[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'd like to profile for you english naturalist and author Margaret Gassy. I'll share about the basics of her life, the books she wrote, and and how she responded to the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's on the Origin of Species. If you've been listening to id the future for a while or reading our news and
[email protected] you'll likely be familiar with the growing evidence of design and nature. As biochemist Michael Behe has put it, we're living through a revolution in molecular biology brought about by advances in the last century of technology that has allowed us to see inside the cell, that black box that Charles Darwin and his 19th century contemporaries were not yet able to comprehend. Today, we know the living cell contains layer upon layer of complexity and design, veritable factories full of precision engineered protein machines that perform the life giving functions of life.
Behe says that in order to appreciate the complexity behind life, we have to experience it. Well, for the last half century and more, that's exactly what we've been able to do. And in the face of this evidence of complexity and design, more and more biologists are finding it untenable to maintain that gradual evolutionary processes like natural selection could be responsible for such remarkable feats. And so some are calling for a new theory of evolution. Some are jumping ship and shifting to a design perspective in their work, opening up new questions and avenues for research, even as they may suffer professionally for their boldness. And some, afraid to go against the grain, simply continue to put their faith in a dying theory. Lately, I've been interested in learning more about Charles Darwin, the man, not the mythological character, as well as Darwin's time and those that lived through the same era with him. I'm hoping to gain some insight into why he put so much faith in natural processes to account for the origin and complexity of life on earth. Later this month, we'll be highlighting a new book by Robert Schedinger called Darwin's bluff, the mystery of the book Darwin never finished. Schedinger delves into the mystery of the sequel to on the Origin of Species that Darwin promised but did not deliver. Darwin called his origin of species a mere abstract, and this sequel would finally supply solid, empirical evidence for the creative power of natural selection, evidence he admitted was absent from the origin. In looking at why Darwin abandoned his promised book, Schedinger reveals a Darwin just as human as the rest of us, subject to the same misconceptions and frailties as we all are. Well, in anticipation of this new book today, I want to profile a woman who lived during the same time period as Charles Darwin, was a naturalist as he was, but had a very different view on the origin and development of life than he did. Margaret Gatti was born in 18 nine the same year as Charles Darwin. Her birthplace was Burnham on Crouch, a small coastal town near London in the southeast of England. Darwin was born 200 miles to the west in Shrewsbury, near the welsh border. Margaret's father, the Reverend Alexander Scott, was a naval chaplain and friend to Admiral Lord Nelson. Until Nelson's death of the Battle of Trafalgar. Scott was known to have had a floating library of hundreds of books. Tragically, Margaret's mother, Mary, died when Margaret was just two years old and her sister Horatia, three. Her father consoled himself with his book collection for many years. They, quote, flooded the sitting rooms and crept up the stairs and lined a long gallery and overflowed into the bedrooms, unquote. To her father, learning was a labor of love and every book he acquired represented that. He also encouraged his daughters to learn from the books he had amassed. Margaret grew interested in marine biology through a second cousin, Charles Gatti, a Royal Society member. She also learned how to draw and Etch and was fond of studying the illustrations and national collection at the British Museum in London. Not content only to learn from books, she began a lifelong habit of corresponding with eminent naturalists of the day, including William Henry Harvey, George Johnston and Robert Brown. George Johnston, a scottish naturalist, would have particularly inspired her in her scientific interests. He encouraged women to take part in natural history study as well as the collecting of specimens. We must not forget the women, he insisted. In 1839, Margaret married author and Reverend Alfred Gatti. Like her parents marriage, it was a union founded on shared aims and pursuits, and her husband encouraged her to continue her work in writing and natural history. She acquired a growing collection of seaweeds and marine invertebrate specimens known at the time as zooophytes, sponges, corals, sea anemones, comb jellies and the like. In the 19th century, it was debated whether these organisms were plants or animals or both. In 1855, Margaret published the first volume of what would be her famous work, parables from Nature, a collection of stories and parable form written for young people, all featuring characters from the natural world. A second volume of her parables came in 1857, among other published works. And then, in 1859, Charles Darwin published on the origin of Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life. It was an abstract of his theory that populations of organisms evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. The concept of evolution was not a new one at the time of his publishing of this transmutation, the idea of one species transforming to another was a topic already of much controversy even before his book. Even natural selection was an idea already in currency before Darwin's book. Scottish farmer and grain merchant Patrick Matthew, for example, discussed the concept of natural selection in a book about timber in 1831, a full 29 years before Darwin published his book. Matthew called it the modification of life to circumstances and didn't make much of it in his own writing. Considering it to be a self evident fact, Matthew held that organisms possessed a variation power, as he put it. But he also recognized what he called a principle of beneficial and a principle of beauty at work in living things that, he argued, cannot be accounted for by natural selection. Darwin, however, thought differently, staking his career and reputation on the seemingly limitless power of natural selection to explain the development as well as the diversity of biological life on earth. Well, it has been said that although she refrained from challenging Darwin directly or publicly, Margaret had strong thoughts of opposition to Darwin's proposals privately amongst her family and friends and her correspondents. In 1861, she published a third series of parables from Nature, and followed that up with the publication in 1862 of her major scientific work, British Seaweeds, a culmination of 14 years of experience that contained over 200 of her illustrations. She published a fourth series of parables in 1863, with the final set of parables arriving in 1870. For almost a decade, Margaret suffered from a sort of paralysis physically that constrained the use of her limbs and even her speech, even if it left alone her mind. This did not deter her, though, and she continued to write through dictation with the help of her husband and her family, publishing her last two books in 1872, including a book detailing her lifelong collection of sundials and their curious mottos. Margaret died in 1873.
In a brief memoir of her mother's life, Margaret Gatti's daughter, Juliana Horatia Ewing, a noted author herself, wrote of her mother that she took a child's pure delight in little things.
Perhaps that's why much of Gatti's writing was directed to children and youth in illuminating the particularities of living things, many of them small and perhaps considered by many to be insignificant creatures. Through her stories and her drawings, Gati inspired many young people with the natural history of the world around them. She promoted curiosity, reverence, and zest for nature, while at the same time encouraging people in the noble principles of living that she herself lived by.
In some of the parables written after Darwin published his origin of species, Margaret indirectly criticized what she saw as the hubris of Darwin's theory. One parable in particular tackles the issue closely. It's called inferior animals, and I'd like to share with you a few excerpts of it before I close this episode. At the beginning of the parable, the speaker invites the reader to become children in heart once more. Let us go forth into the fields and read the hidden secrets of the world.
The speaker comes across a large gathering of rooks in a field, rooks being the large black feathered birds native to Europe and similar to ravens. Here, near the beginning of the story, the speaker issues a challenge to the learned of the world.
Hear this, o you philosophers, you lights of the world, with your books and papers and diagrams and collected facts and self confidence unlimited, you who fancy you are sitting in the supreme light of creative knowledge. Tell me what the rooks are doing and saying why they gathered, and by what methods they call the gathering. Then suddenly the spell is broken, and what was the noisy calling of the birds turns into a language the speaker understands and relates to the reader. The rooks, it turns out, have gathered to hear one particular rook discuss the origins of man. Thanks to a spirit of inquiry, this rook no longer believes in the superiority of humans, instead putting it down to mere myth, to the delusion of timid minds. The rook goes on to provide evidence of man's inferiority, his inability to fly, his need to cover his body with clothes, his want and cruelty to other beings, his restless dissatisfaction. Behold him, a featherless, thin skinned biped. Over time, with lack of use and with the accumulation of bad habits and laziness, humans have turned into a different creature, he explains, a degenerated cousin of the bird race. But heap ages upon ages, he goes on, and other ages upon them. Anything is possible in the course of such a period. The rook echoes the confident tone that Darwin had employed in the origin of species. But what cannot we flatter ourselves with? What we have proved, continues the speaking rook, when our minds are warped by a theory? This is a bold proposition, and I do not ask you to assent to it at once. But if things are not so, how are they? For remember, we have already laid down the maxim that everything ought to be and can be explained. And here the roque employs a scientistic perspective. The idea that science can and will explain everything in time, and that science is our only source of knowledge and wisdom about the world. The roque then claims that humans are striving once again to reassociate themselves with the original bird race. And just as he begins discussing what the response of the rooks should be, the scene suddenly changes again. All the birds are gone, the field is quiet, and the speaker is alone again, awaking as if from a dream. The parable closes with the speaker's reflections. Woe upon us. The world grows old, and life is repeated from age to age, and the same sins are sinned. Still, we desire to be as God in knowledge. So with this parable, Gatti seems to be making a case for a childlike faith and curiosity toward nature, a contrast to the attitude of some of the well educated of her time who thought they had it all figured out. It actually reminds me of the wisdom of Socrates and his admission that what made him wise was merely an awareness that he knew practically nothing. Socrates understood the limits of human knowledge and questioned the certainty of our beliefs and opinions. It seems paradoxical that as we study the natural world to gain knowledge and understanding fueled by natural curiosity, we're going to be well served by a humility and an awareness that we don't have it all figured out and we may not grasp the full extent of reality outside the fullness of time.
Well, that's a brief look at english naturalist and author Margaret Gatti. A number of her books, including Parables from Nature, are still in print in both new and collectible editions, so feel free to read more of her work in other episodes. I'll continue to profile other naturalists, authors, and thinkers of Darwin's era in order to get a fuller picture of Darwin's work and legacy for I be the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
