There’s a lovely new book (or it sounds that way) out, about Darwin. It’s a biography by David Quammen, called “The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution”. There was a very nice radio piece on it on NPR’s Morning Edition, on the segment by Robert Krulwich, with an interview with the author. I recommend it, as it is a very pleasant and interesting conversation. From the website (from where you can find the audio archive):
Quammen describes what happens when a meticulous, shy, socially conservative man comes up with a revolutionary, new, dangerous idea. Darwin gets so nervous thinking what he’s thinking, yet he is so sure that it’s a promising idea. He can’t let it out but he can’t let it go. Instead, he spends years, decades even, checking and double checking his evidence. He wanted to be surer than sure about his ideas on natural selection. But, of course, in science you can never know what you don’t know, and so painfully, gingerly, and on occasion delightfully, he tried to anticipate his critics and get his idea ready. But it was slow to gestate. Very slow.
There’s a rather nice discussion of how Darwin, with his butler and also with his sons, did a number of experiments to test out various ideas. These included leaving seeds of various plants to float for extended periods of time in order to see if they would be able to survive long sea journeys. The idea was to show that various plants can migrate over great distances to get to unexpected places, as an alternative to the “God put it there” argument that was the alternative.
A nice touch in the story is in the forming and testing of the idea that plants and even animals can migrate with the help of other animals. As part of this, a certain Walter D. Crick, a shoe salesman, sent him an envelope with a small freshwater clam attached to a beetle (he’d found it). The beetle supplies a mechanism for the clam to be able to move between ponds. They had a number of exchanges of correspondence about this. And yes, you might recall the name Crick from somewhere…. Yes! This Walter Crick later has some offspring, and one of his grandchildren is Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA, along with Rosalind Franklin and James Watson.
Great…
-cvj
Of course you know this reminds me of the debate between Susskind and Smolin abut the anthropic Principle.
Only today it hit me like a flash of lightening that such a “new idea” could have been borne into a mind, and a new found motivation to sustain an idea bears out actual fruitation?
I guess you needed a good soil bed(background/non background) for such planting?
I mean it just seems like common sense what you are reporting, then the idea of monkey’s doing things on one island could have been transferred to the “oversoul” monkey and then back to earth again on another island. 🙂