From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 10:52:05 MDT
Bravo, Kharin.
Thank you for passing this on.
Walter
Kharin wrote:
> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.asp?story_id=27853
>
> Richard A. Fortey10/07/2003 Time and a microscope
>
> Rebecca Stott
> DARWIN AND THE BARNACLE
> The story of one tiny creature and history's most spectacular scientific breakthrough
> 309pp. Faber. £14.99.
> 0 571 20966 1
>
> In October 1846, Charles Darwin carefully filed away his first outline of The Origin of Species , leaving it untouched to work on barnacles for the next eight years. The notion of transmutation of species in the natural world, the most fundamental generalization in biology, was put on hold in favour of a massive treatise on humble marine invertebrates. It was rather as if Albert Einstein had postponed relativity theory in favour of studying an obscure branch of algebra. What could have possessed the sage of Down House? Rebecca Stott brilliantly explains why Darwin was neither cowardly, nor suffering from a distorted view of his priorities: barnacles were exactly the right organisms to help clarify his ideas on evolution. The laborious production of a massive monograph was the means by which his subsequent, revolutionary ideas were taken seriously by the scientific community. Barnacle minutiae sealed his reputation as a reliable observer, a careful worker, a patient gleaner o!
> f the facts. Taxonomy of the kind that Darwin mastered was central to the intellectual programme of nineteenth-century biologists. Far from being an aberrant episode in the life of the greatest British scientist since Newton, the barnacle phase was a crucial period in Darwin’s journey to the nub of evolution.
>
> Barnacles are not what they seem. They are not shellfish, like cockles or winkles. They are more closely related to shrimps and lobsters, belonging to that great group of animals having jointed legs known as arthropods. Barnacles have given up the vagaries of a wandering life in favour of a sedentary, reliable existence. They are crustaceans tucked into a box made out of several calcareous plates. When currents wash over them, the valves open sufficiently for the appendages of the sequestered animals to filter out tiny edible particles, a fine soup of plankton. The delicacy of their limbs contrasts with the solidity of their stony homes, which cluster together on even the most tempest-lashed cliffs to make a white crust. Barnacles can attach themselves to whales, to boats, or to the shells of other animals in the deep sea; they are found everywhere from Antarctica to the tropics.
>
> Despite the peculiarities of their adult life, when they hatch from the egg they have a swimming larva not so different from that of the average shrimp. Only when they settle down to filter do they build their distinctive houses. When Darwin came to these animals they were a taxonomic mess: nobody knew how many species there were, or how they should be classified. It was recognized that there were two main types: those with flexible stalks, and those cemented directly to the rock. Beyond that, discrimination between the many species needed very careful work. The tiny creatures had to be teased from their shells and dissected; their genitalia had to be probed; the very hairs on their limbs had to be counted. A task that Darwin originally thought might take months burgeoned into years of toil.
>
> At times, Darwin came almost to hate his recalcitrant objects of study. He fretted at the time the work was taking. He admired the zoological puzzles that barnacles set, but resented the labour involved in solving the confusing conundrums. All the time, he built up a wider and wider network of correspondents around the world who supplied him with barnacle specimens, proof of “how much true kindness exists amongst the disciples of Natural History”. These connections were to stand him in good stead when evolution came of age. He even started to describe ancient fossils of stony plates of extinct species, knowing that time, and lashings of it, would be relevant to the secret of the transformation of species.
>
> Darwin had picked up the most peculiar barnacles of all while he was a young naturalist aboard the Beagle , in 1835. They showed up as no more than a series of tiny holes in a conch shell; a very interesting species that was, paradoxically, a boring one. It tunnelled into the surface of sea shells, and filter-fed from the safety of its subtle shelter. It came to be known in Darwin’s correspondence as Mr Arthrobalanus. Rebecca Stott shows that nearly twenty years elapsed before this particular species – an aberrant sprig on the tree of life – was assigned by Darwin into its proper place in nature. It could be argued that the whole edifice of evolutionary thought had to be in place before Mr Arthrobalanus could be classified in the system: how could such a skulking anomaly be explained without understanding how one animal transforms to another the better to fit into the marine environment and out-compete its challengers? And how typical of Darwin to chew over a problem for two!
> decades until he felt he had the answer absolutely right – and even then he entertained some doubts.Barnacles filled the whole Darwin Weltanschauung : “When does your daddy do his barnacles?” one of Darwin’s children is reported to have asked of a friend. After all, what else was a father to do?
>
> During Darwin’s eight years of “barnaclizing” there were, from time to time, breakthroughs. The dry pages of a monograph seldom reveal such moments of excitement, but for the student sitting alone with his microscope and scalpel they are the flashes of joy that make months of labour worthwhile. Darwin’s letters reveal his satisfaction when he realized that a tiny excrescence on one specimen of Ibla was a diminutive male. The female had reduced her mate to little more than a bag of sperm, attached to herself like a purse against the time of fertilization. It is like one of J. G. Ballard’s more sinister views of the future of the human race. Yet other barnacles were hermaphrodites. It can easily be perceived that Darwin might have been led by these invertebrate sex freaks to ponder the causes of adaptation and reproductive advantage. Meanwhile, the evolutionary folder lay undisturbed.
>
> The barnacle years included terrible family traumas. Darwin’s favourite child, Annie, had died agonizingly slowly. The health problems that plagued him made life intolerable at times, and fostered his increasing reluctance to leave Down House. Darwin submitted himself to Dr Gully’s fearful water treatment, which entailed being regularly doused with vast quantities of cold water, and then being wrapped like a mummy while the body slowly heated the damp covering. He must have been extraordinarily hardy not to succumb to pneumonia. He even continued with the treatment after Dr Gully had suggested that a clairvoyant might be able to see into Darwin’s troubled stomach. He dismissed the clairvoyant, but continued with the hydrotherapy.
>
> There was more to the delay in tackling the “big book” on evolution than the perfectionist’s desire to see a monograph through to completion. In 1844, an anonymous book had appeared: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. It was to run through many editions before its authorship was revealed as Robert Chambers, encyclopedist and publisher. Attractively produced, it asserted a crudely “evolutionary” view of the history of life, and was a tremendous success with the reading public. George Eliot took the book seriously; so did Florence Nightingale. It attracted the venom of the scientific classes in equal measure, a “vile book” with threadbare reasoning disguised in stylistic finery. It was certainly full of mistakes and misapprehensions, just the kind of loose reasoning that would leave a meticulous worker like Charles Darwin appalled. Before he unleashed his own version of how life transformed itself – and how new species originated – he must have his arguments as close!
> to unassailable as possible; and he must have a reputation as an intellectual authority secure enough to resist a battering from senior members of the clerical establishment. He must make evolutionary thought respectable. Until that time was judged right, the barnacles provided more than an obsession – they provided a distraction from worry about a dangerous future. Like a sessile barnacle himself, Darwin could hunker down inside his protective environment, and securely carry on filtering the sea of knowledge for his own nourishment.
>
> The reader might be forgiven for thinking that there was not much new to be said about Charles Darwin. The huge biography of Adrian Desmond and James Moore, together with the two volumes of Janet Browne’s, should have said it all. That preconception would be wrong. Rebecca Stott has done a wonderful job in exhuming the barnacle years. She writes very vividly, with just enough seasoning of speculation to enliven the solid research. She is very good on Darwin the family man – and it upsets any clichéd notion of genius to find that this careful invalid was also much loved by his circle of intimates, generous with praise for those less talented than himself – in a word, kindly. Having a private income no doubt helped excuse him from direct engagement in the bloodier frays being fought in the metropolis, but there were several other privileged players who were less circumspect. Stott takes us through his research almost barnacle by barnacle, and in less skilled hands this journey!
> might have been a rather dull one – the monographs are not exactly light reading. She transforms the discoveries Darwin made about these neglected sea creatures into an enthralling detective story.
>
> There is a message here. Today, taxonomy is something of a Cinderella among sciences. Surely, so the argument goes, this was a nineteenth-century activity rendered obsolete by the discoveries of the genome? In fact, any practising taxonomist knows that there are as many puzzles remaining among animals and plants as when Darwin wrote about them – and molecular techniques are but one more tool in their solution. The rapid rate of extinctions today gives an added urgency to the programme of identifying and classifying the living world before conservation plans can even begin. There is still no substitute for going out into the field, and dissecting with pin and microscope. There are very few biologists today who are able to give eight years of their life to understanding a group of organisms – “publish or perish” demands four scientific papers a year, and a long apprenticeship of learning is a disposable luxury. It is interesting to reflect that Darwin would probably not have b!
> een supported in his barnacle endeavours in a modern university biology department.
>
> I do have one caveat about Darwin and the Barnacle. Darwin himself was fanatical about the quality of his illustrations. Indeed, superb illustration was at the heart of the Ray Society’s efforts to bring natural history to the wider world. It is disappointing to have figures in a new book, published a century and a half after the models, which fall far short of the standard of the originals. This is not being pernickety: the high standard of research that Darwin carried out was deployed to illustrate his beloved and accursed animals with unrivalled clarity, and that clarity is largely missing. Even worse is the reproduction of large paintings in black and white and at small size: a representation of Leith Races could be almost anywhere in a fog, and really does not help us get a vision of society at the time. The author, naturally, bears no responsibility for this, but I am surprised that Faber did not serve her as she deserved
>
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