Thoughts: Darwin and Stuff

As most readers know, I shamelessly paraphrase the late Lewis Thomas. He, however, reflected late at night while listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. I reflect during the quiet times of the morning listening to whatever the YouTube sprites might suggest. This morning they slipped in a collection of Maria Grinberg’s rendition of the Beethoven sonatas. Have mercy!

It did remind me of a Thomas quote I read somewhere about the majesty of the earth’s life moving from blue algae to the B-minor Mass in only five billion years.

Then my friend Michael Hester posted “25 Life Lessons from Albert Einstein.” All were good, but the last one hugged my neck like a long-lost friend: “Never lose a holy curiosity.”

It reminded me that I heard a speaker say once that if you studied a topic for 30 minutes a day, in five years you would be an expert. That led me to a long crusade to learn about Charles Darwin’s writings on descent with modification, commonly referred to as “evolution," or, by some fundamentalists as "oozings from the pits of hell," It had seemed the most logical thing I had ever heard of when I encountered it in high school but I had not taken the time to learn, really learn, about it.

So, with the help of “Books on Tape,” a career involving a lot of travel, and Little Rock Public Library, I started. I began with Stephen Jay Gould’s “Ever Since Darwin,” proceeded to a life of Thomas Huxley (Darwin’s “Bulldog”), and then to the works of Darwin himself. Hardly an expert, I do find myself able to converse freely on the topic.

I worked myself through the feuding between Gould and Richard Dawkins over whether the process of modification occurred at the organism or genetic level, an argument that ended with Gould’s untimely death and the advances in genetics that seem to have proven Dawkins right. Imagine the thrill of attending a presentation by Richard Dawkins himself in what will probably be his only trip ever to Little Rock.

It has been a joyous journey. I still marvel at the mind of this self-taught man Darwin (science as such was taught in universities as a field of study until after Huxley’s campaign for it in the late 1800s). Since its publication in 1859, there hasn’t been a scientific study or breakthrough that was not consistent in all important aspects with “On the Origen of the Species.”

Amazing. That’s all I can say. Amazing. Well, the sonatas are as well.

 

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