Charles Darwin shook the world with his theory of evolution. Sadly, he also believed that Irish people had not yet completed the process.
The great English naturalist once echoed a colleague’s concerns about how a “careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits” – which may explain why James Joyce, John Millington Synge and George Bernard Shaw all rejected his big idea as too dreary to accept.
According to David Stipp’s jaunty but learned survey of 21st-century evolutionary research, however, these literary giants were fundamentally mistaken. The veteran Boston science journalist says his message can be boiled down to five words: “Darwinism adds rather than subtracts.”
Far from sucking the romance out of nature, he argues, evolution has an aesthetic beauty all of its own – and should encourage us “self-important great apes” to take more care of our “precious living world”.
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As its title suggests, Why Rats Laugh and Jellyfish Sleep is essentially a series of case studies inspired by strange animal behaviour. To take one typical example, Stipp dissects Darwin’s fascination with earthworms and conviction that these lowly creatures are smarter than they look. In fact, the latest evidence proves that earthworms have extensive social habits such as forming groups to ward off their enemies.
This self-preserving solidarity is Stipp’s most important running theme. Elsewhere he examines the invasive skills of house sparrows, the female chimpanzees who remain fertile almost their entire lives, and the bonding instincts that helped vicious wolves to eventually spawn lovable lapdogs.
The “wonderful irony”, he concludes, is that nature may be red in tooth and claw but Darwin’s survival of the fittest principle also creates “one of evolution’s greatest gifts to us self-aware creatures: togetherness”.
While Stipp’s findings are underpinned by heavyweight academic data (brace yourself before tackling passages on “aposematic paradox” and “phenotypic plasticity”), he sweetens the pill with colourful historical details.
Queen Victoria was convinced that rats could be domesticated and kept pets supplied by Jack Black, her official rodent catcher. The appalling smell of skunk musk inspired “Who, Me?”, an American second World War plot to smear Nazi officers with it and give them a reputation for “extreme personal uncleanliness”.
As the recent discovery of a million-year-old human skull in China has confirmed, Darwin’s earth-shattering thesis is itself still evolving. This engaging and eye-opening book shows why even the Irish should embrace it.
