No More Learning

In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal
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? notes that, in addition to numerous half truths, falsehoods and non- sequiturs, his original article contained some 'syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever'. He regrets that there were not more of the latter: 'I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack. ' If he were writing his parody today, he'd surely have been helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it at http://www. elsewhere. org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ it will spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6000-word article called 'Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context' by 'David I. L. Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University' (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge who saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here's a typical sentence from this impressively erudite work:
If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious.
Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.
As for the harder task of reclaiming humanities and social studies departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed.
POSTMODERNISM DISROBED
53
? The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle24
My life has lately been dominated by education. Home life over-
shadowed by A-level* examination horrors, I escaped to London to
address a conference of schoolteachers. On the train, in preparation for
the inaugural 'Oundle Lecture' which 1 was nervously to give at my old
schoolf the following week, I read H. G. Wells's biography of its famous
Head: The Story ofa Great Schoolmaster: being a plain account ofthe life an 2
ideas of Sanderson ofOundle. * The book begins in terms which initially
seemed a little over the top: 'I think him beyond question the greatest
man I have ever known with any degree of intimacy' But it led me on
26
to read the official biography, Sanderson of Oundle, written by a large,
anonymous syndicate of his former pupils (Sanderson believed in cooperation instead of striving for individual recognition).
I now see what Wells meant. And I am sure that Frederick William Sanderson (1857-1922) would have been horrified to learn what I learned from the teachers I met at the London conference: about the stifling effects of exams, and the government obsession with measuring a school's performance by them. He would have been aghast at the anti- educational hoops that young people now have to jump through in order to get into university. He would have been openly contemptuous of the pussyfooting, lawyer-driven fastidiousness of 'Health and Safety', and the accountant-driven league tables that dominate modern education and actively encourage schools to put their own interests before those of their pupils. Quoting Bertrand Russell, he disliked competition and 'possessiveness' as a motive for anything in education.
Sanderson of Oundle ended up second only to Arnold of Rugby in
*Advanced-levels: school-leaving examinations, on which acceptance to British universities largely depends. A-levels notoriously traumatize teenagers, because so much hangs on the result. Schools vie with each other in nationally compiled tables of A-level performance, and ambitious schools have been known to discourage less able pupils from even trying, for fear of damaging the school's rank in the league table.
tOundle School, in Northamptonshire in central England, founded 1556.
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? fame, but Sanderson was not born to the world of public schools. Today, he would, I dare say, have headed a large, mixed Comprehensive. * His humble origins, northern accent and lack of Holy Orders gave him a rough ride with the classical 'dominies' whom he found on arrival at the small and run-down Oundle of 1892. So rebarbative were his first five years, Sanderson actually wrote out his letter of resignation. Fortunately, he never sent it. By the time of his death thirty years later, Oundle's numbers had increased from 100 to 500, it had become the foremost school for science and engineering in the country, and he was loved and respected by generations of grateful pupils and colleagues. More important, Sanderson developed a philosophy of education that we should urgently heed today.
He was said to lack fluency as a public speaker, but his sermons in the School Chapel could achieve Churchillian heights:
Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who binds the universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibnitz with their wondrous mathematical harmonies; Coulomb measuring out electricity . . . Faraday, Ohm, Ampere, Joule, Maxwell, Hertz, Rontgen; and in another branch of science, Cavendish, Davy, Dalton, Dewar; and in another, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Lister, Sir Ronald Ross. All these and many others, and some whose names have no memorial, form a great host of heroes, an army of soldiers - fit companions of those of whom the poets have sung . . . There is the great Newton at the head of this list comparing himself to a child playing on the seashore gathering pebbles, whilst he could see with prophetic vision the immense ocean of truth yet unexplored before him . . .
How often did you hear that sort of thing in a religious service? Or this, his gentle indictment of mindless patriotism, delivered on Empire Day at the close of the First World War? He went right through the Sermon on the Mount, concluding each Beatitude with a mocking 'Rule Britannia'.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Rule Britannia! Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Rule Britannia!
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Rule
Britannia!
Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness sake. Rule
Britannia!
Dear souls! My dear souls! I wouldn't lead you astray for anything.
*'Public schools' are, as you might imagine, private schools! Only relatively affluent parents can afford them, which puts them at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the government-run Comprehensive schools (not invented in Sanderson's time) where education is free.
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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
Sanderson's passionate desire to give the boys freedom to fulfil them- selves would have thrown Health and Safety into a hissy fit, and set today's lawyers licking their chops with anticipation. He directed that the laboratories should be left unlocked at all times, so that boys could go in and work at their own research projects, even if unsupervised. The more dangerous chemicals were locked up, 'but enough was left about to disturb the equanimity of other masters who had less faith than the Head in that providence which looks after the young. ' The same open door policy applied to the school workshops, the finest in the country, filled with advanced machine tools which were Sanderson's pride and joy. Under these conditions, one boy damaged a 'surface plate' by using it as an anvil against which to hammer a rivet. The culprit tells the story in Sanderson ofOundle:
That did disconcert the Head for a little when it was discovered. * But my punishment was quite Oundelian. I had to make a study of the manufacture and use of surface plates and bring a report and explain it all to him. And after that I found I had learnt to look twice at a fine piece of work before I used it ill.
Incidents like this led eventually, and not surprisingly, to the work- shops and laboratories again being locked when there was no adult supervision. But some boys felt the deprivation keenly and, in true Sandersonian fashion, they set out, in the workshops and the library (another of Sanderson's personal prides) to make an intensive study of locks.
In our enthusiasm we made skeleton keys for all Oundle, not only for the laboratories but for private rooms as well. For weeks we used the laboratories and workshops as we had grown accustomed to use them, but now with a keen care of the expensive apparatus and with precautions to leave nothing disorderly to betray our visits. It seemed that the Head saw nothing; he had a great gift for assuming blindness - until Speech Day came round, and then we were amazed to hear him, as he beamed upon the assembled parents, telling them the whole business, 'And what do you think my boys have been doing now? '
Sanderson's hatred of any locked door which might stand between a boy and some worthwhile enthusiasm symbolized his whole attitude to education. A certain boy was so keen on a project he was working on that he used to steal out of the dormitory at 2 a. m. to read in the (unlocked, of course) library. The Headmaster caught him there, and
*As well it might, for a 'surface plate' is a precisely machined plane surface, used for judging the flatness of objects.
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? roared his terrible wrath for this breach of discipline (he had a famous temper and one of his maxims was 'Never punish except in anger'). Again, the boy himself tells the story:
The thunderstorm passed. 'And what are you reading, my boy, at this hour? ' I told him of the work that had taken possession of me, work for which the day time was all too full. Yes, yes, he understood that. He looked over the notes I had been taking and they set his mind going. He sat down beside me to read them. They dealt with the development of metallurgical processes, and he began to talk to me of discovery and the values of discovery, the incessant reaching out of men towards knowledge and power, the significance of this desire to know and make and what we in the school were doing in that process. We talked, he talked for nearly an hour in that still nocturnal room. It was one of the greatest, most formative hours in my life . . . 'Go back to bed, my boy. We must find some time for you in the day for this. '
I don't know about you, but that story brings me close to tears.
Far from coveting garlands in league tables by indulging the high-
flyers,
Sanderson's most strenuous labours were on behalf of the average, and specially the 'dull' boys. He would never admit the word: if a boy was dull it was because he was being forced in the wrong direction, and he would make endless experiments to find how to get his interest . . . he knew every boy by name and had a complete mental picture of his ability and character. . . It was not enough that the majority should do well. 'I never like to fail with a boy. '
In spite of - perhaps because of - Sanderson's contempt for public examinations, Oundle did well in them. A faded, yellowing newspaper cutting dropped out of my second-hand copy of Wells's book:
In the higher certificates of the Oxford and Cambridge School examinations Oundle once again leads, having 76 successes. Shrewsbury and Marlborough tie for second place at 49 each.
Sanderson died in 1922, after struggling to finish a lecture to a gather- ing of scientists, at University College, London. The chairman, H. G. Wells himself, had just invited the first question from the floor when Sanderson dropped dead on the platform. The lecture had not been intended as a valediction, but the eye of sentiment can read the published text as Sanderson's educational testament, a summation of all he had learned in 30 years as a supremely successful and deeply loved headmaster.
My head ringing with the last words of this remarkable man, I closed
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the book and travelled on to University College, London, site of his swan song and my own modest speech to the conference of science teachers.
My subject, under the chairmanship of an enlightened clergyman, was evolution. I offered an analogy which teachers might use to bring home to their pupils the true antiquity of the universe. If a history were written at a rate of one century per page, how thick would the book of the universe be? In the view of a Young Earth Creationist, the whole history of the universe, on this scale, would fit comfortably into a slender paperback. And the scientific answer to the question? To accommodate all the volumes of history on the same scale, you'd need a bookshelf ten miles long. That gives the order of magnitude of the yawning gap between true science on the one hand, and the creationist teaching favoured by some schools on the other. This is not some disagreement of scientific detail. It is the difference between a single paperback and a library of a million books. What would have offended Sanderson about teaching the Young Earth view is not just that it is false but that it is petty, small-minded, parochial, unimaginative, unpoetic and downright boring compared to the staggering, mind-expanding truth.
After lunching with the teachers I was invited to join their afternoon deliberations. Almost to a man and woman, they were deeply worried about the A-level syllabus and the destructive effects of exam pressure on true education. One after another, they came up to me and confided that, much as they would like to, they didn't dare to do justice to evolution in their classes. This was not because of intimidation by fundamentalist parents (which would have been the reason in parts of America). It was simply because of the A-level syllabus. Evolution gets only a tiny mention, and then only at the end of the A-level course. This is preposterous, for, as one of the teachers said to me, quoting the great Russian American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (a devout Christian, like Sanderson), 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. '
Without evolution, biology is a collection of miscellaneous facts. Before they learn to think in an evolutionary way, the facts that the children learn will just be facts, with no binding thread to hold them together, nothing to make them memorable or coherent. With evolu- tion, a great light breaks through into the deepest recesses, into every corner, of the science of life. You understand not only what is, but why. How can you possibly teach biology unless you begin with evolution? How, indeed, can you call yourself an educated person, if you know nothing of the Darwinian reason for your own existence? Yet, time and
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? again, I heard the same story. Teachers had wanted to introduce their pupils to life's central theorem, only to be glottal-stopped dead in their tracks: 'Is that on my syllabus? Will it come up in my exam? ' Sadly, they had to admit that the answer was no, and returned to the rote learning of disconnected facts as required for A-level success.
Sanderson would have hit the roof:
I agree with Nietzsche that 'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. ' A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.
His spirit lived on at Oundle. His immediate successor, Kenneth Fisher, was chairing a staff meeting when there was a timid knock on the door and a small boy came in: 'Please, sir, there are Black Terns down by the river. ' 'This can wait,' said Fisher decisively to the assembled committee. He rose from the Chair, seized his binoculars from the door and cycled off in the company of the small ornithologist, and - one can't help imagining - with the benign, ruddy-faced ghost of Sanderson beaming in their wake. Now that's education - and to hell with your league table statistics, your fact-stuffed syllabuses and your endless roster of exams.
That story of Fisher was told by my own inspiring Zoology teacher, loan Thomas, who had applied for the job at Oundle specifically because he admired the long-dead Sanderson and wanted to teach in his tradition. Some 35 years after Sanderson's death, I recall a lesson about Hydra, a small denizen of still freshwater. Mr Thomas asked one of us, 'What animal eats Hydra? ' The boy made a guess. Non-committally, Mr Thomas turned to the next boy, asking him the same question. He went right round the entire class, with increasing excitement asking each one of us by name, 'What animal eats Hydra? What animal eats Hydra? ' And one by one we guessed. By the time he had reached the last boy, we were agog for the true answer. 'Sir, sir, what animal does eat Hydra? ' Mr Thomas waited until there was a pin-dropping silence. Then he spoke, slowly and distinctly, pausing between each word.
I don't know . . . (Crescendo) I don't know . . . (Molto crescendo) And I don't think Mr Coulson knows either. (Fortissimo) Mr Coulson! Mr Coulson!
He flung open the door to the next classroom and dramatically inter- rupted his senior colleague's lesson, bringing him into our room. 'Mr Coulson, do you know what animal eats Hydra? ' Whether some wink
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passed between them I don't know, but Mr Coulson played his part well: he didn't know. Again the fatherly shade of Sanderson chuckled in the corner, and none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.
Sanderson's tradition that the whole school, not just the choir, even the tone deaf, should rehearse and bellow a part in the annual oratorio, also survived him, and has been widely imitated by other schools. His most famous innovation, the Week in Workshops (a full week for every pupil in every term, with all other work suspended) has not survived, but it was still going during my time in the fifties. It was eventually killed by exam pressure - of course - but a wonderfully Sandersonian phoenix has risen from its ashes. The boys, and now girls I am delighted to say, work out of school hours to build sports cars (and off-road go- carts) to special Oundle designs. Each car is built by one pupil, with help of course, especially in advanced welding techniques. When I visited Oundle last week, I met two overalled young people, a boy and a girl, who had recently left the school but had been welcomed back from their separate universities to finish their cars. More than 15 cars have been driven home by their proud creators during the past three years.
So Mr Sanderson, dear soul, you have a stirring, a light breeze of immortality, in the only sense of immortality to which the man of reason can aspire. Now let's whip up a gale of reform through the country, blow away the assessment-freaks with their never-ending cycle of demoralizing, childhood-destroying examinations, and get back to true education.
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? LIGHT WILL BE THROWN
The title of this section - and of its first chapter - is a quotation from the Origin of Species.
Darwin was talking about light being thrown on human origins and he made it come true in his Descent of Man, but I like to think of all the other light that his ideas have thrown in so many different fields. Indeed, it was our second choice for the title for the whole book. The first essay in the section, Light Will Be Thrown (2. 1), is the Foreword that I wrote very recently for a new student edition of The Descent, published by Gibson Square Books. In the course of writing it I discovered that Darwin was even more far-sighted than I had previously realized.
Darwin Triumphant (2. 2) was my contribution to the second Man and Beast symposium, in Washington DC, 1991, with the subtitle 'Darwinism as a Universal Truth'. The phrase Universal Darwinism was one that I had introduced at the 1982 Cambridge conference to commemorate the centenary of Darwin's death. Darwinism is not just something that happens to be the basis of life on this planet. A good case can be made that it is fundamental to life itself, as a universal phenomenon wherever life may be found. If this is right, Darwin's light is thrown farther than was ever dreamed by that gentle and modest man.
One place where light could be thrown with advantage is the murky underworld of creationist propaganda. Television producers have such obvious power in the editing suite and the cutting room, it is amazing how seldom they abuse it. Tony Benn, the veteran socialist Member of Parliament, is said to switch on his own tape recorder, as a witness of potential foul play, whenever he is interviewed. Surprisingly, I have seldom found this necessary, and the only time I have ever been deliberately deceived was by an Australian creationist. How this disreputable story prompted me to publish The 'Information Challenge' (2. 3) is explained in the piece itself.
'A devil, a born devil, on whose nature, Nurture can never stick. ' Gratified as Shakespeare might be to know how many of his lines have assumed household familiarity, I suspect that he might squirm at the modern over-
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exposure of the nature/nurture cliche. A flurry of publicity in 1993 for a so-called 'gay gene' on the X chromosome led to an invitation from the Daily Telegraph to expose the myths of 'genetic determinism'. The result was the piece reproduced here as Genes Aren't Us (2. 4).
My literary agent John Brockman has the charisma to persuade his clients and others to drop everything and contribute to books of his own editing, even in the teeth of the better commercial judgement he might normally advise them to deploy. The distinction of his guest list flatters them in through the door of his salon (http://www. edge. org/) and before they know where they are they are correcting the proofs for a printed spin- off. Son of Moore's Law (2. 5) was my futurological contribution to a typically fascinating on-line symposium, The Next Fifty Years.
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? 2
Foreword to a new Student Edition of Darwin's Descent of Man "
"!
Light Will Be Thrown
Humanity is the missing guest at the feast of The Origin of Species. The famous 'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history' is a calculated understatement matched, in the annals of science, only by Watson and Crick's 'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. ' By the time Darwin finally got around to throwing that light in 1871, others had been there before him. And the greater part of The Descent of Man is not about humans but about Darwin's 'other' theory, sexual selection.
The Descent of Man was conceived as a single book but ended up as three, two of them bound together under the same title, with the second topic signalled by the subtitle, Selection in Relation to Sex. The third was The Expression of the Emotions, not my concern here, but Darwin tells us that it grew out of the original Descent, and he began writing it immediately after finishing Descent. Given that the idea of splitting the book was in Darwin's mind, it is at first sight surprising that he didn't spin off sexual selection as well. It would have seemed natural to publish chapters 8 to 18 as Selection in Relation to Sex followed by a second book, The Descent of Man, consisting of the present Chapters 1 to 8, and 19 to 21. That's a neat split into eleven chapters
for each book, and many have wondered why he did not do this. I shall follow the same order - sexual selection followed by the descent of man - and then return at the end to the question of whether the two might have been split. In addition to discussing Darwin's book, I shall try to give some pointers to where the subject is moving today.
The ostensible connection between sexual selection and the descent of man is that Darwin believed the first was a key to understanding the second; especially to understanding human races, a topic which preoccupied Victorians more than it does us. But, as the historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse has remarked to me, there was a
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tighter thread binding the two topics. They were the only two sources
of disagreement between Darwin and his co-discoverer of natural
selection. Alfred Russel Wallace never took kindly to sexual selection, at
least in its full-blooded Darwinian form. And Wallace, though he
coined the word Darwinism and described himself as 'more Darwinian
than Darwin', stopped short of the materialism implied by Darwin's
view of the human mind. These disagreements with Wallace were all
the more important to Darwin because these two great men agreed on
almost everything else. Darwin himself said, in a letter to Wallace of
28 1867:
The reason of my being so much interested just at present about sexual selection is, that I have almost resolved to publish a little essay on the origin of Mankind, and I still strongly think (though I failed to convince you, and this, to me is the heaviest blow possible) that sexual selection has been the main agent in forming the races of man.
The Descent ofMan and Selection in Relation to Sex could be seen, then, as Darwin's two-pronged answer to Wallace. But it's also possible - and anyone who reads those chapters would forgive him - that he just got carried away by his enthusiasm for sexual selection.
The disagreements between Darwin and Wallace over sexual selection have been teased out by the Darwinian philosopher and historian
29
Helena Cronin in her stylish book The Ant and the Peacock.
follows the two threads to the present day, classifying later theorists of sexual selection as 'Wallaceans' and 'Darwinians'. Darwin rejoiced in sexual selection. The naturalist in him loved the extravagant ostenta- tion of stag beetles and pheasants, while the theorist and teacher knew that survival is only a means to the end of reproduction. Wallace could not stomach aesthetic whim as a sufficient explanation for the evolu- tion of bright colours and the other conspicuous features for which Darwin invoked female (or in a few species male) choice. Even when persuaded that certain male features have evolved as advertisements aimed at females, Wallace insisted that the qualities they advertise must be utilitarian qualities. Females choose males not because they are pretty but because they are good providers, or something equally
30
worthy. Modern Wallaceans such as William Hamilton and Amotz
31
Zahavi see bright colours and other sexually selected advertisements as
honest and uncheatable badges of true quality: health, for example, or resistance to parasites.
Darwin would have no problem with that, but he also was prepared to countenance pure aesthetic whim as a selective force in nature.
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She even
? Something about the female brain just likes bright coloured feathers, or whatever is the species equivalent, and that is a sufficient pressure for males to have evolved them, even if this is disadvantageous to the male's own survival. It was that leader among twentieth-century Darwinians, R. A. Fisher, who put the idea on a sound theoretical foundation by suggesting that female preference could be under genetic control and therefore subject to natural selection, in just the same way as the male
32
qualities preferred. The interaction between selection on female
preference genes (inherited by both sexes) and simultaneously on male advertisement genes (also inherited by both sexes) provides the coevolutionary driving force for the expansion of ever more extravagant sexual advertisements. I suspect that Fisher's elegant reasoning, supplemented by more recent theorists such as R. Lande, might have reconciled Wallace to Darwin, because Fisher did not leave female whim unexplained, as an arbitrary given. The key point is that female whims
33 of the future agree with those inherited from the past.
The divide between Darwinian and Wallacean sexual selection, then,
is one thing to bear in mind while reading the substantial middle section of The Descent of Man. Another is that Darwin made a clear distinction between sexual and natural selection, one which today is not always understood. Sexual selection is all about competition between members of the same sex for the opposite sex. It usually produces adaptations in males for outcompeting other males: either for fighting males or for attracting females. It does not include all the rest of the apparatus of sexual reproduction. A penis, in its capacity as an organ
of intromission, is a manifestation of natural selection, not sexual selection. A male needs a penis to reproduce, whether or not competing males are around. But male vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) have a bright red penis set off by a sky-blue scrotum, which together are shown off in dominance displays to other males. It is for their colours, not the organs themselves, that Darwin would invoke sexual selection.
To decide whether something is a sexually selected adaptation or not, do the following thought experiment. Imagine that all competitors of the same sex could somehow be magicked away. If the pressure for the adaptation now disappears, it was sexually selected. In the case of the vervet monkeys it is reasonable to guess, as Darwin surely would, that if competition from rival males were removed by a magic wand, the penis and scrotum would remain, but their red and blue colour scheme would fade. The ornate colours are a product of sexual selection, the utilitarian organs of sperm production and intromission are manifesta- tions of natural selection. Darwin would have loved the baroque and
LIGHT WILL BE THROWN
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spiky penises documented by W. G. Eberhard in his book, Sexual 3
Selection and Animal Genitalia. *
The distinguished American philosopher Daniel Dennett has credited
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Darwin with the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind. This was
natural selection, of course, and I would include sexual selection as part of the same idea. But Darwin was not only a deep thinker, he was a naturalist of encyclopaedic knowledge and (which by no means necessarily follows) the ability to hold it in his head and deploy it in constructive directions. He was a master encyclopaedist, who collated huge quantities of information and observations solicited from naturalists all around the world, each gentleman meticulously acknowledged for having 'attended to' the subject and sometimes complimented as a 'reliable observer'. I find an addictive fascination in his Victorian prose style, quite apart from the feeling one gets of having been ushered into the presence of one of the great minds of all time.
Prescient as he was (Michael Ghiselin has said that he worked at least
36
a century ahead of his time ) Darwin was still a Victorian, and his book
must be read in the context of its age, warts and all. What will grate most irksomely on the modern ear is the unquestioned Victorian presumption that animals in general, and humans in particular, are disposed on a ladder of increasing superiority. Like all Victorians, Darwin happily referred to particular species as 'lowly in the scale of nature'. Even some modern biologists do this, though they should not, for all living species are cousins who have been evolving for exactly the
37
same length of time since the common ancestor. What educated
moderns never do, but equivalent Victorians always did, is think of human races in the same hierarchical way. It requires a special effort for us to read something like the following without distaste:
It seems at first sight a monstrous supposition that the jet blackness of the negro has been gained through sexual selection [i. e. is attractive to the opposite sex] . . . The resemblance of Pithecia satanas with his jet black skin, white rolling eyeballs, and hair parted on the top of the head, to a negro in
38 miniature, is almost ludicrous.
It is a mark of historical infantilism to view the writings of one century through the politically tinted glasses of another. The very title, Descent of Man, will raise hackles among those naively locked into the mores of our own time. It can be argued that reading historic documents that violate the taboos of one's own century gives valuable lessons in the ephemerality of such mores. Who knows how our descendants will judge us?
Less obvious, but as important to understand, are the changes in the
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? scientific climate. In particular, it is hard to overstate the fact that Darwin's genetics were pre-Mendelian. The intuitively plausible blending inheritance theory of his time was not just wrong, it was grievously wrong and especially grievous for natural selection. Darwinism's incompatibility with blending inheritance was pointed out in a hostile review of the Origin by the Scottish engineer Fleeming Jenkin. Variation tends to disappear with every blending generation, leaving not enough for natural selection to get its teeth into. What Jenkin should have realized is that blending inheritance is incompatible not just with Darwinian theory but with obvious fact. If it were really true that variation disappeared, every generation should be more uniform than the previous one. By now, all individuals should be as indistinguishable as clones. Darwin needed only to retort to Jenkin: Whatever the reason, it is obviously the case that there is plenty of inherited variation and that's good enough for my purposes.
It is often claimed that the answer to the riddle lay on Darwin's shelves, in the uncut pages of the proceedings of the Brunn Natural History Society, where nestled Gregor Mendel's paper on Versuche iiber Pflanzen-Hybriden. Unfortunately this poignant story seems to be an urban myth. The two scholars best placed (at Cambridge and at Down House) to know what was in Darwin's personal library can find no evidence that he ever subscribed to the proceedings, nor does it seem
39
likely that he would have done so. They have no idea where the legend
of the 'uncut pages' originated. Once originated, however, it is easy to see that its very poignancy might speed its proliferation. The whole affair would make a nice little project in memetic research, complementing that other popular urban legend, the agreeable falsehood that Darwin
40 turned down an offer from Marx to dedicate Das Kapital to him.
Mendel did indeed have exactly the insight Darwin needed. Its relationship to the Jenkin critique, however, would not have been immediately obvious to the Victorian mind. Even after Mendel's work was rediscovered in 1900 and inspired the Hardy-Weinberg Law in 1908, it was not until Fisher came along in 1930* that its supreme relevance to Darwinism was widely understood. If heredity is particulate, variation does not disappear but is reconstituted in every generation. Neo- Darwinian evolution precisely means change in gene frequencies in gene pools. What is genuinely poignant is that Darwin himself came
41
tantalizingly close. Fisher quotes him in a letter to Huxley of 1857:
I have lately been inclined to speculate, very crudely and indistinctly, that propagation by true fertilization will turn out to be a sort of mixture, and not true
'Actually rather earlier, but 1930 was when Fisher published his landmark book.
LIGHT WILL BE THROWN
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? LIGHT WILL BE THROWN
fusion, of two distinct individuals, or rather of innumerable individuals, as each parent has its parents and ancestors. I can understand on no other view the way in which crossed forms go back to so large an extent to ancestral forms. But all this, of course, is infinitely crude.
Fisher cleverly remarked that Mendelism has a kind of necessary plausibility
which could have led to its discovery by any thinker in a mid-Victorian
armchair (quoted on page 82). He might have added that particulate inheri-
tance stares us in the face whenever we contemplate sex itself (as we not
infrequently do). All of us have one female and one male parent, yet
each of us is either male or female, not an intermediate hermaphrodite.
Fascinatingly, Darwin himself made this very point, clearly, in an 1866 letter
42
to Wallace, which Fisher would surely have quoted had he known of it.
My dear Wallace . . . I do not think you understand what I mean by the non- blending of certain varieties. It does not refer to fertility; an instance will explain. I crossed the Painted Lady and Purple sweetpeas, which are very differently coloured varieties, and got, even out of the same pod, both varieties perfect but none intermediate. Something of this kind I should think must occur at least with your butterflies & the three forms of Lythrum; tho' these cases are in appearance so wonderful, I do not know that they are really more so than every female in the world producing distinct male and female offspring . . .
Believe me, yours very sincerely Ch. Darwin
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? Here Darwin comes closer to anticipating Mendel than in the passage quoted by Fisher, and he even mentions his own Mendel-like experi- ments on sweet peas. I am extremely grateful to Dr Seymour J. Garte of New York University, who found this letter by chance in a volume of correspondence between Darwin and Wallace in the British Library in London, immediately recognized its significance and sent a copy to me.
Another piece of Darwin's unfinished business later sorted out by Fisher was the matter of the sex ratio, and how it evolves under natural selection. Fisher begins by quoting the Second Edition of The Descent of Man, in which Darwin prudently said:
I formerly thought that when a tendency to produce the two sexes in equal numbers was advantageous to the species, it would follow from natural selection, but I now see that the whole problem is so intricate that it is safer to leave its solution to the future.
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Fisher's own solution made no appeal to species advantage. Instead he
pointed out that, since every individual born has one father and one mother, the total male contribution to posterity must equal the total female contribution. If the sex ratio is anything other than 50/50,
LIGHT WILL BE THROWN
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? LIGHT WILL BE THROWN
therefore, an individual of the minority sex can expect, other things being equal, a greater share of descendants, and this will set up selection in favour of rebalancing the sex ratio. Fisher rightly used economic language to express the strategic decisions involved: they are decisions over how to allocate parental expenditure. Natural selection will favour parents who spend proportionately more food or other resources on offspring of the minority sex. Such correcting selection will continue until the total expenditure on sons in the population balances the total expenditure on daughters. This will amount to equal numbers of males and females, except in those cases where offspring of one sex cost more to rear than offspring of the other. If, for example, it costs twice as much food to rear a son than a daughter (perhaps to make sons big enough to compete effectively with rival males) the stable sex ratio will be twice as many females as males. This is because the strategic alternative to one son is not one daughter but two. Fisher's powerful logic has been extended and refined in various ways, for
44 45 example by W. D. Hamilton and E. L. Charnov .
Once again, and notwithstanding the quotation above from the Second Edition of The Descent of Man, Darwin himself, in the First Edition, came remarkably close to anticipating Fisher, although without the economic language of parental expenditure:
Let us now take the case of a species producing, from the unknown causes just alluded to, an excess of one sex - we will say of males - these being superfluous and useless, or nearly useless. Could the sexes be equalized through natural selection? We may feel sure, from all characters being variable, that certain pairs would produce a somewhat less excess of males over females than other pairs. The former, supposing the actual number of the off- spring to remain constant, would necessarily produce more females, and would therefore be more productive. On the doctrine of chances a greater number of the offspring of the more productive pairs would survive; and these would inherit a tendency to procreate fewer males and more females. Thus a tendency toward equalization of the sexes would be brought about.
Sadly, Darwin deleted this remarkable passage when he came to prepare the Second Edition, preferring the more cautious paragraph later to be quoted by Fisher. Darwin's partial anticipation of Fisher in the First Edition of Descent is all the more impressive because, as Alan Grafen points out to me, Fisher's argument depends crucially on a fact which was not available to Darwin, namely that the two parents make an equal genetic contribution to every offspring. Indeed, in historical times, different schools of thought (the spermists and the ovists respectively)
70
? had held that the male, or the female, sex had a monopoly on heredity. The whole question of Fisher's sources for the sex ratio theory has
been meticulously sleuthed by Professor A. W. F. Edwards of Cambridge
46
University, himself one of Fisher's most distinguished pupils. Edwards
not only notes Darwin's priority over the essential argument and the odd fact that he deleted it from the Second Edition. He also shows how Darwin's argument was taken up and developed by a series of other workers whose writings were probably known to Fisher. First Carl Diising of Jena, in 1884, reiterated and clarified Darwin's argument. Next, in 1908 the Italian statistician Corrado Gini discussed the argument more critically. Finally in 1914, the eugenicist J. A. Cobb gave a form of the argument which seems to have all the refinements of Fisher's own of 1930, including the economic idea of parental expenditure. Cobb seems to have been unaware of Darwin's priority, but Edwards is persuasive that Fisher was aware of Cobb's. Edwards remarks that:
commentators have assumed, and most have firmly stated, that the argument was original to Fisher, though he did not claim it to be, nor did he refer to it either before or after 1930 in any of his other publications. Indeed, there is no evidence that he saw it as particularly novel, remarkable, or likely to lead to major developments in evolutionary biology . . . he may well have regarded it as public property by 1930.
Edwards himself is one of those (I am another) who once overlooked the crucial difference between the First and Second Editions of The Descent.
Fisher's economic view of sex was developed further by Robert L. Trivers, writing in a volume published to commemorate the centenary of The Descent of Man. " Trivers's subtle application of the theory of parental investment (his name for what Fisher had called parental expenditure) to male and female roles in sexual selection greatly illuminates the facts collected by Darwin in the middle chapters of Descent.