Do Elephants Have Knees?

And Other Stories of Darwinian Origins

Charles R. Ault

• Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501706417
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

Thinking whimsically makes serious science accessible. That's a message that should be taken to heart by all readers who want to learn about evolution. Do Elephants Have Knees? invites readers into serious appreciation of Darwinian histories by deploying the playful thinking found in children's books. Charles R. Ault Jr. weds children's literature to recent research in paleontology and evolutionary biology. Inquiring into the origin of origins stories, Ault presents three portraits of Charles Darwin—curious child, twentysomething adventurer, and elderly worm scientist. Essays focusing on the origins of tetrapods, elephants, whales, and birds explain fundamental Darwinian concepts (natural selection, for example) with examples of fossil history and comparative anatomy.

The imagery of the children's story offers a way to remember and recreate scientific discoveries. By juxtaposing Darwin's science with tales for children, Do Elephants Have Knees? underscores the importance of whimsical storytelling to the accomplishment of serious thinking. Charles Darwin mused about duck beaks and swimming bears as he imagined a pathway for the origin of baleen. A "bearduck" chimera may be a stretch, but the science linking not just cows but also whales to moose through shared ancestry has great merit. Teaching about shared ancestry may begin with attention to Bernard Wiseman's Morris the Moose. Morris believes that cows and deer are fine examples of moose because they all have four legs and things on their heads. No whale antlers are known, but fossils of four-legged whales are. By calling attention to surprising and serendipitous echoes between children's stories and challenging science, Ault demonstrates how playful thinking opens the doors to an understanding of evolutionary thought.

1

“curtiosity’s” child

Bobby Darwin’s Impertinent Early Years

But there was one Elephant—a new Elephant—an Elephant’s Child—who was full of ’satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions. And he lived in Africa, and he filled all Africa with his ’satiable curtiosities. He asked his tall aunt, the Ostrich, why her tail-feathers grew just so, and his tall aunt the Ostrich spanked him with her hard, hard claw. He asked his tall uncle, Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and his tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked him with his hard, hard hoof. And still he was full of ’satiable curtiosity!…He asked questions about everything that he saw, or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, and all his uncles and his aunts spanked him. And still he was full of ’satiable curtiosity!

Rudyard Kipling, “The Elephant’s Child”

Ernst Mayr posed the question “What made Darwin such a great scientist and intellectual innovator?” He then answered himself, employing Kipling’s famous phrase: “He was a superb observer, endowed with an insatiable curiosity. He never took anything for granted but always asked why and how.”1 And Darwin’s questions were many:

Why is the fauna of islands so different from that of the nearest mainland? How do species originate? Why are the fossils of Patagonia basically so similar to Patagonia’s living biota? Why does each island in an archipelago have its own endemic species and yet they are all much more similar to each other than to related species in more distant areas?2

As Evolution’s Child, Darwin practiced curiosity from a young age. He ventured not to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, but to the shores, forests, mountains, and plains of Brazil, Patagonia, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, and the Galápagos Islands. What was the origin of his inquisitive “’satiable curtiosity” tendencies?

The Origins of Impertinence

Of course, no definitive answer to that question exists. Family values, childhood experience, and inherited nature interact in complex ways, placing great distance between the relatively simple just-so stories accounting for the origin of whale flukes and elephant trunks and the more complex tale of human mental development. The origin of curiosity in the mind of a human being defies complete explanation. Still, there is an abundant biographical record of Darwin’s life, told by historians, his descendants (for example, Randal Keynes, a great-great-grandson of Darwin, and author of Darwin’s Daughter), and even the man himself. His early childhood holds clues about how to promote curiosity as both a cultural value and a personal trait.

In his earliest years, young Charles Robert Darwin enjoyed a childhood of leisure and play. As poignantly emphasized by historian Janet Browne, his sisters called him “Bobby.” He romped across the lands of the family’s English estate, the Mount, in Shrewsbury, above the Severn River, near the Welsh border. He had one younger (Catherine) and three older sisters (Marianne, Caroline, and Susan). Caroline oversaw his education and was reportedly quite stern. Charles had one big brother, Erasmus, with whom he was very close. He often visited and played at the estate of his Wedgwood cousins, perhaps troubling his aunts, uncles, and other family members with question after question; he was the family’s “Elephant’s Child.”

According to his biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, from childhood on Charles “craved” praise and acceptance. “He was an inveterate collector and hoarder—shells, postal franks, birds’ eggs, and minerals. They were trophies, piled up for praise.”3 He feared provoking displeasure, yet often could not resist the temptation to engage in mischief, then tried to cover up his backyard antics.

Young Bobby roamed, collected, and spent many afternoons fishing with worms. Unlike the marine invertebrates that would captivate him later on, his terrestrial worms lacked the ability to desalinate water. He quickly learned to euthanize them in a saltwater bath. Late in life he would author his final scholarly tome, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations of Their Habits (1881): a worm scientist when just seven as well as when seventy.

At home he marveled at the beauty of and differences among the pigeons kept by his mother, Susannah Wedgwood Darwin. His appreciation of pigeon fanciers and their broods would yield the most fundamental insight into his solution to the problem of the origin of species: the analogy between variation under domestication—scaly and feathered pigeon legs, for instance—and variation within natural populations of organisms, such as stocky and slender finch beaks. His preschool collecting days disposed his mind to attend to nature’s endless capacity for producing variation. His childhood encouraged him to experience delight and joy in such details. Death, however, soon intruded upon his idyllic existence.

The shocking loss of his mother in the midsummer of 1817 came when Charles was only eight and had just begun formal schooling. His older sisters had to assume even greater responsibility for his care. The following year found him bound with affection and admiration to his thirteen-year-old brother, Erasmus (“Ras,” who later became a favorite uncle to his children), a fellow boarder at the Shrewsbury School. By the time he was ten, rote learning, recitation, and authoring verse dominated school life. Yet Charles found the opportunity to read great literature—Byron, Shakespeare, and Horace—with pleasure. He continued to amass collections and take long, solitary walks, “day-dreaming of tropical islands and South American landscapes…a refuge from the stultifying grown-ups.”4

Upper-class education for English youth in the nineteenth century did not include the study of the sciences. The Shrewsbury boarding school, which he attended from 1817 to 1825, stressed drill and the classics. Teenage Charles found refuge from tedium in the family estate’s garden tool shed. Here, with his brother Ras, Charles pursued an avid interest in “chemistry.” They assembled the requisite retorts, beakers, and mortars and pestles, obtained a great variety of reactive substances, and actively conducted chemical experiments in their makeshift lab—not always with complete safety in mind. The boys combined their reagents to make new substances: solid, gaseous, and liquid.

Some reactions required heating, and sometimes they supplied more than necessary. As a result, he and Ras frequently ignited things, not just in their backyard tool shed but also at night in the boarding school dorm, where he experimented with an open flame. Some of the vapors created by his chemistry set ignited quite well, and teasing soon earned schoolboy Bobby the nickname “Gas.”5

Figure 1.1 Young Charles Darwin destined to become a worm scientist. Illustration by Jan Glenn.

Chemical experimentation may have seemed a relatively novel hobby, but experimentation with kiln-firing techniques was actually a natural extension of family tradition. Darwin’s maternal grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, built his fortune on industrial-scale pottery-making, and his innovative manufacturing company rose with the tide of England’s Industrial Age.6

Beyond material riches, the Darwin family was heir to the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and they trusted in the investment of capital to return increasing wealth. The Darwins and Wedgwoods were, in this way, classic liberals. They believed in upward progress through competition and industrial innovation—a global process properly led, to their way of thinking, by England. Charles Darwin was a third-generation freethinker, responsive to egalitarian ideas despite being a member of privileged society.

Rousseau’s Darwin

Devotion to the virtues of learning spanned the generations of the Darwin family. Darwinian upbringing stressed childhood exploration and interest in the natural world, family values Charles would refine into meticulous investigation and provocative theorizing. Grandfather and physician Erasmus Darwin, who numbered among his close friends the steam engine inventor James Watt and the chemist Joseph Priestley, spent a lifetime engaged in scientific debate. He held no small interest in the origins of life’s novelties, and his influence on his son Robert Darwin made medicine a family profession, a tradition that was broken when Charles Darwin enrolled in medical school but reacted with revulsion to human surgical dismemberment.

Dissenter from the Anglican faith, freethinker, Unitarian, and French egalitarianism sympathizer, Erasmus Darwin had worked out his own ideas about inheritance and the transformation of life in his Zoonomia. In 1837 Charles Darwin made reference to this title in his private notebook, where, in conversation with himself (to avoid the risk of censure and disapproval), he had begun to elaborate upon his thoughts about the “transmutation of species,” or one kind of creature becoming something entirely different.7

Darwin family tradition reinforced the value of playful, even risky exploration in thought as well as empirical experimentation with things. Charles’s father, an intimidating man of massive physique, may have scolded his son from time to time on account of his backyard ramblings and incessant collecting, but both the “Darwins and Wedgwoods had a long-standing interest in advanced approaches” to rearing children, and many of these stemmed from the teachings of Rousseau.8

Ideas from Rousseau’s Émile clearly influenced Erasmus Darwin regarding the education of children. He promoted Rousseau’s views when he advised his own daughters in their planning of a boarding school for girls. Grandson Charles, who honored his grandfather with a biography, acknowledged his debt to the elder man’s thoughts about human nature. Quoting Erasmus, he noted, “A sympathy with the pains and pleasures of others is the foundation of all our social virtues.”9 To Charles Darwin, this statement was profound. It implied that morality and ethics did not originate through divine or supernatural intervention. Instead, they resulted from sympathy for and empathy with others. But where might such sympathy and empathy have come from?

At the peak of his intellectual journey, Charles Darwin concluded that this same sympathy and empathy with others was no more than the human expression of social instincts observed in non-human animal behaviors. He believed that these instincts were inheritable and evolved under the influence of natural selection working to promote group survival through cooperation. This line of reasoning reconciled the strife, ugliness, and pain of life with its equally real exquisite, sublime, and noble experiences. In time, and by virtue of natural selection, selfishness begot selflessness. Selection converted the amoral struggle to survive into social instincts; human learning then expanded on these to achieve social virtues.

Across the generations, recognition of the parallelism between social virtues and social instincts united the minds of grandfather and grandson. This view provided a cornerstone to Darwin’s thinking about the origin of civilized behavior and conflicted with contemporary theological accounts of virtue. The England of Darwin’s youth was not a modern secular state. Anglicanism reigned, and the joint role of church and state was accepted as indispensable to the establishment of a just and moral society.

Rousseau’s and Darwin’s views accelerated the transition from a sectarian to a secular society. These views discounted divine intervention, whether as creation, grace, or soul, as the source of civilizing virtue. There was no room for original sin. Rousseau taught unequivocally that people are born good, free of sin: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”10 Therefore there was no need for harsh intervention in the Darwinian view of early childhood education. Instead there was a call for learning to sympathize with the thoughts and feelings of other h...