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Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott
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Review
“Absorbing…Stott’s narrative flows easily across continents and centuries…her portraits evoke vividly realized and memorable characters…Stott captures the breathless excitement of an investigation on the cusp of the unknown…[a] lively, original book. Darwin’s Ghosts unfolds like an enjoyable and informative TV series, each episode devoted to a fascinating character who provides a window into the world of ideas of his time….it [helps] us see the necessity of bold and ambitious thinking. And right here, right now, it has additional value. Stott reminds us that even if evolution is currently fought over more brutally in the United States than elsewhere, this fight has a long and stubborn ancestry, one that is by no means peculiarly American or entirely modern.”—The New York Times Book Review"Stott gives personality to her historical characters, introducing their families, their monetary concerns, their qualms about publishing so-called heretical theories, and the obsessions that kept them up at night. She also brings her settings and secondary characters to life, from the deformed sponge divers Aristotle consulted in ancient Lesbos to the exotic animals in the caliphate’s garden that inspired Jahiz in medieval Basra to lost seashells found by Maillet in the deserts outside 18th-century Cairo. Stott’s focus on her settings makes her narrative compellingly readable, and it also reminds us that even as animal species are shaped by their environment, so intellectuals are shaped by their societies….Stott’s book is a reminder that scientific discoveries do not happen in a vacuum, that they often stem from incorrect or pseudo-scientific inquiries, and that they are constantly changing, mutable concepts as they meander towards something that might eventually be called the truth.”—Christian Science Monitor “Mesmerizing, colorful, and often moving…richly drawn…This many-threaded story of intellectual development – of different discoveries and enquiries into fossils and polyps, of tropical birds and the curious properties of sponge, of men scouring seashores and caves, and trying to work new ideas around the fixed, immovable pillars of religion – is hypnotic….The subject is science, but Stott has a novelist’s confidence, and there are vivid tableaux…This is a sympathetic examination of the innate human qualities of curiosity and inquiry, the helpless compulsion every generation has to probe further and further into the structures of creation.”—The Telegraph (UK) “This extraordinarily wide-ranging and engaging book rediscovers evolutionary insights across a great span of time, from the famous, such as Aristotle and the Islamic scholar Al-Jahiz, to the 16th-century potter Palissy, the 18th-century merman-believer Maillet and the transformist poet and botanist, Rafinesque – as well as from Diderot, Lamarck, Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus and his contemporary Wallace. And these are just a few of the figures who emerge from the dark into the glow of Stott’s attention. Each of them is evoked with an intimacy that is also clearheaded about the way ideas get stuck, or prove wrong-headed, but can’t be parted with. Stott can make the nuances of ideas emerge in descriptions that suddenly bring the person close…. Gripping as well as fair-minded… Darwin’s Ghosts is a book that enriches our understanding of how the struggle to think new thoughts is shared across time and space and people.”—The Sunday Telegraph (UK) “Stott's research is broad and unerring; her book is wonderful…. An exhilarating romp through 2,000 years of fascinating scientific history.”—Nature “Impressively researched... A gripping and ambitious history of science which gives a vivid sense of just how many forebears Darwin had.”—The Times (UK) “[Stott] has revealed an extraordinary batch of free thinkers who dared to consider mutability during times when such ideas might still cost the thinker his head….Every character that Stott introduces has a riveting story to tell, and all their histories are told with style and historical nous….Stott has done a wonderful job in showing just how many extraordinary people had speculated on where we came from before the great theorist dispelled all doubts.”—The Guardian (UK) “A fascinating history of an idea that is crucial to our understanding of life on earth.” —The Independent (UK) “Beautifully written and compelling…These mavericks and heretics put their lives on the line. Finally, they are getting the credit they deserve.”—The Independent on Sunday (UK)"Stott provides the lucid intellectual genealogy of evolution that the great man could not."—New Scientist (UK) “Stott does a superb job of setting the scene for her protagonists, whether on the island of Lesbos, 18th-century Cairo, or revolutionary Paris. But her real strength lies in intellectual history. She demonstrates conclusively that evolutionary ideas were circulating among intellectuals for many centuries and that, for most of that time, those who promoted these ideas found themselves under attack by religious and political leaders. Darwin’s scientific breakthrough, therefore, did not occur in a vacuum, but rather provided the most fully conceptualized theory. Stott has produced a colorful, skillfully written, and thoughtful examination of the evolution of one of our most important scientific theories.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A lively account of the ‘pathfinders, iconoclasts, and innovators’ who were Darwin's spiritual kin…. Stott masterfully shows how Darwin, by discovering the mechanism of natural selection, made a unique contribution, but he did not stand alone—nor did he claim to.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “The history of science comes alive as a drama of vibrant personalities wrestling with a dangerous idea.”—Booklist“Charles Darwin provided the mechanism for the evolution of the exquisite adaptations found in plants and animals, but the awareness that species can change had been growing long before him. With wonderful clarity Rebecca Stott traces how ideas about biological evolution themselves evolved in the minds of great biologists from Aristotle onward. Darwin would have loved this brilliant book—and so do I.”—Sir Patrick Bateson, president of the Zoological Society of London “Clever, compassionate, and compellingly written, Darwin’s Ghosts interweaves history and science to enchanting effect. The evolution of the theory of evolution is a brilliant idea for a book, and Rebecca Stott has realized it wonderfully.”—Tom Holland, author of Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic “From Aristotle onward, evolutionists have—thank God—always been a quarrelsome lot, and not much has changed. Rebecca Stott shows how dispute, prejudice, and rage have accompanied their science from the very beginning. Darwin’s Ghosts is a gripping history of the history of life and of those who have studied it, with plenty of lessons for today—perhaps for today’s biologists most of all.”—Steve Jones, author of Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated “The concept of evolution was not created fully formed and placed in the garden one day for our delight and terror but, as Rebecca Stott demonstrates in her inspiring book, evolved as much as we did. Darwin’s Ghosts is a beautiful tribute to the buried tradition of curious, courageous observers who, before Darwin explained how evolution worked, witnessed the mutability of species for themselves and recorded what they saw.”—Jonathan Rosen, author of The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature
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About the Author
Rebecca Stott is a professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia and an affiliated scholar at the department of the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University. She is the author of several books, including Darwin and the Barnacle and the novels Ghostwalk and The Coral Thief. She lives in Cambridge, England.
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Product details
Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau; 1st Edition edition (June 12, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400069378
ISBN-13: 978-1400069378
Product Dimensions:
6.7 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
111 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,164,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
If you're like me you figured Charles Darwin was a pioneering scientist way ahead of his time. You assumed his Theory of Evolution erupted on the scene as an overnight sensation, forcing the world to think of time and the origins of life in ways never before imagined. And like me, you'd be wrong.As Rebecca Stott so aptly chronicles in Darwin's Ghosts, Darwin was by no means the first person to challenge the Biblical version of creation. The notion that human beings and other forms of life evolved from common ancestors over a span of millions of years was broadly understood and discussed within the scientific and educated communities of Darwin's day. In fact as I now know, many great thinkers who lived long before Darwin were at least sniffing at the door of evolutionary theory.And I mean REALLY long before him ... Even though we normally think of Aristotle as being an airy-fairy ancient Greek philosopher and not a nitty-gritty empirical scientist, it turns out that he spent a good chunk of his life categorizing the bugs, fish and plants around the Mediterranean. He was the first guy to organize animals and plants into distinct species and in so doing he became the first guy to recognize the profound similarities between all the things that constitute life on earth. He may have been lacking in many of the particulars but he nonetheless established the link between man and other creatures. He also theorized about the upheavals that turned sea beds into mountains and had a good sense about the endlessness of time on earth.Fast forward two thousand years or so and we have Leonardo da Vinci also declaring confidently that the earth was unfathomably old - far older than what it says in the Bible, and old enough for a process like evolution to occur. Da Vinci considered the earth and all the life upon it to be intertwined and in a perpetual state of transformation. He dismissed as superstitious nonsense the idea of a fixed world being created in six days by God. You see his vision of an ever-changing world reflected in his paintings and etchings - perhaps most famously in his now lost fresco of the Battle of Anghiari where human forms mingle and join with animals. Meanwhile, Da Vinci spent a couple of decades thinking about a set of sea shell fossils collected and presented to him by some mountaintop peasants. The more he contemplated these fossils and consulted the works of the great philosophers who preceded him - including Aristotle and his History of Animals - the more certain he became that those fossilized oysters weren't washed up onto the mountains as the result of a 40-day Biblical flood. Da Vinci understood that they were born there, as were generations upon generations of similar creatures, millions of years ago when the mountain tops of his present day were mere islands in a greatly expanded ocean.As Rebecca Stott reveals, the Theory of Evolution as we understand it today has itself evolved in much the same way as have our genes: from a primordial soup of simple notions and observations it has - over a long stretch of time - coalesced into a complex scientific theory. It's been a rough road. Like the first primates to venture down from the trees, the theory has had to face some pretty ferocious lions lurking in the grass, especially in the relatively modern era when the catholic and protestant churches had the power to tear the flesh from any threats to their orthodoxy.In Darwin's Ghosts we learn not only about what Darwin's forbears studied and believed, we learn about the ruses they devised to advance their findings to avoid being arrested for heresy and sent to prison. Da Vinci wrote backwards in his mirror, others created fictional characters to espouse the more controversial aspects of their writings, some wrote anonymously, still others only dared to publish their works posthumously. History remembers so little about these "free thinkers" in our day and age because they were forced to keep their profiles so low during their day and age.Darwin owed everything to these brave and determined geniuses that Stott brings so compellingly to life in her book. Not only did they contribute to the vast body of knowledge that he built upon, they softened the beachheads of ignorance for him - and for us.
Anyone who thinks that scientific discoveries that radically alter the way we view the world are typically the products of one genius working alone need only read Rebecca Stott's thoroughly researched book to find a striking example to the contrary. In Darwin's Ghosts Stott makes a carefully documented and compelling case that theories of evolution with a great deal in common with that offered by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species have a long history, predating Darwin by many centuries. In some instances, notably the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the only essential element missing was a mechanism whereby transformations that yielded new species might occur.In the early 1970's I was given a brief introduction to Lamarck when studying Herbert Spencer for a course in classical social theory. In retrospect, it seems extremely unfair that Lamarck was then presented as laughable because he subscribed to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In truth, however, Lamarck's failure to discern natural selection as the mechanism that animates evolution puts him in the good company of thousands of others, among them Charles Darwin's accomplished and prolific grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.While Darwin's list of intellectual antecedents, beginning with Aristotle, covers two millenia and nineteen men of undeniable brilliance, Stott's account makes clear that brilliance was not enough to explain the achievements of these keen observers and powerful thinkers. The word enthusiasm comes to mind, but even boundless enthusiasm doesn't quite cover it. Joyful obsession seems a better characterization. How else explain Bernard Palissy's life-long search for new and different fossils from varied locations? How else explain the endless hours spent by Abraham Trembley staring through microscopes to discover that polyps regenerated parts that were cut off? How else explain Alfred Wallace's tireless work through malarial fever until he independently, though nearly two decades later than Darwin, identified natural selection as the mechanism driving evolution?These were not gravely solemn, self-abnegating, and reckless men worshiping at the altar of science and driven by nothing but the need to know and disseminate the truth whatever the consequences. Yes, they sometimes took risks that their fact-finding and theorizing would offend the religious and political sensibilities of those in power. But they also took precautions, writing about their efforts in poetic, dramatized, or systematically obscure forms to mislead official censors and confuse church leaders as to the heretical nature of their research.Charles Darwin himself was among the most cautious. He hit upon natural selection in 1844 but refrained from publishing this key insight until 1858, when he was prompted by Wallace's independent discovery of the same phenomenon. Scientific truth was important to Darwin, but so was avoiding public condemnation as one who defamed the biblical story of creation. And so was letting the world know that he had, indeed, been first, revealing understandable pride.These were men who laughed, loved, procreated prodigiously, ate, drank, earned a living, argued, grieved and did all the other things we would expect of their contemporaries. But when their brilliance was combined with joyful obsession, doing exactly what they loved most, the results were sometimes stunningly original.Similar stories have been told about other discoveries, including the history of special relativity and approximations of Crick and Watson's discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. The conventional expression is "standing on the shoulders of giants," and Stott makes it clear that Darwin was no exception, inadvertently taking credit not only for his own work but for the contributions of others.Stott's well written and interesting book prompts one to wonder how many unnamed, unknown, unpublished men and women of brilliance have devoted their lives to doing what they loved best, never bothering with the nuisance of writing it all down for others to admire. The work itself was reward enough. No doubt less likely today when science has become so narrowly specialized and capital intensive, but who knows.
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