The Science of Discworld III - Darwin's Watch tsod-3

by Terry Pratchett

  Such an easy thing to come up with - don't cool the steam in the cylinder, cool it somewhere else. Yet it improved the machine's efficiency so much that within a few years the only steam engines that anyone even thought of installing were those of Watt and his financial partner Boulton. Boulton-and-Watt engines cornered the market. No really significant improvements were subsequently made to their design. Or, to be more accurate, later `improvements' supplanted the steam engine with engines of a very different design, driven by coal and oil. The steam engine had evolved to the pinnacle of its existence, and what displaced it was, in effect, a new species of engine altogether.

  In retrospect, steam engine time arrived around the period of Savery, when the ability to make practical machines coincided with a genuine need for them in an industry that could afford to pay for them and would make more profits as a result. Add to that a sound business mind, to notice the situation and exploit it, and a sense for publicity to raise money from investors and get the idea off the ground, and the steam engine went like a ... train.

  Ironically, before most people realised that steam engine time had arrived, it had gone again, and in the end there was only one winner. The rest of the competition fell by the wayside. And that is why Watt gets so much credit, and why, ultimately, he deserves it. But he also deserves credit for his systematic quantitative experiments, his focus on the theory behind the steam engine, and his development of the concept - not as its inventor.

  Certainly not for watching a kettle as a kid.

  The history of the introduction of the Boulton-and-Watt steam engine is essentially an evolutionary one: the fittest design survived, the less fit were superseded and vanished from the historical record. Which brings us to Darwin, and natural selection. The Victorian era was `steam engine time' for evolution; Darwin was just one of many people who recognised the mutability of species. Does he deserve the credit he gets? Was he, like Watt, the person who brought the theory to its culmination? Or did he play a more innovative role?

  In the introduction to Origin, Darwin mentions several of his predecessors. So he certainly wasn't trying to take credit for the ideas of others. Unless you subscribe to the rather Machiavellian school of thought that giving credit to others is just a sneaky way of damning them with faint praise. -One predecessor that he does not mention is perhaps the most interesting of all - his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. Perhaps Charles felt that Erasmus was a bit too nutty to mention, especially being a relative.

  Erasmus knew James Watt, and may have helped him to promote his steam engine. They were both members of the Lunar Society, an organisation of Birmingham technocrats. Another was Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's uncle Jos's grandfather and founder of the famous ceramics company. The 'Lunaticks' met once a month at the time of the full moon - not for pagan or mystic reasons, or because they were all werewolves, but because that way they could see their way easily as they rode home after a few drinks and a good meal.

  Erasmus, a physician, could also turn a nifty hand to machinery, and he invented a new steering mechanism for carriages, a horizontal windmill to grind Josiah's pigments, and a machine that could speak the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. When the 1791 riots against `philosophers' (scientists) and for `Church and King' put paid to the Lunar Society, Erasmus was just putting the finishing touches to a book. Its title was Zoonomia, and it was about evolution.

  Not, however, by Charles's mechanism of natural selection. Erasmus didn't really describe a mechanism. He just said that organisms could change. All plant and animal life, Erasmus thought, derived from living `filaments'. They had to be able to change, otherwise they'd still be filaments. Aware of Lyell's Deep Time, Erasmus argued that: In the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the first great cause endowed with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended by new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end! If this sounds Lamarckian, that's because it was. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed that creatures could inherit characteristics acquired by their ancestors - that if, say, a blacksmith acquired huge muscular arms by virtue of working for years at his forge, then his children would inherit similar arms, without having to do all that hard work. Insofar as Erasmus envisaged a mechanism for heredity, it was much like Lamarck's. That did not prevent him having some important insights, not all of them original. In particular, he saw humans as superior descendants of animals, not as a separate form of creation. His grandson felt the same, which is why he called his later book on human evolution The Descent of Man. All very proper and scientific. But Ridcully is right. `Ascent' would have been better public relations.

  Charles certainly read Zoonomia, during the holidays after his first year at Edinburgh University. He even wrote the word on the opening page of his `B Notebook', the origin of Origin. So his grandfather's views must have influenced him, but probably only by affirming the possibility of species change[47]. The big difference was that from the very beginning, Charles was looking for a mechanism. He didn't want to point out that species could change - he wanted to know bow they changed. And it is this that distinguishes him from nearly all of the competition.

  The most serious competitor we have mentioned already: Wallace. Darwin acknowledges their joint discovery in the second paragraph of the introduction to Origin. But Darwin wrote an influential and controversial book, whereas Wallace wrote one short paper in a technical journal. Darwin took the theory much further, assembled much more evidence, and paid more attention to possible objections.

  He prefaced Origin with `An Historical Sketch' of views of the origin of species, and in particular their mutability. A footnote mentions a remarkable statement in Aristotle, who asked why the various parts of the body fit together, so that, for example, the upper and lower teeth meet tidily, instead of grinding against each other. The ancient Greek philosopher anticipated natural selection: Wheresoever, therefore, all things together (that is all the parts of one whole) happened like as if they were made for the sake of something, these were preserved, having been appropriately constituted by an internal spontaneity; and whatsoever things were not thus constituted, perished, and still perish.

  In other words: if by chance, or some unspecified process the components carried out some useful function, they would appear in later generations, but if they didn't, the creature that possessed them would not survive.

  Aristotle would have made short shrift of Paley.

  Next, Darwin tackles Lamarck, whose views date from 1801. Lamarck contended that species could descend from other species, mostly because close study shows endless tiny graduations and varieties within a species, so the boundaries between distinct species is much fuzzier than we usually think. But Darwin notes two flaws. One is the belief that acquired characteristics can be inherited - Darwin cites the giraffe's long neck as an example. The other is that Lamarck believed in `progress' - a one-way ascent to higher and higher forms of organisation.

  A long series of minor figures follows. Among them is one noteworthy but obscure fellow, Patrick Matthew. In 1831, he published a book about naval timber, in which the principle of natural selection was stated in an appendix. Naturalists failed to read the book, until Matthew drew attention to his anticipation of Darwin's central idea in the Gardener's Chronicle in 1860.

  Now Darwin introduces a better-known forerunner, the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. This book was published anonymously in 1844 by Robert Chambers; it is clear that he was also its author. The medical schools of Edinburgh were awash with the realisation that entirely different animals have remarkably similar anatomies, suggesting a common origin and therefore the mutability of spe
cies. For example, the same basic arrangement of bones occurs in the human hand, the paw of a dog, the wing of a bird, and the fin of a whale. If each were a separate creation, God must have been running out of ideas.

  Chambers was a socialite - he played golf - and he decided to make the scientific vision of life on Earth available to the common man. A born journalist, Chambers outlined not just the history of life, but that of the entire cosmos. And he filled the book with sly digs at `those dogs of the clergy'. The book was an overnight sensation, and each successive edition slowly removed various blunders that had made the first edition easy to attack on scientific grounds. The vilified clergy thanked their God that the author had not begun with one of the later editions.

  Darwin, who respected the Church, had to refer to Vestiges, but he also had to distance himself from it. In any case, he found it woefully incomplete. In his `Historical Sketch', Darwin quoted from the tenth `and much improved' edition, objecting that the anonymous author of Vestiges cannot account for the way organisms are adapted to their environments or lifestyles. He takes up the same point in his introduction, suggesting that the anonymous author would presumably say that: After a certain number of unknown generations, some bird had given birth to a woodpecker, and some plant to the misseltoe {sic}, and that these had been produced perfect as we now see them; but this assumption seems to me to be no explanation, for it leaves the case of the coadaptations of organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life, untouched and unexplained.

  More heavyweights follow, interspersed with lesser figures. The first heavyweight is Richard Owen, who was convinced that species could change, adding that to a zoologist the word `creation' means `a process he knows not what'. The next is Wallace. Darwin reviews his interactions with both, at some length. He also mentions Herbert Spencer, who considered the breeding of domesticated varieties of animals as evidence that species could change in the wild, without human intervention. Spencer later became a major populariser of Darwin's theories. He introduced the memorable phrase `survival of the fittest', which unfortunately has caused more harm than good to the Darwinian cause, by promoting a rather simple-minded version of the theory.

  An unexpected name is that of the Reverend Baden Powell, whose 1855 `Essays on the Unity of Worlds' states that the introduction of new species is a natural process, not a miracle. Credit for mutability of species is also given to Karl Ernst von Baer, Huxley, and Hooker.

  Darwin was determined not to miss out anyone with a legitimate claim, and in all he lists more than twenty people who in various ways anticipated parts of this theory. He is absolutely explicit that he is not claiming credit for the idea that species can change, which was common currency in scientific circles - and, as Baden Powell shows, beyond. What Darwin is laying claim to is not the idea of evolution, but that of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism.

  So ... we come full circle. Does an innovative idea change the world, or does a changing world generate the idea?

  Yes.

  It's complicity. Both of these things happen - not once, but over and over again, each progressively altering the other. Innovations redirect the course of human civilisation. New social directions encourage further innovation. The world of human ideas, and the world of things, recursively modify each other.

  That is what happens to a planet when a species evolves that is not merely intelligent, but what we like to call extelligent. One that can store its cultural capital outside individual minds. Which lets that capital grow virtually without limit, and be accessible to almost anybody in any succeeding generation.

  Extelligent species take new ideas and run with them. Before the ink was dry on Origin, biologists and laymen were already trying to test its ideas, shoot them down, push them further. If Darwin had written Ology, and if nobody else had written something like Origin, then Victorian extelligence would have been enfeebled, and perhaps the modern world would have taken longer to arrive.

  But it was evolution time. Somebody would have written such a book, and soon. And in that alternat(iv)e world of if, he or she would have got the credit instead.

  So it's only fair to give Darwin the credit in this world. Steam engine time notwithstanding.

  19. LIES TO DARWIN

  ARCHCHANCELLOR RIDCULLY'S MOUTH DROPPED OPEN.

  `You mean killed?' he said.

  +++ No +++, Hex wrote, +++ I mean vanished. Darwin disappears from Roundworld in 1850. This is a new development. That is to say, it has always happened, but has always happened only for the last two minutes +++

  `I really hate time travel,' sighed the Dean.

  `Kidnapped?' said Ponder, hurrying across the hall.

  +++ Unknown. Phase space currently contains proto-histories in which he reappears after a fraction of one second and others where he never reappears at all. Clarity must be restored to this new node +++

  `And you only tell us this now?' said the Dean.

  +++ It has only just happened +++

  `But,' the Dean attempted, `when you looked at this ... history before, this wasn't happening!'

  +++ Correct. But that was then then, this is then now. Something has been changed. I surmise that this is as a result of our activities. And, having happened, it has always happened, from the point of view of an observer in Roundworld +++

  `It's like a play, Dean,' said Ponder Stibbons. `The characters just see the act they're in. They don't see the scenery being shifted because that's not part of the play.'

  +++ Despite being wrong in every important respect, that is a very good analogy +++ Hex wrote.

  `Have you any idea where he is?' said Ridcully. +++ No +++

  `Well, don't just sit there, man, find him!' Rincewind reappeared above the lawn, and rolled expertly when he hit the ground. Other wizards, nothing like so experienced at dealing with the vicissitudes of the world, lay about groaning or staggered around uncertainly.

  `It wears off,' he said, as he stepped over them. `You might throw up a bit at first. Other symptoms of rapid cross-dimensional travel are short-term memory loss, ringing in the ears, constipation, diarrhoea, hot flushes, confusion, bewilderment, a morbid dread of feet, disorientation, nose bleeds, ear twinges, grumbling of the spleen, widgeons, and short-term memory loss.'

  `I think I'd like to ... thing ... end of your life thing ... ' murmured a young wizard, crawling across the damp grass. Nearby, another wizard had pulled off his boots and was screaming at his toes.

  Rincewind sighed and made a grab at an elderly wizard, who was staring around like a lost lamb. He was also soaking wet, having apparently also landed in the fountain.

  He looked familiar. It was impossible to know all the wizards in UU, of course, but this one he had definitely seen before.

  `Are you the Chair of Oblique Frogs?' he said.

  The man blinked at him. `I ... don't know,' he said. `Am I?'

  `Or the Professor of Revolvings?' said Rincewind. `I used to write down my name on a piece of paper before this sort of thing. That's always a help. You look a bit like the Professor of Revolvings.'

  `Do I?' said the man.

  This looked like a very bad case. `Let's find you your pointy hat and some cocoa, shall we? You'll soon feel-'

  The Luggage landed with a thump, raised itself on its legs, and trotted away. The possible Professor of Revolvings stared at it.

  `That? Oh, it's just the Luggage,' said Rincewind. The man didn't move. `Sapient pearwood, you know?' Rincewind carried on, watching him anxiously. `It's very clever wood. You can't get the very clever wood any more, not around here.'

  `It moves about?' said the possible professor.

  `Oh, yes. Everywhere,' said Rincewind.

  `I know of no plant life that moves about!'

  `Really? I wish I didn't,' said Rincewind, fervently, gripping the man a little tighter. `Come on, after a nice warm drink you'll-'

  `I must examine it closely! I am aware, of course of the so-called Venus Fly-'

  `Ple
ase don't!' Rincewind pleaded, pulling the man back. `You cannot botanise the Luggage!'

  The bewildered man looked around with a desperation that was shading into anger.

  `Who are you, sir? Where is this place? Why are all these people wearing pointy hats? Is this Oxford? What has happened to me!'

  A chilly feeling was creeping over Rincewind. Quite probably, he alone of all the wizards had read Ponder's briefings as they arrived by surly porter; it paid to know what you might have to run away from. One had included a picture of a man who looked as if he was evolving all by himself, an effect caused by the riot of facial hair. This man was not that man. Not yet. But Rincewind could see that he would be.

  `Um,' he said, `I think you should come and meet people.'

  It seemed to the wizards that Mr Darwin took it all very well, after the initial and quite understandable screaming.

  It helped that they told him quite a lot of lies. No one would like to be told that they came from a universe created quite by accident and, moreover, by the Dean. It could only cause bad feeling. If you were told you were meeting your maker, you'd want something better.

  It was Ponder and Hex who solved that. Roundworld's history offered a lot of opportunities, after all.

  `I didn't feel any lightning strike,' Darwin said, looking around the Uncommon Room.

  `Ah, you wouldn't have done,' said Ponder. `The whole force of it threw you here.'

  `Another world ... ' said Darwin. He looked at the wizards. `And you are ... magical practitioners ...'

  `Do have a little more sherry,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. The sherry glass in Darwin's hand filled up again. `You create sherry?' he said, aghast.

  `Oh no, that's done by grapes and sunshine and so on,' said Ridcully. `My colleague just moved it from the decanter over there. It's a simple trick.'