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The River of Consciousness - Softcover

Sacks, Oliver W.

 
9780804171007: The River of Consciousness
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804171009 ISBN 13: 9780804171007
Verlag: Vintage, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks's passionate engagement with the most compelling ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience.

"Curious, avid and thrillingly fluent." —The New York Times Book Review

In the pieces that comprise The River of Consciousness, Dr. Sacks takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience, and the arts, and calls upon his great scientific and creative heroes--above all, Darwin, Freud, and William James. For Sacks, these thinkers were constant companions from an early age. The questions they explored--the meaning of evolution, the roots of creativity, and the nature of consciousness--lie at the heart of science and of this book.

The River of Consciousness demonstrates Sacks's unparalleled ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless endeavor to understand what makes us human.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Oliver Sacks was a physician, writer, and professor of neurology. Born in London in 1933, he moved to New York City in 1965, where he launched his medical career and began writing case studies of his patients. Called the "poet laureate of medicine" by The New York Times, Sacks is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, Awakenings (which inspired an Oscar-nominated film and a play by Harold Pinter), On the Move, and Gratitude. He was the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2008 for services to medicine. He died in 2015.

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9780385352567|excerpt

Sacks / RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers

We all know the canonical story of Charles Darwin: the twenty-­two-­year-­old embarking on the Beagle, going to the ends of the earth; Darwin in Patagonia; Darwin on the Argentine pampas (managing to lasso the legs of his own horse); Darwin in South America, collecting the bones of giant extinct animals; Darwin in Australia—­still a religious believer—­startled at his first sight of a kangaroo (“surely two distinct Creators must have been at work”). And, of course, Darwin in the Galápagos, observing how the finches were different on each island, starting to experience the seismic shift in understanding how living things evolve that, a quarter of a century later, would result in the publication of On the Origin of Species. The story climaxes here, with the publication of the Origin in November 1859, and has a sort of elegiac postscript: a vision of the older and ailing Darwin, in the twenty-­odd years remaining to him, pottering around his gardens at Down House with no particular plan or purpose, perhaps throwing off a book or two, but with his major work long completed.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Darwin remained intensely sensitive both to criticisms and to evidence supporting his theory of natural selection, and this led him to bring out no fewer than five editions of the Origin. He might indeed have retreated (or returned) to his garden and his greenhouses after 1859 (there were extensive grounds around Down House, and five greenhouses), but for him these became engines of war, from which he would lob great missiles of evidence at the skeptics outside—­descriptions of extraordinary structures and behaviors in plants very difficult to ascribe to special creation or design—­a mass of evidence for evolution and natural selection even more overwhelming than that presented in the Origin.

Strangely, even Darwin scholars pay relatively little attention to this botanical work, even though it encompassed six books and seventy-­odd papers. Thus Duane Isely, in his 1994 book, One Hundred and One Botanists, writes that while

more has been written about Darwin than any other biologist who ever lived .?.?. [he] is rarely presented as a botanist.?.?.?. The fact that he wrote several books about his research on plants is mentioned in much Darwinia, but it is casual, somewhat in the light of “Well, the great man needs to play now and then.”

Darwin had always had a special, tender feeling for plants and a special admiration, too. (“It has always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings,” he wrote in his autobiography.) He grew up in a botanical family—­his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written a long, two-­volume poem called The Botanic Garden, and Charles himself grew up in a house whose extensive gardens were filled not only with flowers but with a variety of apple trees crossbred for increased vigor. As a university student at Cambridge, the only lectures Darwin consistently attended were those of the botanist J. S. Henslow, and it was Henslow, recognizing the extraordinary qualities of his student, who recommended him for a position on the Beagle.

It was to Henslow that Darwin wrote very detailed letters full of observations about the fauna and flora and geology of the places he visited. (These letters, when printed and circulated, were to make Darwin famous in scientific circles even before the Beagle returned to England.) And it was for Henslow that Darwin, in the Galápagos, made a careful collection of all the plants in flower and noted how different islands in the archipelago could often have different species of the same genus. This was to become a crucial piece of evidence for him as he thought about the role of geographical divergence in the origin of new species.

Indeed, as David Kohn pointed out in a splendid 2008 essay, Darwin’s Galápagos plant specimens, numbering well over two hundred, constituted “the single most influential natural history collection of live organisms in the entire history of science.?.?.?. They also would turn out to be Darwin’s best documented example of the evolution of species on the islands.”

(The birds Darwin collected, by contrast, were not always correctly identified or labeled with their island of origin, and it was only on his return to England that these, supplemented by the specimens collected by his shipmates, were sorted out by the ornithologist John Gould.)

Darwin became close friends with two botanists, Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew Gardens and Asa Gray at Harvard. Hooker had become his confidant in the 1840s—­the only man to whom he showed the first draft of his work on evolution—­and Asa Gray was to join the inner circle in the 1850s. Darwin would write to them both with increasing enthusiasm about “our theory.”

Yet though Darwin was happy to call himself a geologist (he wrote three geological books based on his observations during the voyage of the Beagle and conceived a strikingly original theory on the origin of coral atolls, which was confirmed experimentally only in the second half of the twentieth century), he always insisted that he was not a botanist. One reason was that botany had (despite a precocious start in the early eighteenth century with Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Staticks, a book full of fascinating experiments on plant physiology) remained almost entirely a descriptive and taxonomic discipline: plants were identified, classified, and named but not investigated. Darwin, by contrast, was preeminently an investigator, concerned with the “how” and “why” of plant structure and behavior, not just the “what.”

Botany was not a mere avocation or hobby for Darwin, as it was for so many in the Victorian age; the study of plants was always infused for him with theoretical purpose, and the theoretical purpose had to do with evolution and natural selection. It was, as his son Francis wrote, “as though he were charged with theorising power ready to flow into any channel on the slightest disturbance, so that no fact, however small, could avoid releasing a stream of theory.” And the flow went both ways; Darwin himself often said that “no one could be a good observer unless he was an active theoriser.”

In the eighteenth century, the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus had shown that flowers had sexual organs (pistils and stamens), and indeed had based his classifications on these. But it was almost universally believed that flowers were self-­fertilized—­why else would each flower contain both male and female organs? Linnaeus himself made merry with the idea, portraying a flower with nine stamens and one pistil as a bedchamber in which a maiden was surrounded by nine lovers. A similar conceit appeared in the second volume of Darwin’s grandfather’s book The Botanic Garden, titled The Loves of the Plants. This was the atmosphere in which the younger Darwin grew up.

But within a year or two of his return from the Beagle, Darwin felt forced, on theoretical grounds, to question the idea of self-­fertilization. In an 1837 notebook, he wrote, “Do not plants which have male and female organs together yet receive influence from other plants?” If plants were ever to evolve, he reasoned, cross-­fertilization was crucial—­otherwise, no modifications could ever occur, and the world would be stuck with a single, self-­reproducing plant instead of the extraordinary range of species it actually had. In the early 1840s, Darwin started to test his theory, dissecting a variety of flowers...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804171009
ISBN 13 
9780804171007
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
237
Kontakt zum Hersteller
EDITIONS GALLIMARD
ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it

Via Verdi, 8.
Assago Milano
20090
Italien

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