Not all scientists are like Darwin. This is clear from a fascinating book (Darwin’s Backyard, by James Costa) about Darwin’s second life: not the five years he spent on the Beagle Expedition, but the remainder of his life, which he spent for the most part based at his home, Down House, in Kent. Darwin was an experimentalist, using his own garden (hardly a “backyard”) as his laboratory. For more than 40 years, Darwin researched and thought about the natural history around his house: climbing plants, orchids, bees, and, of course, earthworms.
Darwin must have been an inspiring teacher, since he demonstrated that simple observation, when carried out carefully, can provide great insights. In fact, Costa’s book concludes each chapter with some simple experiments that anyone – adult or child – could carry out. The experiments are not difficult, and require only simple kit.
But more importantly, the book displays Darwin, the scientist at work, to be a wonderfully communicative and engaging thinker. He involved everyone in his experiments – family, neighbours, friends. He didn’t communicate only with experts. He seemed to have infinite patience to write asking for information, and to respond to, anyone who was prepared to observe as well. He seemed to be without snobbery; members of a pigeon fancier’s association or a gardening group were as valuable to him as advanced thinkers.
There was an interesting controversy with Julius von Sachs, professor of physiology at the University of Würzburg: Darwin could not replicate some of Sach’s results. Their disagreement seems to summarise the position of Darwin: the last of the gentlemen scientists vs the rise of the professional academic laboratory. But what can we conclude from this? Is the age of the amateur scientist over? Not at all, according to this book. Darwin showed that observation, asking questions, can be the basis of good science. These experiments that Darwin carried out are not simply interesting exercises for home schooling; they represent one of the greatest scientific thinkers at work.
Darwin’s view of science would appear to be very much at odds with the lab-based attitude of many scientists today. Take Lewis Wolpert, for example, whose The Unnatural Nature of Science (1999) is one of the best-known books on the nature of modern science. Wolpert’s vision is almost diametrically opposed to that of Darwin. For Wolpert, “scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive”. Doing science requires training, and a conscious awareness of the pitfalls of ‘natural’ thinking. “If scientific ideas were natural, they would not have required the difficult and protracted techniques of science for their discovery.”
This may be true for high-energy theoretical physics (although, paradoxically, the scientists at CERN have been responsible for some of the most co-operative initiatives in science: they were pioneers of placing content in repositories), but surely most science is based around observation. Wolpert’s assertive viewpoint contrasts enormously with Darwin’s. I don’t think Wolpert would involve his children or his nephews and nieces on his latest experiment, such as recording the movement of bees, or counting the number of this or that flower variety in their garden.
Fundamentally, Darwin appears to be about co-operation, while Wolpert sees competition as the basis of modern science: “Because any scientific discovery can be made only once, scientific research generates intense competition”. This gives the impression that competition is the natural state of science: it is me against you. Darwin’s method would be to observe, to share, to reflect with others, and to ask questions. To over-simplify, perhaps, Wolpert emphasizes how the lay person gets science wrong, while Darwin seems always ready to praise what the lay person gets right. I know who I would like to learn science with.
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