A Raconteur of Nature’s Back Story

Richard Dawkins, with a statue of Charles Darwin at the Natural History Museum in London.


The Greatest Show on Earth,' by Richard Dawkins: Evolution All Around (October 11, 2009)

Richard Dawkins’s Web Site







If there were a celebrity of the evolutionary world, Mr. Dawkins would certainly be it. His best-selling books — including “The Selfish Gene” and “The Blind Watchmaker,” laying out his case for a gene-centered view of evolution — have gone a long way toward making evolutionary biology accessible to a wide audience.

He lectures to sell-out audiences, receives standing ovations and regularly places in the Top 10 on Prospect magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 Top Public Intellectuals. His latest book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” (Free Press), has been on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for three weeks.

For one thing, 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of his book “On the Origin of Species.” For another, “The Greatest Show on Earth” is Mr. Dawkins’s own “missing link,” he said, filling in the gaps in his previous works. While earlier books assumed that readers understood the scientific basis for evolution, this one lays it out directly.

Books on Language

April 17, 2009, 6:55 P.M. ET
Books on Language
by MICHAEL QUINION

1. The Stories of English 427 C [420s in Dewey are English & Old English; 427 is for variations]
By David Crystal
Overlook, 2004

This richly textured, nontechnical account of the evolution of English is fascinating because it interweaves multiple narratives. In parallel with the standard language, David Crystal discusses varieties usually considered nonstandard -- dialect, slang and the speech of ethnic minorities -- which previously hadn't received the same level of attention. Traditionalist speakers and grammarians deplore such varieties as inferior or corrupt, but they are increasingly becoming accepted as legitimate, not least because only one in three speakers of English now has it as a mother tongue. With a cornucopia of examples that range from "The Canterbury Tales" to "The Lord of the Rings," and from the correspondence of medieval kings to Internet chatroom gossip, Crystal's exposition is a delight.


2. Language in Danger 417.7 D [410s are Linguistics; 417 is Dialectology & historical linguistics]
By Andrew Dalby
Columbia University, 2003
Languages not only change, they also die: World-wide, a language vanishes on average every two weeks. Andrew Dalby argues that each disappearance diminishes us, because a language encapsulates local knowledge and ways of looking at the human condition that die with the last speaker. Stronger languages squeeze out others: An early example is the language extinction that occurred around the Mediterranean in classical times, through the rise of Latin. Closer to our own time, minority languages -- Irish, Welsh, Native American and Australian tongues -- were banned in school to force minority groups to speak the language of the majority. The mood is now swinging toward encouraging minority languages, and some of those in danger may be saved. Dalby's engrossing account documents endangered languages throughout the world.


3. The Thurber Carnival 817 T [810s are American Literature; 817 is Satire & humor]
By James Thurber
Harper, 1945
James Thurber's antic attitude to language was a revelation when, at age 12, I bought this compilation of essays and stories in a British paperback edition. I first understood that grammar could actually be interesting when I read "Here Lies Miss Groby," his recollection of an English-composition teacher who drilled into her charges that metonymy means "Container for the Thing Contained," as in the phrase "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" -- "ears" is not meant literally; their hearing is. Young Thurber lies awake at night wondering about a wife threatening to hit her husband with the milk -- would "milk" be a case of Thing Contained for the Container? Thurber's whimsical drawings are a joy -- one has a puzzled man sitting on a motionless sled, holding his dog on a leash, as a passing skater, apparently steeped in Swinburne's poetry, shouting: "I said the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, but let it pass, let it pass!" I am glad to have encountered Thurber's storytelling skills and his humor so early in life.




4. Words and Rules 400 P [400s are Language]
By Steven Pinker
Basic Books, 1999

When Americans prefer "snuck" and "dove" to the British "sneaked" and "dived," they're pointing up one of the curiosities of English: the battle between regular and irregular verbs. These two American usages are especially odd because they're 19th-century revivals, reversing what grammarians often assert is an unstoppable historical trend toward regularization. The battle of the verbs can be especially vexing for children, who are avid for rules when they learn a language -- rules that lead to errors such as "breaked" and "holded." Steven Pinker's research confirms that we actually use two tools for making words: rules and memory. Regular verbs pop into mind almost automatically; irregular ones take longer to process because they must be retrieved from memory. Pinker's "Words and Rules" is erudite, readable and funny, leading the reader through a great range of topics, one of which is the cause of the gradual transformation of language over time.

5. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress SF Heinlein
By Robert Heinlein
Putnam, 1966
Science fiction has invented much vocabulary -- "robot," "force field" and "spacesuit," for instance -- that has since reached the mainstream. And linguistic change itself has been a significant sub-theme in many science-fiction works, partly because it contributes to the sense of otherness that is key to the suspension of disbelief, partly because it is a useful indicator of social and cultural distinctness. Anthony Burgess's anglicized Russian slang in "A Clockwork Orange" and George Orwell's Newspeak in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" are two famous examples. Another memorable example is Robert Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." With a sentient computer as a main character, the story is set in a lunar penal colony in 2075, where the inhabitants speak in an English dialect influenced by Russian and Chinese: not yet a pidgin, certainly not yet a creole, but a form of speech indicative of the changes that happen when disparate language communities are forced to communicate.

Mr. Quinion's most recent book, "Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary" (Oxford), has just been published in paperback.

Books on Charles Darwin

These books about Charles Darwin are a very select group, says James A. Secord.

1. The Tree of Life       Q JB Darwin S
By Peter Sís
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003
It might seem surprising to begin a column on books about Charles Darwin with a children's title (age 8 and up), but this delightful volume is a superior introduction for all readers to the great naturalist. The delicate drawings and diagrams -- displaying animals, plants, instruments, portraits, maps -- lend to the book the flavor of a gorgeously illuminated medieval manuscript. Peter Sís's images, like Darwin's own writings, invite the reader to observe carefully and make connections. The emphasis on detail comes across best in a cross-section of the Beagle, the ship that took Darwin around the world. This is a book to think with and an ideal way to escape the mindless polemics (and hero worship) that will inevitably crop up during the 2009 bicentenary of Darwin's birth on Feb. 12. Give it to your kids, if you can stop looking at it long enough yourself.

2. The Beak of the Finch    598.883 W
By Jonathan Weiner
Knopf, 1994
The theory of evolution, for all its generality, is founded on the observation of tiny differences in plants and animals. The classic instance involves "Darwin's finches" from the Galápagos Islands. These exceptionally variable birds range in type from the bark-stripping vegetarian to the blood-drinking vampiric (preying on another Galápagos bird, the booby). It is often assumed that the finches provided Darwin with on-the-spot evidence that clinched the case for evolution. But this is a myth. To watch "evolution in action" among the finches, as the biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant began to do in the 1970s, has taken almost unimaginable patience. In "The Beak of the Finch," a classic of science writing, Jonathan Weiner brings to life the scientific process as practiced both in Darwin's era and among modern Galápagos researchers. We watch as the Grants measure barely perceptible differences in the lengths of beaks, gather tiny drops of blood for DNA sequencing and trace birds over many generations. There is no better way to understand the character of Darwinian science.

3. The Politics of Evolution    575 D
By Adrian Desmond
University of Chicago, 1989
London in 1837, where Darwin moved soon after the Beagle voyage, was a modern Babylon: dirty, noisy and dangerous. It was in this bustling metropolis, not on a tropical island or in the rural isolation of his later home in Kent, that he forged the theory of evolution. Adrian Desmond's "The Politics of Evolution" shows why it matters that Darwin began his speculations in London during a turbulent era of political and religious reform. Forget polite academic discussions and salon conversations about divine design; the ideas Darwin was contemplating in the 1830s were threatening and divisive. When "On the Origin of Species" was finally published in 1859, it came into a very different scene, causing little of the uproar it would have prompted two decades earlier.

4. Charles Darwin
By Janet Browne
Knopf, 1995, 2002 (two vols.)
There are several fine biographies of Darwin, but Janet Browne's two-volume work is the best at capturing the genteel and peculiarly English tone of Darwin's life. The early chapters might almost be taken from an undiscovered Jane Austen novel: We watch an aimless young man emerge as a leading naturalist and daringly speculative theorist. Browne draws on the comprehensive edition of Darwin's correspondence, which is being prepared by an international team at the University of Cambridge. The biography's second volume, which opens with the publication of "On the Origin of Species," traces Darwin's ability to turn fame to account in spreading his ideas. Few long biographies are so successful at maintaining interest and energy right to the end.

5. Darwin Loves You   576.82 L
By George Levine
Princeton, 2006
Does Darwinism strip the world of meaning, reducing life to cutthroat competition and cold calculation? Fundamentalist atheists and evangelical Christians generally agree that it does, but such a perspective is far too narrow. In this highly personal book, the literary historian George Levine argues that Darwin's work, with its generous language that invites interpretation, has the potential to create aesthetic and moral value. Darwin writes of flying squirrels, pouting pigeons, peacocks' tails and the instincts of ants. But he also encourages wonder at small things, gradual forces and the power of individual action in a world of life and possibility.

Mr. Secord, the editor of Darwin's "Evolutionary Writings" (Oxford, 2008), is the director of the Darwin Correspondence Project and professor of the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University.    576.82 D

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8
* FIVE BEST
* FEBRUARY 7, 2009