Sunday Science Poem: Darwin vs Happy Endings
Introducing an occasional poetry feature on This Genomic Life
I intend to keep this blog primarily focused on developments in genome sciences and why they matter for human health and society. But on an occasional weekend, I plan to bring back something I used to feature in my earlier blogging days: poetry. No, not my own. I don’t write any. I’ll occasionally present some poetry that touches on big themes in science in interesting ways, and that expresses responses to the pervasive influence of science on how we live. However, don’t expect serious literary analysis. I do this because it’s fun.
Wisława Szymborska’s “Consolation” (2002)
Evolution has always been more controversial for social rather than scientific reasons. The core idea that contemporary organisms from different species share a common ancestry was accepted quite quickly by scientists after Darwin published the Origin in 1859. Natural selection as a mechanism of evolution remained scientifically controversial for longer but became part of the scientific consensus in the first part of the 20th century. The primary reason that evolution is controversial in society are its real and perceived conflicts with beliefs about the kind of world a deity would create. Even among those who don’t see a conflict with their religion, evolution can be challenging because of what it suggests about the Big Picture. If you take evolution seriously, then you recognize that the biological adaptations that make you you — your ability to see, hear, touch, speak, and think — are the consequences of billions of years of selective death. As Darwin put it in one of the most famous passages of the Origin, “from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” Richard Dawkins put it even more starkly in his famous essay, “God’s Utility Function”:
[M]aximization of DNA survival is not a recipe for happiness. So long as DNA is passed on, it does not matter who or what gets hurt in the process. Genes don't care about suffering, because they don't care about anything.
The late Polish Nobel Laureate, Wisława Szymborska, responded to this perspective with a good-natured poem that captures the tension between our often romanticized view of the world and the bleaker picture presented by science. This poem doesn’t require much exegesis, because the premise is immediately obvious. Szymborska portrays Darwin, the thinker who discovered the harsh reality of evolution, looking for escape by reading novels — but only novels with happy endings.
Consolation
Darwin. Supposedly for relaxation he read novels. But he had a requirement: they couldn't end sadly. If he happened on one, he flung it furiously in the fire. True or not – I gladly believe it. Roaming in his mind over so many times and places looking back on all the extinct species, such triumphs of strong over weak, so many tests of survival, sooner or later all in vain, that at least in fiction and its micro-scale he had a right to expect a happy ending. And so necessarily: sunrays behind a cloud, lovers together again, kin reconciled, doubts dissolved, faith rewarded, fortunes recovered, treasures dug up, neighbors regret their mulishness, good names restored, greed put to shame, old maids married to respectable ministers, schemers expelled to the other hemisphere, forgers of documents cast down the stairs, seducers of virgins hurrying to altars orphans taken in, widows embraced, pride humbled, wounds mended, prodigal sons invited to the table, the cup of bitterness poured into the sea, tissues wet with tears of reconciliation, universal singing and music-making, and the puppy Fido, lost already in the first chapter, let him run home again and bark joyfully.
Translation from the Polish by Michael White. This poem was originally posted on my old blog in 2016. Image by Diamond Glacier Adventures via Wikimedia Commons.
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