Seeing Further (22 page)

There has always been something of a tension between the private and public ownership of collections. In the seventeenth century the growing interest in antiquarianism led to many individuals of wealth acquiring collections of Classical antiquities – and, somewhat later, of artefacts from Pharaonic Egypt. Interest in more domestic European archaeology merged naturally enough with a growing awareness of prehistory, and many
dilettanti
also began to write up their observations in a burgeoning number of journals. Natural history ‘cabinets’ often featured conchological collections, of variable scientific value, but fossils also began to become popular objects of interest. Whether or not such collections were retained was often at the whim of the son and heir: many were not. Probably the first example of a public exhibition open to paying customers was ‘The Ark’ in Lambeth, a miscellany mostly of antiquarian import collected by John Tradescant (d. 1638) and elaborated by his son (also John, 1608–62). Unlikely though it may seem in what is now a very urban part of London, the Tradescants also ran a nursery for exotic plants, particularly from North America where the younger Tradescant visited, and they were equally known for fruit trees – they supplied ‘Cherryes’ to the royal household. So the conflation of collections of more-or-less scientific importance with ‘Botanical Gardens’ had a long pedigree. But these collections were definitely part of private enterprise. Elias Ashmole FRS (1617–92) acquired the Tradescants’ collection and added much of his own. When the doors of Ashmole’s Museum opened in Oxford on 24 May 1683 the concept of an accessible collection was something of a novelty – a ‘Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men’ as it was described in a contemporary lexicon. The notion that qualified people and members of the public might learn from objects without expecting a fee was novel, and, even though Ashmole’s (and the Tradescants’) collections were to suffer a subsequent chequered history, the Ashmolean Museum broke new ground. Robert Plot FRS (1640–96), the first Professor of Chemistry in Oxford, was also first keeper of the Ashmolean collections (and provided early descriptions of fossils). As we
have seen, this tradition of public access was followed by Joseph Banks in his house in Soho Square, and, at least within the upper classes, was commonly held among the savant classes of Europe. If not exactly sponsoring a democracy of learning, there was a growing sense that diffusion of knowledge was desirable in general, rather than its protection by an esoteric elite. Collections provided evidence, and should be carefully preserved.

Ashmole’s collections were dwarfed by those made by Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). He could outspend most of his rivals, and outlived all of them. Sloane was, moreover, a forerunner of Banks in exotic travel. Between 1687–89 he was physician to the Governor of Jamaica, and acquired there his lifelong enthusiasm for botany – and began his own collections and herbaria. These still survive in good condition in the Botany Department of the Natural History Museum. He also established his reputation as a savant with the publication of such weighty works as
A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, four footed beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles &c of the last of those islands (2
vols 1707–25). Titles have become crisper since the eighteenth century, but at least the reader knew exactly what he was getting. Sloane also encountered cacao in Jamaica, and made a tidy sum from mixing it with milk and providing it as a wholesome chocolate recipe. Sloane’s advancement through the social hierarchy depended on his great reputation as a physician, and he eventually became President of the Royal Society.

Sloane continued to recognise the close connection between living and inert collections, leasing extra land to the Chelsea Physic Garden at a nominal rent; this Thames-side garden was originally founded in 1673 to teach young apothecaries their herbal trade, and it played an important part in establishing exotic plants and in exchanging seeds internationally. Sloane had eventually moved to Chelsea when his collections outgrew his Bloomsbury address; his statue remains in the Physic Garden. By then he had a library of more than 48,000 volumes and had added Egyptian mummies and Greek
and Roman antiquities to his colossal natural history collections. Many of his plants were the type specimens of species recently recognised.

Sloane had determined to keep his collection together years before he died; he regarded it as his life’s work. He offered the collection to the King for the use of the nation for the sum of £20,000 to be distributed between his daughters – undoubtedly a bargain for the nation. He evidently fretted about the fate of the collection – to the extent of having no less than forty Fellows of the Royal Society as Trustees. The 1753 British Museum Act by which Sloane’s collections were changed into a public facility includes the instruction that the collections should be ‘preserved and maintained not only for the Inspection and Entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the Publick’. The collections were moved back to Montague House in Bloomsbury, and there the Museum officially came into existence in 1756. The head of the permanent staff was known as the Principal Librarian. With the appointment of Banks’ old friend and Linnaeus’ student Daniel Solander to the staff in 1773 the connections explored in this chapter reached consummation. The classification of the collections on scientific grounds was assured, with all the subsequent implications for discovery of the natural causes that underpinned that arrangement. The permanence of the collections in the public domain was guaranteed, and the modern notion of a scientific museum was established in Britain.

More than a century would pass before the natural history collections parted company with the antiquarian collections and found their own place in Alfred Waterhouse’s extraordinary building in South Kensington. The collecting fruits of Empire, and the gradual increase in staff, not to mention the scientific pretensions of the collections, all acted together to ensure better funding. Richard Owen was appointed in May 1856 as Superintendent of the Natural History Departments in Bloomsbury, and worked tirelessly to get separate accommodation for the scientific collections. His contacts with the Royal Family assuredly did no harm: indeed, the progressive spirit of Prince Albert still inhabits all that elegant part of London south of Kensington Gardens. At last, when important specimens were discovered money could be found to acquire them for the nation, not merely to embellish the reputation of the wealthy
aficionado.

So it was with
Archaeopteryx,
with which this chapter began. The specimen was acquired as part of a collection put together by a Bavarian doctor, Karl Häberlein. His large collection included 23 reptiles, 294 fishes, 194 plants and more than a thousand invertebrate fossils. The price paid was £700 – which historians are always obliged to qualify with the phrase ‘a considerable amount of money in those days’. However, no price is relevant when the prize is priceless.

Collections achieved their scientific importance from three innovations: scientific purpose (including collections made on dedicated expeditions); appearance of a rational system for curation; and the museum as a permanent repository for the public good. All this happened before Charles Darwin’s birth; but even Darwin began as a collector, and only later became a ‘machine for generating hypotheses’. He spent a decade immersed in barnacles, and it is plausible that his ideas on evolution matured during those ‘forgotten’ years. Science always advances with new techniques and new ideas, but these are frequently applied to collections held for future study. Scientific collections don’t die; they are constantly re-invented.

E
VOLUTION WAS IN THE AIR IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY – A THRILLINGLY RADICAL NOTION WHICH OFFERED A WAY TO MAKE SENSE OF A HUGE ARRAY OF FACTS.
W
HAT, THEN, WAS
D
ARWIN’S UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION? AS
R
ICHARD
D
AWKINS TEASES OUT, IT WAS THE COMBINATION OF SEEING THE TRUE POWER OF NATURAL SELECTION, AND EXPLAINING HOW IT WORKED THROUGHOUT THE LIVING WORLD.

Was Darwin the most revolutionary scientist ever? If, by revolutionary, we mean the scientist whose discovery initiated the most seismic overturning of pre-existing science, the honour would at least be contested by Newton, Einstein, and the architects of quantum theory. Those same physicists might have outclassed Darwin in sheer intellectual firepower. But Darwin probably did revolutionise the worldview of people outside science more comprehensively than any other scientist. He may be only one plausible candidate for the most important or most revolutionary scientist ever, but Darwin has a strong claim to be the most
seditious.

Before Darwin, it took a philosopher of the calibre of David Hume to rumble the illogic of ‘if a thing looks designed it must have
been
designed’.
And even Hume, though he could see that the argument to design was a bad argument, couldn’t think of a good alternative. Darwin provided the alternative. How Hume would have relished the ‘I told you so’ moment that Darwin handed him.

The argument to design was familiar to Darwin, for whose cohort of Cambridge undergraduates the Reverend William Paley was compulsory reading. If it looks designed, it was designed. And the more designed it looks, the stronger the argument. ‘Looks designed’ means something along the lines of ‘statistically improbable in a previously specified functional direction’. Paley’s watch,
¹
and the vertebrate eye, are both statistically improbable in that, if you take their parts and scramble them into random combinations a million times, not once will you hit upon a combination that tells the time to the nearest second, or that sees, in full colour, stereoscopically and with instantaneous light-metering and autofocus.

We must add ‘in a previously specified direction’ because, with hindsight, every random combination can be made to seem as improbable as any other. How astounding that, of all the blades of grass on the golf course, the ball landed on this particular blade, and no other! The reason a hole-in-one is so rare is that the hole is specified in advance as the target. If you specified any particular blade of grass in advance, and the ball landed on it, it would be as remarkable as a hole-in-one (actually more so, because the hole is larger than a blade of grass).

Watches and eyes have their functions – telling the time and seeing, respectively – specified in advance, and both are functions that are difficult to achieve. Therefore a random scrambling of parts is exceedingly unlikely to perform either function with any efficiency. The fact that a watch does tell the time accurately, and with (at least) two hands to accommodate two conveniently related time-scales, correctly indicates to any reasonable person that it is not the product of random chance. Before Darwin, the only known alternative to random chance was design. Everybody could see the force of the argument that Paley generalised from watch to eye – and to
every other part of every living body. There must have been a designer. And yet intuition was wrong. It is the unholy juxtaposition of ‘commonsensically true’ with ‘now known to be false’ that singles out Darwin’s great idea as seditious. Darwin discovered the alternative to chance and design that had eluded everybody, even Hume. The answer is cumulative natural selection. Provided that a smoothly cumulative gradient of improvement exists – not a difficult condition to realise – natural selection is likely to find it, and will propel evolution up the slopes of ‘Mount Improbable’
²
to apparently limitless heights of perfection, which – if you overlooked the smooth, cumulative gradients – you would think were too improbable to countenance.

Darwin’s dangerous idea
³
was seditious, revolutionary, deeply surprising. And yet, having eluded Hume in the eighteenth century, and every great philosopher and scientist before him, it was an idea that came, independently, into the prepared minds of at least two naturalists in the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. I’m not talking about evolution itself, for that idea had occurred to many, including Lamarck and Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus. Nor am I talking about natural selection itself, for that too, as we shall see, had crossed other minds than Darwin’s and Wallace’s. I am talking about the idea that natural selection is
powerful
enough to drive evolution in such a way as to explain everything about life, including that illusion of design that, in Hume’s own words, ‘ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated [them]’.
⁴

I singled out Darwin and Wallace as the two nineteenth-century naturalists who independently solved the riddle of life. But claims of priority have been made on behalf of at least two other nineteenth-century writers, Patrick Matthew and Edward Blyth. If those claims are upheld, it should be a matter of some national pride that all four independent discoverers of natural selection were British. But should they be upheld?

Edward Blyth (1810–73) was Darwin’s near contemporary. Like Darwin and Wallace, he was a naturalist and collector of specimens in the tropics, in his case India. He really did hit upon the idea of natural selection, publishing it in 1835. But his version is only what we would today call
stabilising
selection, that is, natural selection preserving the original type,
not
natural selection driving evolutionary change to ever new types. No wonder he was a staunch creationist. He thought of natural selection as preserving God’s original creations in their pristine, archetypal state. He was, indeed, the very opposite of an evolutionist. Natural selection, in his formulation, would amount to a force of resistance against evolutionary change.