Natural Selection\'s Evolution: Rebecca Stott Talks About \'Darwin\'s Ghosts\'

By JOHN WILLIAMS

Soon after he published “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin was accused of neglecting to mention the thinkers that had helped to shape evolutionary theory before him. He scrambled to put together a list of predecessors that would be added to future editions of his book. In “Darwin's Ghosts,” Rebecca Stott tells the story of those predecessors, from the empirical studies of Aristotle to the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, who was piecing together the science around the same time as Darwin. In The New York Times Book Review, Hugh Raffles called the book an “absorbing account” with a narrative that “flows easily across continents and centuries.” In a recent interview via e-mail, Ms. Stott discussed the roots of her interest in Darwin, the reasons Mr. Wallace played second fiddle without complaint and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:

The very first sentence of your book is: “I grew u p in a Creationist household.” How much did that drive your interest in Darwin?

Darwin was described as the mouthpiece of Satan in the fundamentalist Christian community in which I was raised. His ideas were censored, and of course censorship can act as a kind of provocation to curiosity. The school library had a good encyclopedia with several pages on Darwin. I can't say I understood much of his ideas back then, but I understood enough to be mute with fascination. It was extraordinarily different from the Biblical version of how things had come to be - but no less strange.

You've written about Darwin before. What led you to concentrate on this aspect of his story?

In writing “Darwin and the Barnacle,” I had come to respect the kinds of risks Darwin took in asking these dangerous questions about the origins of species. But I also I knew there had been others before him who entertained similar ideas, and I wanted to know i f they had had to take similar risks.

Alfred Russel Wallace was independently reaching the same conclusions as Darwin around the same time, and Darwin felt compelled to rush his book to publication to establish his primacy. Wallace responded to the situation with incredible equanimity. Why didn't he fight for more turf?

I don't think it occurred to him to do that. There were subtle class issues that determined his place in the question of priority for him, I think. Wallace had long looked up to Darwin and [the geologist] Charles Lyell and [the botanist] Joseph Hooker - they were gentlemen of science, whereas he thought of himself as a collector. Other things mattered to him more than fame - he was determined to play his part in the collection of proof about evolution. He was deeply proud to have been part of that, and also probably relieved to be able to slip away from the politics and the fuss and get back into the field.

Aside from Wallace, who came close st to scientifically (as opposed to metaphorically) figuring out natural selection before Darwin?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was one of the first men of science to have access to enough fossil and living animal specimens and bones to really gather the weight of evidence that would be needed to understand the ways in which species evolve. Lamarck worked in the Museum of Natural History in Paris, which in 1800 had the most remarkable collection of natural history specimens in the world - Napoleon Bonaparte had stolen hundreds of famous European natural history collections during the Napoleonic Wars and brought them all to Paris.

The book's roster of notable predecessors starts with Aristotle. As brilliant as he was, that's a very early time for thoughts about evolution. What did he know or intuit that makes him a part of this intellectual lineage?

What is remarkable about Aristotle is that he was the first to practice empirical science, rather than to settle for l arge-scale hypothetical theories about natural laws or cosmologies. He insisted on gathering facts; only facts he had verified with his own eyes. By trying to gather together all the information on all the animal species in the world, he was asking questions about species diversity and adaptation that would lead later scientists to evolutionary speculations. But he was not an evolutionist. He believed in the fixity of species.

You start in 344 BC. Then you hop forward to 850. And then to the late 15th century. What accounts for such large gaps between periods of progress in this subject?

I wish I knew. Perhaps certain thinkers or schools of thought have been lost to history. Perhaps in the West it was due to the dominance of Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, over intellectual inquiry. Some of the periods of acceleration in the history of evolutionary thought were caused by material changes - the development of the printing press or of the microscope, gr owth in literacy rates, the gradual opening up of libraries and natural history collections to the public - but it always strikes me as salutary that one of the greatest periods of acceleration in evolutionary speculation took place in post-Revolutionary Paris between 1790 and 1815, when the priests had been banished and the professors had been given license to pursue any question they liked. That's when evolutionary ideas really came into their own.

The polyp is a small organism that plays a large role in the story. What about it captured people's imaginations?

I am particularly fond of the polyp. It was first “discovered” by a Swiss naturalist called Abraham Trembley in The Hague in the 1730s. Under a powerful microscope, he found that if you cut the “animal” in half, it could regenerate itself. The discovery caused a sensation amongst European naturalists, philosophers and theologians because it seemed to challenge all natural laws - animals cannot reg enerate themselves. Why could a simple organism like the polyp have such powers and not humans?

Darwin would add people to a list of acknowledgments, then cross them off. He criticized a predecessor in one edition of “Origin” and then struck that criticism from the next edition. What drove his anxiety about the list and his fiddling with it the way he did?

I am more and more convinced that assembling that list of predecessors was a kind of political act as well as a public relations exercise for Darwin. He was effectively saying, “Look, I'm not the first. Here are the men who have made this claim before me. We are all responsible.” He wanted to have sane, respectable, ordinary people on that list to try to persuade his readers that evolution wasn't a mad, French, radical, anti-establishment idea. So it seems no coincidence that he worked particularly hard at finding hard-working respectable people like himself to put on his list, and that a large proporti on of those people are British.