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NEWS AND EVENTS IN THE HUMANITIES

When he was old, English naturalist and evolutionist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) looked back and lamented that "now for many years" he could "not endure to read a line of poetry" nor did he care anymore for music or art. "My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness."

Historian Bob Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, recently quoted Darwin's mournful musings while reminding humanities practitioners to focus less on shrunken budgets and more on reaffirming the humanities' vitality and essentiality. "At their core," Berdhal offered, "the humanities are about the two things that make us human, that separate us from all other living things -- they are about language and about time. Language enables community, and the development of a common language, a public language . . . is the basis of all human community. A public language, in all of its dimensions, is what makes it possible for us to live within the framework of shared concerns and the quest for shared solutions."

"Our awareness of time," continued Berdhal, "places us in a larger temporal community, with obligations to the past and the future. And, too, an awareness of time makes us conscious of our own mortality, which, though shared by all, is a fate we must contend with individually, and it thus gives us a framework, a sense of urgency, in the search for a meaningful life. So let us celebrate the humanities and reaffirm their centrality to our individual and collective existence."

Returning briefly to the Darwins, it may be interesting to note that Charles' grandfather Erasmus, himself an early evolutionist, routinely fused his own tastes for celebration and for the humanities -- especially poetry--in both his quotidian life and his scientific work. A bon vivant and "brilliant conversationalist," this Darwin (1731-1802) became "known to the wider public as a poet who hymned the virtues of plant sexuality" and of Linnaean taxonomy in The Loves of the Plants (1789), "one of his major literary achievements."

These and many other details about E. Darwin are noted in the biographical entry under his name in Evolution: The First Four Billion Years (Harvard Press, 2009; see www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/RUSEVL.cfml). Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse co-edited this book with biologist Joseph Travis, marshalling contributors from disciplines across the humanities and sciences. About half the volume consists of detailed essays, and the other half provides encyclopedic entries about key figures or events. Taken all together these present, as the jacket text aptly summarizes, "the history and philosophy of evolution, the nuances of the science itself, and the intricate interplay among evolutionary study, religion, philosophy, and society." This thoroughly engaging volume offers valuable reference materials for the office shelf and excellent bedtime reading, too.

Another exemplary contemporary cross-disciplinary research venture is profiled in "Who Killed the Men of England?" (see http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/07/who-killed-the-men-england). This project, convened by Harvard medieval historian Michael McCormick with funding from a Mellon Foundation Award, has engaged genomics, evolution, demography, and molecular archaeology to explore why and how Anglo-Saxon genes and culture so completely replaced a large Romano-Celtic population throughout England between the fourth and eighth centuries AD. As this article notes, "Not only in this instance, but across entire fields of inquiry, the traditional boundaries between history and prehistory have been melting away as the study of the human past based on the written record increasingly incorporates the material record of the natural and physical sciences." It is a multi-way street for correspondences among humanities and sciences: as one researcher comments, while genetic studies of present-day populations are central to the project, these data "are sort of floating in mid-air" until contextualized with other types of information, such as "linguistics, history, archaeology, fossils, and geology."

Kate Christen (christenc@si.edu)
Humanities Representative, Board of Governors

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