Why Big Ideas (made simple) Matter - David Quammen on Darwin and Dinosaurs

David Quammen has a gift not many people do: the ability to understand scientific writing. What makes Quammen special though, is he then turns all that jargon into words that are comprehensible, compelling explanations of complicated ideas. The bridge he builds between the scientific community and the rest of us is a facinating one to cross, and lucky for us, he's coming to visit!

He'll be here is Beijing to speak at The Bookworm's month long EVOLVE: Darwin, Dinosaurs and Discovery event, and will be speaking twice – first on Sep 5 about “Why Big Ideas Matter,” and why it is imperative that we listen to those who challenge the norm, and again on Sep 9 with Micheal Keller, on “The Importance of Darwin.”

Here, he tells the Beijinger a bit about what dinosaurs and people have in common.

The first line of your introduction to On the Origin of Species talks
not about Darwin's theory, but about his prose. Is it hard to write about science in a way that is easy for the general public to understand?

There's a big distinction between the writing done by scientists to report their ideas and findings within the scientific world (which is nowadays done in scientific journals) and the writing done (by me and many others) to explain science to the general public. In Darwin's day, there was far less distinction – scientific journals were just being invented, and books such as The Origin of Species were relatively more important. Darwin was unique among world-changing scientific revolutionaries in that, unlike the works of Newton or Copernicus or Einstein, his great book could (and still can) be read and understood by anyone literate, intelligent, and patient enough to give it a chance. That's one of the things that makes One the Origin of Species magnificent and enduring and so important: it's written in plain English prose.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the gallup statistic that
44 percent of americans don’t believe in evolution. Is it really that simple, or is there a more complicated gap between religious faith and logic?

It's important to remember what the polls actually say: roughly 44 percent of the American public decline to accept the reality of human evolution. Their attitudes toward the possibility that microbes evolve is a separate question — or, more accurately, they seem to think that it's a separate question. The resistance to evolutionary thinking is all about treating homo sapiens as though we are a special case--a godlike creature that just can't have evolved from an ancestral line shared by chimpanzees, gorillas, lemurs, tarsiers, giraffes, turtles, and (ultimately) sea cucumbers. But of course we did evolve from that shared lineage. These people, these many many americans, who hide their brains from the overwhelming evidence for, and the basic concepts of, evolution--frankly, i think they're intellectually lazy.

I've heard that there hasn't been a rate of extinction as high as
we're experiencing now since the dinosaurs.

There have been five really huge mass extinctions in the history of life on earth, of which the fifth was the cretaceous extinction, 65 million years ago, which finished off the last of the dinosaurs. Yes, most experts who track the losses in biological diversity currently being caused by human actions agree that we're precipitating what will amount to a sixth extinction of roughly the same scale as those earlier, devastating five.

How similar is our situation to theirs?
Not similar at all. The dinosaurs didn't cause the cretaceous extinction; and though we are causing this one, we as a species are unlikely to go extinct ourselves. We're too opportunistic, too weedy. We're (nearly) ineradicable survivors. You can take that as the good news for us, or the bad news for life on earth generally, as you see fit.

What is a greater threat to humanity: a pandemic of infectious
disease like H1N1 or SARS, or ecosystem decay?

Pandemic infectious disease is a threat to humanity. Ecosystem decay is one of a small handful of causes for the current mass extinction, and therefore is a threat to biological diversity on earth. It's important to think clearly about the distinction between those two issues.

What is the most important scientific discovery made during your
lifetime?

Wow, that's a dizzying but interesting question. My quick answer is: Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule, made when they were a pair of obscure, ambitious young grad students at Cambridge in 1953. Next after that, I’d say, is the sequencing of the human genome and the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome, which together showed that we're 99 percent similar to them, our closest cousins.

What is one piece of scientific knowledge you wish every human being was taught as a child?

All forms of life are interconnected, both by their historical origins and in their daily living. Later, children could learn that those two related truths go by the fancier labels "evolution" and "ecology."