"There is no way anything of value can be done without some framework. It might wqell be that the framework is discarded, or the rules opposed; that is not important. What is essential is that they exist so that one knows when one is in opposition to them." — Margot Fonteyn

"You don't have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework." — Michael Dell

By DR. CAMERON BARROWS

In science, other names for a framework are hypothesis and theory. A hypothesis is a reasoned prediction for how nature is organized, or how nature will respond as circumstances change. Then, with each new observation, you test whether those new observations are consistent with your framework or hypothesis. If the new observations are in line with the framework, then the hypothesis is supported. If not, then the hypothesis is either modified or rejected in lieu of a new more robust framework. If the hypothesis is repeatedly and independently supported by each new observation and separate observers, then the hypothesis can become a “theory." If hypotheses or theories are upended by observations that negate those frameworks, that’s when science leaps forward.

Charles Darwin, born in the early 19th century in England, was the second son of a successful physician, Robert Darwin, and grandson of yet another successful physician, Erasmus Darwin. It was therefore expected that both Charles and his older brother, Erasmus Jr., would follow in the family’s business. In their mid-teens the two boys were shipped off to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, then and still today known as one of the premier medical universities in Europe. It turned out that neither brother was a disciplined student, but their medical academic careers were brought to a halt when they witnessed their first surgery. This was before anesthetics were developed; the patient was simply strapped down as the physicians cut away whatever they felt necessary, all through the patient’s screams of pain. For both Charles and Erasmus, that experience shook their young sensibilities and ended their pursuit of their father’s dream of them becoming physicians.

If not a physician, the only path that was deemed suitable for an upper middle class second son in England was to become an Anglican minister. Charles, although not a passionate Anglican, warmed to the idea of just working on Sundays, leaving the rest of the week to pursue his growing interest in natural history. To that end, Charles entered Christ College in Cambridge and graduated on schedule. The only coursework where Charles truly shined was natural history (the church expected their ministers to be well-rounded individuals) and he became like an adopted son of the natural history professor, John Stevens Henslow. Charles’ nickname while at Cambridge was “the man who walks with Henslow." As Charles was nearing graduation, Henslow received a request from the Royal Navy’s Admiralty to serve as a companion to the captain on a small frigate christened the HMS Beagle while the Beagle’s crew meticulously mapped the southern coasts of South America. In that era ship’s captains did not socialize with any crew member of a lower social status. The Beagle’s Captain, Robert Fitzroy, was acutely aware of the mental stress of years without a social peer to exchange ideas with. The previous captain of the Beagle had committed suicide while at sea. Henslow had a wife and several children, and so the idea of leaving them for what could be years was unacceptable. However, he wrote back to the Admiralty offering Charles as a suitable replacement. That chance event, of being in the right place at the right time, is how Charles Darwin became the dining companion to Captain Fitzroy and was a naturalist on a voyage that was supposed to take a year or two, but ultimately took nearly six years.

Darwin suffered terribly from sea sickness, so while the Beagle and its crew mapped the coasts of Argentina, Patagonia, and Chile, Charles spent as much time as possible on land. As was the role of naturalist of that day, he collected all sorts of plants and animals, shipping them back to England with every ship they met that was heading back home. Darwin was in his element, loving the sense of exploration, the discovery of creatures previously unknown to the academic elite of Europe. Still, as the years passed, he along with all the Beagle’s crew grew increasingly homesick. Finally, Fitzroy decided their job was completed and opted to head west to sail around the world. There was to be just one last stop, the Galapagos Islands.

While in the Galapagos archipelago, Darwin collected a few birds, plants, and reptiles from each island, but his mind was on going home to England. There is a mythology surrounding Darwin, that while in the Galapagos he had his “Eureka!” moment when he allegedly and suddenly envisioned how animals and plants evolved. None of that is true. Darwin’s framework, the lens through which he viewed nature was still very much steeped in the teachings he received at Cambridge from Henslow, who was also an ordained Anglican minister. That framework held that life did not evolve, did not change.

Finally, back in England, Darwin focused on cataloging his thousands of specimens that he had shipped back home during the Beagle’s voyage. He sent all his plants to the plant experts, all his birds to the bird experts, and so on, so that those experts could then ascribe proper scientific names to each species. It was then, with the bird expert, John Gould, that Darwin’s epiphany occurred, the change in his framework of how nature was structured happened. Gould saw that Darwin had labeled most of the birds from the “Galapagos Islands” but failed to identify which island they were from. A rookie mistake, but one based on a framework that the birds should not vary between the islands; islands that were so close as to be in view of each other and with similar volcanic origins and climates. Gould compared Darwin’s birds from those Fitzroy and other Beagle crew mates had collected, but they had included individual island names, and saw that species varied between the islands. There were four or five basic types, a very large-billed finch, a medium-billed finch, a small-billed finch, a slender-billed finch, and a tiny-billed finch, that occurred on most islands, but the relative bill sizes varied depending on which island the bird was found. The very large-billed finch from one island could be nearly twice as big as the one on a nearby island. Similar variability was seen for each bill size. Using the properly labeled birds from Fitzroy and others, Gould was able to identify the island-origin for each of Darwin’s specimens. Gould eventually was able to describe a dozen or more species of finches from that one archipelago and show that each species varied depending on which island it was found. The picture that emerged did not fit a stable-species framework.

That was the moment that Darwin began to formulate a new framework, a new hypothesis that embraced the idea that species can and do change over time, ever fine tuning to survive. Darwin and his contemporary naturalists, including Alfred Russel Wallace, brought natural history from a hobbyist’s pastime to disciplined sciences called biology, biogeography, and ecology. Darwin was meticulous to a fault, knowing his ideas of change over time, which he called natural selection, would be met by resistance by all the scientific leaders of the day. To the end, he spent 20 years refining and re-examining, and coming up with arguments that would stand against the criticisms he knew would be leveled against his framework. Darwin spent those years talking with animal breeders to understand how one might start with a wolf, ancestor of a domestic dog, and end up with a chihuahua or start with a wild pigeon and get pigeons of all sorts of colors and shapes. The breeders told Darwin that they would see slight variations in young animals and then select those they wanted to develop. Those were bred with others with desired variations and repeating that selection over many generations gave them their desired new breeds. Darwin thought that this human selection could be mirrored in nature. Except rather than a human making the choices, nature was selecting those individuals who where the most successful breeders, successful because their agility, size, or color allowed them to better escape predators, and be better at finding food, mates, and rearing their young. He called this new framework “natural selection.”

Still reluctant to rock the boat of the prevailing framework of the fixity of species, Darwin took another few years describing the species of barnacles of the world. He took on this seemingly arcane task because a close friend and confidant, and acclaimed botanist, Joseph Hooker, told Darwin that to be taken seriously, he needed to show the scientific elite that he knew a thing or two about what was a species. Soon after finishing his barnacle book, he received a brief manuscript in the mail from Alfred Russel Wallace, who while amid a malaria fever in Indonesia, penned an almost identical set of arguments describing natural selection. Ultimately Wallace’s manuscript and an abstract of Darwin’s thesis were published together. Darwin then finished his book, “On the Origin of the Species” within a year. Instantly popular with naturalists, the scientific hierarchy took a bit longer to accept a framework that allowed species to change. Today there is hardly a branch of the biological sciences that does not owe its foundations to Darwin and Wallace. What to me is particularly notable is that Wallace was self-taught, and while Darwin did have the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University, his degree was not meant to prepare him to change the direction of natural science. Both were naturalists, who gained their insights from observing nature. As naturalists, are all the intellectual descendants of Wallace and Darwin.

Nullius in verba – Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), and think like a mountain.