Darwin and the age of wonder

It doesn't happen too often that I find a book that continues to fascinate me from beginning to end, but I found one in 'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science', a very fascinating book from Richard Holmes. It talks about scientists and poets in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Or, according to the text on the cover:

"The Romantic imagination was inspired, not alienated, by scientific advances, argues this captivating history. Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes's biographical approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy's self-experimenting with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge. Their discoveries, he argues, helped establish a new paradigm of Romantic science that saw the universe as vast, dynamic and full of marvels and celebrated mankind's power to not just describe but transform Nature. Holmes's treatment is sketchy on the actual science and heavy on the cultural impact, with wide-ranging discussions of the 1780s ballooning craze, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and scientific metaphors in Romantic poetry. It's an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society."

I particularly enjoyed the parts about Joseph Banks' 1769 trip to Tahiti, about Bank's tenure as president of the Royal Society, about Humphrey Davy, who just missed out on the concept of anesthetics despite his many experiments with nitrous oxide and other gases, who developed a lantern to detect methane gas in mines, but did not recognize the talents of his lab junky Michael Faraday, and the wonderful life stories of William and Caroline Herschel, who immigrated from Hanover, and who discovered Uranus and many comets on self constructed telescopes. This happened 200 years ago. Most of the reading is awe inspiring. These people lived in a time where here was only a sketchy framework to understand physical phenomena. How to conduct scientific work was a still largely undeveloped, certainly not common understanding.

The other day I read this paragraph from Humphrey Davy, which makes it clear that evolution was a known concept before Darwin embarked on his voyage on the Beagle. 'That the fish has in millions of generations ripened into the quadruped, and the quadruped into man; and that the system of life by its own inherent powers has fitted itself into the physical changes in the system of the universe." We actually already knew this. In fact, Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, a genius in his own right, did much to develop the framework for evolutionary theory. Of course, Charles constructed natural selection as the evolutionary motor, based on an incredible amount (in size and detail) of supporting observations.

Darwin's contribution to science (and life) can easily be classified as the best, the most comprehensive, and brilliant, despite the fact that he lived in a time that was ripe for these kinds of ideas to be developed. Remember that Alfred Russel Wallace came pretty much to the same conclusions as Darwin, which actually led to Darwin hastily publishing his thoughts and findings about natural selection at the same meeting at which Wallace's results were read. The fact that Wallace never claimed his share of the 'price', while Wallace was already considered an eminent scientist, who continued on a long and fruitful career in many fields of science, is a true testament to Wallace's appreciation of Darwin's insights, Darwin's reliance on observations, his understanding that you can never prove, only strengthen, a theory, his willingness to plug as many 'holes' in the theory of evolution as possible, and his determination to win the battle of the minds with an idea that he knew would redefine the discussion about the meaning of life.