Survival of the fittest?

Review

by Joan Ede

Evolution by Steve Jones (2017).

Hard-cover: Ladybird Books, London. 56 pages. £7.99.

Prof Steve Jones is an author and TV presenter. He is also one of the world's top six experts on snails, he says that the other five agree.

This beautiful 56-page book is an easy read. One of a series of Penguin Ladybird Expert books for adults, it consists of some 25 short, stand-alone arguments, each followed by facing illustrations.

So much more evidence has been accumulated since 1859, when Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species. His book gave irrefutable proof of how all life was created over our world's billions of years history.

In the 1960s I was told that the key to understanding evolution was Darwin's theory of Natural Selection and that Darwin meant by this that life forms that were best adapted to their environment survived at the expense of the rest.

Jones' book takes a more holistic, all-embracing view. The environment to which survivors adapt is highly complex, including:

1. the effect of human livestock breeding programmes;

2. the effect of species' sexual bullying, cheating and lying;

3. chance events such as the record speed notched up by a French destroyer crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 1929 and carrying malaria-infected mosquitoes from Africa to Brazil;

4. the luck of one genetic variation being slightly more advantageous that another.

Jones' writing style is concise but loaded with hints of arguments in fields remote from biology that illustrate his biological arguments, and he often resorts to academic words that are accurate but multi-syllabic. Stalin managed to convey his arguments in the words of the worker. Stalin did not need to under-line his arguments with clever hints at how brilliant he was – Professor Jones apparently does need to.

Well, what do you expect from a bourgeois scientist? I just skimmed over them and had a good read.

Down House: A unique place in the history of science and evolution

by Carole Barclay

The works of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx shook and shocked Victorian Britain. Although they lived less than 20 miles apart from each other they never met. But Marx genuinely admired Darwin's On The Origin of the Species despite its “crude English style” and even sent Darwin a personally inscribed copy of the recently published second edition of Das Kapital in 1873.

            Down House was Darwin’s home for 40 years until his death in 1882. Darwin and his wife Emma remodelled the house and its extensive gardens, which Darwin used as an open-air laboratory. Here Darwin worked on his theory of evolution that was first published in 1859.

In Darwin’s day the house was in the village of Downe, a parish in Kent. It later became a girls’ school and the home of the Darwin Museum. Now part of Bromley in Greater London, the house, gardens and grounds is run by English Heritage and open to the public throughout the year.

            There’s plenty to see. Anyone interested in the life and times of Darwin will be fascinated by the gardens and the exhibits in the museum as well as rooms that have been restored to appear as they would have looked in Darwin’s day. There’s the inevitable visitors’ shop for books and souvenirs, and a very welcome café in the courtyard.

But beware – plan your journey unless you’re driving because it’s not easily served by public transport. Although you can get trains from central London to Bromley South or Orpington you’ve then got to get a bus for the rest of the journey.

Down House is in Luxted Road, Downe, Kent, BR6 7JT. The house, garden and grounds are open to the public at the usual English Heritage rates. There’s free parking and Down House opens daily from April to the end of October, and on weekends only from November until the end of March.