues as a young scholar with potential. And he looked up, in a big way, to the ultra-famous, imposingly famous, super-big-shot-famous geologist, Charles Lyell. As you will see a bit later on with my next selection, Lyell influenced Darwin and Darwin’s approach to science more than any other individual. Darwin respected Lyell and was afraid of Lyell.

Meanwhile, Lyell had this theory about how coral reefs formed. Darwin was quite excited to be going on this voyage, in part, because he was going to get to look at these reefs firsthand, and combining these observations with Lyell’s theoretical descriptions of the reefs was going to be cool. As  I said, he was a total geology nerd.

But something went differently than originally planned. When Darwin started to observe coral reefs “in the wild,” he quickly started to notice things that were unexpected. Lyell’s model for how coral reefs formed did not fare well under the test of observations that Darwin was making in the field.

Now, the next part of the story is conjecture on my part, but reasonable conjecture. While on the voyage, Darwin wrote letters back home, sometimes including his scientific observations. One such letter, it seems—a letter about coral reefs and how Lyell was seemingly wrong in his theory about them—was passed around back home and impressed people sufficiently that it was read at a scientific meeting and published, unbeknown to Darwin. I suspect that this embarrassed Darwin a great deal, because it was a sidelong attack on Lyell or, at least, could be seen that way.

As it would turn out, Lyell did not get mad at Darwin and accepted Darwin’s new understanding of coral reef formation and development. But Darwin was still a scholar who leaned towards caution. In his monograph on coral reefs…the book I’m suggesting you have a look at…he developed a method of making scientific assertions that was based in part on methods he had learned from Lyell, but which I believe was taken by Darwin to a greater height. Darwin would assemble all the prior writings and facts about a topic, catalog all the explanatory models, develop falsifiable hypotheses which he would then, in turn, try very hard to falsify and, in the end, present what was left: some descriptive and some explanatory theory about what something was and how that thing worked.

I believe that while this approach was shown to Darwin by Lyell, and may have been part of Darwin’s nature, that it was sharpened and underscored by the fact that Darwin’s first real contribution, his first real bit of novel research with new results destine to change the way we think about a certain natural phenomenon, was in conflict with the theories of his hero Lyell, the man he feared.

The monograph on coral reefs was his first run at this approach. It’s all in one neat little not-too-long volume. Go online and have a look at it, enjoy the prose, peruse the volume, pay attention to the structure of the argument, and read it as carefully or as casually as you like. You won’t be able to avoid enjoying it.

The third Darwin book you should read is Darwin’s autobiography. This is a great companion volume to The Voyage of the Beagle because it focuses on Darwin’s life before and after The Voyage. There are notes throughout added by Darwin’s son, clarifying or correcting here and there. It is roughly written, like a first draft, and could be a bit unfocused and wandering except that, since it is a chronological memoir, it has a natural structure that holds the “plot” together. Darwin’s autobiography is short, engaging, and includes at least half the famous “Darwin stories” you’ve heard in college lectures or read in the writings of Stephen Gould. This is where we learn Darwin’s attitude towards medical school, for instance.

That’s it. Read The Origin if you want, but even though Darwin saw it as an abstract, it is mind-numbingly long. Same with Descent. His other books are highly specialized or a bit quirky, though all are fun. I won’t dissuade you from exploring all of Darwin’s other work, but I strongly recommend the plan I lay out above.

Enjoy.