The Most Famous Punch-up in Science, 30th June 1860

Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the protagonists

30^th June, 1860, Oxford Museum of Natural History, the scene of one of the biggest punch-ups in Science.  It was only built in the few years before and opened that year as a demonstration of how Art could reveal the science of the natural world as the Intelligible embodied expression of the Will of God. The British Association meeting of 1860 was therefore an inaugural event, but not as the authorities might have wished. 

Imagine being asked to compose a piece of music for a friend’s retirement in that location (if you happen to be a composer of Darwin-related music). A bit like being asked to put on a sketch or two at La Scala, or maybe a religious service in the Vatican. It was a bit too early for the main oratorio (see below), but a string quartet seemed be lower risk, especially if one had ever written one (I hadn’t). But it was important to rise to the occasion, as Thomas Henry Huxley did. I wasn’t up against a different world view or a skilled orator such as Bishop Wilberforce, but the intellectual history of the place seemed to require some effort.

“As the debate unfolded, Wilberforce taunted Huxley about his possible ape ancestry, to which Huxley is claimed to have retorted: 'If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’ Admiral Fitzroy held up a bible and exhorted all to believe God rather than man.” The account is legendary, and probably embellished or distilled, but that’s essentially what contempories made of it.

I wrote last time about the Adventure of Faith in many areas, science, art and religious faith. We can’t always prove things which we believe to be manifestly true. There is no full theory of gravity which includes how it actually works (Einstein’s is the closest we have) but that doesn’t mean that things don’t fall down. But we can ‘clear the weeds’ and remove obfuscation. Huxley had that faith in the correctness of Darwin’s theory – as far as it went – and seemed to want to remove the irrelevant suggestion of social awkwardness of having apes in the family tree. But he didn’t understand the full thing, and neither did Darwin, hence the inclusion of the genetic code in Eyenigma Variations.

The first blog in this series featured the splendid student quartet who played the piece in the setting of the 30/06/1860 debate. Maybe one day a choir and orchestra will perform the full oratorio. I’m grateful to a friend with a good, traditional hand for score writing for copying out the first page of the opening chorus ‘Entangled Bank’ for me. 

Opening chorus 'Entangled Bank', hand-copied score, weighed down by ammonites

Picture Credits: National Portrait Gallery; David F Gahan copyright

Enigma Wrapped in an Eyenigma: for Edward Elgar’s Birthday

 

Edward Elgar: St Wulstans' R.C. Church, Little Malvern, at bluebell time

For those who raise an eyebrow at my thieving (or ‘Reproduction with Variation’ to use Darwin’s term) of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations title - both for this blog and my string quartet on Darwinian themes concerning the Eye – some belated justification and also my homage to the great man.

My great grandmother Margaret Delaney sang in his choir at the Catholic church in Great Malvern (so family legend says) and I also was suffused with the theology behind his greatest work, the setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, the journey of the soul after death. I sang this with Imperial College Choir in ~1983 and absolutely love it. Although no longer a believer (by Occam’s Razor) in anything beyond nature, I greatly appreciate the Adventure of Faith: an effort to extrapolate beyond what we know (from a firm and reasoned foundation) in many areas of life and thought.

Charles Darwin had to do such an extrapolation, “These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse…”  He had to take on faith that a mechanism would be found for the bit in bold. The first edition of Origin of Species contained a (wrong) guess that something he called ‘gemules’ would pass on information from parents to embryo encoding information about useful/harmful behaviours - pretty much Lamarckism – which he later disowned. If he had wanted a complete theory he would have had to wait for another hundred years for the elucidation of the DNA/RNA/protein mechanism. That’s why I included the genetic code of the Eye protein into Eyenigma variations even though anachronisitic. The enigma had a solution and Darwin’s faith was justified.

I’m sure they would have got on, Elgar and Darwin, despite differences in outlook on religion. Elgar might even have given Darwin a start since, “A study of the composer’s papers reveals that for most of his life he was fascinated by cryptography. His letters and music scores, for example, are dotted with codes and anagrams.” New Scientist. The dedication to Gerontius is AMDG: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam  "For the greater glory of God", similar to J.S. Bach’s S.D.G (only for the glory of God) dedication on most works (and of course he encoded his own name BACH in the Art of Fugue, which I take as a theme for Eyenigma Variations).

Elgar’s most famous coded work is the delightful Enigma Variations itself. The fourteen variations all have coded initials, but these are meant to be easily ‘cracked’ as names of his close friends - amateur music makers, collaborators and family. But the underlying melody: “The Enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguessed”; he kept that secret to his grave (above). Here’s one proposed solution: I rather like that one, and Elgar may have liked my returned compliment in the Victorian hymn tune I cryptically embed (transferred to Lydian mode) in Eyenigma.

I have my own faith that the whole Darwiniana oratorio will someday get performed; here’s an extract (rendition) promised some time in my piece about the Southern Stars (it will get a detailed write-up another time). But there’s no doubt that Elgar’s faith is still an inspiration. I used a figure from his mighty aria Proficiscere, Anima Christiana as an input for Darwin’s words on ‘A Man Looks Forwards & Backwards’ and for the ascent of the holy mountain of Science (in Darwin's case), and the Gerontius demons (everyone’s favourite!) make a brief appearance in a location I’m sure of which Elgar would approve. So, hats off to him for his birthday (actually 2nd June - 'fat fingers' had added another digit).

From 'Three Soliloquies for baritone and c. guitar': spot the Demons!

Picture credits: Katherine Langrish, Little Malvern; David F Gahan (composition copyright)

To the Nursery!

 

"Go Forth and Multiply", she says

While waiting last Friday for our “you’re-the-experts-so-you-do-the-picking” take-away Bangladeshi menu (they chose delicious, aromatic Lamb Shatkora), I picked up a copy of The Sun - you know how you do, chaps - 8^th June. There, on the anti-Woke page, was a demographic scare story Brits face serious consequences if our birth rate continues to decline by darling-of-the-Conservative right, Miriam Cates MP: (probably saved from a speech in May but trotted out by the Sun to match with a gender-wars story on policing).

Readers of this blog will know, eg from the piece We Forgot the Begat that demographics is the future, including its relevance for how we will meet the Aliens). I read the article with interest, and also as a piece of attempted social engineering. Mrs Cates, who has a degree in genetics and been a science teacher, has impeccable pro-natalist credentials, including doing her bit. She scores highly on the Kinder, Kirche categories but it would be unfair given her present employment to insist too much on the Küche aspects (but see on). She has just picked up on the fact that UK TFR (Total Fertility Rate) has been below replacement rate for the last 50 years (since 1973), with Conservative-led administrations for 32/50 years if that alone makes a difference to women’s choices (which seems unlikely). Her Sun article makes it clear that she doesn’t like immigration as a way to population stability (which would indicate around 200k per year net immigration to be the target for stability). Instead, she calls on her own government to ‘Remove the Barriers’ to women choosing to have children. As a father of two daughters in their early thirties, I’m right with you. But she rejects free childcare, because of the choices made by her Finnish sisters, although my daughters would vote for more help there (to counter the prevailing wisdom that ‘one partner’s wages all go on childcare’, as one of them told me). Cates wants the husband’s taxes to be, effectively, fully remitted (following her link from “Until the 1990s, our tax system…” will fail to inform you of the full details).­ This is supposed to provide funding and esteem for the wife’s many years out of the world of employed work. (Cates was lucky herself that she could benefit from being Financial Director in her husband’s company to top-up her earnings and self-esteem whenever she wished). Unless you are very high-end financially, like these prominent eugenicist Pronatalists, you may wonder how far the rebate of the Standard Rate taxation (20%, and after personal allowance) of an ordinary husband’s salary – the rebate she seems to be hinting – will go towards those childcare costs. And whether that will do much to reversing 50-60 year-old trends in the UK and, successively, every single other country in the world. Mrs Cates might like to ponder on why her sisters worldwide are choosing to have fewer babies, and not just people who look like her.

It's undeniable that economics and relative taxation/subsidy does have some effect on personal choices, but that’s probably a smaller consideration vs the personal choice element. If you want to see a worked example of a policy of her government working in absolutely the opposite way to baby-booming Mrs Cates’ wishes, here’s a some food for thought. The base data for her, and me, is Birthsin England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) – that’s everything, including useful definitions like age-specific fertility rates. The real fun bit is to go to Section 5, Figure 4, where you can see ‘austerity in action’. If you click on pause/play you can click through every year from 2001 to 2021 and see the dark blue (>2 children per woman) areas join up into a chubby bracelet stretching from Lands End to The Wash throughout the child-friendly Labour years, but scarcely beyond. Watch birth rates plummeting from the beginning of Conservative austerity showing up in the 2013 figures. Cates points out that rates “dropped dramatically over the past ten years” but doesn’t point out that the obvious fact that 2011 was at the end of a long boom period in the UK and with a large contribution from immigrant families and their choices. Not a good baseline. Neither is Singapore, a favourite nation of some of her Conservative colleagues, where the TFR is 1.2births/woman (2022 figures). My estimate of worldwide average trending to 1.6 when everyone is fully integrated into the world economy looks quite reasonable. With a standardised mean age of mother at childbirth at 30.7 years in 2020 in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics) and an average age of mothers giving birth to their first child in England and Wales at 29.1 years, my estimate of 3 generations per 100 years also seems OK. That underlies my estimate of extinction-due-to-lack-of-interest in about three thousand years.

Mrs Cates has her work cut out, but she can do a bit of good by adopting some of those child and mother friendly policies of 2001-2010.

NB, this week also marks the anniversary (10^th June), in 1956, of the first licensing of the progesterone-only hormonal ‘pill’ for menstrual disorders. The rest followed.

Picture credits: The Sun and Getty (linked)

Lampyris Noctilucae: Glowworms

 

Glowworms at work

In June 1832, Charles Darwin was exploring the Brazilian Coast. From ‘The Voyage of theBeagle’ (p29):

“At these times the fireflies are seen flitting about from hedge to hedge. On a dark night the light can be seen at about two hundred paces distant. It is remarkable that in all the different kinds of glowworms, shining elaters, and various marine animals (such as the crustacea, medusae, nereidae, a coralline of the genus Clytia, and Pyrosma), which I have observed, the light has been of a well-marked green colour. All the fireflies, which I caught here, belonged to the Lampyridae (in which family the English glowworm is included), and the greater number of specimens were of Lampyris occidentalis. I found that this insect emitted the most brilliant flashes when irritated: in the intervals, the abdominal rings were obscured. The flash was almost co-instantaneous in the two rings, but it was just perceptible first in the anterior one. The shining matter was fluid and very adhesive: little spots, where the skin had been torn, continued bright with a slight scintillation…” Much follows about the behaviour of the insects. Darwin, ‘The Man Who Walks with Henslow’, was a beetle expert from his Cambridge days and gave a proof of his zeal in Autobiography: “one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”

It's strange that, although in the opposite hemisphere, it’s now also our (British/Irish Isles) season for glowworms, as it is for fireflies where I used to live in upstate New York. I once flew from Midsummer’s Day in N.Y. to Midwinter’s Day in Brasilia and found it the same temperature, 26C, so that may have something to do with it. I’ve only ever come across glowworms once in England, on the Cotswold scarp in Gloucestershire, but there’s a splendid website which will give you a start at UK Glow worm survey home page.

I learned about the enzymatic production of light via luciferase in my biophysics classes at Imperial under Dr Nick Franks, who also ‘sparked’ my interest in rhodopsin – the basic photoreceptor in almost every eye - which became the basis for the genetic code theme in Eyenigma Variations. So, a light emitter and a light receiver, both of use to our beautiful summer glowworms and suitable to celebrate in music.

Another musical fan of these ‘living lamps’ and ‘country comets’ was the composer Richard  Rodney Bennett in his suite ‘The Insect World, setting a lovely poem from Andrew Marvell (period of King Charles II) celebrating haymaking time and his beguiling love Juliana. My wife used to sing this in girls’ choir under the amazing Mr Smith at Ross-on-Wye Grammar in the 1970s. Here’s a recording of an orchestral version with its lovely melody. I’ve not been able to resist doing a setting for classical guitar and solo voice using RRB’s amazing jazz inspired chords - but I’ll need RRB’s estate’s permission to perform it publicly. But here’s the start.

My setting of RRB's 'Glowworms'

Picture credits: Universal Editions; David Gahan (copyright for that arrangement)