Science of Discworld III

steam engine time had arrived, it had gone, again, and in the end there was only one winner. The rest of the competition fell by the wayside. And that is why Watt gets so much credit, and why, ultimately, he deserves it. But he also deserves credit for his systematic quantitative experiments, his focus on the theory behind the steam engine, and his development of the concept – not as its inventor.
    Certainly not for watching a kettle as a kid.
    The history of the introduction of the Boulton-and-Watt steam engine is essentially an evolutionary one: the fittest design survived, the less fit were superseded and vanished from the historical record. Which brings us to Darwin, and natural selection. The Victorian era was ‘steam engine time’ for evolution; Darwin was just one of many people who recognised the mutability of species. Does he deserve the credit he gets? Was he, like Watt, the person who brought the theory to its culmination? Or did he play a more innovative role?
    In the introduction to Origin , Darwin mentions several of his predecessors. So he certainly wasn’t trying to take credit for the ideas of others. Unless you subscribe to the rather Machiavellian school of thought that giving credit to others is just a sneaky way of damning them with faint praise. One predecessor that he does not mention is perhaps the most interesting of all – his own grandfather, ErasmusDarwin. Perhaps Charles felt that Erasmus was a bit too nutty to mention, especially being a relative.
    Erasmus knew James Watt, and may have helped him to promote his steam engine. They were both members of the Lunar Society, an organisation of Birmingham technocrats. Another was Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin’s uncle Jos’s grandfather and founder of the famous ceramics company. The ‘Lunaticks’ met once a month at the time of the full moon – not for pagan or mystic reasons, or because they were all werewolves, but because that way they could see their way easily as they rode home after a few drinks and a good meal.
    Erasmus, a physician, could also turn a nifty hand to machinery, and he invented a new steering mechanism for carriages, a horizontal windmill to grind Josiah’s pigments, and a machine that could speak the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. When the 1791 riots against ‘philosophers’ (scientists) and for ‘Church and King’ put paid to the Lunar Society, Erasmus was just putting the finishing touches to a book. Its tide was Zoonomia , and it was about evolution.
    Not, however, by Charles’s mechanism of natural selection. Erasmus didn’t really describe a mechanism. He just said that organisms could change. All plant and animal life, Erasmus thought, derived from living ‘filaments’. They had to be able to change, otherwise they’d still be filaments. Aware of Lyell’s Deep Time, Erasmus argued that:
    In the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the first great cause endowed with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended by new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!
    If this sounds Lamarckian, that’s because it was. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed that creatures could inherit characteristics acquired by their ancestors – that if, say, a blacksmith acquired huge muscular arms by virtue of working for years at his forge, then his children would inherit similar arms, without having to do all that hard work. Insofar as Erasmus envisaged a mechanism for heredity, it was much like Lamarck’s. That did not prevent him having some important insights, not all of them original. In particular, he saw humans as superior descendants of animals, not as a separate form of creation. His grandson felt the same, which is why he called his later book on human evolution The Descent of Man . All very proper and scientific. But Ridcully is right. ‘Ascent’ would have been better public relations.
    Charles certainly read Zoonomia , during the holidays after his first year at Edinburgh University. He even wrote the word on the opening page of his ‘B Notebook’, the origin of Origin . So