By: John Priest,
on 10/9/2016
From the publication of the Origin, Darwin enthusiasts have been building a kind of secular religion based on its ideas, particularly on the dark world without ultimate meaning implied by the central mechanism of natural selection.
The post Darwinism as religion: what literature tells us about evolution appeared first on OUPblog.
By: DanP,
on 11/11/2015
Charles Darwin was widely known as a travel writer and natural historian in the twenty years before On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. The Voyage of the Beagle was a great popular success in the 1830s. But the radical theories developed in the Origin had been developed more or less in secret during those intervening twenty years.
The post The impact of On the Origin of Species appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 10/2/2015
Two other major and largely unsolved problems in evolution, at the opposite extremes of the history of life, are the origin of the basic features of living cells and the origin of human consciousness. In contrast to the questions we have just been discussing, these are unique events in the history of life.
The post Evolution: Some difficult problems appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Hannah Paget,
on 5/9/2015
Where would old literature professors be without energetic postgraduates? A recent human acquisition, working on the literary sociology of pulp science fiction, has introduced me to the intellectual equivalent of catnip: Google Ngrams. Anyone reading this blog must be tech-savvy by definition; you probably contrive Ngrams over your muesli. But for a woefully challenged person like myself they are the easiest way to waste an entire morning since God invented snooker.
The post Literary fates (according to Google) appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Hannah Paget,
on 4/3/2014
We tend to think of ‘science’ and ‘literature’ in radically different ways. The distinction isn’t just about genre – since ancient times writing has had a variety of aims and styles, expressed in different generic forms: epics, textbooks, lyrics, recipes, epigraphs, and so forth. It’s the sharp binary divide that’s striking and relatively new. An article in Nature and a great novel are taken to belong to different worlds of prose. In science, the writing is assumed to be clear and concise, with the author speaking directly to the reader about discoveries in nature. In literature, the discoveries might be said to inhere in the use of language itself. Narrative sophistication and rhetorical subtlety are prized.
This contrast between scientific and literary prose has its roots in the nineteenth century. In 1822 the essayist Thomas De Quincey broached a distinction between the ‘the literature of knowledge’ and ‘the literature of power.’ As De Quincey later explained, ‘the function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move.’ The literature of knowledge, he wrote, is left behind by advances in understanding, so that even Isaac Newton’s Principia has no more lasting literary qualities than a cookbook. The literature of power, on the other hand, lasts forever and draws out the deepest feelings that make us human.
The effect of this division (which does justice neither to cookbooks nor the Principia) is pervasive. Although the literary canon has been widely challenged, the university and school curriculum remains overwhelmingly dominated by a handful of key authors and texts. Only the most naive student assumes that the author of a novel speaks directly through the narrator; but that is routinely taken for granted when scientific works are being discussed. The one nineteenth-century science book that is regularly accorded a close reading is Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). A number of distinguished critics have followed Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots in attending to the narrative structures and rhetorical strategies of other non-fiction works – but surprisingly few.
It is easy to forget that De Quincey was arguing a case, not stating the obvious. A contrast between ‘the literature of knowledge’ and ‘the literature of power’ was not commonly accepted when he wrote; in the era of revolution and reform, knowledge was power. The early nineteenth century witnessed remarkable experiments in literary form in all fields. Among the most distinguished (and rhetorically sophisticated) was a series of reflective works on the sciences, from the chemist Humphry Davy’s visionary Consolations in Travel (1830) to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33). They were satirised to great effect in Thomas Carlyle’s bizarre scientific philosophy of clothes, Sartor Resartus (1833-34).
These works imagined new worlds of knowledge, helping readers to come to terms with unprecedented economic, social, and cultural change. They are anything but straightforward expositions or outdated ‘popularisations’, and deserve to be widely read in our own era of transformation. Like the best science books today, they are works in the literature of power.
James Secord is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, and a fellow of Christ’s College. His research and teaching is on the history of science from the late eighteenth century to the present. He is the author of the recently published Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age.
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Image credit: Charles Darwin. By J. Cameron. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The post When science stopped being literature appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Nicola,
on 1/25/2012
The search for human origins is a fascinating story – from the Middle Ages, when questions of the earth’s antiquity first began to arise, through to the latest genetic discoveries that show the interrelatedness of all living creatures. Central to the story is the part played by fossils – first, in establishing the age of the Earth; then, following Darwin, in the pursuit of possible ‘Missing Links’ that would establish whether or not humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. John Reader’s passion for this quest – palaeoanthropology – began in the 1960s when he reported for Life Magazine on Richard Leakey’s first fossil-hunting expedition to the badlands of East Turkana, in Kenya. Drawing on both historic and recent research, he tells the fascinating story of the science as it has developed from the activities of a few dedicated individuals, into the rigorous multidisciplinary work of today.
In these videos, John Reader, author of Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins talks about the treasure hunt that is the search for the missing link.
Is it possible to discover the missing link?
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What is it like finding the remains of an ancient pre-humanoid?
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Can scientists draw firm conclusions from fossil finds?
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John Reader is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. A writer and photographer with more than fifty years of professional experience, his work has included contributions to major international publications, television documentaries and a number of books, including including The Untold History of the Potato, Africa, Pyramids of Life with Harvey Croze, and Rise of Life. His latest book, Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins, published in October 2011. John Reader has previously written about Australopithecus sediba for OUPblog.
View more about this book on the 
By: Kirsty,
on 6/27/2011
This is the latest post in our regular OUPblog column SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Today: how do organisms evolve?
The world around us has been in a state of constant change for millions of years: mountains have been thrust skywards as the plates that make up the Earth’s surface crash against each other; huge glaciers have sculpted valleys into the landscape; arid deserts have replaced fertile grasslands as rain patterns have changed. But the living organisms that populate this world are just as dynamic: as environments have changed, so too has the plethora of creatures inhabiting them. But how do creatures change to keep step with the world in which they live? The answer lies in the process of evolution.
Many organisms are uniquely suited to their environment: polar bears have layers of fur and fat to insulate them from the bitter Arctic cold; camels have hooves with broad leathery pads to enable them to walk on desert sand. These so-called adaptations – characteristics that tailor a creature to its environment – do not develop overnight: a giraffe that is moved to a savannah with unusually tall trees won’t suddenly grow a longer neck to be able to reach the far-away leaves. Instead, adaptations develop over many generations. This process of gradual change to make you better suited to your environment is called what’s called evolution.
So how does this change actually happen? In previous posts I’ve explored how the information in our genomes acts as the recipe for the cells, tissues and organs from which we’re constructed. If we are somehow changing to suit our environment, then our genes must be changing too. But there isn’t some mysterious process through which our genes ‘know’ how to change: if an organism finds its environment turning cold, its genome won’t magically change so that it now includes a new recipe for the growth of extra fur to keep it warm. Instead, the raw ‘fuel’ for genetic change is an entirely random process: the process of gene mutation.
In my last post, I considered how gene mutation alters the DNA sequence of a gene, and so alters the information stored by that gene. If you change a recipe when cooking, the end product will be different. And so it is with our genome: if the information stored in our genome – the recipe for our existence – changes, then we must change in some way too.
I mentioned above how the process of mutation is random. A mutation may be introduced when an incorrect DNA ‘letter’ is inserted into a growing chain as a chromosome is being copied: instead of manufacturing a stretch of DNA with the sequence ATTGCCT, an error may occur at the second position, to give AATGCCT. But it’s just as likely that an error could have been introduced at the sixth position instead of the second, with ATTGCCT becoming ATTGCGT. Such mutations are entirely down to chance.
And this is where we encounter something of a paradox. Though the mutations that occur in our genes to fuel the process of evolution do so at random, evolution itself is anything but random. So how can we reconcile this seeming conflict?
To answer this question, let’s imagine a population of sheep, all of whom have a woolly coat of similar thickness. Quite by chance, a gene in one of the sheep in the population picks up a mutation so that offspring of that sheep develop a slightly thicker coat. However, the thick-coated sheep is in a minority: most of the population carry the normal, non-mutated gene, and so have coats of normal thickness. Now, the sheep population live in a fairly tempera
By: Kirsty,
on 4/7/2011
How could Darwin still be controversial? We do not worry a lot about Isaac Newton, nor even about Albert Einstein, whose ideas have been among the powerful shapers of modern Western culture. Yet for many people, undisturbed by the law of gravity or by the theories of relativity that, I would venture, 99% of us don’t really understand, Darwin remains darkly threatening. One of the great figures in the history of Western thought, he was respectable and revered enough even in his own time to be buried in Westminster Abbey, of all places. He supported his local church; he was a Justice of the Peace; and he never was photographed as a working scientist, only as a gentleman and a family man. Yet a significant proportion of people in the English-speaking world vociferously do not “believe” in him.
Darwin is resisted not because he was wrong but because his ideas apply not only to the ants, and bees, and birds, and anthropoids, but to us. His theory is scary to many people because it seems to them it lessens our dignity and deprives our ethics of a foundation. The problem, of course, is that, like the theories of gravity and relativity, it is true.
At the heart of this very strange phenomenon there is a fundamental crisis of secularism. Secularism is not simply disbelief; it is not equivalent to atheism. Many supporters of secularism, like the distinguished Catholic philosopher, Charles Taylor, are believers. The most important aspect of secularism is that it is a condition of peaceful coexistence of otherwise antithetical faiths. In a secular state, diverse religions must agree that on matters of civil order and organization there is an institution to which they will all defer in what Taylor has described as “overlapping consensus.” They may disagree about God but they have to agree that in civil society they will adhere to the laws of the country.
But what happens when the overlapping consensus doesn’t overlap? This brings us to a very complicated problem: the authority of the specialist. In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of each of us to stay informed on issues that matter to the polity, and to make judgments, usually through established institutions, school boards, for example, or national elections. At the same time, our society usually sanctions the training of professionals, and forces them to undergo rigorous training, tests them to be sure of their qualifications.
Within professions, there will inevitably be learned and crucial squabbling and exploration, and new theories piled on top of old ones, or revising them. But these squabbles are part of what it is to be professional and they rarely reach the ears of the lay population. When science as an institution sanctions evolutionary theory (and squabbles about how it works), and its most distinguished practitioners insist that evolution is the foundation of all modern biology and by way of that theory make ever expanding discoveries about our health, a significant portion of the population accuse them of mere prejudice against doubters. People insist they don’t “believe” in Darwin, when they haven’t read him, don’t understand the theory to which they object, and seem unaware that evolutionary biology, though perhaps founded on Darwin, has long since made the nature of Darwin’s belief irrelevant to the validity of modern science.
Imagine a scientific community that allowed published papers to be reviewed by lay people, or simply published them without being reviewed by experts in the field. Imagine if The New England Journal of Medicine, or Nature, accepted papers which had not produced adequate evidence to make their cases, or distorted and misrepresented the evidence. Would that be a reasonable and democratic openi
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By: PJ Reece,
on 12/8/2010
Help me out here…
Charles Darwin—in his 1859 publication called On the Origin of Species—made a hugely convincing case for the advantages of adversity. His thesis would point to:
“…the pivotal role of the struggle for existence as a mechanism for evolutionary change.”
So…then…why don’t we value struggle more than we do?
Is it because we believe that evolution is behind us? That it’s history? That we humans incarnate fully evolved? I believe that yes we do indeed believe that. Therefore, let’s spend this incarnation believing in something else. And we do. We believe in happiness, success, God, etc. Why on earth would we believe in struggle? Struggle is up there with schizophrenia and wrinkles as things most passionately to avoid. What’s more, even if we agreed that struggle may be ultimately good for the species, when would you or I see the results? Not in this lifetime. Struggle simply makes no sense. Is that it?
But just a minute…happiness usually occurs in the aftermath of hardship, doesn’t it? Likewise, success. It seems to me that we should be worshipping whatever makes life challenging. After all, a certain amount of suffering would appear to be the catalyst in the transformation of ourselves into happier, wiser (even religious) people.
Forget worship… where is there any discussion about the upside of adversity?
Sure, life coaches tell us, “No pain, no gain.” And we all know it’s good for the soul, yada yada yada. And Buddhists go on and on about the role of dukkha in the scheme of things. And for a century and a half we’ve had the benefit of Darwin’s insight—struggle as evolution’s mechanism. So, again, help me out here…why has “struggle” been relegated to a blind spot in our psyche?
These questions are rhetorical, of course. We’re blind to what’s good for us because that’s the way we’re wired. All I’m trying to do is point that out. Oh, and never mind struggle—it’s anguish that really allows us to see.
Soon I’ll get back to blogging about books and movies and how they dramatize this wonderfully grotesque and essential irony.
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By: Lauren,
on 12/3/2010
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Where do geniuses come from? What makes a genius? Are all geniuses interesting people? Who’s more amazing, Shakespeare, Darwin or Einstein?
There are many questions about genius, and in his newest book, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs, Andrew Robinson answers all these and more.
About Sudden Genius
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A Q&A with Andrew Robinson
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Andrew Robinson was Literary Editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement from 1994-2006. His latest book is Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs. He has written many other books including biographies of Albert Einstein, the film director Satyajit Ray, the writer Rabindranath Tagore, and the archaeologist Michael Ventris. He is also the author of Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, and Genius: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming Spring 2011). You can read his previous OUPblog posts here (2009) and here (2010).
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 12/17/2009
December 18 1832
After passing through the straight of Le Maire at Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle anchored at Good Success Bay. Here Darwin had his first encounter with savages [sic]. He was shocked by the primitive way of life they led but was also fascinated by them. A group of four male Fuegians met the landing party. After an attempt to communicate with the Feugians the party presented them with some bright red cloth and the Feugians immediately became friendly with them. The natives initiated a dialogue by patting the crewmen on their chests. Apparently they had the most amazing ability to mimic the crew's gestures and even the words they spoke, often repeating whole English sentences back to them. Darwin was bewildered by all this.
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 8/18/2009
They say the sky's the limit
But the sky's about to fall
Down come all them record books cradle and all
They say before he bit it
That the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there's a gamblin' man
With a ticket in the rain...
--The Low Anthem, "Ticket Taker"
, is the first of his books I've read.In Julian Comstock, with the demise of oil, America has returned to preindustrial levels of technology. The nation’s calamitous fall—involving a thorough depletion of the population and the collapse of the political system as we know it—is a hazy historical memory, replaced by a larger-feeling country, more sparsely populated and more difficult to control. The much-weakened government vies for authority with the Dominion, a huge religious organization with theocratic aims, while waging a war with a European power for possession of a recently opened Northwest Passage.Wilson developed Adam Hazzard's narrative voice after reading novels by Oliver Optic (William Taylor Adams) and finding the naive and good-natured perspective a useful one to set against the often-ghastly events -- like a milder, less absurd Candide. It's an effective choice, not just because it makes the book fun to read (and it does that), but because it gives us, the readers, something to do -- it's easy enough to pick up the clues very early on that Adam's perspective is a naive one, and from that moment on we understand the book through the surface of Adam's narrative and the deeper structure of our speculations about what is "really" going on. (One of my favorite instances of this is the information we receive about Julian's sexual orientation. The clues are relatively subtle, but they add up to a scene at the end that is deeply moving -- as much because of what Adam doesn't say as for what he does.)
Into the political, military, and religious tumult steps Julian Comstock, the nephew of the current president, Deklan Conqueror, and—inconveniently for Deklan—also the son of Deklan’s brother Bryce, the former president whom Deklan had executed in his ascent to power. Julian’s own artistic and political ambitions carry him and his best friend, Adam Hazzard, from the Midwest to Labrador to New York City, from homesteads to army barracks to the halls of power. The novel, narrated by Hazzard, is funny and sad, accessible and thought-provoking; a story of the future written in the style of the past; a light romance and a war saga; a novel of power plays and intimate friendship, where the personal is political and the political is personal.
Manhattan in a spring dawn! I would have been in awe, if not for the dangers overhanging us. I won't test the reader's patience by dwelling on all the wonders that passed my eye that morning; but there were brick buildings four and five stories tall, painted gaudy colors -- amazing in their height but dwarfed by the skeletal steel towers for which the city is famed, some of which leaned like tipsy giants where their foundations had been undercut by water. There were wide canals on which freight barges and trash scows were drawn by reams of muscular canal-side horses. There were splendid avenues where wealthy Aristos and ragged wage workers crowded together on wooden sidewalks, next to fetid alleys strewn with waste and the occasional dead animal. There were the combined pungencies of frying food, decaying fish, and open sewers; and all of it was clad in a haze of coal smoke, made roseate by the rising sun.This is a paragraph that could have appeared -- at least in terms of what it describes -- in a 19th century novel. Indeed, scenes from Gangs of New York popped into my mind occasionally. Artifacts from the days of the "Secular Ancients" are prized, but by the time the novel begins, most of the useful ones have been found, and many of them have been locked away by the Dominion, which seems to consider ignorance a vital ingredient for religious faith.
"He agreed that the story lacked some essential ingredients."Julian eventually recognizes the value of these elements, and so adds them to the story of Charles Darwin, leading to pages where I chortled continuously as I read.
"Such as?"
I cleared my throat. "Three acts -- memorable songs -- attractive women -- pirates -- a battle at sea -- a despicable villain -- a duel of honor--"
(parts of which can be heard on the band's MySpace page). I listened to the album repeatedly throughout my reading of the second half of the book. In particular, the first song, "Charlie Darwin" (available via the YouTube here), which, when listened to late at night while reading the last chapter before the epilogue, will make you cry.
By: Kirsty,
on 8/6/2009
We at OUP UK were delighted recently when we heard that Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Dixon had won The Dingle Prize. It is awarded biennially by the British Society for the History of Science for the best book in the history of science, technology and medicine accessible to a non-expert readership, with the judges declaring that Thomas Dixon’s book “is clearly and concisely written, well argued, and accessible to the non-expert; it should appeal to a wide readership not only beyond the history of science community but also outside academia”.
Below is an extract taken from the book, regarding Darwin and evolution. Thomas Dixon has previously written two posts for OUPblog, which can be found here and here.
In his early 20s, Darwin was looking forward to a career in the Church of England. He had embarked on medical training in Edinburgh a few years earlier but had found the lectures boring and the demonstrations of surgery disgusting. Now his father sent him off to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where young Charles signed up to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England and set about studying mathematics and theology with a view to entering holy orders after graduation. But Darwin found that theology appealed about as much as surgery. His real passion at this time was for beetle-hunting rather than Bible-reading, and he had an early triumph when one of the specimens he had identified appeared in print in an instalment of Illustrations of British Entomology. In 1831 this enthusiastic young amateur naturalist was invited to join the HMS Beagle as a companion to the ship’s captain, Robert Fitzroy, and to undertake collections and observations on matters of natural-historical interest. Perhaps he was not, after all, destined to become the Reverend Charles Darwin.
The voyage of the Beagle lasted from 1831 to 1836. The primary purpose of the expedition was to complete the British Admiralty’s survey of the coast of South America, but its five-year itinerary also took in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Darwin’s observations of rock formations, plants, animals, and indigenous peoples were incidental to the purpose of the expedition but absolutely central to his own intellectual development. On board the Beagle, Darwin’s religious views started to evolve too. He had no doubt that the natural world was the work of God. In his notebook he recorded his impressions of the South American jungle: ‘Twiners entwining twiners – tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – hosannah.’ To Darwin, these jungles were ‘temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature’, in which no-one could stand without ‘feeling that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body’. He even admired the civilizing effects of the work of Christian missionaries too, observing that ‘so excellent is the Christian faith, that the outward conduct of the believers is said most decidedly to have been improved by its doctrines’.
Back in England, however, after the voyage, Darwin would start to have doubts. His grandfather, father, and elder brother had all rejected Christianity, adopting either Deism or outright freethinking unbelief. He seemed to be heading in a similar direction. His reasons were many. His travels had revealed to him at first hand the great variety of religious beliefs and practices around the world. All these different religions claimed to have a special revelation from God, but they could not all be right. Then there was his moral revulsion at the Christian doctrine that while the faithful would be saved, unbelievers and heathens, along with unrepentant sinners, would be consigned to an eternity of damnation. Darwin thought this was a ‘damnable doctrine’ and could not see how anyone could wish it to be true. This objection hit him with particular force after the death of his unbelieving father in 1848.
There were two ways in which Darwin’s re-reading of the book of nature also gave him reasons to re-think his religion. He and others before him had seen in the adaptation of plants and animals to their environments evidence of the power and wisdom of God. But Darwin now thought he saw something else. Hard though it was for him to believe it himself – the human eye could still give him a shudder of incredulity – he came to think that all these adaptations came about by natural processes. Variation and natural selection could counterfeit intelligent design. Secondly, along with the silent beauty of the jungle he had also observed all sorts of cruelty and violence in nature, which he could not believe a benevolent and omnipotent God could have willed. Why, for example, would God have created the ichneumon wasp? The ichneumon lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, with the effect that when the larvae hatch they eat their host alive. Why would God create cuckoos which eject their foster siblings from the nest? Why make ants that enslave other species of ant? Why give queen bees the instinct of murderous hatred towards their daughters? ‘What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write’, Darwin exclaimed, ‘on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!’
Darwin never became an atheist. At the time he wrote On the Origin of Species he was still a theist, although not a Christian. By the end of his life he preferred to adopt the label ‘agnostic’, which had been coined by his friend Thomas Huxley in 1869. Darwin, for the most part, kept his religious doubts to himself. He had many reasons to do so, not least his desire for a quiet life and social respectability. The most important reason, though, was his wife Emma. In the early years of their marriage, Emma, a pious evangelical Christian, wrote a letter to Charles of her fears about his loss of faith in Christianity and the consequences for his salvation. She could not bear the thought that his doubts would mean they were not reunited after death in heaven. The death of their beloved young daughter Annie in 1851 brought home again the need for the consolation of an afterlife. The difference between Charles and Emma on this question was a painful one. Among Darwin’s papers after his death, Emma found the letter she had written to him on the subject 40 years earlier. On it her husband had added a short note of his own: ‘When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed and cryed over this.’
By: Deborah Heiligman,
on 4/21/2009
My friend Pamela Curtis Swallow is writing a biography of her relative Ellen Swallow Richards. This is how our conversations go lately:
Me: Pam, could you please pass the salt?
Pam: Salt comes from mines, Deb, and did you know that Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman member of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers?”
Me: Really?
Pam: Also Ellen was the first woman admitted to M.I.T. and did you know that she founded the first health food take-out restaurant and was the founder of Home Economics?
Me: Pam?
Pam: Deb, it all comes down to Ellen.
Pam is besotted. She talks about Ellen all the time. Did I mention she also giggles when she talks about Ellen sometimes? She is completely obsessed. And this is how it should be.
I have written four biographies and each time I fell in love. It wasn’t always love at first sight, and sometimes I had to fight to stay in love. But love it was. And being in love with your subject serves an author very well. Because when the road gets bumpy, love keeps you going.
My first love affair was with Barbara McClintock. I had heard of Barbara back when I was an editor at Scholastic News (See Karen Romano Young’s post of March 5, 2009). McClintock won the Nobel Prize for her discovery of jumping genes and we ran a photo of her holding up an ear of maize, the plant she worked with. A few years later, I was thinking about how much I loved biographies as a kid and I decided I wanted to write one about Barbara McClintock. She had won the Nobel Prize for work she had done three decades earlier and when she finally won, interviewers asked her, "Wasn’t it hard that nobody believed you for all these years?" She answered she knew she was right, and “it would all come out in the wash.” What kind of person believes in herself so much that she keeps on working despite the fact that nobody believes her? I had to write about her so I could find out what made her tick.
I read the first chapter of an adult biography of her, called A Feeling For the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller, which gave some insight into McClintock as a person, and I was hooked. I wrote a proposal, got a contract, and then read the next chapters of Keller’s book and realized I couldn’t understand the science AT ALL. The short arm of chromosome number 9? What is a chromosome? Jumping genes? What is a gene? How do they work? I had barely taken any science since 9th grade biology. I wanted to give my advance money back. But of course I had already spent it on diapers and cheerios and printer ink. I had to write the book.
Besides, I was already in love, which was a very good thing because I stayed up late many nights giving myself a crash a crash course in genetics so I could write the book.
Love makes you do crazy things. Love made a telemarketer give me her rendition of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” when I told her I was on a deadline writing a biography of John F. Kennedy. Love made me write a first draft of said book, High Hopes, in six weeks, as my editor begged me to. Love made me, the only girl who didn’t get into the sixth grade chorus, sing the lyrics to J.F.K.'s campaign song “High Hopes” with Tita Cahn (“Sing it with me, Deborah!”), widow of Sammy Cahn, so I could get permission to use the lyrics in the book. And love made me agree to write the book in the first place even though I knew I would find out things about John F. Kennedy I did not like. (O.K., love and a decent advance.)
So what do you do when you find out things about your person you don’t like? You take a deep breath and say, I am a biographer. I am not, actually, marrying the person. (Not that the people we marry are perfect, either.) You tell yourself that you are obliged to give a full portrait of your subject. And you want to. Within limits, when you are writing for kids.
Writing is all about choices. Did I write about J.F.K.'s extramarital affairs? No. Not only was it not relevant for kids, it was not an integral part of the story I was telling. Did I write about the fact that he and his family covered up his poor health so he could win the election? Yes, absolutely. It was an integral part of the story: his illness and the decision to cover it up shows who John F. Kennedy was. When kids read the book I hope they come away with a sense of the real person – a boy who grew up in a large family in the shadow of his older brother, and overcame illness to become President of the United States. I must admit I was glad I couldn’t write about the affairs.
Love can be hard. Love is hard when your subject dies. I spent many years thinking about, researching, and writing about Charles and Emma Darwin for Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith. And every time I read or wrote about Charles or Emma dying, I cried. As time went on my tears did not lessen. Because as time went on I was more deeply in love.
By the time I was writing what would be my almost final draft, I started sobbing uncontrollably when Charles died. This moment coincided with our younger son packing to go to college. Everyone in my family knows I do not deal well with separation. Benjamin was only moving 13 blocks uptown, but he was moving out and we all knew things would change. So Benjamin assumed I was crying about him. He came into my office, patted me on the back, and said, “There, there, Mom, I’ll see you soon,” and I said, between sobs, “It’s not you. Charles Darwin died.” Benjamin has not yet forgiven me, and he’s a sophomore. My husband likes to tell the story that months later, when I got to Charles’s death again, this time in galleys (of my OWN book), I whispered to myself, “Maybe this time Charles won’t die.”
I wasn’t always in love with Charles Darwin, and I barely knew he had a wife. My husband sort of owned Darwin in our family. But one day he (husband, not Charles) said to me, “Did you know that Charles Darwin’s wife was religious? And they loved each other very much. She was upset that he would go to hell and they would be separated for eternity.” I fell in love with the subject immediately: marriage, science and religion, God, devotion, death… I knew I had a book to write. Now I just had to fall in love with Charles and Emma themselves. Primary sources were the way in. I read (and as the research went on, read and read again) a two-volume book called Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters. There is no surer way to love than through someone’s personal correspondence—assuming, of course, that person is wonderful and articulate and funny and kind and spunky and true and (oh, dear, stop me). I was in love with Emma.
Next I read Charles Darwin’s autobiography and then his journals, and letters, and the same thing happened. I fell in love with him, too. Irrevocably. How can you not love a man who writes in a private notebook, “But why does joy, & OTHER EMOTION make grown up people cry.—What is emotion?” while he’s thinking about the theory of evolution? And writes to Emma around the same time, “I long for the day when we shall enter the house together. How glorious it will be to see you seated by the fire of our own house.”
Darwin was “one of the true Good Guys of history,” as the woman who helped put together the Darwin show at the American Museum of Natural History said to me after my book was published. He was a terrific husband (and Emma deserved that!) and an attentive and loving father. Charles and Emma had a wonderful marriage, which was a profound influence on his work. When he finally wrote The Origin of Species, it was a different book than it would have been had he not been married to Emma. Although Charles Darwin saw wars in nature he also saw the beauty and--
“Deb?”
Sorry.
But I can't help it. I'm in love.
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By: Lizzy Burns,
on 2/10/2008
Becky at Farm School has a most excellent post up in honor of Charles Darwin's Birthday on February 12.
She begins it with a quote that is very true: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” Charles Darwin
Wow. How true that is.
Farm School's post has a great list of resources about Darwin, from children's books to documentaries.
The only thing I didn't notice was fiction books about Darwin, (CORRECTED: the list does include fiction books!) which allows me mention Robin Brande's Evolution, Me, & Other Freaks of Nature. OK, so Darwin isn't in that book, but in addition to just being a great book, it's a great look at science, evolution, what "scientific theory" really means, and religion.
By: Jenny,
on 6/21/2007
SCBWI had a stand at the Cape Town Book Fair where members of SCBWI displayed examples of their work.
LeAnne Hardy from Jo'burg was one writer who took advantage of the opportunity to display her books. Other authors included Wendy Hartman and Reviva Schermbrucker.
Illustrators also displayed their books as well as examples of their work. Gauteng illustrators whose work was on display included Joan Rankin and Yvette de Beer. Other illustrators who displayed their work included Marjorie van Heerden and Paddy Bouma.
The stand was very busy throughout the fair. Many people went through portfolios and looked at the books published by SCBWI members. They took down names of writers and illustrators whose work they could commission. A popular attraction were the beautiful posters for sale. These were done by renowned artists such as Piet Grobler and were snapped up by eager teachers and librarians.
The SCBWI stand was next to the IBBY stand which displayed some wonderful examples of South African books. A large number of exciting children's events were also organised.
All in all, children's books were prominent at the Cape Town Book Fair.
By: Jenny,
on 6/9/2007
FIVE different A2-size posters with illustrations by Joan Rankin, Marjorie van Heerden, Samantha van Riet, Piet Grobler and Paddy Bouma will be for sale at the SCBWI Stand at the Cape Town Book Fair 2007 @ R30.00 each. Avoid disappointment and pre-order one or more posters by e-mailing [email protected].
Click on the picture below to view the posters.
盛年不再來，一日難再晨；及時當勉勵，歲月不待人..................................................