Evolution

Fifty years ago (when I was a very young scholar), I was asked to write an essay review of some recently published books about the Huxleys. None of them in my view, including Julian Huxley’s own volume of Memories (1970), did justice to their subjects’ scientific achievements and social concerns. Half a century later we now have Alison Bashford’s An Intimate History of Evolution: The story of the Huxley family. It has most definitely been worth the wait. Indeed this work is the crowning achievement of her distinguished career. 

Millions of words have been printed by and about Charles Darwin. There are hundreds of biographies, the dozens of books he wrote (including his own autobiography), as well as various pamphlets, essays, correspondence, diaries, manuscript notes, and other ephemera. Fascinating though the man and his work is, it must be hard to come up with anything ...

David Rothenberg’s formal appellation at the New Jersey Institute of Technology is Professor of Philosophy and Music. He refers to himself as a ‘musician, composer, author and philosopher-naturalist’. Others have called him an ‘interspecies musician’. Rothenberg, a highly regarded jazz saxophonist and clarinettist, has published a range of books on science, technology, and music. But an ‘interspecies musician’? Much of Rothenberg’s fame stems from his improvised duets with ‘singing’ animals: whales (Whale Music, 2008), birds (Why Birds Sing, 2005) and even cicadas (see YouTube). With this background, Rothenberg is well credentialled to tackle a problem that lies at the heart of the apparent divide between science and the arts: what is beauty? Why do we find much birdsong beautiful? More critically, what do the birds themselves hear in these products of their evolutionary history? Can mere animals experience some kind of aesthetic sense, a sense of ‘beauty’?

At the outset of Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy poses a thought experiment. Each year 1.6 billion passengers fly around the world. We do so with remarkable ease. Just imagine, Hrdy asks, if our fellow human passengers suddenly morphed into another species of ape. We would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, or with any babies on board still alive. Bloody appendages would litter the aisles. It would be mayhem.

Exactly one hundred years before this new edition of The Evolution Revolution, by Australian palaeontologists Ken McNamara and John Long, the Rationalist Press Association promoted the first English version of The Evolution of Man (1907), by the great German biologist Ernst Haeckel. In his preface, Haeckel’s translator, Joseph McCabe, pointed out that, since the first German printing in 1874, only fifteen years after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), ‘fresh facts have come to light in each decade, always enforcing the truth of man’s evolution’. Thus, ‘evolution is not a laboriously reached conclusion, but a guiding truth in biological literature today’ and, as such, ‘is accepted by influential clerics ... and by almost every biologist and anthropologist of distinction in Europe’.