The amazing power of Darwinite

You remember Superman and how he suddenly lost all his powers in the presence of the element kryptonite? Well, I am beginning to wonder if there isn't an element called Darwinite out there that means people lose their critical faculties and say and write and believe any old rubbish when face to face with Darwin, his life and his theory of evolution. 

I have already pointed out some of the many myths surrounding this topic, but the more I read about the myth of Annie's-death-caused-Darwin's-loss-of-faith, the more I am driven to believe in this powerful but hidden element, Darwinite.

Before I start on the Annie myths, let me point out that Darwinite is clearly inherited, as proven by this piece written by CD's great-great-grand-daughter Emma Darwin, where the diluted Darwinite in her veins is still able to induce hyperventilation in a healthy human male:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3663891/The-Insider.html

Let me give just two examples from the Annie mythos:

1. In his Autobiography, Darwin admits that 

"later in life I wholly lost, to my great regret, all pleasure from poetry of any kind, including Shakespeare".

Well, lot's of people go off poetry in later life or get cheesed off with Shakespeare-it's part of becoming a grumpy old man. But exposure to Darwinite ensures that American English professor, George Levine, comes up with an explanation custom-built for Darwin in his book Darwin Loves You. It goes like this: 

• Annie Darwin died on April 23rd 1851. 
  
• Which happens to be Shakespeare's birthday
  
• So the memory of her death meant that Darwin developed a life-long downer on Shakespeare! 

It has just got to be true (not)!

2. Without Darwinite poisoning, how else could anyone write the kind of twaddle that ends Jim Moore's publication (Of Love and Death: Why Darwin 'gave up Christianity'’ in Jim Moore ed., History, Humanity and Evolution. pp. 195-229, Cambridge, 1989) that kicked off the Annie myth? As opium was to Coleridge's poetry, so it seems Darwinite is to Moore's prose. Be warned this is strong stuff!

"He ends the chapter in search of a palliative: 'We may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.' But the words ring hollow. Why should consolation be sought unless some one has been bereaved? And can bereavement be so readily assuaged? Nature is the victim in Darwin's figure, but nature is also given a 'face', a face 'bright with gladness', to which death comes promptly without fear. Only one face in Darwin's experience ever did that. He could recall it 'with much distinctness' - 'her eyes sparkled brightly; she often smiled' - and he had the imaginative ability with bygone faces to make them 'do anything I like' Here, then, nature may be tortured that health and happiness should prevail, but the face is also sacrificed for the redemption of the world. The bereavement is finally his own; the real victim, tragically, a child already perfect. Annie, who died at Easter, became the paschal lamb of Darwin's post-Christian evolutionary soteriology."

And how many of you didn't have to look up that last word!!

I am turning into a grumpy old man

I despair. Every day I am becoming more and more like Victor Meldrew. As if the twinges and aches that come with middle age weren't enough, nearly two years of immersion in Darwiniana has left me any unable to encounter any popular TV show or radio programme or magazine article about Darwin without shouting "No, that is not quite right!" And I am just an amateur on Darwin! How on earth do real experts like John van Wyhe or Janet Browne cope!

The latest outrage appears in this week's Radio Times, a publication from that bastion of British respectability, the BBC. There, on p. 20, is an article by Rod Liddle about David Attenborough, Darwin and religious belief (not available on-line). And slapped gratuitously on the image of Attenborough and Darwin's statue at the Natural History Museum is a quotation supposedly from "Charles Darwin, from On the Origin of Species":

"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."

Now my first thought was that this doesn't sound much like Darwin to me. Not his style...

So it took me all of five minutes to check on Darwin On-line. The phrase occurs nowhere in any of the six editions of The Origin. In fact, it doesn't appear anywhere in the vast corpus of Darwin's work that is available in Darwin On-line. And a quick check over at the Darwin Correspondence Project fails to find it in any of Darwin's letters. So I conclude: DARWIN NEVER SAID OR WROTE IT!

What's more he did not ever use several of the constituent phrases: "struggle for survival" "fittest win out" "expense of their rivals". This sentence is not even close to Darwin's style!

So, I guess we should blame the careless Liddle for not checking his sources? But where did the sentence originate?... 

Now it's time to get really grumpy! Because if you do a Google search for the sentence, you find about 10,400 results!! In other words, a sentence that Darwin never even uttered, has been copied around the Internet thousands and thousands of times without anyone even confirming its provenance! EVEN THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM ARE AT IT!--seems they haven't learnt from the tree of life fridge magnet gaffe and the left-handed polar bear fiasco!

I despair; I am now officially grumpy! 

And, if you, dear reader, know who made this phrase up, please let us all know!

Ten myths about Darwin and his theory of evolution

One of the things I discovered while writing The Rough Guide to Evolution was how much that I thought I knew about Darwin and his theory of evolution turned out to be wrong. There are many suppositions masquerading as facts-- for example, how many times have you seen it written that Darwin suffered from Chagas disease or his daughter Annie died from tuberculosis, when there is no way anyone can make a definitive diagnosis in either case. These are just educated guesses. And despite what Claire claims in the TV series Heroes, Darwin never said "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change"--that quote originates from Clarence Darrow!. But worse still, there are plenty of myths among the dozen things that everyone "knows" about Darwin that have no substance in fact or which can neither be falsified nor verified.

To liven things up for the Year of Darwin, here is my choice of ten myths about Darwin and his life and times! I do not have time and space in this one post to elaborate the history of all the myths here nor the reasons why they count as myths rather than reality (some are discussed in the book), but I will set my self the challenge of exploring one myth in detail each month for the ten months (Feb-Nov) that span the two Darwin anniversaries this year.

Feel free to suggest your own myths in the comments section or challenge my assignments. But please don't just parrot biographers and other self-styled authorities: challenge the assignments only if you are prepared to quote the primary literature--there is no excuse not to, now with Darwin Online and The Darwin Correspondence Project available online and freely searchable.

TEN MYTHS

Myth 1. Darwin lost his Christian faith because of the death of his daughter Annie.
Brief response: There is no direct documentary evidence for this in anything Darwin or his contemporaries wrote. Darwin certainly never said anything about it. It is a hypothesis formulated by Darwin biographer Jim Moore. Darwin describes his own loss of faith in his Autobiography and brings in plenty of other good reasons that explain his loss of faith that have nothing to do with Annie's death. See earlier posting.

Myth 2. Darwin delayed publication of his work on evolution fearful of its consequences for religion and the reception it would receive.
Brief response: He didn't delay. He was busy working on lots of other projects. Plus there is little or no evidence for this myth from anything Darwin or his contemporaries wrote. It is a modern invention. See van Wyhe's paper. [covered in the book]

Myth 3. Marx offered to dedicate Das Capital to Darwin.
Brief response: No he didn't. This myth is the result of a mix-up in letters assigned to Marx and his common-law son-in-law Aveling. [covered in the book]

Myth 4. Darwin lied about the timing of when Wallace's package arrived and stole some of his ideas.
Brief response: No he didn't. This issue is explored in the introduction to the relevant section of Darwin's correspondence.

Myth 5. Darwin was scooped by the Baghdad scholar Al-Jahiz, who hit on the idea of evolution a thousand years earlier than Darwin did; Darwin learnt Arabic from his Cambridge friend Samuel Lee and then stole ideas about evolution from the Islamic tradition.
Brief response: There is little or no evidence in English as to what Al-Jahiz actually wrote, but a lot of uncritical acceptance of material misrepresented in the Wikipedia. There is no evidence that Darwin ever knew anything of Al-Jahiz and other Islamic scholars and evidence for only one brief dinner party meeting with Lee. [covered in the book]

Myth 6. Huxley and science trounced Soapy Sam Wilberforce and religion at the BA meeting in Oxford in 1860
Brief response: there are few contemporary accounts of what happened here and at least three participants claim to have won the day (Wilberforce, Hooker and Huxley). Huxley did not deliver any decisive knock-out blow and Wilberforce argued against Darwin on scientific not religious grounds. [covered in the book]

Myth 7. Darwin underwent a deathbed conversion to Christianity.
Brief response: no he didn't. This myth starts with the accounts of certain Lady Hope, who claimed to have visited Darwin during his final illness. The family strongly denied that she was ever there and if she was, she never claimed that Darwin underwent a conversion.

Myth 8. Darwin abandoned a belief in God as a direct consequence of his discoveries in the field of evolution.
Brief response: as noted above, in his Autobiography, Darwin put forward plenty of other reasons for abandoning his belief in conventional Christianity and on several occasions stated that he saw no incompatibility between evolution and religion. He never became an atheist and even well into middle age claimed that "the conclusion was strong in my mind" [that] "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist". See earlier posting.

Myth 9. Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust.
Brief response. There is no direct link between Darwin and Hitler. Darwin never advocated anti-semitism or genocide. Hitler never cited Darwin as an influence. Even if it could be established that Darwin's view had any kind of impact on Nazism, attaching personal blame to a historical individual for the unforeseen consequences of their work is fraught with difficulty. Should we blame Jesus for the Inquisition or Mohammed for 9/11? A more obvious historical figure to blame for the Holocaust is Martin Luther, who advocated the burning of synagogues. [covered in the book]. See this earlier posting.

Myth 10. Darwin experienced a eureka moment while visiting the Galapagos, where on glimpsing the resident finches and tortoises he immediately hit upon his theory of evolution.
Brief response: no, he didn't. His notebooks reveal that it was only months later, during the journey home in the summer of 1836, that the Galapagos mocking birds (not finches) raised his first doubts as to the fixity of species. Darwin's finches played only a minor role in his thinking and only well after his return to England. He does not specifically mention the Galapagos finches in The Origin. [covered in the book]

Evolution rocks!

The Rough Guide to Evolution contains a whole section on music related to Darwin and evolution, from classical to hip-hop, and features the ultimate evolutionary playlist. But only now after the book is finished, I have just come across this hopeful contender for a place on the playlist (maybe it'll make the second edition):

http://www.overman.info/evolutionrocks.html
(watch out for the myth of Darwin's finches)

The site comes complete with a making-of video available via YouTube:

Enjoy!