Here is the full transcript of Dr. John van Wyhe’s talk titled “Historical Myths” at TEDxNUS conference.
Author Dr. John van Wyhe’s talk titled “Historical Myths” delves into the common misconceptions surrounding pivotal moments and figures in the history of science. He debunks widely believed narratives, such as Columbus proving the Earth is round, Newton discovering gravity from an apple falling on his head, and Darwin’s theory of evolution being inspired by finches in the Galapagos.
Van Wyhe clarifies that these stories, while popular and captivating, are either completely false or significantly distorted versions of the truth. He emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and rigorous historical research in understanding the true nature of scientific discovery. Ultimately, van Wyhe’s talk invites us to question the romanticized versions of history that are often taken for granted, highlighting the gap between popular myths and historical realities.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Columbus Myth
First of which will be the story, the traditional story that every school child has heard for many generations, which is that when Columbus set sail into the Atlantic towards the Americas, everyone in the world then believed the Earth was flat. His arrival in the Americas was a sort of miracle and, in a way, disproved the traditional stereotype or view that was held until then.
In fact, according to the legend, Columbus had such a difficult time getting his voyage sponsored and to get people to man his ships because, of course, no one was crazy enough to go on a ship that was going to go straight off the edge of the Earth, which is what the legend tells us. Indeed, some versions of the story have it that his crew almost mutinied because they were so afraid that the ship would go off the edge of the Earth, and only Columbus, with his special faith in the accuracy of his views, was confident that the Earth was round.
Now that’s a wonderful story. It’s romantic, it has sort of traditional superstition being trounced by empirical evidence and so forth. The problem is that everything about that story is completely wrong. Everyone in Columbus’s day knew that the Earth was round. Here are just two examples from his time. First is a globe built in Germany, which happens to still survive today; it’s the oldest known globe in the world, obviously it’s a globe, it’s round. There was no doubt about that.
The Truth Behind the Myth
Secondly, some of the notes of Leonardo da Vinci, one of them measuring the distance between the Earth and the Sun, look at the shape there, they’re spheres, and the lower one there was some calculations he made on how to estimate the size of the Earth, because everyone knew that it was round. In fact, people had known for 2,000 years that the Earth was round.
So the story that we usually hear about Columbus having to struggle against the superstition and stupidity of his old-fashioned contemporaries in order to struggle through with a more modern understanding and so forth, it’s completely wrong, it’s utterly and completely fake. Why should that be?
Taking for granted that the world was indeed round, everyone in his time knew, the only difference between Columbus was, of course, he wanted to get from Europe over to Southeast Asia to the Spice Islands, and knowing that the Earth was round, of course, he wanted to sail around and cut out all the middlemen that made the prices in Europe unbelievably expensive, spices were worth more than gold in those days by their weight.
So, of course, he would sail around. The problem is, of course, Columbus was in fact fundamentally wrong, because he underestimated the size of the Earth drastically. His little ships barely made it to the Caribbean.
If there had been no American continent there, which of course no one knew about, they would have sailed on a bit and either starved to death or been forced to turn around. There’s no way they could have crossed the Pacific and made it to the Spice Islands. So his contemporaries who objected to his voyage were objecting for exactly the right reasons. The Earth is too big, you can’t sail around with one of our ships, they don’t have the range.
The Perpetuation of a Myth
So again, everything about the traditional story is completely wrong, and yet that is a story that everyone in the world knows. It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? The reason we believe this story comes from the American author Washington Irving, whose biography of Columbus in 1828 first really kicked off this myth. It was a more romanticized, it was a more sexy sell, it made his book quite spicy and became a bestseller.
And from that time on, including all sorts of invented dialogues about Columbus, contesting with people with old-fashioned ideas who claimed that the Bible said the Earth is flat and therefore it must be flat and you must be wrong, just completely made up dialogue, because it made the story more exciting. And of course, exciting stories sell far better than true ones.
The Newton Myth
Okay, next myth. Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. I guarantee everyone has heard this before. It is so familiar. Now, Isaac Newton, of course, formulated his law of universal gravitation, which revolutionized astronomy and many other sciences, allowing the movements of planets and moons and other bodies in space to be not only for the first time understood, they no longer had to rely, for example, on the idea that there were invisible angels pushing the planets around the sun and so forth, but also to make accurate predictions.
And during his lifetime and ever after, he was one of the greatest names in science, worshipped almost like a god by men in the scientific community. So why the idea of the apple falling on Newton’s head, which is everywhere?
I mean, I just did a little bit of Googling to come up with some of these. It is the universal fact that most people know about Newton. An apple fell on his head, and he got the idea for gravity.
Now this one is also completely legendary, but it actually does have a small grain of truth, or a small grain of truth to its origin, which is that Newton actually did tell a couple of his contemporaries in his old age, yes, well, one day I was sitting in an apple orchard, and I observed an apple to fall. And this prompted me to think of why did it fall perpendicularly towards the center of the planet rather than, say, falling in another direction and so forth. So you might think that there’s some grain of truth behind this, although the latest research by historians of science seems to show that, in fact, it wasn’t an apple at all.
It was probably observations of a comet that had been seen vanishing behind the sun and then coming around the other side, and the measurement, some of those observations prompted Newton’s ideas for his law of gravity.
Okay, myth number three, Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, and there, 600 miles off the west coast of South America and the Pacific, he observed these lovely little birds, which are now known universally as Darwin’s finches. And the legend has it that Darwin observed the beaks, the differently shaped beaks of these birds, and was inspired in another great eureka moment of discovery to think of evolution.
And furthermore, the special thing about their beaks is, of course, they’re all differently shaped, and they’re each specifically suited for a different kind of diet, different size of seeds, for example. This is an illustration from Darwin’s book, “The Voyage of the Beagle.”
Now, Darwin’s finches are another one of these huge iconic images about science, almost as popular as Newton and his apple. I mean, they are everywhere, Darwin’s finches. In fact, they’ve been in the news recently, again, because of some new genetic studies about them. How did they become the iconic image of what sparked Darwin to come up with his theory? They’re so iconic that, in fact, even a lot of people have emblazoned them on their own flesh as a, I suppose, as a point saying that I like evolution, or I believe in evolution.
Unfortunately, they’ve chosen the wrong icon, because the finches did not inspire Darwin to become an evolutionist from the Galapagos. Darwin should now understand that when he was there, he had no eureka moment. He didn’t come up with a new theory, and not only did he not recognize that all of these little birds had evolved and so forth, he didn’t even know that they were all finches. He thought he’d selected a whole bunch of little birds.
It was only after he got home that an expert ornithologist told him, ah, by the way, all of these drab little birds, I’ve put them all in one family of finches. Then Darwin’s ideas began to kick off, but he never said what he is most famous for supposedly discovering in the Galapagos, which is that they’re differently shaped beaks show that they are adapted. This is actually the work of someone else, an ornithologist named David Lack, whose book, note the title, “Darwin’s Finches,” published in 1947, is the book that made the argument that the reason that these little birds have differently shaped beaks is that they are adapted to a different ecological niche.
And somewhere along the line, this message, this new explanation of how Darwin’s theory could explain the beaks of the finches came to be attributed to Darwin, rather than to David Lack, who was the one who actually came up with it.
Darwin himself, if I go back, Darwin himself only thought that the fact that the beaks gradually varied from smaller into larger, that this simply looked like an evolutionary scale. He did not think that they were specially adapted. In fact, he had observed them all feeding together in flocks at the same spot, so he had no notion whatsoever that they were ecologically distinct.
Darwin simply believed that a bird had been blown, or a species had been blown from South America to the Galapagos, and over time those birds had spread to nearby islands and had gradually changed into different forms, which is why there were sometimes different species of birds on nearby islands, even though the islands’ environments were basically identical, and yet they had different species.
Dispelling Myths in Science
So the island did prompt Darwin to come up with his theory, but not, again, in the romantic Eureka moment way that we often expect. So these are just three examples of probably some of the biggest myths, or I would say the biggest beliefs about the history of science present in the world today, the most widely spread and the most iconic images, and that’s just these three. I could talk about many more.
So, for example, did Darwin really keep his theory secret for 20 years because he was afraid of what people would say? Nope, not at all, completely false. Did Thomas Edison invent the light bulb? No, he didn’t. Did Vikings really look like this, with horns on their helmets? Unfortunately, no. I quite regret this, because I quite like those helmets with the horns, but in fact, this was invented by a costume designer for a German opera in the middle of the 19th century. No Viking ever saw anything like this. But some images we simply prefer.
And so the moral of this story is that some of the most widespread stories about science and about history are completely wrong, and I’ve identified some, and historians have identified many others, but that means that there are many thousands more out there that have not been identified, and that you will be wondering in your lives all the time how to tell which is true and which are legend and which are myth.
I would suggest that if the story has a dramatic discovery by a lone genius, if it’s one of vanquishing bad old-fashioned ideas with super new modern ones, if the story sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Thanks.