(Shared by Sohail Rizvi)
When I was a student I was enjoined to reject the “Cleopatra’s Nose” theory of history, so called after Pascal’s remark in the Pensées : “Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter, everything in the world would have changed.”1 The intent was not to dismiss biography as a way into the structuring of a historical narrative, but to reject the idea that the properties, ideas, or actions of some particular person were the necessary conditions for the unfolding of events in the world. If Josef Djugashvili had never been born, someone else could have been Stalin.
Despite this injunction, a remarkable amount of the history of science has been written through the medium of biographies of “great” scientists to whose brilliant discoveries we owe our understanding of the material world, and this historical methodology has reinforced the common notion that history is made by outstanding individuals. No respectable historian would claim that if Newton had never been born we would still be ignorant about gravitation. Yet we still refer to the regularities of the behavior of physical bodies as “Newton’s Laws,” the general regularities of simple inheritance as “Mendelism,” and the science of biological evolution as “Darwinism.” Even the famous history of science written by the Marxist J.D. Bernal is a recounting of the discoveries and inventions of individuals.
It would be wrong to say that biography is the sole, or even principal, present pathway into an understanding of the history of science. Certainly since Robert Merton’s founding of modern studies of the sociology of science in his 1938 work on seventeenth-century English science,2 the social milieu in which the problems of science arise and the institutional structure of scientific investigation have been central to our understanding of the history of scientific work. There are, however, occasions on which there are orgies of idolatrous celebrations of the lives of famous men, when the Suetonian ideal of history as biography overwhelms us. For Darwinians, 2009 is such a year.
Sohail Rizvi Sahib, why Darwin, why not Wallace … article access is conditional with subscription.
It would be nice if you could write a summery.
Babar
Thank you Rizvi Sahib for sending me the full article.
Now I understand why the author questioned the credit given to Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural selection; According to the author Darwin did not know the method of heredity by which the traits/structure of a species is passed on to the offspring hence (according to the author) his theory was not complete until Mendel figured out genetics. Author has suggested to call the theory of evolution as not “Darwin’s theory” but “Darwin-Wallace-Mendelism”.
I totally disagree – Darwin deserves all the credit for figuring out the method of “natural selection” as the driving force even if he didn’t know “how” the selection made by nature passed on to the offspring. In my view this fact (of Darwin not knowing genetics) makes Darwin even more awesome.
Author has also challenged the process of natural selection saying that “Indeed for environmental changes that have their effect after the age of reproduction (meaning in old age), it is not clear that natural selection can operate at all”. I reject this idea as well because the example he gives of excessive exposure to sun on the beach causing skin cancer is not a good example, because, if the offspring of that particular person will also be exposed to sun similarly the same results are likely as the genome basically will be almost same in both and both will react/protect in the same way. Secondly now with the age of genetic tinkering arriving natural selection will change into human interference …. this should also not rob Darwin of his idea of natural selection because from the beginning of life until now the evolutionary force was, and is, the natural selection. We will change it and we should remember that we are changing it (that does not make Darwin wrong).
Babar