Science

Wednesday

Matt Ridley

The origin of the theory

From our UK edition

Darwin’s Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel In 1858, on the brink of publishing his theory of evolution, which I discussed here three weeks ago, Charles Darwin took a hydropathic rest cure at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. While walking on the sandy heath, he caught a glimpse of ‘the rare Slave-making Ant & saw the little black niggers in their Master’s nests’. A certain species of red ant kidnaps the young of a smaller black ant and rears them as unwitting slave workers in the service of the red queen. Darwin had heard about this phenomenon but had not till then seen it. Darwin’s upbringing had been steeped in the anti-slavery movement.

Christopher Booker

Mind over matter

From our UK edition

Why Us?, by James Le Fanu The past half-century has seen the most astonishing concentration of scientific discoveries in history. In physical terms, from the Big Bang to the Double Helix, our understanding of the universe, of life and ourselves has been extended with an intensity and on a scale that may never be repeated. And in terms of cracking the riddle of what allows ourselves and all other species to function, no discoveries held more promise than the unravelling of the genetic code which drives all life and of those workings of the human brain uncovered by neuroscience. But in each case, as Dr James Le Fanu shows in his enthralling book, these have brought us up against a dead end.