Radiolab - Darwinvaganza

Episode Date: February 24, 2009

For this week's podcast, Radiolab throws a birthday party for Charles Darwin!

I sh quite. You're listening to Radio Lab. The podcast from New York Public Radio. Public Radio WNYC. And NPR. Hello, I'm Chad Aboumrod. And I'm Robert Crilwitch, and this is not the regular Radio Lab. No, this is Radio Lab, the podcast, meaning, you'd like to explain?

Yes, it's Radio Lab in between our regular season shows. So this is going to be a little shorter probably than the regular. shows and a little less produced, but a lot of fun because it's birthday time. I'm having to say, happy birthday, of course, to Charles Darwin or Chuck Darwin, as I sometimes like that. Oh, more Charles Darwin birthday celebrity. Just be quiet and listen to me for just a second. I want to say that a lot of people, when they think about Charles Darwin, think about a

brilliant, brilliant man who 150 or so years ago woke up some morning and thought, wow, I have a wonderful deep insight into the nature of how life changes. It was wonderful and it was deep. It was one of the deepest ever. Yes, but it wasn't instant. And that's the first thing we ought to say about Charles Darwin, is that he did not have an excelsior idea. He had a notion which gradually formed into an idea, which then required an enormous amount of hard, hard work.

And to begin, I'd like to play you a story I did a number of years ago with David Kuman, who was one of the best scholars about Darwin that I know. He's actually a professional journalist, but we call him a scholar. We call him a scholar. We're suddenly living in a world where scholars and journalists are on par. Well, why not, you know? Because David works very hard, but he doesn't even work as close to hard as Chuck Darwin, as I like to call him. So let's listen to this story, which is Darwin working out a theory.

150 years ago when people asked, how come you can go to Australia and there are kangaroos hop and hopping around everywhere, but you go to five. places that look almost exactly the same, say grasslands in Africa, and there are no kangaroos. Now, why is that? Why don't the same kinds of places have the same kinds of animals? Well, 150 years ago, there was an answer. It was a simple one, says science writer David Kwan. God has made kangaroos and put them in Australia. So God did it. He decided. That was what God wanted to do. God created every species individually and put them down wherever they they are. Actually, I call that special creation plus special delivery.

So that was the explanation, even among some of the most learned people around. But then, says Quaman, Darwin came along and said, wait a minute, I don't think that's the explanation. I think these things all evolved from common ancestors. So the reason you find kangaroos only in Australia and New Guinea, he said, it's not God's doing. It's because the earliest kangaroo ancestors evolved there and then they spread out but they couldn't get across the water that surrounds Australia. They went about as far as they could go. Every plant, every animal that you see, Darwin proposed,

got where it is today on its own. Animals and plants must disperse. They must be capable of dispersing in order to explain what we see on the planet by way of evolution. So it was critical to Darwin's theory to show how living things got to where they are today, and this can get kind of tricky. for example, cabbages. You can find cabbage plants on islands near Antarctica.

Now, how would a cabbage get there? Well, either God put it there or it got there on its own. Yeah, but how does a cabbage seed cross an ocean on its own? Yeah, how? Well, it turns out that Darwin obsessed about this question, vegetable voyaging. For years, he concocted experiments and experiments that were so delightful

and so unlike what you'd imagine. Exactly, exactly. You remember the old TV show, Watch Mr. Wizard? Yeah. That was Darwin. That was Charles Darwin. Here's a perfect example. Darwin wondered how might a radish travel.

Well, he imagined that a radish might accidentally get swept to sea on a windy day, but now that's do radishes float? Well, Darwin had his buckling, Mr. Parslow, pour saltwater, kind of like ocean water, into a tub, and into that tub they plopped radishes. and carrots, and rhubarb, and celery. And Mr. Parslow was, he was one of these proper English butlers. Absolutely, yeah. I guess there weren't too many other butlers in the vicinity

who have anything to do this sort of thing. Probably not, no. But Mr. Parslow also dropped in seeds. He tried cabbage seeds, radish seeds, pepper, cress, as in water, cress. And then they watched to see what floated for how long, then they'd remove the wet seeds and they'd plant them to see that they would still grow. Some did better than others.

With radish seeds, he got 42 days worth of floating. And with cress? 42 days plus a wonderful quantity of mucus, Darwin said, if I recall correctly. So it's stinky, but it's getting there. A slimy mess that still travels the ocean. And that's typical of Darwin, that he would not say, you know, a disgusting or a gross quantity of mucus. He would say a wonderful quantity of mucus because everything about the natural world was

wondrous to this guy. Okay, so that's 42 days for the radish, 42 days for the crest. How much now for dried asparagus seed? 85 days. They stayed afloat. 85 days. And then he took him out and planted the seeds, and they germinated. So let's do the math, Darwin did. If an asparagus seed can float for 85 continuous days and an ocean current moves roughly 38 miles a day, let's multiply 85 times 38, That means an asparagus can sail 3,230 miles across the sea. That's like Magellan. Asparagus is king. Well, at least among those Darwin looked at, yeah.

So yes, ocean crossing vegetables are possible. But Darwin didn't stop there. One day his eight-year-old son Francis said to him, you know, Dad, dead birds float, kind of like ships. And his father said, yeah. He seems to have been a terrific father. So Francis said, well, why don't we feed a bird some seeds? So the seeds get inside the bird.

And then, you know, shoot the bird. And then pop it in the tub, the corpse, and let it float for a while. So he suggested that, and Darwin said, you bet, Francis, that's a great idea. Then after a month or whatever, they opened up the dead carcass, and they pulled out the seeds inside, and they planted them. And found that those seeds also germinated. thereby establishing the principle that seeds can either float on their own or they can hitch a ride. As passengers inside a bird, as passengers attached to the foot of a bird,

which then led Darwin back to animals and to the last science article he ever published, in which he proposed the possibility of flying clams. Now, at this point, Darwin wasn't so well. He's suffering from degenerative heart disease, but he's still working. He's still very much alive mentally. And one day he gets a letter from a shoe salesman, a young guy named Walter Crick. The way the story goes, you imagine Crick out in the woods collecting beetles when he just happened to see it was a water beetle.

And when he got down and looked real close... And attached to one of the legs was a little clam, a little freshwater clam. A very little. Yeah, very little. Small enough that the beetle scarcely noticed it. And Crick thought, that's kind of curious. So he wrote Darwin. And he said, you know, I think you might be interested in this.

and sure enough, Darwin wrote right back, and he asked him all kinds of questions that Crick couldn't answer, because after all, he was in the shoe business. So he did something better than, you know, fake it. He sent the beetle with the shell attached to Darwin. He mailed it. He just popped it into an envelope?

He popped it into an envelope. Was the clam still attached to the beetle? It was. It was. So he said, okay, well, you take a look for yourself. Yeah. So a day or two later, the beetle and the clam did arrive at Darwin's house in an envelope, but they were separated now.

And the beetle? The beetle was dying by the time. It wasn't feeling very well. It wasn't feeling very well. But right away, Darwin could see a possibility here. This is very interesting. This goes back to the whole subject of dispersal of how creatures can travel from one place to another.

Maybe this little clam can fly from place to place. Right. Because this beetle is a swimming beetle, but it can also fly. So maybe clams can fly from pond to pond hitchhiking on a beetle. Darwin couldn't prove this because he felt kind of badly watching that little beetle he had suffer. So this is why I mention it at the end of my book, because it's such a wonderful example of the kind of fellow this guy Charles Darwin was. He writes back to W.D. Crick and says, Dear Mr. Crick.

As the wretched beetle is still feebly alive, he wrote, I put it in a bottle with chopped laurel leaves. Now, he knew that those leaves give off a gas that would very gently help this beetle die. In one of the very last acts of his life, he decided that he needed to put this beetle out of its misery. And then a few weeks after that, Darwin died himself. There is a postscript to this story. It turns out that years and years later, the shoe salesman, Walter Crick, had some grandchildren, and one of Walter's grandsons just happens to be Francis Crick. The Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with James Watson. So perhaps the greatest champion of evolution in the 20th century,

deciphered the structure and the code of DNA both, that guy's grandpa? His grandpa was a pen pal sharing beetle specimens with Darwin. And how strange and wonderful is that? And it is kind of strange. Did you end the piece with how strange is that? No, no, not that I ended the piece that way,

but that it's very strange. You who always sweat the ending and torture me on the endings, you end it with how strange is that? Well, here's why, because think about science the way it's done today. Yeah. You have to finish high school.

You have to get good grades. You have to take the SATs. You have to get into college. You have to be a major in science. PhD and get the GREs and the publish and the papers. No, it's very specialized now. And look at that. Look at their science.

This is Charles Darwin with the Butler and the Tubbs. I like that part of it. It's very optimistic in a way. And very homespun, you know. But here's what I don't get. He comes up with this idea. in like 1830 something, right? Yes, he's a young man when he figures out maybe species evolve in this peculiar.

Right. So he's got the idea in 1838, and he's a young dude. And then it's only like 20-something years later that he finally, 21? 21 years later that he finally actually comes out with it. And publishes it. What happened in the gap? Was he testing? Well, that's one of the great questions is why did Charles Darwin wait so long to announce the idea?

Yeah. One version of that is that he just wanted to do what you just heard him do. He wanted to be sure. Test. He wanted to test and evidence and evidence and so forth. The other reason is actually a more romantic and interesting and also sad reason because it tells you that from the beginning this idea had deep problems with its audience. In this case, Charles Darwin's audience was a precious audience.

It was the woman he fell in love with. What was her name? I don't think I should tell you because I think you're going to learn it from Deborah Heiligman, who is an author of a new book called Charles and Emma. Anyway, Deborah, she sat down with me when you were talking, and she tells me, let's see, let's go back to when Charles was in his mid-20s. Here we go. Okay, I'm 28.

I got this promising career, this great theory I'm thinking about. Now he has to make his next big decision, should he get married or not. Right. So what does he do? Well, he makes a list of pros and cons. Is it called pro-marriage or con marriage? It's called marry, not marry. This is the question.

Let's hear the not-marry things. Fighting with her. Like, that would, that could be a problem. He wrote down quarreling? Quarling, yes. And he did, you know, he loved children. And so he really thought about having children, but he also worried.

about, again, the time it would take to raise children and the expense and also the anxiety. Meanwhile, what was on the pro side? If I do marry, what do you get? He was looking for somebody who would sit on the sofa with him and, you know, make nice and, you know, whatever. But I think when he made that... He could make music and play some kind of game. Yes, right. They did pay you. What did they play? They played... Charles and Emma played backgammon. But now we gave away that it was Emma.

Sorry, okay, sorry. So there they are. We're wondering which way to go. But there's one big question that he did not put on his list. What was that? God. Why God? He really was beginning to think that he was having problems with God and with religion in general.

And he knew very often that if the man was a skeptic, a religious skeptic and the woman was a believer, things went along fine until there was some problem. Somebody got sick. Somebody died. and then the woman was miserable because the husband wasn't a believer. And if the husband isn't a believer, Jed, then that person's probably going to go to hell for not having faith in God. So when you go on to your eternal rest, you're in hell and your life is in heaven. And so that's a long time to be apart. So you want to stay with them here and there?

Yeah. Darwin falls in love, as it happens with one of these religious girls, Emma. And he falls really in love with her. But she says to him, uh-oh, I don't know. I want to live with you forever in heaven. And she's a believer. Yeah. So during their courtship, they talk about this. He shares his doubts about the existence of God.

She shares her hope that he will come out come to faith. But she does agree to marry him. In spite of that. And when he's there, she's all happy because he's so Charles and she loves him and he's great. And then he goes away, I can so relate to this. and then she starts to worry. Because he's not there to sort of distract her with his wonderfulness. She worries about his not having faith or losing his faith.

I mean, to me, it's never clear exactly what he's thinking. I mean, I don't think it was clear to him. He was struggling with it. Let's put it that way. She probably knew she wasn't going to really change his mind, but she just knew that prayer was really helpful to her. And she saw him in pain, an emotional pain. And she thought if he would just pray, maybe he would feel better.

But she didn't want to really say that to him. So she wrote it down and said, sometimes it's easier to write something down. And she wrote him, I think, three letters during their time together, maybe four. He kept those letters with him all the time. And he wrote, he just had a feeling he would die first. And he wanted her to know after he was gone that he really took her concerns seriously. He also, on the letter itself, wrote some later point,

When I'm dead, know that many times I have kissed and cried over this. So they had an arrangement. He grieved for her, she grieved for him. And they had very different ideas about what death meant. until something happened in their lives it has a kind of a feeling of a real deep tragedy about it. What? Who's Annie?

Annie was their second child, their oldest daughter, and really the apple of their eye. She was a wonderful little girl, and Charles Darwin later said she was his favorite, which I always have mixed feelings about because I don't think a parent should have favorites, but there you go. Do you know why she was his favorite? She was spirited.

She was kind. She was musical like Emma, but she was orderly like Charles. Emma was a slob. Annie was very attentive and connected to both of her parents. But some scarlet fever had run through the household. It seemed, in retrospect, like Annie never got quite better. After about a week of that, right around Easter, by the way, Annie just got worse and worse, and she finally died.

He and Emma said to each other in letters right then, we just have to stay close to each other. Emma wrote to him, you are my prime treasure and always have been. Because this is one of those moments where for a lot of couples, you can kind of go break up. And considering what death meant to each of them and how different, you know, the different meanings they took, it's pretty amazing to me that I think it brought them even closer,

But no. The sense along the way is that the reason that Charles Darwin hung on to his idea and didn't publish one of the reasons is that he was worried that Emma would have been upset. And there's reason right for him to feel that way because she's so much more or less intimated that. Well, the thing is great about Emma was that you asked me before, I think, what, how they changed after Annie's death. I think they became a little bit more, I think they saw each other's point of view just a little

bit more, I think. I think Charles saw, oh, would be probably really nice if I believed in it after life, because then I could see Annie again, and that would be lovely. And I think probably as Emma watched Charles working and probably as she struggled with what was the sense of Annie's death, you know, maybe there was no sense. Maybe it was just one of those things that happens. I believe that they actually started to come together more than go apart in the way they were thinking. Neither surrendered their point. Neither surrendered, but I think that they were really able to see the other person's point of view, which is really what all we need, right? And so Emma, who was never much interested in science, by the way, but she was always his first reader and his best reader. So

whenever he was sending something out from publication, she always read it. Back in 1842, he had first shown her and her alone this sketch of his species theories, just in case he should die. And he wrote her a letter saying, in case I should die, I'm entrusting you to publish this. well, you know, she was the one who was so worried he was killing God, and yet he trusted her, and he knew he could trust her. And so Emma read it in manuscript, and she didn't object to anything. She didn't object to anything that would, you know, maybe have sort of personally offended her about God. In fact, she cleaned it up, cleaned up his language, because he wasn't good with commas,

and, you know, and he had spelling mistakes, and so she cleaned it up and made his argument stronger for him. So wow, so emotionally she traveled a great distance. He did. But here's my question. If he can do so much work to convince the scientists, his colleagues, that this is a theory that is true. And if he can, you know, through a sort of personal loss and time and understanding, convince his wife, through love, really, that it's true, why can't he convince the rest of us? I mean, Ike, our producer here to our right, just handed me a paper which says there was a gallop poll of 1,018 Americans less than 4 out of 10 say they, quote, believe in the theory of evolution. That's less than 40% of them.

It's been that way, by the way, for decades. You know, for decades. Darwin has never had a majority. No. animals, and Darwin insisted. He always insisted, we are not closer to the angels. We are not separate. We are not different. We are beasts. Couldn't you at least say to sort of counter that argument, okay, we're beasts, but we're turbocharged beasts? We're like special beasts. You can say that, but that's not the only problem. What's number two? The second one I think has to do with

everybody's desire for, well, let me just introduce you to Adam Gopnik, who has written another book about Charles Darwin. He's written more than one. No, another one in our series of mini books that we are visiting here. We have the Quaman book. We have the Hollywood book and we know of the Gopnik book. But I sat down with Adam and we talked about what is the problem really with Darwin's theory. Now, nobody understood in the 19th century better than Charles Darwin that death is the great

reaper out of life. He didn't believe in immortality and he believed in what he called the wedge of death. He understood that that's how species proceed. the nature of life is to involve a great deal of death. But that realization, of course, provided him absolutely no comfort for the loss of his own child. Knowledge about the common experience gave him no ease in his core experience. And that, I think, Robert, is the deepest reason why we have trouble with Darwinism, because we look to big ideas to take common experience and give us comfort about our core experience. And no matter how we try and pull it apart, no matter how we try and

search it, Darwinism won't do that for us. We can't say, I read Darwin and now I feel better about my own life. Actually, it makes you feel kind of worse, because if you ask, how did I get here? There's an explanation in Darwin's rating for that. But if you ask the, what everybody asks, if you ask, why, what's it for? How does it end? What's the point? Then the answer is a very unsatisfying one is don't know or don't speak to that or there is none. There is none. That's hard. There is none. It's very hard for people to take. I think too that it's, you know, I do think that there's a tragic grandeur in Darwin's view of life, but it doesn't make me feel sad. It makes me feel there is meaning there to be had. Darwin's love, Charles's love for Emma, Charles's love for

Annie, still speak to us 100 years later. We're moving. by them. We're stirred by them. We see pictures of our own life and our own loves in them. Human life isn't meaningless because it ends. And one of the great changes in the human spirit that Darwin ushers in, Darwin heralds, is a belief that the future is as important as our past and that our real afterlife lies in our children and in the afterlife of our ideas and values more than it lies in the inheritance of our ancestors. And then now is part of a river. Yes, that we're in a long river of time, a long river of life.

And after all, you know, it's one of the things we try and teach our children. When we talk about giving our kids a moral education, that's all we mean. We mean we want them to be aware that they are not unique consciousnesses, which are little dictators of reality. We want them to be aware that they are fishermen and fisher women standing along the long stream of life where many, many, many have stood before, where their place is unique but not specially privileged. That's what we mean.

And even if they look down at the grass and at the fish, that those are cousins. That those are cousins, that those are distant great, great, great grandparents. That, I think, has the virtue of being a genuinely and profoundly inspiring view of how we got here and what we're doing here, and also has the not small advantage of being true. Well, not everybody would agree with Adam that this is true, but that's Adam's view. I would.

Yeah, I know you would. Adam Gavnik wrote Angels and Ages. It's a short book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. Oh, he put them together? Yes, he put, because they were born on the exact same day. They were same birthday. Okay. Deb Heilingman, she wrote Charles and Emma, and David Kwan wrote The Reluctant Mr. Darwin.

Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. I'm not I was supposed to say I'm Robert Crowlish but I'm not Robert Crowlish but I'm not Thank goodness I'm Jeddah boomrod And I'm Robert Crowley We'll see you in two weeks