Steve Jones on forgetting about Darwin

Steve Jones, like me, is in rant mode, but he goes one step further in today's Telegraph and says let's just forget about Darwin entirely: Can we please forget about Charles Darwin?

I can see where he is coming from, but I will wait two more weeks before I join him in this position, after our Darwin roadshow and Darwin Day is over (of which more exciting details later)!

Steve Jones (and I) on Stephen Jay Gould

I guess I have to confess that the course of my life would not have been the same without Stephen Jay Gould. My lifelong interest in Darwin and evolution was sparked by his book "Ever Since Darwin". But,  like many others, I have an ambivalent relationship to his life and work. This week in Nature, Steve Jones has written a balanced and nuanced appraisal of Gould while reviewing a new book Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on his view of life. Steve Jones's review is well worth a look and I am looking forward to getting my hands on the book too.

My own book, The Rough Guide to Evolution, (which is due to be published on 2nd January, but is apparently available from amazon.com on December 22nd) contains numerous pen portraits of evolutionary scientists. Here is what I wrote about Gould:

Stephen Jay Gould – Darwin’s essayist
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was an American palaeontologist who eloquently wrote essay after essay, interweaving Darwin and evolution with the details of history, baseball and light opera. For over twenty years he reigned supreme as America’s foremost spokesman for evolution and defender of his hero, Darwin. His status as the people’s palaeontologist even earned him a cameo role in The Simpsons!

A New Yorker by birth, upbringing and sporting affiliation, Gould spent almost all his working life at Harvard, as professor of geology and curator at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. His 1977 book Ontology and Phylogeny prefigured the evo-devo movement. That same year, he published a collection of essays, Ever Since Darwin, the first of over a dozen volumes that thrilled and informed readers for the next quarter century. In his 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man, Gould fearlessly defended human equality. Throughout his life, he attacked biological determinism, particularly in sociobiology and its offshoot evolutionary psychology. In the courtroom, he fought against the teaching of creationism in American schools.

Gould courted controversy at every turn. His punctuated equilibrium theory stirred up things in palaeontology. Gould’s opposition to adaptationism – the idea that every feature of an organism has to have an explanation in natural selection – led to him being misquoted by creationists and derided by his “ultra-Darwinist” critics. Gould’s belief that Cambrian fossils proved that life’s history depended on luck and was non-repeatable – popularized in his bestselling book, Wonderful Life (1989) – brought him into dispute with fossil expert Simon Conway Morris. And Gould’s attempt to categorize religion and science as two separate fields of human experience, as “non-overlapping magisteria” has been seen as excusing religion from intellectual scrutiny.

In 1982 Gould was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a usually fatal form of cancer. After two years of aggressive treatment, sweetened by non-recreational use of cannabis, he recovered to write a magazine article, “The Median isn’t the Message”. Here he highlighted the perils of hasty conclusions when faced with the statistics of cancer survival, giving hope to many subsequent cancer sufferers. He died twenty years later from an entirely different kind of cancer, surrounded by books in an attic room in an apartment in his beloved Manhattan. He lived just long enough to see his 1400-page magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Thought published. Creative in his controversy, Gould’s legacy is perhaps best summarized by the title of a paper written by two fellow palaeontologists shortly after his death: “Wonderful Strife”!

The hummingbird on the ten pound note

Not quite sure why Steve Jones is getting quite so upset about the humming bird on the British ten pound note. His complaint is that

'The note is supposed to encapsulate Darwin's trip to the Galapagos, with him looking at a hummingbird as a source of inspiration. But there are no hummingbirds on the islands'

OK there are no hummingbirds on the Galapagos, but according to the Bank of England:

" the ship HMS Beagle... is depicted on the back of the note. Also pictured is an illustration of Darwin 's own magnifying lens and the flora and fauna that he may have come across on his travels."

In other words, the illustrations on the note are not specifically about Darwin's trip to the Galapagos, but illustrate all his travels on HMS Beagle. And there is no question that he saw hummingbirds. He might not have written about them in The Origin but then he doesn't specifically mention Galapagos finches in The Origin either. So, this all strikes me as a storm in teacup. Why is this news?!

If one wanted to rant about Bank of England notes, let's start with the way in which they replaced the quintessential English composer with a Scotsman on the £20 note! Hrmmph! When did the Bank of Scotland last put an Englishman on one of their notes? If one wanted to start a conspiracy theory, one could blame it on the Scotsman who is running England ;-)

Human evolution over or speeding up?

"Compare and contrast..." goes the start of many an exam question. Well, in catching up on my reading of blogs and news media, I have just come across an interesting pair of articles, ripe for the compare-and contrast-treatment:

• How We Evolve by BENJAMIN PHELAN from Seed magazine, which claims that human evolution has sped up recently.
  
• Evolution is complete: so where do we go from here? by STEVE JONES in the Daily Telegraph, which claims that human evolution has stopped!
  

I will leave it to you the reader to work through the two articles and do your own "compare-and-contrast" assessment, but my own inclination is to side with Phelan rather than Jones on this. 

In fact, it seems odd that Jones is still publishing articles like this, because he has been making this point for a decade or more and this is nothing new in the Telegraph article. When  Jones first started saying human evolution is over, we were still in the history-is-over epoch, before 9/11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the reassertion of Russian military and political power. 

Even back then, I found several problems Jones' argument:

• It reeks of first-world complacency, when infant mortality is still so high in the Third World and populations are still being decimated by HIV, TB and malaria.
  
• Even if the vast majority of people survive to reproductive age, the fact that even a small number do not is still enough to drive evolution. As Darwin said: "A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die, -- which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct."
  
• Even if the vast majority of people survive to reproductive age, in an era of contraception and family planning, not all will have the same number of children. Any genetic difference that underlies this differential in reproductive success will still be the subject of natural selection. It’s a matter of speculation what affect fertility control will have on the human gene pool. When procreation is a matter of choice, rather than an inevitable consequence of passion, perhaps there will be a selective pressure for children to become steadily more manageable: if your first child is a terror, you might choose not to have any more! And conversely, whatever genes make people like children will be selected for!
  
• If evolution is defined as any change in the frequency of alleles in the human gene pool, then lifting the selective pressure against what would, before modern society and medicine, have been deleterious genes or combinations of genes, then we are clearly in an era of massive evolutionary change. For example, is it really plausible that the rise in Caesarian sections is not having some effect on the distribution of genes underlying pelvic anatomy or determining the likelihood of other complications during labour?

Add to that the arguments in the Seed article and in the articles cited therein, and I see little or no cogency in Jones' arguments. I will leave the last word to Darwin:

“But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.”

Additional reading:

Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, Hawks et al, PNAS
Not the end of evolution again! by John Wilkins on the Evolving Thoughts blog