An informal appreciation of Charles Darwin

Much of what we admire about Darwin rests on how profoundly his ideas have shaped pretty much everything of interest in the last century and a half. We admire the accomplishment of having the insights on natural selection. We're impressed with how quickly his work reordered everything from taxonomy to research strategy. We love the exceptionally powerful moments, the great achievements, the climaxes, the balls hit out of the park.

We like the theater of the whole thing. Most of us haven't sat down to read _On the Origin of Species_, but I'm sure a lot of us have enjoyed watching Fredric March and Spencer Tracy duke it out in _Inherit the Wind_. Which have you paid more attention to-- the Federalist Papers or _1776_? And why not? It's fun to watch an electric personality with a switchblade wit make the older guys look like buffoons.

Even the legends of evolution go for the razzle-dazzle. There's a famous account of the 1860 debate on Darwin's ideas, where Darwin advocate Thomas Huxley squared off against Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce. The story has it that Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was descended from apes on his mother's or father's side: Huxley replied to the effect that he wouldn't being related to a monkey, but he'd be ashamed to be related to someone who used sophistry to suppress the truth. It's a great comeback, and the legend has the room exploding in an uproar at that moment. But that exchange was an uncharacteristic spark in a dry and generally responsible scientific debate.

I spend a lot of time thinking about comedians. (How's that for circling wide of the topic?) When George Carlin passed away, he got a lot of praise for truth-telling-- the sort of thing that's been pushing the posthumous Bill Hicks legacy as well. As much as I love those two, I don't look to comedians for truth-telling: Sam Kinison was at least as funny as Hicks or Carlin, but I wouldn't call his routines "speaking truths." And Harry Shearer's a fine performer, and knows his issues, but his radio show's pretty turgid stuff. So performance requires a trade-off. If you work hard at understanding and presenting facts and reasons, you're also restraining yourself a performer. If you go for the performance and the spectacle, you have to shortchange the research and simplify the issues in favor of the witty comebacks and funny one-liners.

This is one thing I truly admire about Charles Darwin. He wasn't an expert rhetoritician. He spent two decades carefully working up his arguments... and a lot of that work was anticipating objections, and working out strong, scientifically valid responses. He didn't spend days working on _le mot juste_ to play to the balcony and skewer an opponent: he worked at presenting an intellectual case for a new and complex idea as clearly as he could. He didn't treat objections to his theory as attacks from ideological opponents. He treated them as necessary correctives to his own work.

Darwin serves as an example of how that wonderful moment of insight, that little click that happens in your mind when some new idea settles in and reshapes the way you see things, can come about from careful intellectual work-- probably the least glamorous job in our society. It's tedious. It requires reading. It means doing shitloads of math. It means paying careful attention to what your opponents think, acknowledging when they're right, and slogging on. Even scientists would rather think of Einstein and von Neumann and Godel as otherworldly savants instead of number-crunchers.

Remember that old joke about people who do hallucinogens for the first time-- the goop-eyed fascination with "really looking" at your hand for the first time? Well, hands really _are_ fascinating. How do the bones form? How do they move so smoothly? How complex can their movements be? Why do we have three knuckles instead of two or four? When we hold a stick in our hand, it angles out from our arms at nineteen degrees: why that particular angle? What is the impact of the opposable thumb? Well, some of these can be answered, and in a way that explains a lot more than just that _particular_ question. It can lead to a pretty profound appreciation of morphology. Maybe even a career. (Dropping acid, however, doesn't seem to help much with _developing_ an insight, much less a career.)

And that's just when you have an insight _explained_ to you. Imagine the thrill of _creating_ that insight. That amazing moment when your _own brain has surprised you_. I'd get it when I tried writing fiction, but it was a rare moment, and I really envy writers who can sit down and just Have It Come. You have to envy Darwin on this, because not only did he have that brilliant moment, he spent at least a decade refining, grinding and polishing it. And he knew it was _profound_. This wasn't just a neat connection that explained a particular natural process; he knew he'd hit upon something that explained tremendous swathes of the natural world. I can't even _imagine_ his excitement. You can't even call it a "Road to Damascus" moment, because that was someone being force-fed a world-view. Darwin's wisdom wasn't received, but _achieved_.

That's part of what I admire about Charles Darwin. We hear about scientists as brilliancies or eccentrics. But Darwin, probably the greatest of all, was neither. He gives hope to those of us who may not be terribly great at seizing and holding other people's attentions, but who work hard and honestly try to understand things.