Andrea Barrett Credit: Julian Dufort
From the JUN/JUL 2006 issue of Seed:
As a biology major in the 1970's, celebrated American writer Andrea Barrett was introduced to the work of paleontologist Niles Eldredge through her study of his theory of "punctuated equilibria." Having long explored the work and lives of scientists in her fiction, Barrett was keen to meet Eldredge and discuss his experience with developing a controversial theory. As curator of the AMNH's recent Darwin exhibit, Eldredge had been immersed in one of the great stories in science, and was eager to gain a novelist's perspective on the creative process. The two caught up at New York's Algonquin Hotel to talk about narrative in science, Darwin and discovery, and all things evolved.
Andrea Barrett: You're primarily a scientist and a scholar, but the skills you brought to this particular book [on Darwin] are actually those of a literary analyst. What you really did was give a very close reading to the Red and the transmutation documents. You also went back to the other primary sources and then to a certain extent to the secondary sources; the people that first worked with those notebooks. You might as well have been working with Wordsworth. You're looking word by word, phrase by phrase for the sources of the ideas. And also for how the ideas move through time. That's a process that we don't associate with scientists.
Niles Eldredge: I think there's a disconnect that's largely sort of formalized but not really necessarily true; a disconnect between science and the rest of basically-creative human thinking and analysis. I never really saw the sharp distinction. I think we're looking at the natural world, so that's our book if you will. What Darwin did as a young man on the Beagle was absorb the patterns he saw in the natural world more or less intuitively, coming to a conscious realization about them—what they are, what they mean—only later. So that's a little bit different, but on the other hand Darwin himself was very keen to read everybody and figure out what they were saying, including his grandfather. The first thing he did when he got home was to go back and re-read his grandfather. He found a lot more in there than he remembered had been in there.
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AB: You might argue that ideas or theories have an evolution of their own; that they undergo a process not dissimilar to natural selection. They enter the culture. They survive and propagate, or they're winnowed out and die. You could argue on the one hand that the theories that are tested and hold up repeatedly are the ones that survive. Or you might argue that the ones that form the best story and are also picked up by people who are themselves wonderful storytellers are the ones that survive.
NE: I think both are true.
AB: I do too, but in evolutionary biology so much is about the story you tell. So much is about the convincing narrative you're able to construct about how the process works.
NE: The way I read evolutionary theory, the history of it, is that genetics is extremely important, but after it finally came along in the 20th century, it didn't really change Darwin's fundamental viewpoint very much. What is new now about evolutionary theory—different from the way Darwin left it—is the struggle to put back in what Darwin deliberately took out. He excised things to make a better narrative—and we're putting them back in to make a narrative that is more faithful to the facts of the history of life. He had to make a nice linear story himself, so he left out isolation, or he downplayed it, along with all this stuff on stability and turnovers and all of these things.
