This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of SpeciesHappy birthday to Charles Darwin, 200 years old next month, and to his most famous tome, The Origin of Species, which will soon will clock up a century and a half. The Grand Darwin Pageant creaks onwards, with an exhibition in the Natural History Museum, a festival in Cambridge and, the ultimate accolade, not just a David Attenborough documentary but four by Melvyn Bragg (and, yes, Steve Jones has written a book to add to the celebratory heap).
All this is quite justified when it comes to marking the foundation of modern biology, but my own ambition for Darwin Year is different. I hope that, by its end, its subject's beard, his gastric troubles and even his voyage on HMS Beagle will have faded from public consciousness. I would be even happier if the squabbles about the social, moral, legal, political, historical, ethical and theological implications of his work were to find, at last, their long-delayed demise. In 2009 we should celebrate the science rather than the man – the fact rather than the anecdote.
So far, there is little sign of that happening. Instead, Darwin's long shadow is in danger of blotting out the great monument of truth that he built during his half century of labour.
Certainly, Charles Darwin was a fascinating and attractive figure – kindly, uxorious (when his wife was in her forties he wrote that "Emma has been very neglectful of late, for we have not had a child for more than one whole year") with a mind that was, as he described it, a "machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts". But what he did could, as is true for all other scientific research, have been done by anyone. His ideas founded today's biology, which is still, from molecular genetics to ant behaviour, a subject held together by his great notion of "descent with modification".
It would be wonderful to celebrate that truth in its profundity – but instead, most of the time, we are hearing more than we need to about the travails of an elderly Victorian. Yes, the Origin was written at a time of uproar in London's streets; yes, Darwwin was passionate in his hatred of slavery and devotion to the unity of humankind; and yes, he despised the use of his ideas to promote a social agenda – but so what? Does biology really need such a cult of personality?
Experts on chloroplasts or chlorine manage with living facts, and are not forced to attach them to dead heroes. But there is something about evolution that calls for Immortals. To their acolytes, the great men's lives form their science, which can as a result only be understood in the context of the times in which they lived.
The Sage of Down House towers above them all, but there are plenty more. But even so, the minutiae of these other scientists' daily lives are not used – as Darwin's are – as the key to their science. I once collected fruit flies in California with perhaps the last in that great line, the memorably named Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Siberian horse-breeder who escaped from Stalin's Russia and appears as a fictional character in a Nabokov novel. Any attempt to fit his research (and he was a keen student of natural selection) into his varied life would be Procrustean at best. And the man who almost stole a march on Charles, Alfred Russel Wallace, was not a toff in Darwin's tradition, but spent his days (when not acting as a surveyor or designing the Mechanics' Institute in Neath) as an impoverished collector of natural history specimens – which makes rather a nonsense of the attempts to read Darwin's scientific thinking into his bourgeois background.
The Origin of Species is, as its author described it, a "long argument". It begins with the familiar, in the form of pigeons and dogs; moves on to the less so, with instincts, islands and embryology; nods at the dangerous notion that what is true for pigeons might be true for humans; and builds up to its last word, "evolved", which appears nowhere else in the book. It lacks any mention of the social, political and historical context of its daring ideas. Darwin's later volumes, on topics ranging from insectivorous plants to pollinators to earthworms, are equally devoid of speculation about the larger implications, such as they are, of his discoveries.
If only that were true today! The least welcome among the many gate-crashers at Darwin's birthday party are the philosophers. When it comes to God, I am an untheist rather than an atheist: I have no interest in the topic, particularly in its supposed overlap with science. Who cares about the wrangling of silly old men in frocks as they argue (often murderously) about who has the best dress designer? And when theologians try to explain what Darwin really thought, I roll my eyes in despair.
It's not just their ignorance (for we all, to some degree, share that) but the fatuity of their case. I have spoken recently (and at such moments I feel like a rather mangy lion fed to the Christians) at several events that discuss the religious significance of Darwin's work; once, indeed, from the august pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral. Once the Great Flooders and the Six Dayers have had their say, the consensus among the faithful is that, yes, human evolution happened in the accepted way – because it was meant to happen. Quite what (if anything) that signifies I have no idea, but one thing is certain: it has nothing to do with science and should find no place within a year that celebrates that pastime.
Here in Darwin's native land, we have some fine monuments to the abiding value of his work. Some are Victorian in their immensity – the Natural History Museum, Kew Gardens, Sir David Attenborough – while others, such as the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, which sequenced human DNA, or the Field Studies Council centres that allow schoolchildren to experience what it means to make discoveries about nature, are less grand and less familiar. We still have 11 months to find out what is going on in such institutions: to concentrate on the biology rather than the architecture, the scientist rather than the architect. It's not too late to get it right.
Steve Jones is professor of genetics at University College London
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