It Didn’t Start With Darwin

It was 150 years today that the evolutionary era got started, with a letter delivered to Down House, where Charles Darwin lived.  This is a piece I wrote for the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

 

Leafing through the mail at his home outside London one June day 150 years ago, Charles Darwin came across an envelope sent from an island in what is now part of Indonesia. The writer was a young acquaintance, Alfred Russel Wallace, who eked out a living as a biological collector, sending butterflies, bird skins and other specimens back to England. This time, Wallace had sent along a 20-page manuscript, requesting that Darwin show it to other members of the British scientific community.

As he read, Darwin saw with dawning horror that the author had arrived at the same evolutionary theory he had been working on, without publishing a word, for 20 years. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,” he lamented in a note to his friend the geologist Charles Lyell. Darwin ventured that he would be “extremely glad now” to publish a brief account of his own lengthy manuscript, but that “I would far rather burn my whole book than that [Wallace] or any man should think that I had behaved in a paltry spirit.”

The threat to his life’s work could hardly have come at a worse moment.

The Myth of Clean Coal

This is an opinion piece I wrote for the new web site Yale Environment 360:

You have to hand it to the folks at R&R Partners. They’re the clever advertising agency that made its name luring legions of suckers to Las Vegas with an ad campaign built on the slogan “What happens here, stays here.” But R&R has now topped itself with its current ad campaign pairing two of the least compatible words in the English language: “Clean Coal.”

“Clean” is not a word that normally leaps to mind for a commodity some spoilsports associate with unsafe mines, mountaintop removal, acid rain, black lung, lung cancer, asthma, mercury contamination, and, of course, global warming. And yet the phrase “clean coal” now routinely turns up in political discourse, almost as if it were a reality.

The ads created by R&R tout coal as “an American resource.” In one Vegas-inflected version, Kool and the Gang sing “Ya-HOO!” as an electric wire gets plugged into a lump of coal and the narrator intones: “It’s the fuel that powers our way of life.” (“Celebrate good times, come on!”) A second ad predicts a future in which coal will generate power “with even lower emissions, including the capture and storage of CO₂. It’s a big challenge, but we’ve made a commitment, a commitment to clean.”

Well, they’ve made a commitment to advertising, anyway.

THAT GREAT BEAST OF A TOWN

This is a historical piece I wrote for the March issue of Natural History magazine:

In November, 1774, a cask of rum arrived in London, spiked with four dead electric eels, the largest of them three feet eight inches long and up to 14 inches around.   They had smooth, snaky bodies, flattened heads, blunt snouts with a pronounced underbite, and two small fins, resembling ears, at the sides.  Their eyes were small and round, and their dark facial skin was heavily pockmarked, as if with the point of a knitting needle.

The eels, actually knifefish of the species Electrophorus electricus, had come from the Suriname River in South America, and the sensation they caused in England was literally electrical. One of them had survived aboard ship all the way to the port of Falmouth, in southwestern England, and duly delivered electric shocks to British thrill-seekers, before finally expiring.  But even dead and consigned to rum, a standard preservative then, the specimens still had the power to excite educated minds. 

John Hunter, master dissector, avid client of grave robbers, Surgeon-Extraordinary to King George III, and father of modern surgery, “danced a jig when he saw them, they are so compleat and well preserved,” wrote his equally eminent naturalist friend Daniel Solander. 

Eliot Spitzer’s Bright Red Ferrari

This is a piece I wrote last year for the New York Times.  For New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the appetite was for 20-something hookers rather than bright red Ferraris.  But his sad demise suggests that the message bears repeating. 

 

April 4, 2007

 

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me

By RICHARD CONNIFF

Old Lyme, Conn.

THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. I mention this only because it’s easy to get confused by the vast and highly repetitious category “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” Mr. Griffin walked away uninjured, and everybody offered wise counsel about how this wasn’t really such a bad day after all.

So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money?

Modern science has the answer, with a little help from the poet Hilaire Belloc.

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.”

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