17 Feb 2009: Opinion

On His Bicentennial,
Mr. Darwin’s Questions Endure

Charles Darwin brought an insatiable inquisitiveness to his view of the natural world. On the bicentennial of his birth, author Verlyn Klinkenborg reflects on what Darwin’s most fundamental observations mean to us.

by verlyn klinkenborg

Do bees vary in different parts of Great Britain?, Charles Darwin asks, in print. And is the female Bombus fertilized in the air? What is the action of common salt on carbonate of lime? Can two parent horses, neither of them dun, produce a dun horse? Will wire rope, he asks, work in my well, which is 325 feet deep? Does seawater kill seeds?

Darwin examines the skulls of Polish chickens, which have an extraordinary tuft of feathers on their heads and a skull deformation to

I wonder whether Darwin ever noticed a natural fact that didn’t raise a question in his mind.

support it, and wonders whether keepers of tufted fowl “have observed any clear signs of deficiency in the mental powers of any of their birds?” Even when he is not asking questions, you can hear the question implicit in the title of Darwin’s articles. “Cause of the variation of flowers” — in the Journal of Horticulture — is itself a variation of “Why do flowers vary?”

I wonder whether Darwin ever noticed a natural fact, no matter how trivial, that didn’t raise a question in his mind. I think his very manner of perception was interrogatory. To notice was to ask. But what strikes me is the poise of Darwin’s questions. They are modest and yet, at the same time, full of authority. The modesty is implicit in the noticing, surrendering his sense of self to the detailed imprint of the world around him.

And the authority? It lies in his confidence that questions have answers. That confidence is private — a faith that careful thought and the steady accumulation of evidence will yield a hypothesis. But it is also public. Many of Darwin’s questions appeared in print, in places like the Gardeners’ Chronicle, calling for answers from a community of fellow noticers. He distributed printed questionnaires about the breeding of animals. He interviewed pigeon fanciers and animal breeders of all description. And he was not remiss in offering answers where he could — reporting, for instance, about hedgehogs with strawberries stuck to their spines. He believed, though not credulously, in the value of the public exchange of ideas and information.

Darwin doesn’t often moralize about the state of his own species. But his faith in its essential rationality and its occasional perceptiveness seems very deep. We tend to think of Darwin ruminating about nature in its wild state. But it’s striking how much of the evidence he gathered during his life was really about the effects humans have on nature. He understood the clear analogy between the variation of species in nature and the variation of domestic species in the hands of breeders. He realized that humans often knew that they could do a thing — like creating Polish chickens — without understanding the underlying mechanisms that allowed them to do it.

Consider the opening of The Variation of Animals and Plants Under

It’s striking how much of the evidence he gathered was really about the effects humans have on nature.

Domestication. “Man,” Darwin writes, “has no power of altering the absolute conditions of life.” Plant and animal breeding is essentially a kind of jujitsu, using the force of nature’s inherent tendency against it, so to speak. But Darwin’s sentence goes on, and suddenly we are the ones who find ourselves looking through time, because he says, man “cannot change the climate of any country.”

What makes Darwin such a striking thinker is the way he gets to the root of things. His questions may sometimes look simple and naïve, but they are nearly always pointing us to the problem of underlying mechanisms, always wondering why things happen to be so.

Sometimes he takes us deeper than we realize. In that same passage, talking about the huge variation of size and form and coloration in domesticated species, he writes, “It is an error to speak of man ‘tampering with nature’ and causing variability. If organic beings had not possessed an inherent tendency to vary, man could have done nothing.”

That phrase — an inherent tendency to vary — can change the way you look at the world around you. It was written by a man who was used to looking through time. Caught in the snapshot of the present, we don’t instinctively feel the inherent tendency to vary in the organic beings around us. But to Darwin, everything is on its way to being something else. And that, of course, includes us.

POSTED ON 17 Feb 2009 IN Science & Technology

Print Email Digg Del.icio.us Reddit Mixx Facebook

POST A COMMENT

Comments are moderated and will be reviewed before they are posted to ensure they are on topic, relevant, and not abusive. They may be edited for length and clarity. By filling out this form, you give Yale Environment 360 permission to publish this comment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board at the New York Times, where he regularly writes editorial opinions about rural life. His most recent book is Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile.

Print

Email

Tweet This

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Mixx

Facebook

Stumble Upon

Climategate: Anatomy of
A Public Relations Disaster
The way that climate scientists have handled the fallout from the leaking of hacked e-mails is a case study in how not to respond to a crisis. But it also points to the need for climate researchers to operate with greater transparency and to provide more open access to data.
READ MORE

In Search of New Waters,
Fish Farming Moves Offshore
As wild fish stocks continue to dwindle, aquaculture is becoming an increasingly important source of protein worldwide. Now, a growing number of entrepreneurs are raising fish in large pens in the open ocean, hoping to avoid the many environmental problems of coastal fish farms.
READ MORE

The Pursuit of New Ways
to Boost Solar Development
The solar power boom in Germany, Spain, and parts of the United States has been fueled by government subsidies. But now some U.S. states — led by New Jersey, of all places — are pioneering a different approach: issuing tradable credits that can be sold on the open market. So far, the results have been promising.
READ MORE

Pulling CO2 from the Air:
Promising Idea, Big Price Tag
Of the various geoengineering schemes being proposed to cool an overheated planet, one approach — extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using “artificial trees” — may have the most potential. But both questions and big hurdles remain before this emerging technology could be widely deployed.
READ MORE

New York City Girds Itself
for Heat and Rising Seas
By the end of the century, New York’s climate could resemble that of present-day Raleigh, North Carolina and its harbor could easily rise by two feet or more. Faced with this prospect, the city is among the first urban centers to begin changing the way it builds its infrastructure — and the way it thinks about its future.
READ MORE

Why Africa’s National Parks
Are Failing to Save Wildlife
by fred pearce
The traditional parks model of closing off areas and keeping people out simply may not work in Africa, where human demands on the land are great. Instead, what’s needed is an approach that finds ways to enable people and animals to co-exist.
READ MORE

How High Will Seas Rise?
Get Ready for Seven Feet
by rob young and orrin pilkey
As governments, businesses, and homeowners plan for the future, they should assume that the world’s oceans will rise by at least two meters — roughly seven feet — this century. But far too few agencies or individuals are preparing for the inevitable increase in sea level that will take place as polar ice sheets melt.
READ MORE

Looking for a Silver Lining
in the Post-Summit Landscape
by fred pearce
Much was left undone in Copenhagen, and the many loopholes in the climate accord could lead to rising emissions. But the conference averted disaster by keeping the UN climate negotiations alive, and some expressed hope that the growth of renewable energy technology may ultimately save the day.
READ MORE

Copenhagen: Things Fall Apart
and an Uncertain Future Looms
by bill mckibben
The Copenhagen summit turned out to be little more than a charade, as the major nations refused to make firm commitments or even engage in an honest discussion of the consequences of failing to act.
READ MORE

The Dangerous Allure of
Global Warming Technofixes
by dianne dumanoski
As the world weighs how to deal with warming, the idea of human manipulation of climate systems is gaining attention. Yet beyond the environmental and technical questions looms a more practical issue: How could governments really commit to supervising geoengineering schemes for centuries?
READ MORE

Bringing Hope to Copenhagen
With a Novel Investment Idea
by orville schell
Governments from the developed world will never come up with enough money to help poorer nations adapt to global warming and implement renewable energy technologies. The solution may lie in using a modest allocation of government funds to spur private sector investment in green energy projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
READ MORE

Copenhagen: The Gap Between
Climate Rhetoric and Reality
by bill mckibben
As the UN conference enters its second and decisive week, the calls for strong global action to deal with climate change do not appear to be penetrating inside Copenhagen’s Bella Center.
READ MORE

Climategate: Anatomy of
A Public Relations Disaster
by fred pearce
The way that climate scientists have handled the fallout from the leaking of hacked e-mails is a case study in how not to respond to a crisis. But it also points to the need for climate researchers to operate with greater transparency and to provide more open access to data.
READ MORE

As the World Waits on the U.S.,
a Sense of Déjà Vu in Denmark?
by bill mckibben
Twelve years ago in Kyoto, the world was poised to act on a climate treaty but looked for a clear signal from the United States. Now, with the Copenhagen talks set to begin, the outcome once again hinges on what the U.S. is prepared to do.
READ MORE

As Copenhagen Talks Near,
What Are Prospects for Success?
For months, hopes that a climate treaty would be signed at the upcoming Copenhagen conference have been raised, then dashed, then raised again. Now, with prospects waning that a binding accord on reducing greenhouse gas emissions can be reached this year, ten environmental leaders and climate experts outline for Yale Environment 360 what they believe can still be accomplished at Copenhagen.
READ MORE