Spring Books I
Ape, angel and essence
Elisabeth Whipp
Life on Earth David Attenborough (Collins £7.95) Man has always needed an explanation of why he is here on this earth. Christianity once fulfilled this need, but in recent centuries science has cast doubt on what were once regarded as its unquestionable truths. Copernicus was perhaps the first to challenge dogma, but the real watershed came with Darwin. Things have never been the same since. Except for the unswerving Fundamentalist, there are no longer any absolute truths. Such lack of certainty has made the recent plethora of scientific television series hugely popular. They try to explain something that the church is no longer equipped — or no longer claims — to deal with.
Of all the television presenters, David Attenborough is the least manic and the most compelling. The accompanying book is a delight. With a pleasant enthusiasm he effortlessly encompasses 3000 million years in 300 pages, from the very start of life to its most bizarre and intricate manifestations. Using the historical framework of the gradually evolving species, he juxtaposes fossil evidence and comparative anatomy to give a vivid picture of our present understanding of how life came about. The illustrations are superb.
It is perhaps the very brilliance of the photography of the series that has made the most unreflective Darwinist stop and stare. Can random variations really account for such fantastically diverse forms of life? Surely even the most selfish gene is unable to conjure the humpbacked whale out of a tree shrew? Could internecine struggle alone produce the ludicrously flamboyant plumes of the Birds of Paradise? How could the mundane business of insect pollination produce the extravagances of flowers?
But scientists have not sat back in ecstatic admiration of their own cleverness at having concocted any explanation at all. Research goes on, and biological thinking has been much modified since the 19th century. In fact, modern Darwinian theory provides an excellent working model for the biologist. As understood by the average layman, it provides a perfectly decent cosmogenic myth. However it is still theory. That evolution happens is a fact. It has been observed in the field, and in the laboratory even at the level of the gene. How evolution happens is a complex matter: the very beginning of life — the genesis of the first self-replicating molecule — remains a subject for informed speculation. Still we want to know where we came from. Are we apes or angels? Could we really have evolved from chance confrontations between carbon and hydrogen? Reactions provoked by Attenborough's series suggest that the question is still anguished for some. That all species alive today, including Man, are but a small group of temporary winners in an interminable evolutionary game seems impious. At the same time, the principles of neo-Darwinism are widely misunderstood.
A notion of the huge probabilities involved in the theory must be grasped to make it comprehensible. 'Mere chance' is not just the stuff of life itself but of the whole physical world we live in. Thermodynamics, for example, describes physical and chemical as well as biological reactions, but it is a statistical science and its predictions are most accurate when the number of molecules involved is infinitely large. Thus with other kinds of biological chance, so that every time two human cells meet and fertilise, the number of possible arrangments of the genes exceeds the number of atoms in the visible universe. In the 3000 million years since the earliest known fossils were laid down it is surely conceivable that sufficient chance variations did occur.
When Darwin first published his theory in 1859, the idea that different forms of life might have evolved from a common ancestry was not new. What was new was his suggestion as to how these transformations came about — by the survival of the fittest. Bertrand Russell described it as a kind of biological economics in a world of free competition. Applied to Man the idea is deeply repugnant. At what stage in human evolution did all men become equal? Are the ethical values by which we live mere acquisitions to ensure the survival of the tribe rather than of the individual? For studies of evolution clearly show that individual mortality is the price that a species pays for long term adaptability. Yet it seems that it is not these disturbing possibilities that so provoked the 19th-century establishment, but the suggestion that Man might merely have come about by some haphazard jumbling of molecules. Vanity is wounded.
But whatever awkward emotions may be aroused by neo-Darwinism, it must be emphasised that its principles are in daily use in hospitals, farms and laboratories. Its predictions have been aligned so consistently with findings in many branches of biology that it must be regarded as one of the most firmly grounded and reliable explanatory systems in all science.
It was surprising, therefore, to read in recent issues of the Spectator Christopher Booker taking Life on Earth as a pretext for an uncompromising dismissal of the whole concept. 'Over the past century', he states, Darwinism 'has been so utterly discredited as illogical, irrational and unscientific that it would take an act of sheer superstitious faith to continue to uphold it.' Now to quote Russell again, it is not what a man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. Mr Booker's outrage exceeds his ability to cope with the how and the why. Intoxicated by shallow draughts of Pierian spring water, Mr Booker has made an ass of himself: his admirable flair for keeping up old buildings is not matched by an equivalent gift for knocking down modern scientific theories. Although correctly pinpointing some of the more obvious difficulties in the theory, he has gone to no trouble to discover how science answers them. Why, he asks, if species have evolved gradually do the fossil records bear an infinite blur of forms? The readily available answer is that if a species is threatened with extinction as a result of some change in the environment, only a very small number will have the fortuitous advantage that enables them lc) survive. Until this group has established itself successfully in some new environmental niche, it will not have produced sufficiently large numbers to provide enough fossilised evidence. Not astonishingly, Mr Booker has been unable to resist the bogey of a teleological mechanism at work — a conscious strategy of design. Alas, there is not one jot of supportive evidence. Some other points that Mr Booker raises are worthy of serious answer: some are merely facetious. That he should feel that Mr Attenborough has with lus enchanting programmes and his book smuggled the heresy of Darwinism into the homes of unsuspecting millions is just silly.
It seems probable, as far as we can know, that the human genetic make-up IS too complex to be threatened by crude attempts at social engineering. But it I.s also obviously true that pushing back scientific frontiers can raise some horrible implications. The answer is surely t° attempt to deal with these implications, however unpleasant, rather than to denY with all the sophistication of the Flat Earth Society that the earth goes round the sun. Bernard Shaw made a gallant attempt to understand the way the world was understood in his time. He too found evolutionary theory all a bit too much: and opted for the 'Creative Evolution which Mr Booker expounds. But be seems to have ended on a note of resignation. 'They tell me there are leucocytes in my blood, and sodium and carbon in my flesh. I thank them for the information, and tell them that there are black beetles in my kitchen, washing soda in my laundry and coal in my cellar. I do not deny their existence; but I keep then) in their proper place.'
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