「经济学人」Origin Story

A turning-point in the history of science

Origin Story. By Howard Markel. W.W. Norton; 368 pages; $35 and £25

IT usually TAKES a rather long time for a worldview to become outmoded and replaced by a new one. But in the eyes of many scientists, a monumental shift took place on one day: June 30th 1860. It was then, at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, that Thomas Huxley, an English biologist and representative of the new theory of evolution, bested in debate Samuel Wilberforce, the city’s bishop and (unsurprisingly) a biblical creationist.

In retrospect, the mythmakers are right, for in the spin game that followed the debate the evolutionists came out on top, the bishop’s reputation was badly tarnished and Huxley acquired the sobriquet “Darwin’s bulldog”. But as to what actually happened that day, no minutes were taken and recollections varied. So Howard Markel, a doctor and historian, has ransacked correspondence, newspaper archives and the memoirs of participants to put together a plausible reconstruction of events.

Seven months before the debate a naturalist called Charles Darwin had published a book catchily entitled “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. It not only asserted that species were not the individual creations of God, but also proposed an alternative, non-supernatural mechanism for their creation. June 1860 marked the first time the British Association for the Advancement of Science had met since the book’s publication: it was therefore the first opportunity to debate Darwin’s ideas in what was, in those days, a parliament of science.

Books about “On the Origin of Species” are at no risk of going extinct: as Dr Markel observes, there is a thriving “Darwin industry” in publishing. By making the debate its centrepiece, though, “Origin Story” brings something new to the literary selection. The author sets things off with insightful pen-portraits of Darwin and his milieu, including friends (his best mate, Joseph Hooker, a botanist; Charles Lyell, a noted Scottish geologist; and Huxley himself, a self-made scientific gadfly), adversaries (such as Wilberforce) and colleagues (John Murray, the publisher of the “big species book”).

Dr Markel also examines the treatment of Alfred Russel Wallace, a professional specimen collector who came up with the idea of natural selection independently while travelling in the Malay Archipelago in 1858. Dr Markel subscribes to the view that Wallace was genteelly sidelined by Darwin and his friends when the two men’s ideas were presented jointly to a meeting of the Linnean Society in 1858. But, if that was what did happen, Wallace seems to have borne no grudge—and, indeed, went on to fame and respect almost as great as that enjoyed by Darwin.

With his physician’s hat on, Dr Markel also weighs in on the question of Darwin’s mysterious and sometimes convenient illness. (It was this, for example, that stopped him facing the inquisition personally at the Oxford meeting.) Looking at the man’s diet—as evidenced by his wife Emma’s recipe books—and rigorously analysing his symptoms, he concludes it was probably lactose intolerance, whose symptoms were triggered by many dairy-rich meals.

If true, that is ironic. Lactose, a sugar found in milk, is easily digested by babies, but adults generally struggle to stomach it. The exceptions tend to live in cattle-raising societies, such as Europe, where milk from stock animals is routinely drunk. Here, natural selection favours adults who retain lactose digestion. The intolerance did not, in the end, affect Darwin’s contribution to the gene pool (he and Emma raised seven children to adulthood). But gastric troubles no doubt prevented him from feeling the fittest.(Sep 3rd 2024)

我没有译文，仅供拓展阅读

LearnAndRecord

2015年2月8日

2024年9月13日

第3506天

每天持续行动学外语