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NPR's resident scientist Robert Krulwich speaks with Eric Simons, author of Darwin Slept Here: Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America, on "All Things Considered."

2009 is a double-anniversary year for Darwin: the 200th anniversary of his birth in February, and the 150th anniversary of publication of The Origin of Species. Following in Darwin's footsteps, author Eric Simon's new book is an innovative and thrilling new look at Darwin as a young naturalist in South America.

by Cassie, Publicity Assistant

Darwin Day continues on the OUPblog! This month, OUP has published a fully corrected and annotated edition of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The annotations are by Paul Ekman, the behavioral scientist who inspired the new Fox drama “Lie to Me.” The following post explains Darwin’s three general principles of expression and follows each with an example taken from the text.

I. The principle of serviceable associated habits. Certain complex actions are of direct or indirect service under certain states of the mind, in order to relieve or gratify certain sensations, desires, etc.; and whenever the same state of mind is induced, however feebly, there is a tendency through the force of habit and association for the same movements to be performed, though they may not then be of the least use. Some actions ordinarily associated through habit with certain states of the mind may be partially repressed through the will, and in such cases the muscles which are least under the separate control of the will are the most liable still to act, causing movements which we recognize as expressive. In certain other cases the checking of one habitual movement requires other slight movements; and these are likewise expressive.

Example:

From the continued use of the eyes, these organs are especially liable to be acted on through association under various states of the mind, although there is manifestly nothing to be seen. A man, as Gratiolet remarks, who vehemently rejects a proposition, will almost certainly shut his eyes or turn away his face, but if he accepts the proposition, he will nod his head in affirmation and open his eyes widely. The man acts in this latter case as if he clearly saw the thing, and in the former case as if he did not or would not see it. I have noticed that persons in describing a horrid sight often shut their eyes momentarily and firmly, or shake their heads, as if not to see or to drive away something disagreeable; and I have caught myself, when thinking in the dark of a horrid spectacle, closing my eyes firmly. (Pg. 38)

II. The principle of antithesis. Certain states of the mind lead to certain habitual actions, which are of service, as under our first principle. Now when a directly opposite state of mind is induced, there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of movements of a directly opposite nature, though these are of no use; and such movements are in some cases highly expressive.

Example:

I will here give one other instance of antithesis in expression. I formerly possessed a large dog, who, like every other dog, was much pleased to go out walking. He showed his pleasure by trotting gravely before me with high steps, head much raised, moderately erected ears, and tail carried aloft but not stiffly. Not far from my house a path branches off to the right, leading to the hot-house, which I used often to visit for a few moments, to look at my experimental plants. This was always a great disappointment to the dog, as he did not know whether I should continue my walk; and the instantaneous and complete change of expression which came over him, as soon as my body swerved in the least towards the path (and I sometimes tried this as an experiment) was laughable. His look of dejection was known to every member of the family, and was called his hot-house face. This consisted in the head drooping much, the whole body sinking a little and remaining motionless; the ears and tail falling suddenly down, but the tail was by no means wagged. With the falling of the ears and his great chaps, the eyes became much changed in appearance, and I fancied that they looked less bright. His aspect was that of piteous, hopeless dejection; and it was, as I have said, laughable, as the cause was so slight. Every detail in his attitude was in complete opposition to his former joyful yet dignified bearing; and can be explained, as it appears to me, in no other way, except through the principle of antithesis.

Note from Ekman:
I am less convinced that this is an instance of antithesis. Instead it seems better explained as dejection or what Darwin called ‘lowered spirits.’ He apparently did not accept this as the full explanation because it happened so quickly and the occasion, from his point of view, was so slight. (Pg. 62)

III. The principle of actions due to the constitution of the nervous system, independently from the first of the will, and independently to a certain extent of habit. When the sensorium is strongly excited, nerve-force is generated in excess, and is transmitted in certain definite directions, depending on the connection of the nerve-cells, and partly on habit: or the supply of nerve-force may, as it appears, be interrupted. Effects are thus produced which we recognize as expressive. This third principle may, for the sake of brevity, be called that of the direct action of the nervous system.

Example:

The heart, as I have said, will be all the more readily affected through habitual associations, as it is not under the control of the will. A man when moderately angry, or even when enraged, may command the movements of his body, but he cannot prevent his heart from beating rapidly. His chest will perhaps give a few heaves, and his nostrils just quiver, for the movements of respiration are only in part voluntary. In like manner those muscles of the face which are least obedient to the will, will sometimes alone betray a slight and passing emotion. The glands again are wholly independent of the will, and a man suffering from grief may command his features, but cannot always prevent the tears from coming into his eyes. A hungry man, if tempting food is placed before him, may not show his hunger by any outward gesture, but he cannot check the secretion of saliva. (Pg. 79-80)

by Cassie, Publicity Assistant

Yesterday wasn’t just Lincoln’s birthday. It was also Charles Darwin’s birthday; the 200th anniversary of his birth. Rather than having Darwin get lost among all the Lincoln chatter of the day, the OUPblog decided to declare today an unofficial Darwin Day!

To start the celebration, we have an excerpt from Darwin’s Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character, a delightfully informal autobiography originally intended for his family. This selection is taken from a new collection of Darwin’s best and most famous works, Evolutionary Writings, edited by James A. Secord.

I am not conscious of any change in my mind during the last 30 years, excepting in one point presently to be mentioned; nor indeed could any change have been expected unless one of general deterioration… I think that I have become a little more skilful in guessing right explanations & in devising experimental tests; but this may probably be the result of mere practice & of a larger store of knowledge. I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly & concisely; & this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time; but it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long & intently about every sentence, & thus I have been often led to see errors in reasoning & in my own observations or those of others. There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement & proposition in a wrong or awkward form. Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down; but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can, contracting half the words; & then correct deliberately. Sentences thus scribbled down are often better ones than I could have written deliberately.

Having said this much about my manner of writing, I will add that with my larger books I spend a good deal of time over the general arrangement of the matter. I first make the rudest outline in two or three pages, & then a larger one in several pages… Each one of these headings is again enlarged & often transposed before I begin to write in extenso. As in several of my books facts observed by others have been very extensively used, & as I have always had several quite distinct subjects in hand at the same time…I keep from 30 to 40 large portfolios, in cabinets with labelled shelves, into which I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought many books & at their ends I make an index of all the facts which concern my work; or if the book is not my own write out a separate abstract, & of such abstracts I have a large drawer full. Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes & make a general & classified index, & by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all the information collected during my life ready for use.

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed… Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth Coleridge & Shelley, gave me great pleasure, & even as a school-boy I took intense delight in Shakspeare… I have also said that formerly Pictures gave me considerable, & music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare & found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.— Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure… On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief & pleasure to me, & I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, & I like all if moderately good, & if they do not end unhappily,—against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class, unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, & if it be a pretty woman all the better.

This curious & lamentable loss of the higher æsthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies & travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain) & essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered; & if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry & to listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, & may possibly be injurious to the intellect & more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

…

My habits are methodical, & this has been of not a little use for my particular line of work. Lastly I have had ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread. Even ill-health, though it has annihilated several years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of society & amusement.

Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex & diversified mental qualities & conditions. Of these the most important have been—the love of science—unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject—industry in observing & collecting facts—& a fair share of invention as well as of common sense. With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that thus I shd have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.

Eric Simons, author Darwin Slept Here, is profiled in today's San Francisco Chronicle: "When Eric Simons grew tired of larking about on a glacier in Tierra del Fuego, it was snowing hard, so he found a shop with books in English, bought a copy of "The Voyage of the Beagle" by Charles Darwin and read the naturalist's charming prose. Simons, 24 then and 28 now, was hooked. He'd had a rigorous grounding in biology from his Castro Valley high school teacher and in evolution from his undergraduate days as a science major at UC Santa Barbara. He'd served a stint writing for a couple of small Bay Area newspapers, but now he was footloose and adventure-hungry at the bottom of the world, where Darwin - seasick aboard the Beagle - had once sojourned briefly. The result of that chance and chilly encounter with history was a quick flight home, a decision to retrace at least some of the naturalist's path, and a twice-over-deeply self-study of Darwin's seminal "On the Origin of Species," plus all the other Darwin writings Simons could lay his hands on. Then came the footsteps: "I wanted to capture his adventures," Simons says. "I wanted to share his experiences and feel the same feelings he must have had because everything in the Beagle book told me Darwin was so joyful, whether he was saddling up with gauchos in Patagonia, or climbing a mountain in Chile, or kicking his heels in the air while he was lying down with a herd of inquisitive camel-like guanacos in a field near Buenos Aires." Simons graduated from UC Berkeley's journalism school last year and his first book is just out. It's called Darwin Slept Here, subtitled "Discovery, Adventure, and Swimming Iguanas in Charles Darwin's South America," published by Overlook Press."

National Geographic Traveler includes two new Overlook titles in their March round-up of "New Books that Transport Us:" Darwin Slept Here, Eric Simons's travelogue retracing Darwin's steps through South America, published in time to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and The Republic of Vengeance, Paul Water's historical novel set in third-century B.C. Greece.

2009 is the year of Darwin, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his most famous work On the Origin of Species. BBC Radio 4 has recently been running a series of programmes called ‘Dear Darwin’, which invited five eminent thinkers to write a letter to Darwin, and to read it on air. One of the contributors was Jerry A. Coyne.

Jerry Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and author of Why Evolution is True, which is published in the UK by OUP and in the USA by Viking. Below is the text of his letter to Darwin.

My Dear Mr. Darwin,

Happy 200th birthday! I hope you are as well as can expected for someone who has been dead for nearly 130 years. I suppose that your final book, the one about earthworms, has a special significance for you these days. Are the worms of Westminster Abbey superior to the ones you studied so carefully in the grounds of your home at Downe in Kent? They’ve certainly mulched some distinguished people over the years!

But enough of the personal questions: let me introduce myself. I am one of thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of professional biologists who work full time on your scientific legacy. You’ll be happy to know that Britain remains a powerhouse in what we nowadays call evolutionary biology, and your ideas now have wide currency across the entire planet. I work in Chicago, in the United States of America. But even the French have finally reluctantly relinquished their embrace of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose misguided evolutionary ideas you did so much to discredit.

Your Origin of Species turns 150 this year. I just re-read it in your honour and must say that, though you did not always have the snappiest turn of phrase, it really is a wonderfully comprehensive and insightful work. It is remarkable, considering what you did not know when you wrote it, how robust the book has proved over the years. The findings of modern biology, many of them inconceivable to you as you beavered away in your Down House study, have provided ever more evidence in support of your ideas, and none that contradicts them. We have learned a huge amount in the past 150 years, but nearly all of it still fits comfortably into the framework you outlined in The Origin. Take DNA, for example. This is what we call the hereditary material that is passed down from generation to generation. You knew nothing about it – remember how you wished you understood more about how heredity works? Now we have full DNA sequences from dozens of species, each one a string of billions of the four DNA letters—A, T, G and C—each a different chemical compound. What do we find when we compare these sequences, say between a mouse and a human? We see the DNA equivalent of the anatomical similarities – as mammals – that you noted mice and humans share because they are descended from a common ancestor, an early mammal. Strings of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts tell precisely the same evolutionary story as traits like lactation and warm-bloodedness. It is absolutely marvelous that your 150 year old insight on common ancestry should be so relevant to the very latest discoveries of the new field we call molecular biology.

In The Origin, you gave very little evidence for evolution from the fossil record, wringing your hands instead about the incompleteness of the geological record. But since then, the labors of fossil-hunters throughout the world have turned up plenty of evidence of evolutionary change, and many amazing “transitional” forms that connect major groups of animals, proving your idea of common ancestry. You predicted that these forms would exist; we have found them. These include fossils that show transitions between mammals and reptiles, fish and amphibians, and even dinosaurs with feathers—the ancestors of birds! Just in the past few years, paleontologists have unearthed an astonishing fossil, called Tiktaalik, that is intermediate between fish and amphibians. It has the flat head and neck of an amphibian, but a fishy tail and body, while its fins are sturdy, easily able, with slight modification, to give them a leg up when they left the water. The fossil record has given us a direct glimpse of an event of great moment in the history of the planet: the colonization of land by vertebrates. And we have evidence just as convincing for the recolonization of the sea by mammals: the group that gave rise to whales. In The Origin, you were correct in suggesting that whales arose from land animals, but you got it wrong on one point. You thought they may have come from carnivores like bears, but we now know this is not true. Instead, the ancestral whale came from a small hooved animal rather like a deer. And in the last thirty years we have discovered a whole series of intermediate fossils spanning the gap from those ancient deer to modern whales, showing them losing their hind legs, evolving flippers, and moving their breathing hole to the top of their head. Both Tiktaalik and these ancestral whales put paid to the objection, which you yourself encountered, that no transitional form between land and water could possibly have existed.

Perhaps the most remarkable set of intermediate fossils, however, come from an evolutionary transition rather closer to home. In 1871, you more predicted that, since humans seem most related to African great apes, gorillas and chimpanzees, we would find human fossils on that continent. And now we have them—in profusion! It turns out that our lineage separated from that of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, nearly 7 million years ago, and we have a superb series of fossils documenting our transition from early apelike creatures to more modern human forms. Our own species has become an exemplar of evolution. And we know even more: evidence from our hereditary DNA material has told us that all modern humans came from a relatively recent migration event—about 100,000 years ago—when our ancestors left Africa and spread throughout the world.

The idea you were proudest of was natural selection. That too has had a good 150 years, holding up well as the main cause of evolution and the only known cause of adaptation. Perhaps the most dramatic modern example involves bacteria that are now known to cause disease, including the scarlet fever that was such a plague upon your family. Chemists have developed drugs to cure diseases like this, but now, as you might well predict, the microbes are becoming resistant to those drugs—precisely in accord with the principles of natural selection—for the most drug-resistant microbes are the ones that survive to breed. There are hundreds of other cases. One that will especially please you is the observation of natural selection in the Galápagos finches you collected in the Beagle voyage—now called “Darwin’s finches” in your honor. A few decades ago, zoologists observed a great drought on the islands that reduced the number of small seeds available for the birds to eat. And, just as predicted, natural selection caused the evolution of larger-beaked birds within only a few years. These examples would surely be a centerpiece of The Origin were you to rewrite it today.

All told, the resilience of your ideas is remarkable. But that is not to say that you got everything right. On The Origin of Species was, admit it, a misnomer. You described correctly how a single species changes through time, but you came a cropper trying to explain how one species splits into two. Speciation is a significant problem, because it underpins the branching process that has yielded the tree of life – that extraordinary vision you bequeathed us of the natural world as one vast genealogy. Speciation is the key to understanding how, starting with the very first species on earth, evolution has resulted in the 50 million species that are thought to inhabit our planet today.

You once called speciation the “mystery of mysteries,” but it’s a lot less mysterious these days. We recognize now that species are separated one from another by barriers to reproduction. That is, we recognize different species, like humans and chimpanzees, because they cannot successfully interbreed. To modern evolutionary biologists, studying “the origin of species” means studying how these barriers to reproduction arise. And now that we have a concrete phenomenon to investigate, we are making remarkable progress in understanding the genetic details of how one species splits into two. This is in fact the problem to which I’ve devoted my entire career

I wish I could end this letter by telling you that your theory of evolution has achieved universal acceptance. As you well knew, evolution has proved a bitter pill for religious people to swallow. For example, a large proportion of the American public, despite access to education, clings to a belief in the literal truth of Genesis. You will find this hard to believe, but more Americans believe in the existence of heavenly angels than accept the fact of evolution. Unfortunately, I must often put aside my research to fight the attempts of these “creationists” to have their Biblical views taught in the public schools. Humans have evolved extraordinary intellectual abilities, but sadly these are not always given a free rein by their owners. But this probably won’t surprise you – remember the Bishop of Oxford and his attempt to put your friend Thomas H. Huxley in his place?

You wrote in your introduction to The Origin of Species that

“No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this.”

It seems that, distracted by other projects, you never got around to it, but my own effort along these lines is represented in a book (which I enclose) called Why Evolution is True. It goes further to describe the evidence supporting you than a letter this size ever could, but it’s just one book at just one moment in the history of biology. When I myself am as long gone as you are, somebody else will certainly need to write an update, for the facts supporting your theories continue to roll in, and I wager they will continue to do so.

So, rest in peace, Mr. Darwin, and here’s hoping that the next hundred years will see a steady evolution of rationality in a troubled world.

Your most humble servant,
Jerry Coyne

Mark S. Blumberg is a Professor and Starch Faculty Fellow at the University of Iowa.  He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Behavioral Neuroscience and as President of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology.  In his newest book, Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution, Blumberg takes a subject that is often shunned as discomforting and embarrassing and manages to shed new light on how individuals-and entire species- develop, survive and evolve.  In the original post below commemorates Richard Goldschmidt’s death by celebrating his work.

As we approach the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, I would like to take a moment to commemorate the anniversary of the death of another great biologist. Richard Goldschmidt, one of the preeminent geneticists of the twentieth century, died fifty years ago at the age of 80. When I was in graduate school, his name had become synonymous with foolishness. Indeed, one did not mention his name without the requisite acknowledgement that his views — especially his notion of the ‘hopeful monster’ — were anathema. I now look back on my eager acceptance of this judgment with a bit of shame. But there is plenty of shame to go around.

Goldschmidt’s seminal volume, The Material Basis of Evolution, was reissued in 1982, 42 years after its original publication. In reconsidering Goldschmidt’s legacy in a review of that reissue, published in Paleobiology, Guy Bush related graduate school experiences that were very similar to my own: when Goldschmidt’s name came up, Bush wrote, “it was inevitably in the context of ‘hopeful monsters’ and to the accompaniment of subdued snickers and knowing nods. It didn’t take long to learn that Richard B. Goldschmidt was not to be taken seriously as an evolutionary biologist…. These early impressions were reinforced by repeated ridicule of Goldschmidt both in print and in conversations with other biologists. I now wonder how many of those who criticized him so authoritatively really read any of his book or papers.”

Bush titled his review “Goldschmidt’s Follies.” Stephen Jay Gould, who penned an introduction to the reissue of the The Material Basis of Evolution, titled his piece “The Uses of Heresy.” Clearly, Goldschmidt had stepped on some toes — and those toes belonged to those individuals who were promoting the so-called Modern Synthesis. Among these promoters were Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson, two eminent scientists whose graduate class it was where Guy Bush’s early impressions about Goldschmidt were formed.

The Modern Synthesis, which grew rapidly in stature during the 1930 and 1940s, was a critical development in evolutionary thinking as it linked the Darwinian commitment to small, incremental change with the specific details of Mendelian genetics. Goldschmidt’s “heretical” willingness to entertain the possibility of rapid evolutionary change was, therefore, a threat to a key Darwinian tenet. So Goldschmidt had to be crushed; and he was — mercilessly and effectively. To this day, despite his many seminal and undisputed contributions to science, his name and legacy remain banished in limbo.

Among Goldschmidt’s many contributions was his in-depth examination of phenocopies (his term), which are ‘mutant phenotypes’ produced without genetic change through alterations in the developmental environment. These and other critical contributions provide adequate support for the notion that Goldschmidt was hardly the loon that Mayr and others made him out to be. Of course, even Goldschmidt’s fans, including Gould and Bush, recognize his missteps; but scientific perfection has never been a requirement for respect. Darwin’s gemmule hypothesis does not dampen our enthusiasm for his brilliance; and Mayr, rightly revered by the time of his death a few years ago at the age of 100, was not able to escape the occasional doozy — although he did manage to escape the kind of ridicule that he had earlier heaped on Goldschmidt.

Unlike Mayr, who had little appreciation for development, Goldschmidt was particularly attuned to the significance that developmental rate, timing, and patterning mean for the individual and the species. In his words: A “genetic change involving rates of embryonic processes does not affect a single process alone. The physiological balanced system of development is such that in many cases a single upset leads automatically to a whole series of consecutive changes of development in which the ability for embryonic regulation, as well as purely mechanical and topographical moments, come into play; there is in addition the shift in proper timing of integrating processes. If the result is not, as it frequently is, a monstrosity incapable of completing development or surviving, a completely new anatomical construction may emerge in one step from such a change.”

This passage, like so many others, is nuanced, sophisticated, and surprisingly modern. But that single phrase — ‘in one step’ — was heresy to too many. Nonetheless, Goldschmidt saw no other way to account for the “bridgeless gaps” that he believed to separate individual species. Nor was he alone. A half-century earlier, William Bateson had also rejected the exclusive focus of the Darwinians on incremental change. And still others, like Goldschmidt and Bateson, emphasized the need to integrate developmental perspectives into evolutionary thought. Gavin de Beer, Walter Garstang, and Pere Alberch developed similar perspectives. Indeed, it is a curious fact of history that scientists with a background in development and embryology have been less enamored of the Neo-Darwinian commitment to incrementalism and population genetics. Thus, for most of the twentieth century, these evolutionary camps were also separated by a bridgeless gap.

But that gap is shrinking as development creeps steadily back into the evolutionary mainstream. Alas, Goldschmidt may still be too controversial to get any credit. For example, I recently read a scientific paper, published in 2005, that in every way evoked Goldschmidt’s ideas about rapid evolutionary change. However, there was no reference to Goldschmidt at all, but for a curious reference in the final paragraph to “the material basis of evolution,” exactly duplicating the title of Goldschmidt’s infamous book. Assuming that this author knew what he was doing, can it be that he felt comfortable only with a surreptitious acknowledgement of Goldschmidt’s influence? This suggestion hardly seems far-fetched when we consider the visceral responses that Goldschmidt and his ideas still evoke. For example, after Olivia Judson wrote a blog in The New York Times entitled “The monster is back, and it’s hopeful,” Jerry Coyne quickly shot back with a sharp rejoinder. The many comments from readers of these blogs were no less heated.

It is difficult to navigate such disputes, especially when there are so many threads coursing through each argument. As with any such complex issue, agreement and disagreement can flow with each passing sentence. But, in the end, what has become clear to me is that these disputes are too firmly wedded to old facts and fading personalities. If we wish to bridge the gaps between today’s various evolutionary camps, we might want to look to the developing embryo for inspiration. Yes, we have been shaped by past disputes, but that does not mean that each generation is doomed to repeat them without modification.