Read The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code for Free Online

But killing off the slowest creatures wouldn’t suddenly make those that escaped any faster—and the escapees would continue having mediocre children as a result. What’s more, most scientists assumed that the speed of any rare fast creature would be diluted when it bred with slower ones, producing more mediocrities. According to this logic, species got stuck in ruts of average traits, and the nudge of natural selection couldn’t improve them. True evolution, then—men from monkeys—had to proceed by jumps. *
    Beyond its apparent statistical problems, Darwinism had something else working against it: emotion. People loathed natural selection. Pitiless death seemed paramount, with superior types always crushing the weak. Intellectuals like playwright George Bernard Shaw even felt betrayed by Darwin. Shaw hadadored Darwin at first for smiting religious dogmas. But the more Shaw heard, the less he liked natural selection. And “when its whole significance dawns on you,” Shaw later lamented, “your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence.” Nature governed by such rules, he said, would be “a universal struggle for hogwash.”
    The triplicate rediscovery of Mendel in 1900 further galvanized the anti-Darwinists by providing a scientific alternative—and soon an outright rival. Mendel’s work emphasized not murder and starvation but growth and generation. Moreover, Mendel’s peas showed signs of jerkiness—tall or short stalks, yellow or green peas, nothing in between. Already by 1902 the English biologist William Bateson had helped a doctor identify the first known gene in humans (for an alarming but largely benign disorder, alkaptonuria, which can turn children’s urine black). Bateson soon rebranded Mendelism “genetics” and became Mendel’s bulldog in Europe, tirelessly championing the monk’s work, even taking up chess and cigars simply because Mendel loved both. Others supported Bateson’s creepy zealotry, however, because Darwinism violated the progressive ethos of the young century. Already by 1904, German scientist Eberhard Dennert could cackle, “We are standing at the death-bed of Darwinism, and making ready to send the friends of the patient a little money, to ensure a decent burial.” (A sentiment fit for a creationist today.) To be sure, a minority of biologists defended Darwin’s vision of gradual evolution against the Dennerts and Batesons of the world, and defended it fiercely—one historian commented on both sides’ “remarkable degree of bitchiness.” But these stubborn few could not prevent the eclipse of Darwinism from growing ever darker.
    Still, while Mendel’s work galvanized the anti-Darwinists, it never quite united them. By the early 1900s, scientists haddiscovered various important facts about genes and chromosomes, facts that still undergird genetics today. They determined that all creatures have genes; that genes can change, or mutate; that all chromosomes in cells come in pairs; and that all creatures inherit equal numbers of chromosomes from Mom and Dad. But there was no overarching sense of how these discoveries meshed; the individual pixels never resolved into a coherent picture. Instead a baffling array of half theories emerged, like “chromosome theory,” “mutation theory,” “gene theory,” and so on. Each championed one narrow aspect of heredity, and each drew distinctions that seem merely confusing today: some scientists believed (wrongly) that genes didn’t reside on chromosomes; others that each chromosome harbored just one gene; still others that chromosomes played no role in heredity at all. It’s whiggishly unfair to say, but reading these overlapping theories can be downright frustrating today. You want to scream at the scientists, like a dimwit on
Wheel of Fortune
or something, “Think! It’s all right there!” But each fiefdom discounted