Passionate Darwinism

The year 2009 marked the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. That year also saw the publication of more than 100 titles in English alone commemorating the man and his work. Evolution: The View from the Cottage was not among the crush.

This is a post-anniversary Darwin book, an updated translation published in English late last year of Jean-Pierre Rogel’s 2007 French-language book on evolution: L’hippopotame du Saint-Laurent (The Hippo in the Saint Lawrence). Rogel enlists his second home in Quebec’s Eastern Townships as a lens to view nature, a passage through evolutionary time in which the reader learns some fascinating facts about the loon (Gavia immer), moose (Alces alces), polar bear (Ursus maritimus), chimps (Pan troglydites), red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) and, in the process, us (Homo sapiens).

The cottage is an interesting device to earmark the book for an English audience, Canadians having a special sliver of real estate in our psyche for the getaway, even if we call it by different names: a chalet in Quebec, a cabin on the West Coast and a camp on the Rock. Although only 6 percent of Canadians actually own a vacation home in Canada, people do rent from or visit those who do. Time spent at the cottage is a value-laden experience, conjuring up contented hours with extended family or friends, leisure time, fresh air, tinkering, daydreaming. A suitable spot, then, to consider nature’s ways of making us who we are, traced back through a 3.5-billion-year history. The book is really a meditation on the natural history of evolution, knowledge gleaned since On the Origin of Species was published, with an emphasis on developments in the last 15 years.

Rogel’s cottage world is one of connectivity, not in the social cyber-networking sense, but based on the findings of evolutionary developmental biology or “evo-devo.” This newish, exciting science got its current catchy name in the early 1990s. The study of how organisms grow and develop uses the new tools of molecular biology and traditional fossil records to look at how “development is tweaked over evolutionary time,” as Harvard evo-devoist Cliff Tabin describes it. “Fundamentally,” Tabin says, “the genetic toolkit, as we call it, was already there in the common ancestor.” Scientists have been surprised to find that very few genes actually separate mice from humans. Certain “architect” genes turned on or off, expressed at a specific point as an embryo develops, can account for a fin, a paw, a hand, a wing.

Rogel’s own definition of evo-devo, in a handy glossary he provides, calls it “a new scientific discipline at the junction of evolution and embryology with a good measure of genetics.” He uses the science to celebrate the evidence that “everything on earth is connected through a web of being.”

The author, a long-time producer for Découverte, Radio Canada’s weekly TV science show, and a columnist for the popular monthly magazine Québec Science, has essentially collected his notes and columns and thoughts, along with his many interviews with scientists, to reflect on the current state of evolution. His is a passionate defence of Darwinian theory, which he still thinks is widely misunderstood and subject to manipulation by creationists or smart-talking proponents of the pseudo-scientific intelligent design. Rogel’s “personal crystal ball” tells him this will remain a hot topic for years to come. He sees us facing a double dilemma: “first because of the increasing pressure of human interaction on the world’s ecosystems; second, because of the challenges to evolutionary science by fundamentalist religious institutions, currently a widespread phenomenon in the United States.”

Rogel might want to consider that some Islamic groups also embrace creationist beliefs, making it more widespread than its American toehold. African evangelical movements are likewise anti-evolution.

Although the book is organized into three sections, there is no reason to read it from front to back. The author intends his 14 chapters to stand alone, in the literary style of a master science communicator he admires, the late Stephen Jay Gould.

To this end, Rogel meanders through the case studies of scientists, many with connections to Canadian research institutions. We meet molecular biologist Paul Hebert, the brains behind the University of Guelph’s Barcode of Life project, and Andrew Hendry, who figured out it only takes 60 years, rather than millennia, for salmon in Lake Washington to stop interbreeding and become separate species. And then there are the Galapagos-loving Grants, Peter and Rosemary. The researchers first met in Vancouver in 1960 and spent the next 40 years studying finches from their base at Princeton. Their research is the “true icon of the synthetic theory of evolution” often attacked by creationists. The Grants studied the birds in exquisite detail, including beak sizes, which varied over time in the overall species, based on rainfall on the remote islands. Dry weather favoured the survival of birds with big beaks because seeds, especially small seeds, were scarce so big beak size was an advantage. The researchers discovered that one gene turned on early in the chick embryo could determine beak size and they observed that environment played a role in turning it on. The tweaking of the gene, not the gene itself, makes the difference and tweaking can be influenced by environmental factors, in this case drought. The result of these studies, which saw Harvard’s Cliff Tabin and Arkhat Abzhanov joining the Grants in the 1990s, Rogel describes as “evolution right before your eyes!”

The chapter on the hippos in the Saint Lawrence, the original title, brings us closer to home. Rogel describes an excursion in 1982 to count the southern beluga population in the mighty river near Tadoussac. The story flows backward in time to a man named Flowers who determined in 1883 that the whale was more like the hippopotamus than like other water-bound mammals such as seals. No fossils were found until the 1970s. Gingerich and Russell, exploring in an ancient seabed in Pakistan, found a 49-million-year-old rock containing a skull fossil with an S bone that only whales have. Pakicetus, they figured, was a primitive whale. In 2005, Berkeley’s Jean-Renaud Boisserie and his French team examined fossils, along with molecular and genetic data, and concluded that hippos and whales had a common ancestor that dwelled in water, 55 million years ago. Two groups emerged from this creature: the first, cetaceans that completely abandoned land for the water, and the second, a group of four-legged mammals that disappeared only 2.5 million years ago, leaving behind just one descendant, our water-dwelling hippo.

Rogel concludes:

Despite some engaging and thoughtful chapters, this is not an easy read. (It is difficult to know if that is the fault of the original or the translation.) The book has a pile-on style—simple sentences cluttered by too many phrases and subordinate clauses—that gets in the way of understanding complicated facts. In writing about science, it is safe to say the average educated reader still needs encouragement to keep turning those pages. Elegant and accurate science writing is tough work.

Despite the occasional pedantic lapse, Rogel does try to limit his use of scientific jargon. His chapters often close with a thought about the human role in this evolutionary drama; our need to protect biodiversity and to make sure science is valued. We probably hear this call too often, but Rogel asks us to really listen. To the loon, to the rustling of the tree of life. And he reminds us more than once that we are “a lucky big-brained animal with an enormous responsibility as the protector of it all.”