Charting The Evolution Of Our Understanding

Sun Herald

Sunday October 7, 2007

Reviewed by John Clare

A Guinea Pig's History Of Biology: The Animals And Plants That Taught Us The Facts Of Life

Jim Endersby

(Random House, $65)

IN a brief and not entirely happy stay at a selective school I observed that people like myself were far outnumbered by those from posh suburbs. Are the rich simply smarter? The question of nature or nurture goes back at least as far as Shakespeare. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as "a devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick".

Charles Darwin was much occupied by the question of breeding, partly because he married a cousin just as the idea took hold that close marriages were weakening the superior classes.

Of course, his interest was also scientific. Like any horse breeder or horticulturist, he knew that a line could be modified to produce speedier animals, pleasing variations and hardier crops. Everybody was aware of inheritance - that you could have your mother's eyes, your father's nose or, most puzzlingly, your grandmother's mouth.

But could new species evolve? Darwin believed they could - gradually.

How could anyone in Darwin's time hope to address such questions with the discovery of DNA far off in the next century? By patient observation of often lowly creatures and plants.

Jim Endersby's book is an enthralling study of these unwitting helpers in our search for knowledge, and for cures, from Aristotle to the present. In contrast to Plato's view that everything we see is an imperfect manifestation of some ideal form, Aristotle spent much time observing things as they were. He studied creatures and plants along the seashore and plied fishermen with questions.

In the Victorian era, which was Darwin's, empirical observation and reasoning were much esteemed.

Hence the popularity of the fictional Sherlock Holmes, who displayed these attributes in most fanciful ways. These are what Darwin, a poor mathematician, was good at.

But rival mathematicians, or biometricians, were soon on the scene, flaying each other with statistical curves in order to prove or disprove Darwin's evolutionary gradualism.

Another rivalry sprang up between laboratory biologists and field naturalists.

This was all resolved, astoundingly, with the advent of quantum physics, the invention of the electron microscope and the growth of molecular biology.

Physicists, devastated that their efforts seemed to be crowned by the horrific bombing of Japan, were drawn increasingly to the "life sciences".

While you will learn a great deal here about evening primrose, fruit flies, guinea pigs, corn, transparent zebra fish and others, you will learn as much about the biologists: their eccentricities, obsessions, rivalries, friendships, brilliance and extraordinary patience.

Just as Henry Ford was standardising cars, two groups of biologists were breeding "standardised" rats and so-called fruit flies to act somewhat like chemical reagents to aid their attempts to map distribution of the chromosomes at the point of cell division. So grateful were the fruit fly crowd that they called themselves the fly boys. One scientist was moved to call the flies "these noble creatures".

Here, Endersby quotes Groucho Marx's sage observation that, "Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana". And here we should note Endersby's own gentle humour and beautifully flowing prose.

But biology's little helpers got even smaller - or did they? The question of whether genes were living creatures is still not entirely resolved.

As we move on, through the discovery that genes were DNA, to the stem cell research of today, Endersby casts a calm light on our unfolding moral dilemmas, dispelling along the way such simplistic notions as a "gay gene" - which could be used to justify gayness, or equally to justify attempts to engineer gayness out of existence, similar to the eugenicists whose theories had been taken up so enthusiastically by the Nazis.

Of course, the moral question of experimenting on animals had come to a head with the passage of guinea pigs from the table, to pet status, to the laboratory.

Affection for these placid creatures heightened the controversy. So science begins to resemble theology. Both have dogma, insight and schism.

Endersby reminds us that today's science will seem quaint in the future. Like theology, art and philosophy it is a grappling with reality itself.

Winston Churchill once declared that war was the great game. Books like this one convince me otherwise. This is the great game: the never-ending search for understanding.

© 2007 Sun Herald

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