Charles Darwin: a very human scientist

Charles Darwin was such a scientist that he made a “Pro” and “Con” list when deciding whether or not to get married. And he was so human that one item on the “Pro” side was that in marriage, he’d have someone to humanize him, so he wouldn’t spend all his time thinking only of theories and experiments.

These two themes – his science and his humanity – braided delicately together at the Darwin exhibit that finished its run at the Royal Ontario Museum last Monday.

The Exhibit, called “Darwin: The Evolution Revolution,” suffered controversy in every North American city where it appeared. (This was the last of the North American showings; it now heads to London, England, for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth in 2009.) Or rather, the exhibit suffered from fear of controversy. Because all the exhibiting museums’ usual corporate sponsors and patrons (40-50 of them, in the ROM’s case) were afraid to support it, afraid the big bad North American creationists would get mad at them.

Fortunately for the ROM, two organizations believed this quaking fear was not just unseemly for rich, powerful patrons, but was insulting to the integrity and freedom of science. So both the Humanist Association of Canada and The United Church Observer magazine kicked in with large donations, followed thereafter by the Blyth Academy, and Zinc Research. What was sad was that the controversy was ultimately unnecessary. During my hours at the exhibit, my constant thought was how utterly non-threatening it was.

Through letters, artefacts, and notebooks, we were shown Darwin’s life in great detail, from childhood until his death in 1882. We learned of his interests and scholastic achievements as a young man, the relationship of the Darwin and Wedgewood families (yes, those Wedgewoods), how he would have abandoned plans to voyage on the Beagle if his father remained unconvinced he should go. How he cared for his wife Emma and their children, and what a rich, happy family life they had. How deeply and genuinely he grieved that he caused pain to Emma, a devout believer, by the conclusions of his scientific studies. We learned a great deal about Charles Darwin, the man.

Running parallel to his personal life were displays of his notebooks, specimens, charts, and letters. I walked from case to case, following the development of his scientific theory as he wrote and recorded data in those notebooks – from the germs of the idea to its final expression. What was obvious throughout was that Darwin based his theory on mountains of evidence, collected in a multitude of experiments conducted in both the plant and animal worlds.

Yet this exhibit was never confrontational. Whenever his interpretation of the evidence differed from the standard view of his time, the meta-narrative acknowledged this and presented the opposing viewpoint. You never had the impression the message was, “How stupid those people were!” Rather it was, “Those scientists held a different view, so Darwin had to justify his theory with evidence.”

In fact, if anyone was confrontational in Darwin’s time, it was one of his defenders after The Origin of Species was published – Thomas Huxley. As Huxley said, “I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness.” And it was actually Darwin who tried to tone him down.

The only place where the exhibit’s tone grew harder was its ending statement. It mentioned that today’s objections are the same ones made 150 years ago. But it states unequivocally that “Creationism, including intelligent design, does not offer a scientific alternative to the theory of evolution. By invoking the act of a Creator or an intelligent designer as the explanation for life’s diversity, creationism invokes a cause that lies outside our powers of observation and thus outside the realm of scientific inquiry.”

And that was what the entire exhibit was about – scientific inquiry. That alone would have made me realize yet again that what I had been taught as a fundamentalist – that Darwin was virulently “anti-God” and tried to use science to rebel against him – was utterly false. Most attendees would already have known this. But what we might not fully have realized was Darwin’s warm, compassionate humanity. For me, that was a large gap that this wonderful exhibit finally filled.

 

Universe Dies — Film at Eleven!

“Twenty-four hours from now, we’ll all be a million miles from here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”

After a physicist friend once explained the simultaneous terrestrial and stellar motions of the earth, sun, and Milky Way galaxy, that was what he concluded. Last night, at a University of Toronto Bookstore-sponsored discussion of Jim Lebans’ new book, The Quirks and Quarks Guide to Space, interviewer Bob McDonald picked up that same ball and ran with it. By the time he had calculated the movements and speeds involved, we realized that at that very moment, sitting in the Innis Town Hall on campus, everyone was moving at a speed of about 2.2 million kilometres per hour.

You kind of wanted to fling yourself to the floor and hang on for dear life, just thinking about it.

It was like a “space geek” convention. In fact Lebans, a producer for the Quirks and Quarks radio program, and Bob McDonald, the show’s host, unabashedly admit that they are the big space fans among the program’s staff. McDonald, in fact, was in Florida in 1977 for the launches of Voyagers 1 and 2, sitting with Carl Sagan and the team that designed the gold records sent with the two craft, conveying information about earth to any aliens that might find them. He’s returned to NASA over the years, every time Voyager drew near a new planet and began sending information. He’s watched himself, the scientists, and other journalists age while following the Voyagers’ progress through space.

Lebans, meanwhile, though it only took a little over two months to write the book, has actually been researching it for a decade, with each astronomy-related guest on the program bringing new information on space travel, asteroids, the stars, and the nature of the universe.

The book starts from the ground up, beginning with questions about the earth and working outward until it discusses the end of the universe itself. As far as that goes, by the way, there are three possibilities: 1) the Big Crunch, where the expanding universe begins shrinking back into the singularity that originally exploded in the Big Bang; 2) the Big Chill, where the universe just keeps expanding and cooling, until everything loses energy, goes dark, and becomes, as McDonald says, “very boring;” or 3) the Big Rip, where the recently discovered dark energy keeps pushing the universe outward until it rips everything apart. We have so much to look forward to!

But that’s pretty much the case, the duo says, when you study astronomy. Every scenario you pursue ends with the death of the earth, sun, solar system, and eventually the universe. Lebans and McDonald are both quite cheery as they talk about it.

In fact, when reading his chosen chapter – “What Will Happen When the Asteroid Hits” – Lebans describes the various scenarios with great relish. Everything from a smallish impact that “merely” destroys Quebec City and sets the entire province on fire – to a larger collision that extinguishes our species – he lays out the consequences with ghoulish enthusiasm, assuring us that we have a greater chance of being hit by an asteroid than of buying a winning lottery ticket. The greatest known potential for collision currently resides with Asteroid 1950 DA, which has a 1 in 300 chance of hitting the earth on March 16, 2880.

But even if we think that gives us plenty of time to avoid it, we’re still  not out of the woods. Lebans reminds us that while scientists are busily mapping all the potentially dangerous asteroids in the solar system, it’s the objects way out in the Oort Cloud, beyond Pluto, that could swoop in undetected, giving us no time to stop them.

Like I said. Cheery.

But even in the midst of that doom and gloom (after all, most of it would be billions of years from now), the two men’s excitement is palpable and contagious. The mere descriptions of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn (volcanic, sulphurous Io; the methane rivers of Titan) discovered for us by Voyager 1, makes it hard not to want to go out there and see for ourselves.

And imagine! In about five years, Voyager 1 will cross the outer boundary of the sun’s magnetic field, making it the very first human-made object to transmit from true interstellar space. It’s hard not to get goosebumps about that.

Do I want to read this book? If I hadn’t already been interested in the topics it discusses, the enthusiasm and excitement of both Lebans and McDonald would have convinced me.