Origin Day lecture: Randal Keynes response

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Armand Leroi

Randal Keynes

I want to touch first on The Origin of Species with that as a central idea, and the power of the idea to explain.  I would just like to suggest that Darwin doesn’t actually prove the case for evolution by showing us speciation happening, that was a great complaint of Thomas Uxley’s I believe.  He said you can't yet prove it.  But Darwin explains why we can't see it happening because of the limits of the human view in space and time and so on, and what Darwin rests his case on is just how much it can explain, how it can explain taxonomy, embryology, distribution in space, distribution in time through the geological record, organic form and behaviour, as touched on by E.O. Wilson with instinct.  And putting all of these together, how it explains the beauties of natural life but also the utter weirdness of so many of its patterns. 

To remind yourself of the power of the book just, I would suggest, read the last chapter, Recapitulation and Conclusion.  For me it’s one of the most thrilling reads in the history of human thought, in the experience that one can have of human thought, and Darwin gallops through all those different areas and just says it can explain this, it can explain that, it can overcome this problem, it can overcome that, and at the end, this explanation that Darwin offers, it doesn’t have to be simplistic and reductive to do all of this explaining, it enriches our understanding and our wonder at the same time.  These, I would suggest, are the qualities of E.O. Wilson’s writing in Darwin’s footsteps. 

There is, though, one feature in the vision that raises real problems for us today.  Darwin writes have been and are being evolved.  He had at his time this sense of this process that was just continuing, continuing, continuing and would produce an endless continual further proliferation of forms.  He thought that humans were just, you know, a point on a way forward.  Evolution by natural selection is the process, the outcome is the diversity of life on earth.  This was the understanding when he wrote in 1859.  It was then also the understanding in 1909, no change.  1959, I don’t know, had Rachael Carson written that yet?

Sandy Knapp

Randal Keynes

2009, now can we still say that these endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful are being evolved?  Is it not arguable that there are human impacts disrupting, damaging, degrading the ecosystems in which evolution takes place, that are having a terrible effect on that proliferation, that wealth, those adaptations and everything like that?  It’s a very, very strange and difficult subject, but I would urge you to consider whether there hasn’t been a significant change in the balance of evolution through natural processes and sort of crashing around of humans with their impacts. 

If Darwin were alive today, I feel he would be simply appalled by the loss of biodiversity.  Now biodiversity, we have a very poor understanding of.  Species loss, yes, but remember always that Darwin says that extinction is part of the natural process.  It’s not actually species loss in itself entirely that I think matters, it’s the loss of habitats, of clusters of creation, of creatures, of dependencies and so on, that interlinking and interdependence, that was what really his vision of life depended on.  We must save this natural wealth, but to be able to save it, to know what to save and how we can save it we must understand how it works.  Darwin emphasised in The Origin of Species how little we understand about the workings of any natural system, its complexities, its knock-on effects, its little interactions.  We must observe, monitor, experiment, and so I would suggest that we commit this anniversary to action on biodiversity.  We look at that very poor understanding, we realise that Darwin stood for understanding, he gave us understanding and we devote ourselves again to the task of giving that understanding to all the people around the world who need to have it if the world is to take action to preserve its natural wealth.

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