Mary and John Theberge
John and Mary Theberge are wildlife biologists. He taught ecology and conservation at the University of Waterloo and she is an educator and researcher, working on presentations to the general public. They obviously share a deep love of nature, whether it be tracking wolves in Algonquin Park or listening to bird songs out in British Columbia.
But their book, The Ptarmigan's Dilemma: An Exploration Into How Life Organizes and Supports Itself, is a little misleadingly titled. It is not really a sustained inquiry into a single problem but, rather, a series of reflections about nature, informed on the one hand by evolutionary and ecological science and on the other hand given empirical substance by the writers' huge and sympathetic understanding of the inhabitants of Canada's forests and lakes, of its rivers and mountains and shores and more.
In a way, this book reads a little bit like a Third Age project. A nasty crack, but not entirely without foundation. The first chapter, about the North American wood duck, is a good example. The male of this species is incredibly brightly coloured. It has a red and white beak, a green cape over its head, its breast is cinnamon coloured, and the flanks are bright yellow.
The authors rightly put this in context by talking about Charles Darwin and evolution through natural selection, especially Darwin's subsidiary mechanism of sexual selection, where cases of sexual dimorphism - the huge horns of many male ungulates for fighting and the incredible colours of (usually male) birds and reptiles and other vertebrates for display - are seen as adaptations in the struggle for mates and reproduction.
But there is not too much deep discussion about, for instance, complaints that this kind of thinking is unduly anthropomorphic. That seeing colours in animals as signs that they are needed for attraction is reading into the animal world too many human qualities about the love of beauty. Is the female's response to the song of the courting bird really something akin to our appreciation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony?
Instead, the reader is diverted into a discussion of something completely different, namely claims by critics of pure Darwinism that much in the living world is less a function of natural selection and more of the laws of physics and chemistry doing it all for us. This point of view is championed especially by people who spend a lot of time playing with algorithms, while sitting in front of the glowing screens of their Apples. Nature itself supposedly generates complexity and adaptation - "order for free" - and at most Darwin's claim that only the fittest survive becomes virtually a truism as it simply eliminates the losers after all of the creative work has been done. Introducing this kind of thinking is all a little bit too lateral and creative for my tastes.
Going back to the wood duck for a moment, no one seems to be suggesting that its colours are order for free. So what really is the point of a discussion of the claims of a group of people who apparently, on being asked to rate natural selection on a scale of one to 10, gave it only a one?
Really, the important thing is to appreciate this book for the things that it does well, for these it does really well. Above all, it gives a sense of how much joy people can get from going out and looking at nature. But not just looking at it for its own sake, rather with a hypothesis or two to inform and to study and to check.
Darwin himself once said: "How odd it is that any one should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service." And elsewhere: "No one could be a good observer unless he was an active theorizer." John and Mary Theberge show this again and again. They obviously delight in the colours of the wood duck, but how much more interesting it all becomes when they can see why it is that only the male is thus coloured and why he is coloured only at certain times of the year (the mating season).
Again, they have tracked wolves all over Algonquin Park, but how much more interesting it became as they probed (with blood samples and consequent DNA testing) into the origins of the wolves and their relationships to other populations in North America. Or in Labrador, checking on the caribou and the carrying capacities of the tundra and how successful the wolves are as predators.
I am a professional philosopher and historian of science. I love ideas and tracing them through the centuries. I love especially the ideas of biologists, from Aristotle to Darwin, from Darwin to Edward O. Wilson. I have no desire whatsoever to become a biologist myself, joking that (based on trips to Algonquin) one turtle a summer is enough for me as I head back to camp for a beer and a detective story. The Theberges get pretty close to persuading me that mine is an impoverished life.
But even without comparisons, one can say they have clearly led lives of great richness and it is a pleasure and privilege to spend time with them. I note also that John, who is now retired, was an undergraduate at the University of Guelph in the late 1960s. I was then already on the faculty at Guelph. If he is into writing Third Age books, what on Earth am I up to?
Michael Ruse's most beautiful duck comes to the table covered in orange sauce.