Darwin’s work is neither perfect nor definitive, but it was revolutionary and foundational. And like all successful scientific theories, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has re-mained authoritative because, in spite of gaps, it still explains more phenomena than any competing theory and rests on a profound underpinning of research and experimentation. Darwin was not only a methodical and diligent scientist; he was a creative thinker. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggests that Darwin’s theory is so multifarious and flexible that “each individual has his own way of interpreting Darwin’s ideas.” Yet Darwin’s ideas are also so compelling that “there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory.”41 Like so many other post-Darwinian scientists, Dawkins consciously stands on Darwin’s shoulders to critique and extend Darwinian thought, within the boundaries of biology and beyond.
Darwin trumps Cuvier. Had he written “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” just thirty years later, Poe would have been hard-pressed to premise his detective story on a science that taught the separate creation of humans and beasts, black people and white. Darwin changed the course of Western cultural and intellectual history, as a theorist, storyteller, and personal example.
Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models?
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “The Epic”
I
Like Darwin, Jane Goodall set out to do one thing and did something else. When Darwin came home after his five-year voyage on the Beagle, he expected to settle down and make sense of his experience and his data, while living the quiet life of the country gentleman scientist. Instead, he was swept up in a storm of his own making. Like Darwin, Goodall expected a simple life; she wanted to live with the animals in the wilds of Africa and understand them, never dreaming that her reentry into industrialized society would be fraught with intellectual controversy and laden with ethical significance. Darwin and Goodall occupy unique places in history: these two scientists have made profound contributions to the sum of knowledge and the methods for adding to it. They cannot be imitated, and their worlds cannot be restored. Their significance goes far beyond their particular discoveries, and everyone who comes after them is, in a sense, belated.
Modern primatology owes Darwin a debt, not only for key concepts and foundational theories but also for the long continuance of the Victorian craze for fossil hunting—which urged Goodall’s mentor Louis Leakey forward into primatology—and for Darwin’s contributions to the ways in which the stories of science are told. In chapter 1, I outlined some of Darwin’s contributions to scientific storytelling, especially when the subject was primates. Here, I will additionally suggest that the figure of Darwin himself, as a hero of science, was a powerful model, directly and indirectly, for scientists in the twentieth century. From the seventeenth century forward, the heroic man of science was not an unfamiliar trope in Western culture. But it was from Darwin, in particular, that Goodall inherited the model of the scientist as questing hero. True, Darwin’s example came to her along a circuitous route, but she was profoundly influenced by it nonetheless, as she, in her turn, has transmitted this model to others in the field.
II
“Meme” is a word invented by Richard Dawkins to indicate a cultural particle that replicates itself in human consciousness.1 Dawkins conceives of genes as self-serving, and memes, in his view, behave the same way. In evolutionary terms, children’s culture is a perfect medium for memetic replication, a primordial soup in which many kinds of memes replicate, sometimes at prodigious rates, or lie dormant for centuries. Like other memes, those carried in children’s literature often jump back and forth through the membrane between stories and real-life actions. The human who talks to animals is a meme that originated in the deeps of antiquity and today is familiar to everyone who has read even a few books written or rewritten for children. In her 1999 memoir Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Goodall proposes a direct link between the influence of this meme in her own childhood reading and the development of her later career, which has included both science and storytelling: “As a child I was not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature, animals, and the magic of far-off wild and remote places. Our house was filled with bookshelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it was wet and cold, I would curl up in a chair by the fire and lose myself in other worlds. My very favorite books at the time were The Story of Doctor Dolittle, The Jungle Book, and the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books.”2 Goodall herself contributed copy for the back cover of The Story of Doctor Dolittle, which was first published in 1920 and reissued in 1988: “Any child who is not given the opportunity to make the acquaintance of this rotund, kindly, and enthusiastic doctor/naturalist and all of his animal friends will miss out on something important. Start with the first in the series, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, and you will not be content until the others are lined up on your bookshelves. If only there were more.” (There are, in fact, fifteen.) It is telling that, in the acknowledgments for her monumental 1986 study The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Goodall again mentions Hugh Lofting’s stories, which she says inspired her at the age of eight to go to Africa to be with the apes and monkeys.
Goodall and the children’s literature that shaped her can be conceptualized as carriers of a very old and powerful meme complex. In addition to her important discoveries, it is perhaps Goodall’s participation in the quest romance memeplex that seems to strike such a powerful chord in contemporary culture. Nonhuman animals need a hero, and in this time of awful environmental challenges, so do the rest of us. Goodall is not simply an adventurous scientist but also a model of kindness to and respect for individual animals. That interest in individuals and belief in individuality in nonhuman species determined Goodall’s deliberate reinvention of primatological field protocol and has remained a key component of her thinking during the second part of her long career, as she has shifted from science and natural history to environmental activism and animal advocacy.
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle is a naturalist, teacher, and leader who saves humans and animals from disease, ignorance, and natural disasters. In this fictional character, the figure of Darwin as a hero of science intersects with the tradition of the questing hero of romance. And it is not surprising that Lofting’s stories prefigure the present-day cultural phenomenon of Jane Goodall, not only as she presents herself in her writing but also as she has appeared in various media representations: a tall, blond, youthful woman with a ponytail, dressed in khaki and sturdy shoes, making her way through the forest and touching, following, or exchanging glances with the animals she studies and serves (or more recently, in a lab coat, comforting caged primates used for biomedical research). So powerful is this new recombinant meme (recombinant partly because the hero of primatology is a woman) that, in popular primatology and sometimes even the scholarly literature, many scientists who have come along since Goodall have had to position themselves as followers and imitators, or to deliberately and explicitly distance themselves from this model.
To reconstruct the Darwin-Dolittle-Goodall hero genealogy, it is useful to glance back briefly at the history of the quest romance, one of the oldest literary forms in Western culture. The best-known quest romances are those of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, characters who came into cultural prominence a little before 1200, when their exploits were described in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.