Discworld and Member Articles
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Discworld aims to unwind Darwins watch
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Written by terrypratchettbooks.org
Thursday, 21 July 2005 |
By The Canberra Times
DARWIN'S WATCH is the third in The Science of Discworld series which bestselling British author Terry Pratchett co-writes with Dr Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, and biologist DrJack Cohen. Pratchett fans, however, should be aware, particularly as Pratchett's name features most prominently on the cover, that most of the book is written by Stewart and Cohen. The title Darwin's Watch spins off Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and, to a lesser extent, Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker. The wizards of Pratchett's Unseen University, living on Pratchett's ''real'' world of Discworld, observe that their creation Earth, otherwise known as ''Roundworld'', has suddenly embarked on a different time stream. How did Earth's history come adrift? Was it the result of the publishing success of the Theology of Species by the Reverend Charles Darwin, which extolled the divine nature of humanity and thus made it impossible to deny the divine design of
living creatures? How can the situation be rectified? As a result of Darwin writing the wrong book, scientific progress and 20th-century space development did not occur, with implications for the future of humanity. Certainly something drastic is required to change the ''Trousers of Time'' (alternative universes). Can the wizards use ''Hex'', the University's VBT (Very Big Thing), the University's ''thinking engine''? The VBT, aka supercomputer, ''uses up a lot of money which would otherwise only lie around causing trouble or be spent by the Sociology Department ... it helps push back boundaries and it doesn't matter much what boundaries these are, since, as any researcher will tell you, it's the pushing that matters, not the boundary''. Stewart and Cohen provide entertaining and informative science essays on Darwin's theories, time travel, alternative universes, quantum physics and historical inevitability in the context of Pratchett's plotline. It will be interesting to see how successful the book will be in the southern states of America. Stewart and Cohen say in the chapter on ''Paley's Watch'' that evolution is a concept that is ''anathema to every God-fearing Southern fundamentalist''.
They quote a real conversation on a US radio show in which the speaker noted that since Darwin did not get the Nobel Prize he could not have been any good! The fact that the first Nobel Prize was awarded 19 years after Darwin's death was clearly irrelevant to that debate. Stewart and Cohen have already been criticised in some quarters for their comments on fundamentalism, but as Simon Singh reflected at the Hay-on-Wye Writers' Festival in May: ''Why do so many people prefer to believe in pseudo-science rather than real science? It saddens me that, despite centuries of scientific progress ... there is still a substantial fraction of society that prefers to believe in astrology, homeopathy, reiki, past-life regression and creationism.'' Darwin's Watch may entice younger readers, who otherwise would not reach out for a science textbook, to assimilate good basic science. The latest stage adaptations of Pratchett's novels by Stephen Briggs include Monstrous Regiment and Night Watch. Briggs began the Discworld adaptations with Wyrd Sisters in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1991. He notes in the introductions that most of the audiences are Discworld fans, with royalties from the plays going to Pratchett's favourite orang- utan foundation. Pratchett's next ''whole book'' will be the Discworld City Watch murder mystery Thud, to be published in October. The annual Pratchett Discworld convention is scheduled for Australia in January 2007. Colin Steele is Emeritus Fellow at the ANU.
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