October 2006

Tales of the Rose Tree: Ravishing Rhododendrons
and Their Travels Around the World
by Jane Brown (David R. Godine; $35.00)

To Jane Brown, who writes with florid enthusiasm, the world looks best through rhododendron-colored glasses. Brown’s rhododendrocentrism is understandable. Members of the genus Rhododendron inhabit territories as diverse as Borneo, Japan, Switzerland, and the Himalayas. Notable for their dense, thick greenery and bountiful flowers, they are hardy, showy plants that readily adapt to cultivation and hybridization. Even nongardeners know them—members of the genus

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include the gaudy azaleas and the waxy, large-leafed bushes that shade front porches and jostle for space in the corners of backyards.

In the wild, the plants are impressive, growing in vast, dark thickets that are splotched with brilliant color if you catch the plants in bloom. One of my favorite parts of the Appalachian Trail takes me along a stream so crowded with rhododendrons that, on a sunny day in late May, the passage is a dark tunnel decorated with bright bouquets of white. In his book Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, Frank Kingdon Ward, a noted botanical collector, recalled his travels to China in the early 1900s, where he saw a valley

roofed by grey skies, with the white snowfields above, . . . and everywhere the rocks swamped under a tidal wave of tense colours which gleam and glow in leagues of breaking light. “Pimpernel” whose fiery curtains hang from every rock; “Carmelita” forming pools of incandescent lava. “Yellow Peril” heaving up against the floor of the cliff in choppy sulphur seas breaking from a long low surf of pink lacteum, whose bronzed leaves glimmer faintly like sea-tarnished metal.

Brown’s stories give rhododendrons a central place, not only in the development of gardening, but in mainstream cultural history. Long before globalization became everybody’s business, rhododendrons were establishing beachheads of diversity in the gardens of Europe. In 1736 a botanizing Pennsylvania farmer named John Bartram sent to England some of the first American rhododendrons, gathered along the Schuylkill River not far from my stretch of Appalachian Trail. The plants did well in many English gardens—and their descendants still survive in Windsor and other places.

Another forty-three species from the Himalayan foothills took root in English soil in the mid-1800s, collected by Joseph Hooker during a year of travels in India and Sikkim. Still other rhododendrons came from remote regions of Tibet, thanks to the derring-do of George Forrest, a late Victorian who hunted flora with the panache of Indiana Jones. While dodging an urban uprising in China he bagged the seeds of R. sinogrande for the tame potting sheds of J.C. Williams of Cornwall.

With such exotic foreigners as cultivars, gardeners worked to create new variations through hybridization. Part of the challenge, of course, was to produce plants that felt at home in soil far from their homeland. But the real aficionados also strove for new tints, purer hues, and blossoms that appeared on various dates, so that, whatever the month, a garden would display a full spectrum of blooms, tailored to the aesthetic designs of the landscaper.

Before the advent of commercial garden centers, such obsessions were only for the private rhododendron gardens of the wealthy. Pundits labelled them “stockbroker” flowers, even into the mid-1900s. Lionel de Rothschild, a founder of the British Rhododendron Association, was a typical rhododendrophile, as was Queen Mother Elizabeth, her husband, King George VI, and her brother-in-law the Duke of Windsor.

But you don’t have to be royalty to enjoy those lovely blooms today. And a quick dash through Jane Brown’s chatty book will make you feel like royalty, anyway.

Readers of this magazine scarcely need to be persuaded of the power of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But few, I dare say, have thought deeply about why Darwinism has been so successful. One of those few is Michael Ruse, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University, who has written eloquently for decades about the foundations of the life sciences. His latest book ties that work together, giving an overview of the issues Darwin raised and the criticisms leveled against him in the past century and a half.

In making his spirited defense of evolutionary biology, Ruse does not devote much space to creationism or its place in the public school curriculum. Perhaps his reason is that, though the creationist critique of Darwin is by far the most visible one in the media, it is also the least substantial. The main concession Ruse makes about engaging the creationists is to discuss, and debunk, the work of Duane T. Gish, a “young earth” creationist and author of Evolution: The Fossils Say No!, who seems to seriously believe that a preponderance of the evidence demands a universe less than 10,000 years old.

Mostly, though, Ruse turns his wit to examining just what Darwinism claims—basically, that speciation arises from the slow, natural selection of inherited traits—and how it supports those claims. What do the fossils say about evolution? What insights does molecular biology contribute? How do strands of evidence weave together into such a convergence of conclusions among the disciplines (biology, geology, chemistry, and astronomy, to name just a few) about the history of life on our planet?

Ruse’s most compelling writing addresses the claims of mainstream intellectuals, some of whom, in the name of Darwinism, have expected more of it than it can deliver. Evolution, for instance, is often equated with progress, though nothing about the process of natural selection guarantees that things must get better with time.

Among the greatest of the progressive Darwinians was the Victorian enthusiast Herbert Spencer, whose voluminous and widely read writings identified evolution as a driving force in both nature and society. Spencer’s idea that the struggle for existence in the natural world is mirrored in economics, politics, and morality spawned the strain of thought known as “social Darwinism.” Robber barons cited it to justify their success: the obscene concentrations of wealth they acquired were just the fruits of doing what comes naturally. Mein Kampf perverted those ideas still further into the “fanatasy” of a master race. Ruse points out how mistaken Spencer was about evolution—and indeed, virtually no one reads Spencer nowadays. But social Darwinism still serves as a straw man for modern antievolutionists who argue against what they regard as the inherent moral corrosiveness of Darwinian theory.

Darwinism, Ruse argues, is both less and more than either its vehement critics or its ardent proponents suppose. It is not a form of atheism, as the arch-Darwinist (and arch-atheist) Richard Dawkins (in rare agreement with creationists) claims. Nor is it a manifestation of God’s plan for the universe, as the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had it. Rather, it is a strong scientific theory that provides important insights into the natural world. But to those who would ask it to tell us about God, society, or the meaning of life, Ruse has a warning: “Beware of anything that answers everything. It usually ends by answering nothing. And that is certainly not true of Darwinism.”

Among the most dicey academic inquiries are the ones that deal with the origin of human consciousness. It is hard enough to know what goes on in the heads of our contemporaries, who speak and write in a language we share, without speculating about ancestors who spoke in languages long lost and who never wrote anything down. To explore the prehistoric mind-set, the best one can do is reconstruct plausible scenarios from bones, pottery, and other surviving artifacts. Evidence of primitive consciousness, then, by its very nature, is fragmentary, circumstantial, and open to a wide range of interpretation.

Faced with difficulties of such daunting scope, Steven Mithen, professor of archaeology at the University of Reading in England, remains undaunted. In his 1996 book, The Prehistory of the Mind, he argued that both the origins of thought and the origins of human language are natural outcomes of evolution. But according to the first chapter of Mithen’s latest work, The Singing Neanderthals, that story was incomplete.

What it neglected was the central role of music in the psychosocial makeup of our species. Is it possible to imagine Zog the caveman with a tin ear, not feeling the rhythm in the chipping of a stone axe? Did Zog never feel the urge to move his feet when he wasn’t stalking a tasty mammoth? Did he never hum a tune, pound a drum, or join in a communal dance? “Without music,” Mithen writes, “the prehistoric past is just too quiet to be believed.”

And so we’re off, on a journey across the disciplines, gleaning from each an instructive perspective on the origins of human music-making. Neurological studies, for instance, suggest the brain is somehow wired for music, more or less independently of its circuitry for speech. Lesions and strokes can lead to amusia, the inability to comprehend or produce music. The medical literature has documented cases of stroke patients who could speak and write, but could no longer sing or play an instrument.

Developmental psychologists have established that even babies respond to music. The rhythm and modulation of a mother’s voice holds her baby’s attention before the child can distinguish the meanings of individual words. That’s why parents sing lullabies, and perhaps why adults naturally adopt a high-pitched singsong delivery when they speak to children. The musicality of speech may even help in learning language: the melody, it seems, precedes the message.

Thus, Mithen speculates, humanity might have developed much as the individual does: music first, then language. From an evolutionary standpoint, music would not only help ensure the well-being of the individual, but also the cohesiveness of the group. Calling on primate studies, Mithen likens group music-making to grooming, an activity that evokes feelings of contentment and belonging. When Zog’s family beat out the rhythm of a dance, their music-making may have helped them work together, thus enhancing their success in the hunt and giving them an evolutionary advantage over other families with less musical ability. Perhaps they also musically mimicked the motions and behaviors of the animals they hunted. Music could have served as an early form of communication, characterized by an acronym coined by Mithen: “Hmmmmm.” In other words, he explains, the earliest language was Holistic (not expressed so much in words as by overall feeling); manipulative (aimed at affecting the behavior of others); multi-modal (expressed as rhythm, melody, and so forth); musical; and mimetic (imitative).

“May have” and “might have” are the most common qualifiers in Mithen’s book, and by the time he has woven together all the strands of this argument, the reader may be intoning Hmmmmm in counterpoint with the author. Taken as a look at the natural history of music, Mithen’s book is thoughtful and certainly entertaining. But does it make an airtight case—as the subtitle suggests—for “the origins of music, language, mind, and body”? Or is it just a clever academic song and dance?

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2006