Q & A with Guest Curator David Kohn
Q: Why Darwin?
A: I’ve loved biology since the first day of my high school biology class at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. But by some quirk of my education, I didn’t really learn about evolution and Darwin until graduate school. At that point I was first struck by a question that has obsessed me ever since: How exactly had this person been able to create a theory that seemed to make sense of and give a unified picture of everything I’ve loved in biology? I was, and still am, fascinated by the growth and development of his scientific ideas. With a little digging I found out that Darwin had left a large, only partly published archival record. Natural selection didn’t come to him in one lightening flash, nor did he go from creationist to evolutionist in one easy jump. In both cases, the archive shows there were many steps, many contexts, many colleagues, and many teachers all of which shaped Darwin’s development. So one could actually ask: How did Darwin become Darwin? The answer would be a rich story. I’ve been a Darwin scholar ever since that dawned on me.
Q: What do you find most interesting about him?
A: Along with being a very clear thinker, he also managed to be a very decent person. A genuinely beloved family man and devoted friend, Darwin had a fair measure of ambition for the success of his idea, but he spent 20 years gathering the evidence and working out the arguments to convince all reasonable people of the merit of evolution. He did this with little arrogance, except where he encountered willfully pugnacious opponents. What stands out as the two most interesting facts—let’s call them characteristics—are his brilliance and his patience.
Q: Where does Darwin rank among the most important science theorists of all time?
A: Numero uno, I’d say—at least for now. Of course he is up there with Aristotle, who pioneered many biological ideas, and he is up there with the physicists Newton and Einstein. But I’d say he has a claim to be considered first among this group of equals. There are many ways to judge a theory. One is its scope. I would argue with physicists who might claim that ultimately the finest theories are theories of everything and therefore have the greatest scope. Physical theory and chemistry obviously explain much that needs to be understood for biology to make scientific sense, but they really don’t provide insight into how living systems work. When biology is reduced purely to physics, some crucial biological information slips away. Biology has some key natural laws of its own, most particularly evolution and natural selection. So I think Biology has an independent scope of it own and in that scope, Darwin—certainly Darwin modernized and subject to continual revision by genetic and developmental knowledge—still reigns as numero uno. Let us remember that Darwin made our species subject to the same laws of biology as rule all other species. Certainly that makes Darwin an intellectual revolutionary of the highest order. As someone devoted to the growth of knowledge, I plainly recognize that the day will come when the Darwinian perspective, the integration of knowledge that he launched, is likely to be surpassed or subsumed. Remember that Newton’s laws of mechanics are now understood as special cases of the broader picture elucidated by Einstein. I can see that happening to Darwin in the future.
Q: What are the most important things people should know about Darwin?
A: He demonstrated that all living beings on this planet—including humans—are related to each other by descent from common ancestors. And he explained how this could happen through natural selection. So he gave us the fact of evolution and the most robust explanation of evolution.
Q: Do you have a favorite “Darwin story”?
A: My favorite is actually apocryphal. It comes from a cartoon. Two very large and elderly giant Galápagos tortoises are looking out over the Pacific Ocean. One says, “I remember Darwin.” “Yes,” the other says, “nice guy”! Just about everything I know about CD—as we call him—tells me he was indeed a nice guy.
My favorite story from Darwin's life is also a Galápagos story, one that shows his inquisitive mind at work. He took by its tail a marine iguana sunning itself at the shore and tossed it into the sea. Although he realized that iguanas are generally not marine animals and these Galápagos animals were indeed capable of spending time in the sea, he was intrigued to find that his victim quickly scampered back onto the black rocks. Why? His conclusion—perhaps there is a predator out there that the iguana must avoid. Sure enough, Galápagos waters are often shark infested.
Q: How would you describe Darwin in one or two words?
A: Gentle genius.
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