Darwin’s Dangerous Descendant
Science Debates Are All In the Family
SOURCE: courtesy of Matthew Chapman
Screenwriter Matthew Chapman, the great-great grandson of the great great scientist, reflects upon science, politics, and culture 200 years after Darwin’s birth.
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Matthew Chapman is a screenwriter, movie producer, book author, and science advocate who in late 2007 founded the organization ScienceDebate2008 (now ScienceDebate, Inc.) and currently serves as its president. On top of all this, he happens to be the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin. So precisely 200 years after Darwin’s birth—February 12, 1809—Chris Mooney decided to interview Chapman about his great-great grandfather’s legacy, the meaning of his work, and the state of science in U.S. politics and culture today.
What was the view in your family about the Darwin legacy—were people living in its shadow? Did they make inside jokes about it?
I do think that some of the family lived in Darwin’s shadow. It’s hard not to, but it gets easier as time goes by. When I was young people did not make jokes in the way that I do. There were people, my mother included, who I think felt they had something to live up to, and, failing to do so, were made unhappy. Others I have met over the years—not my immediate family, I hasten to mention—seem to be rather excessively proud of it. I poke fun at the connection by saying that I’m the best argument creationists have because if you look at my family tree with Darwin at one end and me at the other this in itself disproves evolution. When I look at Prince Charles, he always seems rather rueful to me, as if he was saying to himself, “This is all very well, but it’s just an accident of birth.” He’s right about this, and it’s how I feel, except that in my case there are no perks.
What did you think every time you looked at the ten-pound note? Was that why you left England—you prefer your money with crazy pyramids on it?
The ten-pound note didn’t come into existence until after I left in 1982. Sometimes people ask me to sign their copy of Origin of Species, which I do, but with a little embarrassment. I will, however, for a fee of ten pounds, happily sign a ten-pound note.
When you appeared on Science Friday recently and discussed Darwin, the very first caller asked a question about atheism. Is this a regular response?
This is normal. Some callers hate him for his atheism, some adore him for it. I think it is an interesting fact that Darwin slowly came to the conclusion that God did not exist, but this is not his primary achievement. There are several dead philosophers and living commentators who do a far better job. The danger, I think, is that if atheists take possession of Darwin, the public will continue to be distracted from, or feel active antipathy toward, his scientific work and all its modern offshoots. As this is a vital part of modern science, anything that deters people from studying it and perhaps entering science seems to me a shame, and potentially disastrous to America.
Tell us what first sparked the idea of ScienceDebate2008. Do you think Darwin would have been proud?
Like most people, I knew that there were several environmental crises going on and that science was an integral part of their potential solutions. As I watched the first fifteen or so debates, I noticed there were no questions dealing with this, or very few. Similarly, none of the debate moderators were asking questions about the science behind health and medicine, both individual and global. Nor were there any serious questions about the relationship between education and science and science and technological development, nor any about scientific integrity in government.
To me, these were the key issues that would determine our future. That the politicians weren’t discussing them was understandable—that the debate moderators were letting them get away with it seemed really bad news for American voters. When I learned that half the growth in the American economy since the 1950s could be attributed to science, it seemed really, really odd that the debates did not include a segment devoted entirely to science and technology policy. I then thought that actually science was so important in so many ways that it actually deserved a stand-alone debate of its own. I still believe this. I think that Darwin would approve. He did have political causes (he was an abolitionist), and he would certainly be made sad by some of our attitudes to science, to science education, and by our self-inflicted environmental problems.
What do we need to restore science in our culture, so that someone like Darwin is respected as one of history’s greatest scientists, rather than reviled and dragged into the culture wars?
To some extent I’m sure this is an education question—and as such I’m not best equipped to answer it. However, it’s also a cultural question. Almost everyone has at one time or another taken a pill that saved their lives or reduced their physical or existential pain. This is just one example of one aspect of life that people are generally grateful to science for, and yet scientists are usually portrayed as wild-haired madmen. Why is this? There are fantastically interesting and charismatic scientists around, but somehow they don’t achieve popular fame. I’ve suggested elsewhere that scientists ought to dress better, earn more money, get more sex, misbehave, go to rehab at public expense, and generally reap the rewards of their great contributions to society. More seriously, I think that some of this anti-science and anti-scientist stuff must be toxic waste from the gigantic anti-evolution movement in America.
Any Hollywood projects in the works that involve science?
Yes, several, but I don’t want to get robbed!
So how are you celebrating February 12?
I’ll be having dinner with my wife and daughter. My daughter is the great-great-great granddaughter of Darwin. You have probably heard of “regressing toward the mean”—that’s me. My daughter shows signs of an upswing on the family tree.
Comments on this article
Just exactly WHAT did Charles Darwin do? What did he do?
Did he go as a paid well trained Naturalist on a 5-year trip to Galapagos to collect the data he needed to support his theory? Was that his reason for interrupting his study for the Ministry, which he never completed?
Where and when did he study to be a Naturalist?
Did he get the facts right on the Galapagos “finches”? (no he did not, but that is to obtuse a subject, look it up)
Did he write the paper for which he became famous?
Did he actually include a description on how species originate in his book “The Origin of Species”, written 23 years after his trip to the Galapagos Island?
What DID he do for 23 years? Wait for Wallace’s book?
If you are familiar with the subject, you already know that the answers to the above, and many others, is that “contrary to popular opinion” NO, he did nothing like that! Nothing even close to that.
He is credited for originating the “Natural Selection” Theory that culls out the deficient in an specie.
Well, how about evolution being the “average” of the parents? Yes, Darwin held that view but Nature does not.
And, get this, Father Mendel had actually conducted statistical studies that proved the opposite!
And, he sent a copy of his work to Darwin, himself.
And, a copy of Father Mendel was found, annotated, among Darwin’s books -which he never acknowledge.
He changed his mind and adopted three, contradictory, evolution schemes.
The theory of “struggle for survival” Darwin used was described in Rev. Thomas Malthus’s [1755-1834] Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society [London, 1798!].
Darwin, thought evolution of new species was the result of either:
(1) divergences accumulated and produced a new species -all at once. [This is partially true and work continues.]
(2) Driven by tendency and wish, the hypothesis of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck [1744-1829] (no self-respecting scientist would admit believing this);
(3) Darwin also endorsed the concept of trait averaging in offspring ignoring the opposite findings by Austrian Monk Gregor Mendel [1822-84] (his report was found in Darwin’s files). Father Mendel is the acknowledged “Father of Molecular Biology” and “Father of Molecular Genetics”. At issue was whether offsprings of a tall and a short plant would be tall, short or in-between average. Father Mendel´s data showed that it was short or tall but not in-between average, and he developed the algebraic equations.
Darwin, Linnean Society Chairman ADDED his name to Alfred Russel Wallace’s [1823-1913] seminal Theory of Evolution hypothesis of “organisms change over time” [many attribute this phrase to Darwin]-two years before Darwin’s book.
Finally, the only proof he offered that he had done some work before Wallace’s paper was, get this, a COPY he made of a personal letter he sent to a lady friend in America. The original, of course, never was found.
Darwinism is a veritable “cottage industry” to support the believers. Can you name a single new species that was predicted by The Theory of Evolution?
February 27th, 2009 at 4:35 pmAll the work in Evolution is to “fill in” gaps in the fossil record and then have a press conference where these highly paid scientist proclaim “Just like we Predicted!”, I guess they do not know that “predicted” means the assertion must be made BEFORE the fossil is found.
The proper, and meaningless, term is “agrees, with a prediction we would have made if we knew the fossil existed.” In kind terms.