Its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe - invasive species and Victorian ecosystem fiction

The Old Book Conundrum:  I make startling discoveries that are already well known to anyone who cares about the subject.  I plant my flag on the peak, not noticing the other flags, and the little book in the tin box which has been signed by thousands of other climbers, and the little café that sells hot cocoa and strudel.

Everyone already knew, yes, that in early English science fiction much of the “science” under discussion was Darwinism?  I had no idea.  I guess I thought it was all about machines.  The inventor in The Time Machine (1895) invents a time machine.  The invading Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898) crush humanity with their ray guns and space dreadnoughts and ansibles and whatnot.  Perhaps Jules Verne really is a bit more about machines?  Like I know from Jules Verne.

The time machine of The Time Machine is not related to science in any way – it’s pure fantasy.  Necessary, though, because H. G. Wells correctly understood the time scale of Darwinism.  If he wanted big evolutionary changes, he needed millions of years.  Thus, a veneer of time travel was draped over a story about advantageous evolutionary traits and natural selection.  Thus, the strange decision of the time traveler to constantly push forward – I hardly see how, for the sake of the story, Wells needed the final vision of the entropic death of the Earth.  But that scene, stripped of human content, is the thematic climax of the novel, and the best thing in the book.

Richard Jefferies explored new Darwinian ideas in After London, or Wild England (1885) by eliminating the machines altogether, regressing to medieval technology.  He was working on the idea of the ecosystem, although he did not yet have that word.  His novel was, in part, a mental experiment:  remove human pressure on the environment, and see what happens to fields, forests, rivers, wildlife, and, not least importantly, humans.  I’m sure a modern biologist would find it all too simple, but I was able to detect Jefferies’s excitement about the idea that it all fits together.  Or perhaps the new idea was that the system is dynamic, but coherent and understandable.

Wells was studying the ecosystem, too, in The War of the Worlds, this time by introducing invasive species.  I knew about the highly evolved Martians, of course, but not about the other invasive species:

[T]he seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths.  Only that known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms…  It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our triangular window.  And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.  (II.2.)

The red weed spreads throughout the novel, until it, too, succumbs to the clever ecological trick ending, when the terrestrial ecosystem strikes back.

I have not read any other Wells.  I would guess that The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) has more of this, while The Invisible Man (1897) does not, although I am probably wrong.  The novel about bicycles is presumably really about bicycles, maybe?

A day or two more, I guess, poking at the hideous corpses of the Martians.

Remarkable Creatures has an excellent bibliography

In a sense, I'm not quite the right reader for Remarkable Creatures. Not because I already have the history of science covered - ho ho, no - but because I am interested enough to read more. A lot of what Sean Carroll is doing - a lot - is summarizing other books that are worth reading. He does it adeptly (although the seams show, sometimes), so for many people his book will be porridge of the desired temperature and consistency.

I'm willing to push a little farther, both in terms of difficulty and length. To stick with Darwin, for example. Carroll's thirty page chapter on Darwin (less, really, including the illustrations and map) gives half of its length to the Beagle voyage, five years of Darwin's life. For Carroll's main theme, the urge to go out and discover something, this makes sense, and I have no argument with his account of the trip. Or only one argument, which is that The Voyage of the Beagle is very much worth reading on its own, entirely accessible, well written, and even funny. It's also five hundred pages, not thirty.

Darwin's Beagle is the only primary text of Carroll's that I have read, so one real benefit to me of his book is the bibliography. I already knew that I wanted to read Henry Walter Bates's account of his eleven years in the Amazon, mostly during the 1850s. But I had not expected Arthur Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1890) to sound so good. Let's look that one up - how long is it? 544 pages, I see.

How about T. rex and the Crater of Doom (1997) by Walter Alvarez, about the discovery of the Yucatan asteroid impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs? 216 pages; all right, definitely reading that one. Carroll covers this ground in an action-packed eighteen pages. OK, how about Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish - 256 pages, almost a real book (seventeen pages in Carroll, and a must read for fans of Arctic exploration stories). In general, the old books - the ones that belong here on Wuthering Expectations - are long and longer, while more up-to-the-minute science books are rather more petite. Well, who knows when I'll read any of them, but I've made a list.

Two books on the list are by Sean Carroll, so I guess that's some praise. Carroll is not actually a science historian, but rather a leader in a field called evolutionary developmental biology. Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2005) and The Making of the Fittest (2006) will apparently tell me what that means.

The Navy of the Republic of Texas

When John Lloyd Stephens and his party arrived in the Yucatan in 1840, the peninsula was not exactly in rebellion, but had declared itself the autonomous Republic of Yucatan. Negotiations with the central Mexican government were ongoing. As a defensive measure, the Republic of Yucatan had entered a military alliance with the Republic of Texas. Texas naval vessels were patrolling the Gulf of Mexico.

It all sounds like something from an alternate history novel. It's a glimpse of a dead end of history, a contingent path that went nowhere. Every American is taught about the Republic of Texas (the Alamo, remember?), but as a prelude to the 1846 Mexican War, and as part of the path to the Civil War. Not for it's own sake (not outside of Texas, at least). But it was, for a short time, an existing entity, a state with ambassadors and treaties and the like. As was the Republic of Yucatan. As were any number of vanished corners of history. It's an odd thing to read about.

One great value of old travel books is their firsthand encounters with these nooks and crannies of the world that were not in the middle of the action. John Kirk Townsend in the Sandwich Islands, Mungo Park on the banks of the Niger, Darwin in Argentina and Chile. Almost no one thinks to read The Voyage of 'The Beagle' for his description of Argentina and the gauchos in the 1830s. But it's there, and it's worth the time, and where else can you read about them?*

* I know, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (1845). Is that a book for non-specialists? We shall see.

Darwin the foodie

This is regarding the less famous of the two species of giant Galapagos lizards, not the one that sits on rocks by the shore, posing for the documentarian:

"These lizards, when cooked, yield a white meat, which is liked by those whose stomachs soar above all prejudices."

p. 401, Everyman's Library edition.

The Republic of Mendoza & other Darwinian fictions

Just as Darwin gains my trust, he makes the outrageous claim that he crosses the Andes from Santiago, Chile to "the Republic of Mendoza". The Chileans check his passport on the west side of the Andes, and the "Mendozans" check it on the east. Joseph Conrad also mentions this mythical country in his story "Gaspar Ruiz" - clearly goofing on Darwin. For shame, Charles.

More specimen collecting: on the island of Chiloe, Darwin sneaks up on a rare fox which is watching the sailors and clobbers it with his geological hammer. "This fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise, than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted in the museum of the Zoological Society." Darwin has a pretty good sense of humor. *

The edition I am reading is about 500 pages. The bulk of the book, 350 pages, is about Argentina and mainland Chile, the Andes and Pampas and Patagonia. The single chapter on the Galapagos Islands is only 30 pages. A surprise to me.

There is a very helpful website about Darwin and the Beagle voyage here, with detailed maps. Notice that the map of "Mendoza" is conspicuously absent!

*Turns out the common species name is actually "Darwin's fox".

Don't know much about geology

I'm reading Voyage of the 'Beagle' as a travel or adventure book, not as a science journal. But one aspect of Darwin's scientific background is striking to me. Darwin is in the first generation that could take the concept of "deep time" for granted, that did not have to argue about whether the age of the earth was in the thousands of years, or the millions. The latter position had won the field, and then some. I think even the debates between the Neptunists and Vulcanists were over by the point Darwin was working.

So Darwin and his colleagues were out in a world with this new, powerful way of seeing things. Literally seeing - a rock or riverbed looked different to someone trying to deduce its million-year history. Combine this with the Linnaean system, and the flood of specimens and descriptions brought back by travellers from all over the world. Explanations were suddenly available for all sorts of phenomena that had been mysteries for centuries. People were looking at animal and plant physiology, geology, oceans and currents, fossils, almost everything, with new, wide-open eyes. It must have been an incredibly exciting time to be a natural scientist.

I thought Stephen Baxter's short book on James Hutton (Age of Chaos) was an excellent amateur introduction to deep time. Amazing to think of great intellects like Johnson or Hume, Johnson pious but indifferent to whether the world started 6 or 10 or 100,000 years ago, Hume dismissing the traditional chronology as nonsense, but neither with any idea, any imaginative conception, of the truth, of an earth that is 4.5 billion years old.

"This day I shot a condor".

Sort of a shocking thing to read. But Darwin is a scientist, so it's all right. It's possible that the condor is on view at the Natural History Museum in London - they seem to still have the specimen.

Regarding the governor of an Argentinian frontier province: "The governor's favourite occupation is hunting Indians: a short time since he slaughtered forty-eight, and sold the children at the rate of three or four pounds apiece". Now this is not just sort of shocking. I have an impression, confirmed here by Darwin, that the crimes of U.S.-Indian policy look a little pale compared to what went on in Argentina. Greed and neglect compared to open genocide. Native Americans and their allies were able to achieve some political success in the U.S., although they lost the fight at most crucial points. But in Argentina, there were no advocates, there was no organization. Just open warfare, or total submission. I need to learn more. A subject for future research.

All about Andean condors: pp. 194-8 of the Everyman's Library Voyage of the 'Beagle', the governor's hobby: pp. 140-1.