Open Letter To Scientists

by tristero

Dear Scientists,

If you haven’t read The Origin of Species, go thou, take it and read, and do so this summer. If I can read it and enjoy it, and I’m not a scientist, so can you. And don’t let Judson’s minor criticisms of its style at times deter you. In fact, Darwin is a charming, witty, writer, often when you least expect it. Even the “tortuous” sections maintain their sense of wonder, amusement, and amazement with life.

(In my opinion, Darwin’s main flaw, as a writer, is an overuse, of the comma. You just learn, to ignore, it.)

The Origin is a great book on so many levels I wouldn’t know where to begin if Olivia Judson hadn’t beaten me to it and mentioned some of the most important. She is right: it is an introduction to a great mind and it is chock full of ideas: great ideas, revolutionary ideas, glorious ideas.

But there is one aspect that Judson didn’t mention that is a crucial reason to read The Origin, and why even non-scientists should do so. It is a literary masterpiece whose influence on English literature has been incalculable. In The Origin, Darwin struggled mightily to find the language for processes of life and nature that, in his time, had never been conceived of in quite the way he did.* He ended up developing both a precise language to describe phenomena – Judson quotes a marvelous passage about cats, flowers, and bees – and a large collection of metaphors, tropes, similes, and the like with which to describe the process of evolution. This language, which Darwin fashioned from his own influences both scientific and literary, deeply influenced English writing in the second half of the 19th Century (The Origin was published in 1859).

There is a wonderful book that discusses Darwin’s use of language and its influence on literature in detail. It is called Darwin’s Plots by Gillian Beer and it is itself considered a masterpiece of literary criticism.

So get reading, dear scientists. Read Your Darwin! You will enter a world where science and the humanities are not falsely separated but are as connected as all life. Which is as it should be.

Love,

tristero

P.S. I guess you can tell I love The Origin of Species. I put it on my short list with Gravity's Rainbow, Lolita, Moby-Dick, and Harmonielehre, as one of the best books I’ve ever read.

*Without going into the details, none of the basic ideas of evolution by natural selection were exactly new with Darwin, but Darwin perceived how to put the pieces together and that transformed their meaning.