Angels and Ages

by Adam Gopnik

  A revolution in human consciousness is made from the self- deluding vanities of rabbit fanciers and poor Van Mons's obvious mistake about Ribston pippins. The argument is airtight, inescapable, and cunningly faux-naïf. Darwin uses empirical in stances not inductively, to build proof, but infectiously, to weaken resistance.

  Darwin's gambit of beginning with dogs and pigeons was almost too successful; one of the readers employed by his publisher, John Murray, recommended in his report on The Origin that the book would sell much better if it were all pigeons, without the weird speculative stuff that came afterward. Yet Darwin made the literary decision along with the practical decision—he knew that he was going to write his book, and he embarked on his program of pigeon fancying in order to help himself get started. The decision was both ethical and rhetorical: Darwin looked for evidence in the homely, the overlooked, the undervalued, and the artisanal. This enterprise of learning from the low—of making the mere naturalist and fancier into a peer of the scientist—was an effort to shift the sources of knowledge and models of thought.

  In a revelatory book, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks, Lyanda Lynn Haupt has a mind- changing chapter on Darwin's relation to the “pigeon fancy,” the largely working-class London and Birmingham pigeon- breeding enthusiasts with whom he studied, and from whom he learned much of what we read in the first part of The Origin. Haupt, a bird lover herself—- good Darwinian writing continues to come from the edges as much as from the center of the field—points out how obsessive and complicated Darwin's relation to bird breeders was. “He traversed, with glee, a boundary clearly marked in both the social and scientific sands,” she writes. He attended pigeon shows, sought out the prizewinning specialists, and then had his children help him as he bred his own flocks. “I am hand & glove with all sorts of Fanciers, Spital- field weavers & all sorts of odd specimens of the Human species, who fancy Pigeons,” he wrote to a friend. He formed a close working alliance with a self- educated pigeon fancier named William Tegetmeier, the poultry editor for the naturalist journal Field, to the point that Tegetmeier claimed a partnership with him. (Darwin gently demurred.) This enthusiasm for the overlooked was not peculiar to pigeons. As Gerald Weiss-mann has argued in his remarkable essay “Darwin's Audubon,” Darwin, against the grain of his time, chose to take Audubon, the American rogue artist and amateur bird collector, seriously, and not just as a source of information but as a model of truth seeking. He set out to widen the scope of what counted and who was allowed to count in science while seeming only to count heads and pigeons.

  Admiring a scientist's prose, we usually try to humanize it by mapping the pattern of metaphor within it: look, Einstein was a visionary just like Keats. But the remarkable thing about Darwin as a writer is not how skillfully he uses metaphor but how artfully he avoids it. He argues by example, not by analogy; the point of the opening of The Origin isn't that something similar happens with domesticated breeds and natural species; the point is that the very same thing happens, albeit unplanned and over a much longer period. The notebooks and letters and earlier drafts show that analogies—not least the very idea of “selection,” nature conceived as breeder—were powerful tools for him, as for anyone else, but it was part of his shrewdness to use them parsimoniously in his exposition.

  To call this novelistic is not to assert a cosmetic likeness; it is to see how closely bound storytelling and truth seeking can be. Both Trollope and Darwin work in the mock- epic mode: the acts of very small and humble and comic creatures, archdeacons and earthworms, are shown to be not just illustrative of heroic and cosmic workings but an aspect of them. Trollope's Barchester is a smallish place, but its acts are not diminutive; every kind of passion and betrayal and tragedy can be found within those narrow provincial precincts. Archdeacon Grantly is a Greek hero and Mrs. Proudie as big as Clytemnestra if we pay them the right kind of attention. England's pastures are small, and its kennels cozy, but for Darwin they contain the keys to all creation. The delight that we take in the work of both is the delight we take in being shown the vastness of the cosmos in a tea bag. (Darwin's own motto of cautious empiricism, “It's dogged as does it,” was drawn from a character in The Last Chronicle of Barset.) Yet the empirical overcharge never becomes a mere data dump. Darwin had the gift— the gift of any good novelist—of making the story sound as though it just got pushed out by the descriptions. The plot seems to grow out of his observations rather than being imposed by his will; in reality, the plot came first, as it usually does.

  Gillian Beer, in her influential 1983 study Darwin's Plots, identified basic ideas about variation, purpose, and development that Darwin learned from his philosophical predecessors and shared with the novelists of his day. No one who has read Beer's book can ever read Middlemarch again without seeing it as a kind of mirror of, or practical application of, The Origin. (Darwin and George Eliot were friends, and once, out of curiosity, attended a séance together.) Darwin's writing, as much as Eliot's, takes speculative argument and makes it look like empirical record keeping. But the man in the notebooks, with his breezy provocations, keeps peeking out even from the work of the whiskered eminence. The book is one long provocation in the guise of being none.

  Yet the other great feature of Darwin's prose, and the organization of his great book, is the welcome he provides for the opposed idea. This is, or ought to be, a standard practice, but few people have practiced it with his sincerity—and, at times, his guile. The habit of “sympathetic summary,” what philosophers now call the “principle of charity,” is essential to all the sciences. It is the principle, as Daniel Dennett says, that a counterargument to your own should first be summarized in its strongest form, with holes caulked as they appear, and minor inconsistencies or infelicities of phrasing looked past. Then, and only then, should a critique begin. This is charitable by name, selfishly constructive in intent: only by putting the best case forward can the refutation be definitive. The idea is to leave the least possible escape space for the “but you didn't understand …” move. Wiggle room is reduced to a minimum.

  This is so admirable and necessary that it is, of course, almost never practiced. Sympathetic summary, or the principle of charity, was formulated as an explicit methodological injunction only recently. In some ways, of course, the practice is very old; we know what we know about the Gnostics because of what Chris tian writers tell us of their views before refuting them. But we can't entirely trust their account because their only goal is to make the other guy look bad by making his case look ridiculous. The principle of charity is to make the other guy's argument look good (before, of course, making yours look even better). It was not commonplace, either in Darwin's time or before. Mill, for instance, or Huxley, both press down on the sarcasm pedal even as they start to play the organ of their invention.

  All of what remain today as the chief objections to his theory are introduced by Darwin himself, fairly and accurately, and in a spirit of almost panicked anxiety—and then rejected not by bullying insistence but by specific example, drawn from the reservoir of his minute experience of life. This is where we get it all wrong if we think that Wallace might have made evolution as well as Darwin; he could have written the words, but he could not have answered the objections. He might have offered a theory of natural selection, but he could never (as he knew) have written On the Origin of Species. For The Origin is not only a statement of a thesis; it is a book of answers to questions that no one had yet asked, and of examples answering those still faceless opponents. (Years later, Wallace would write to Darwin urging him to take on Spencer's aggressive politicized term “survival of the fittest” in place of his “natural selection.” Darwin calmly explained that the virtue of natural selection was that it was a sister phrase to “artificial selection,” which everyone conceded, whereas “survival of the fittest” was awkward and might raise political specters.)

  Darwin invented, cannily a special, plead
ing, plaintive tone— believe me, I know that the counterview not only is strong but sounds a lot saner, to you and me both. And yet … The tone reflects his real state. He was worried about the objections, he did spend long days worrying about eyes and wings and missing fossils, and he found a way to articulate both the anxiety and the answers to it. Darwin tells us himself that he forced on himself the habit, whenever he came across a fact that might be inconvenient for his thesis, of copying it down and paying attention to it, and that this, more than anything else, gave him his ability to anticipate critics and answer them. The idealized notion of the scientist who seeks out “falsifications” has been mocked, and with good reason. (The usual response of the theorist who has predicted that all swans are white, when faced with a black swan, is not “Look, my idea is wrong!” but “You call that a swan?”) But Darwin's long years in the domestic Eden had also been years in the wilderness, years when he had had the chance to brood in a solitary way on what might be wrong with what he was thinking. His objections to his own theory were strenuous but impersonal—or, rather, because they were self- made, they were offered in the same tone, and with the same rigor, as the positive doctrines. In the backand-forth of actual debate, as our grandfathers would have said, personalities intrude. In the back-and-forth of a self- made contest, both sides have a shot.

  Darwin not only posits the counterclaims; he inhabits them. He moved beyond sympathetic summary to empathetic argument. He makes the negative case as urgent as the positive claims. There are two main objections that are still made to Darwin's theory, and he anticipated both: the argument from irreducible structure and the argument from intermediate form. What's striking is that Darwin anticipates arguments against his theory that no one had yet made—the argument from eyes, the argument from missing links—and that these remain exactly and almost exclusively the arguments that are still made against it. It's a really amazing piece of intellectual empathy, and of beating one's opponents to the punch. (And was Emma responsible? She wrote a little note in his first attempt to explain the evolution of the eye, “A great assumption.” Did he use her afterward as a sounding board?)

  Of the first objection, the argument that eyes could not have been made without purpose, he agrees: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” And that “to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

  Of the problem of links—that there are few transitional varieties left on earth, few in the fossil record, and not many walking fish or ape- men—he allows that, though the fossil record is necessarily incomplete, one would expect to find “intermediate varieties” in “intermediate conditions.” That is, since you find two species of similar birds separated by, say, a range of hills, you would expect to find intermediates between the two species in the range itself, and you don't. “But in the intermediate region, having intermediate conditions of life, why do we not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me.” The tone is not one of nettled pettishness but one of disarmed candor: I recognize that I might well be wrong, and let me say what the wrongness would be. Although scientific theories imply their falsifications, they rarely list them. Darwin's does.

  This was in part a pose, or to put it another way, a stance, a persona. Darwin in his letters is clearly not particularly respectful of the objections that were raised to his theory. But it was something more than canny; it supplies an inner voice, a sound of rational anxiety, a recognition of fallibility and of seriousness that gives his great book an oddly unbullying tone despite being a thrusting, far from tentative or timid argument.

  The habit of sympathetic summary, of reporting an objection or contrary argument fully and accurately and even, if possible, with greater force than its own believers might be able to summon, remains since Darwin the touchstone, the guarantee, of what we call seriousness. Darwin's special virtue in this enterprise is that he had to summarize, sympathetically, views contrary to his own that did not yet exist except in his own imagination. His special shrewdness lay in making as large an emotional meal of the objections in advance as could be made; he preempted his critics by introjecting their criticisms. He saw what people might say, turned it into what they ought to say, and then answered.

  This isn't the place, nor am I the writer, to enumerate the arguments that Darwin produced. They are the same arguments his defenders make now. In summary, the argument from eyes emphasizes structure over function: eyes are made of earlier, smaller, simpler eyes: a light- sensitive nerve is enough to begin the process, and many intermediate eyes exist. “In the Articulata, we can commence a series with an optic nerve merely coated with pigment, and without any other mechanism; and from this low stage, numerous gradations of structure, branching off in two fundamentally different lines, can be shown to exist, until we reach a moderately high stage of perfection.” (This is his answer to his beloved Emma's reproachful “great assumption”: it isn't an assumption; it's a fact.) Swimbladders have become lungs; “an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely flotation, may be converted into one for a wholly different purpose, namely respiration.” (Darwin turns out to have been wrong in the particular case, though the concept was right.)

  Two key words are merely and moderately—the point is that dramatic change happens undramatically The problem of missing links is met by the incompleteness of the fossil record, by the brief lives of the in- between, and by the reality of species that are intermediate in the sense that they are clearly reusing antiquated complex structures for new purposes, taking cash registers and turning them into doorstops: “Who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed duck (Micropterus of Eyton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Apteryx.” The beauty of the sentence lies in the ease of the writer's reach as much as in the clarity of his demonstration.

  The point, always, is the power that Darwin lends to undra-matic words: to small and slight and varied. The world is a mixed-up place; variation is the rule already. Darwin's point, again novelistic, is not that everyone is missing a dramatic unseen case but that everyone is missing the small, incremental meaning of animals and evidence pushed to the margins: the oddities of life, the loggerheaded ducks’ awkward pace and the Pekingese's self-possession, the animals that cleverly reuse old devices and the flowers that are half male and half female, the blind spot in the eye, which we don't see that tells us more about how the eye evolved, how we do see, than some sight out on the horizon. Instead of arguing from first premises, Darwin argues from what his friend Sydney Smith called short views, the object near at hand. The proof lies in seeing the things in front of us freshly, as they are.

  Evolutionary biologists no longer embrace the idea of a distinct natural class of transitional forms, though they still use the concept to talk about fossils that demonstrate a surprising evolutionary link between two very different kinds of animals. In a sense, everything is transitional, and nothing is. Dinosaurs are not intermediate forms on their way to being chickens, though chickens are what—well, one of the things that some—dinosaurs became. His arguments remain the arguments that are used today. Darwin learned to be disarming in the most literal sense; like Chaplin with a bully, he takes the club out of his opponent's hand, beats himself on the head with it, staggers a bit, shows that he can survive the assault, and then tosses the club out of the frame with a sideways kick, leaving the opponent with nothing to do but smolder like a silent- movie villain.

  These are not just what pro
fessors would call rhetorical strategies, things that work. They are a circuit of feelings and implicit themes, of voice, that makes The Origin not just a monument in science but a monument in human thought and feeling. One senses the originality of mind, how the stormy, sarcastic, quickwitted Darwin we know from his notebooks and letters, who worked in “mental rioting,” becomes the narrator we know from his book.

  Behind a strong style there is always a human pressure. As Darwin worked on The Origin in the ensuing years, Keynes shows, he was haunted by Annie's death. In earlier musings, he had written of “the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on in the peaceful woods.” But after Annie's death these words seem to have been inadequate. Now he wrote, “Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind…. We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, … we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.” It is this view of life that illuminates the famous passage at the end of The Origin, where Darwin writes of the “entangled bank [of existence], clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,” all produced through the blind agency of natural selection. “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows,” he went on. “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.” At the end of The Origin Darwin feints toward reassurance, suggesting that life will “tend to progress” over time. But his insistent, immediately adjacent point is that the future in which that progress may happen will be like the past—a vast stretch of geologic time, unstructured by plan or purpose. “We may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length,” he writes, and though the words confidence and secure provide cushioning, the plain sense is that there is no God or plan to interrupt a coming span of time beyond our control or even our imagining. It is the blank prospect that Larkin saw from his high windows: more grains of sand, and more shaking.