frown, but they do express rage as emphatically as any human being—by striking the ground with a fist, yawning, screaming, staring, pouting, raising their eyebrows, reddening with passion, sucking their teeth, and throwing tantrums. Pain and astonishment could be read clearly on the countenances of the zoo animals Darwin studied. He recounts the almost comic cognitive dissonance of a multispecies group of monkeys who encountered a turtle in their cage for the first time. Curiosity enticed them to come close, and some of them stood up for a better view before reconsidering and running away. Some made jabbering noises, which Darwin interprets as attempts to conciliate the turtle. On other occasions, he observed monkeys raising their eyebrows in wonder before tasting a new food or when listening to a strange sound. When terrified, some monkeys raise their eyebrows, some scream, and some lose control of their bowels. Sometimes, the hair of a frightened monkey stands on end. And once Darwin watched a monkey “almost faint from an excess of terror” when caught.36
Humans are equipped to interpret most animal emotions, Darwin concludes at the end of a long section on animals, because, like our own feelings, animal emotions can be ex-plained according to three principles. The first is the principle of “serviceable associated habits,” which have evolved in mammals, especially, as surely as protective coloration or canine teeth for hunting, because the outward expression derives from a physiological process. An open mouth denoting astonishment, for instance, is the outward expression of a sudden intake of breath, which might be needed for a quick escape.37 The second principle is “antithesis”: in some situations, there is an involuntary tendency to express an opposite emotion, such as smiling in a conciliatory way to mask fear.38 The third Darwin calls the principle of “direct action of the nervous system,” such as trembling in fear.39 Darwin is clearly fascinated by the expression of emotions in different kinds of animals, who are treated in discrete sections of the book and constantly brought into the more general discussions of anatomy and physiology. But the point of this study is that humans and other mammals express emotions in the same ways and for the same reasons. So much for animated machines.
These were Darwin’s lifelong convictions, not so much drawn from his research as motivating it. In a private notebook, he remarked to himself, “Animals—whom we have made our slaves we do not like to consider our equals.—Do not slave holders wish to make the black man other kind? Animals with affections, imitation, fear. pain. sorrow for the dead.”40
IV
It would be almost impossible to exaggerate Darwin’s influence on science and society. His work in what are now an array of separate scientific disciplines has been formative. The effect of his famous books on the scientific literature of his time, not to mention fiction, poetry, and drama, was substantial. Darwin’s contributions to the modernist worldview are almost incalculable; the figure of Darwin continues to be omnipresent not only in science but in cultural forms of all kinds.
Aside from his theories of natural selection, sexual selection, and the struggle for existence, Darwin’s greatest contributions to science and culture have been to help us identify the important questions and to inspire debate—even when this means mounting challenges to the great scientist himself. Built on Darwinian foundations but departing from them are developments in evolutionary biology such as cladistics, the neutral allele theory, and the notion of punctuated equilibrium. Mendelian genetics quickly proved Darwin wrong about the actual mechanics of genetic inheritance, and a full understanding of genetics was not achieved until the discoveries of Watson, Crick, and Franklin. Darwin’s attitudes about gender and race were considered, in his own day, humane, although in hindsight one finds them mixed. He was every bit a creature of his own moment in history.
Darwin’s work is neither perfect nor definitive, but it was revolutionary and foundational. And like all successful scientific theories, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has re-mained authoritative because, in spite of gaps, it still explains more phenomena than any competing theory and rests on a profound underpinning of research and experimentation. Darwin was not only a methodical and diligent scientist; he was a creative thinker. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggests that Darwin’s theory is so multifarious and flexible that “each individual has his own way of interpreting Darwin’s ideas.” Yet Darwin’s ideas are also so compelling that “there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory.”41 Like so many other post-Darwinian scientists, Dawkins consciously stands on Darwin’s shoulders to critique and extend Darwinian thought, within the boundaries of biology and beyond.
Darwin trumps Cuvier. Had he written “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” just thirty years later, Poe would have been hard-pressed to premise his detective story on a science that taught the separate creation of humans and beasts, black people and white. Darwin changed the course of Western cultural and intellectual history, as a theorist, storyteller, and personal example.
Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models?
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “The Epic”
I
Like Darwin, Jane Goodall set out to do one thing and did something else. When Darwin came home after his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he expected to settle down and make sense of his experience and his data, while living the quiet life of the country gentleman scientist. Instead, he was swept up in a storm of his own making. Like Darwin, Goodall expected a simple life; she wanted to live with the animals in the wilds of Africa and understand them, never dreaming that her reentry into industrialized society would be fraught with intellectual controversy and laden with ethical significance. Darwin and Goodall occupy unique places in history: these two scientists have made profound contributions to the sum of knowledge and the methods for adding to it. They cannot be imitated, and their worlds cannot be restored. Their significance goes far beyond their particular discoveries, and everyone who comes after them is, in a sense, belated.
Modern primatology owes Darwin a debt, not only for key concepts and foundational theories but also for the long continuance of the Victorian craze for fossil hunting—which urged Goodall’s mentor Louis Leakey forward into primatology—and for Darwin’s contributions to the ways in which the stories of science are told. In chapter 1, I outlined some of Darwin’s contributions to scientific storytelling, especially when the subject was primates. Here, I will additionally suggest that the figure of Darwin himself, as a hero of science, was a powerful model, directly and indirectly, for scientists in the twentieth century. From the seventeenth century forward, the heroic man of science was not an unfamiliar trope in Western culture. But it was from Darwin, in particular, that Goodall inherited the model of the scientist as questing hero. True, Darwin’s example came to her along a circuitous route, but she was profoundly influenced by it nonetheless, as she, in her turn, has transmitted this model to others in the field.
II
“Meme” is a word invented by Richard Dawkins to indicate a cultural particle that replicates itself in human consciousness.1 Dawkins conceives of genes as self-serving, and memes, in his view, behave the same way. In evolutionary terms, children’s culture is a perfect medium for memetic replication, a primordial soup in which many kinds of memes replicate, sometimes at prodigious
