The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code Read Online Free PDF Page B

for him. Then again, Morgan could never have expected how most everything in his life had turned out. After laboring away in anonymity, he had now become a grand panjandrum of genetics. After working in comically cramped quarters in Manhattan, he now oversaw a spacious lab in California. After lavishing so much attention and affection on his “fly boys” over the years, he was now fending off charges from former assistants that he’d stolen credit for others’ ideas. And after fighting so hard for so long against the overreach of ambitious scientific theories, he’d now surrendered to, and even helped expand, the two most ambitious theories in all biology.
    Morgan’s younger self might well have despised his older self for this last thing. Morgan had begun his career at a curious time in science history, around 1900, when a most uncivil civilwar broke out between Mendel’s genetics and Darwin’s natural selection: things got so nasty, most biologists felt that one theory or the other would have to be exterminated. In this war Morgan had tried to stay Switzerland, refusing at first to accept either theory. Both relied too much on speculation, he felt, and Morgan had an almost reactionary distrust of speculation. If he couldn’t see proof for a theory in front of his corneas, he wanted to banish it from science. Indeed, if scientific advances often require a brilliant theorist to emerge and explain his vision with perfect clarity, the opposite was true for Morgan, who was cussedly stubborn and notoriously muddled in his reasoning—anything but literally visible proof bemused him.
    And yet that very confusion makes him the perfect guide to follow along behind during the War of the Roses interlude when Darwinists and Mendelists despised each other. Morgan mistrusted genetics and natural selection equally at first, but his patient experiments on fruit flies teased out the half-truths of each. He eventually succeeded—or rather, he and his talented team of assistants succeeded—in weaving genetics and evolution together into the grand tapestry of modern biology.

    The decline of Darwinism, now known as the “eclipse” of Darwinism, began in the late 1800s and began for quite rational reasons. Above all, while biologists gave Darwin credit for proving that evolution happened, they disparaged his mechanism for evolution—natural selection, the survival of the fittest—as woefully inadequate for bringing about the changes he claimed.
    Critics harped especially on their belief that natural selection merely executed the unfit; it seemed to illuminate nothing about where new or advantageous traits come from. As one wit said, natural selection accounted for the survival, but not the
arrival,
of the fittest. Darwin had compounded the problem byinsisting that natural selection worked excruciatingly slowly, on tiny differences among individuals. No one else believed that such minute variations could have any practical long-term difference—they believed in evolution by jerks and jumps. Even Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley recalled trying, “much to Mr. Darwin’s disgust,” to convince Darwin that species sometimes advanced by jumps. Darwin wouldn’t budge—he accepted only infinitesimal steps.
    Additional arguments against natural selection gathered strength after Darwin died in 1882. As statisticians had demonstrated, most traits for species formed a bell curve:. Most people stood an average height, for example, and the number of tall or short people dropped smoothly to small numbers on both sides. Traits in animals like speed (or strength or smarts) also formed bell curves, with a large number of average creatures. Obviously natural selection would weed out the slowpokes and idiots when predators snatched them. For evolution to occur, though, most scientists argued that the average had to shift; your average creature had to become faster or stronger or smarter. Otherwise the species largely remained the same.