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On the origin of the Darwin myths

Gillian Murdoch — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:21:32 +0000

Ever been told by a ruthless boss that, “as Charles Darwin said, it’s survival of the fittest”?

Rather than answering that it was actually a one-time sub editor for The Economist magazine, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase, or fighting back with an equally wrong comment about someone being descended from monkeys, Darwin academics are calling for a moratorium on the everyday use and abuse of the great naturalist.

Two-hundred years after he was born, and 150 years after he published "On the Origin of Species", it’s time to check the facts, as “most of what most people think they know about him is not true,” according to Darwin scholar John van Wyhe, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge.

Visiting Singapore for a Willi Hennig Society-organised talk about Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, who is also the subject of several myths, van Whye ran through a series of widely-believed Darwin misconceptions that make humankind look pretty slow on the uptake.

First off, he the pointed out that Darwin and Wallace, were not, really, such iconoclasts.

By the late 1830s, two decades before Darwin’s Origin, the scientific community had already accepted that the world was far older than could be allowed by a literal reading of Genesis, he said.

The “Bridgewater Treatise” by the Reverend William Buckland, the first person to scientifically describe a dinosaur, detailed geology and mineralogy’s relevance to theology by drawing cross-sections of the earth full of the fossils of extinct creatures, decades before the two came on the scene.

Second, Darwin did not hold off publishing his theory for decades out of a paralysing fear of outraging his wife or conservative Victorian society, as the popular “Darwin’s delay” theory has it.

The more than 20 year gap between his return from the Voyage of the Beagle and publishing his theory of natural selection is better explained by the fact that he was simply “really busy”, according to Wyhe.

After completing several volumes of Beagle findings, he spent so many -- eight -- years writing about barnacles that, by the end, he wrote that “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before”.

The next myth concerns the 1858 letter and paper, from his now comparatively little-known contemporary Wallace, that jolted both into publishing action, and has been cited as evidence that Darwin stole Wallace’s ideas.

Wallace’s years of specimen collecting in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and New Guinea led him to independently articulate a theory of evolution that, Darwin acknowledged in a June 1858 letter, was the most “striking coincidence” he had ever seen.

But rather than Darwin performing a nefarious, unattributed, Victorian equivalent of a cut and paste job from Wallace’s work, and racing to scoop the glory for himself, the two published a joint paper in 1858.

Wallace was himself delayed in writing up his findings into a book by six years, as he sorted through packing cases crammed with the more than 120,000 beetles, butterflies, reptiles and mammals he had collected, while in what he describes in his book introduction as a “weakened state”.

Ever generous in his praise of Darwin, he dedicated his 1869 book The Malay Archipelago to him.

Anyone still not convinced doesn’t have to take my word for it.

Facts can be checked at Darwin Online, a complete archive of his works created by van Wyhe.

(Pictures - top Charles Darwin. Right: Darwin's house, Down House in Kent, southern England, where he wrote "On the Origin of the Species" REUTERS/Tal Cohen)

* This article was modified on 29 June 2009. The original referred to Wallace as having travelled to Papua New Guinea. This has been corrected.

Olympic Bird’s Nest soup

Gillian Murdoch — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:34:08 +0000

The Olympics Bird's Nest National Stadium disappeared into the pollution that enveloped Beijing earlier this week, before emerging as the air cleared on Friday. Each day's photo was taken from my balcony at 8 a.m.

On a bad day the stadium's central red stripe is barely visible.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Who will miss Asia’s awkward elephants?

Gillian Murdoch — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 10:43:43 +0000

Standing ten feet tall and weighing up to five tonnes, you'd think an Asian elephant would be hard to miss.

But the giants that range across 13 Asian states are so at home in the dense forests and jungles they live in they're often hard to spot.

Conservation experts rarely expect to see the wild elephants they spend their time devising management strategies for. Head counts are mostly based on dung samples rather than fleeting sightings.

It's tourists who typically get the clearest view.

Unlike in Africa, where safari tourists see the animals in the wild, Asia's elephant attractions are close-up experiences.

Centres stocked with domesticated elephants let visitors ride ex-loggers left unemployed by a 1989 logging ban, in "mahout training courses" and jungle treks.

But there's a tinge of awkwardness around the elephant tourism boom.

"I still don't like to see them in captivity," Richard Lair, Director of the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampung, near the northern Thai elephant hotspot Chiang Mai, told me.

Even though "tourism is soft work" compared to logging, the current situation - which sees show elephants painting, playing soccer, doing hula hoop with their trunks and being led along city streets by their mahouts to beg for cash -- is no solution to the elephant's troubles, he said.

"Animal rights people say it's belittling these animals to put them in shows, and there's a degree of truth in that. But the two tenets of political correctness clash: One, we've got to be kind to the elephants. And two, we've got to protect people's traditional lifestyles," he said.

"So it's like logging is OK but painting is not? How many elephants have been killed doing painting? None. How many have been killed doing logging? Many".

"I describe myself as a liberal social worker in a penitentiary. I'm doing a job I believe in within a system I don't."

While some mahouts I spoke to at the country's largest elephant festival, in Surin, were happy with their lot others said they are as trapped as their elephants.

One, working at a centre close by the border to Burma, said the centuries old tradition of "mahoutship" should be allowed to die out.

Each day's work with his elephant, whose has been a street-walker, logger, trekking elephant and temple elephant, reminds him of the tough lives today's elephants lead, he said.

"We take them from the wild, we beat them, we torture them, and then they have to pay their way in the world we created for them? I don't see the logic of it. Elephants don't owe us anything whatsoever. They don't need to justify their existence."

"I think we delude ourselves if we always look for signals of their love for us."

"I feel wherever we intervene with them, even with the best intentions, they suffer a bit."

For villagers living alongside wild elephants, seeing the voracious herbivores is more than awkward.

It is often terrifying.

Once elephants taste human crops such as rice, watermelons, bananas and sugar-cane, they become repeat raiders.

Crashing out of forests, they devour whole fields to supplement the 200kg a day of grass, leaves, twigs, bark they need to eat every day.
Far away from the readers of glossy wildlife magazines and primetime nature TV shows that spends hours showcasing the iconic megafauna, patience on the ground is wearing thin.

Asian elephants helped build Cambodia's Angkor Wat and carried Thai troops into battles.

They still log forests in Burma and star in festivals from Nepal to Sri Lanka.

But that does not cut much ice with fishermen whose boats have been destroyed and villagers whose houses have been pushed over.

Hundreds of people, and elephants, are killed in skirmishes between the oversized "agricultural pests" and angry farmers every year.

Asia's high population densities and fragmenting forests mean contact is more frequent, and the death toll higher than in Africa, where there are about ten times more elephants.

With a few fledgling monitoring systems in place, no one even knows where all the wild elephants are, let alone their status.

Experts say the few figures they have are educated guestimates.

"Elephant killings are under-reported -- farmers killing elephants in frustration at chronic human elephant conflict (HEC) are not likely to report elephant carcasses," the co-chair of the IUCN's Asian Elephant specialist group, Simon Hedges, told me.

People aggravated by HEC can take revenge by burning forests, Hedges said, further worsening the root cause of the conflict.

If the forest habitat the elephants need to survive isn't protected, the conflict will worsen, experts fear, creating a triple whammy of habitat fragmentation, conflicts and hunting.

While South Africa is preparing to cull elephants to control numbers, Asia can't afford to lose many more of its already vulnerable endangered herds.

Listed as endangered for more than 20 years, the prospects for many are bleak.

As the developing countries they live in struggle to provide for their human populations, protection of wildlife ranks relatively low on most totem poles.

Elephant range countries, who met to discuss the animals for the first time in January 2006, have already made the choice.

After an elephant species survival plan lapsed years ago, Vietnam's 80 remaining elephants are now functionally extinct according to conservationists.

Barely mentioned in the media, their fate poses a wider question.

Awkward, exploited, feared -- if Asia's elephants vanish, who will miss them?