Literature is one of the window-displays of culture. The novel is surely its incarnation closest to ‘real life’—the form that comes closest to describing the experiences all of us ‘normal’ people have, that we associate with ‘normal’ life.

Examples of novels where science and scientists are treated accurately are disappointingly rare (see e.g. the nice site lablit). But what about novels that, even if not actually featuring scientists and science directly, at least have characters who are curious about the world—characters who care what’s going on around them? Are these characters equally rare?

I worry that they are, especially in modern novels, and this is a clear indicator of a missing piece in our culture. We do not appear to care what’s going on around us. We lack concern or interest in the processes that make the world tick. We lack curiosity.

Quite apart from being a terrible missed opportunity—there are so many astounding things happening in the world around us all the time, of course—this is also a dangerous situation. This cultural missing piece goes beyond simply an imperfection in literature. These days it’s almost needless to say it, but say it I will anyway: Our world may become almost uninhabitable over the next few decades. I think this is mainly because we have failed for too long to pay real attention to how it works. We’ve spent too much of the energy, filling the atmosphere with dangerous gases in the process; we’ve destroyed too many habitats, unbalanced too many ecological networks.

In other words our current environmentally parlous state is not so much the product of greed or evil exploitation, not even of ignorance—but rather of our apparent willingness to accept our ignorance.

I don’t think it’s always been like this. To come back to novels. Lewis Wolpert, on lablit, has mentioned George Eliot’s Middlemarch (first published in 1871), and its well-drawn ‘scientific’ character Thomas Lydgate. I think Middlemarch is distinguished in a broader sense too. The novel contains a number of characters who share a certain attitude: simply that one should be curious and intrigued by natural phenomena. That we should be interested in how the world around us works.

Eliot herself shared this mind-set. She was a keen amateur botanist and collector, spending many a fine day scouring the coastline for new specimens (see for example her Ilfracombe Journal of 1856). It isn’t hard to see both why she wrote about characters with this kind of curiosity for the natural world, and also how she managed to do it convincingly. These are not just characters, they are brilliantly drawn living people. Eliot achieved this at least in part because she shared with her characters what was really important: that same curiosity about the world.

And Eliot was not atypical of her society. In the first half of the 19th century something of a botanical craze swept Europe. It was a combination of circumstances: advances in travel and navigation, and advances in the industrial power of western European countries, meant whole ‘new’ worlds were opened up to eager explorers. Many terrible things were done as part of this wave of empire-building, of course—and the worlds the explorers opened up weren’t new at all, not to their all-too-soon-to-be-extinguished indigenous inhabitants.

But if one major positive result did come from this wave of exploration, it was a growing conception of the fantastic variety, and yet strange interconnectedness, of the world of flora and fauna. No voyage was complete without its ship’s naturalist, no landfall without its excited harvest of new samples.

This mapping of the world’s species laid the vital groundwork for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In the seemingly endless plaudits for Darwin’s theory, little mention is made of the armies of botanists—mostly amateur, self-taught, and self-driven—who essentially collected the data that made the whole idea possible.

A prime example of an ‘amateur’ scientist at the vanguard of the botanical craze was the Scottish botanist Robert Brown. As ship’s naturalist on the first circumnavigation of Australia between 1801 and 1805, Brown collected almost 4000 species previously unknown to European science.

Brown fits in particularly well here because he is actually mentioned in Eliot’s Middlemarch: in Chapter 17, Lydgate and the vicar Mr Farebrother strike a bargain over an ‘anencephalous monster’ preserved in one of Farebrother’s glass jars: ‘I have some sea mice,’ offers Lydgate in exchange, ‘—And I will throw in Robert Brown’s new thing, Microscopic observations on the pollen of plants—if you don’t happen to have it already.’ The swap is concluded to both parties’ satisfaction.

Robert Brown was no more a professional scientist than George Eliot, not by the educational standards of today: though he studied medicine at Edinburgh he never officially graduated, and he taught himself botany simply by doing it: ‘botanizing’ all over the Scottish hills. Nevertheless he became one of the most respected botanists of the age, founding the Botanical Department at the British Museum (later to become the separate Natural History Museum). He advised Charles Darwin on how best to equip himself for the voyage on the Beagle: ‘I stand in awe of the great Robertus Brown,’ Darwin said later.

Robert Brown has been somewhat forgotten even in the scientific world, as I describe in Middle World. Brown’s achievements weren’t confined to botany: his observations of the incessant random motion of small particles in water (later known as ‘Brownian motion’) would have consequences ranging from the final proof that matter was made from atoms, to today’s growing understanding of how biological molecules such as proteins and enzymes keep cells going.

Brown’s self-taught status wasn’t unusual in the scientific world of the time: he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in the same ceremony as fellow ‘unqualified’ giants of science, Michael Faraday and John Dalton. Like Faraday and Dalton, Brown was simply someone who made it his business to be curious about the natural world around him. It was no coincidence, I suspect, that George Eliot picked Robert Brown out for a mention in her novel—a novel, ultimately, of curious people.

Do we have such examples—novels of curious people—in the vanguard of our literature today? I’m not sure we do (perhaps better-read blog-perusers will enlighten me by liberal use of the ‘comment’ button…) Even if we do, I don’t think they are celebrated in the way other literature is.

But surely it’s a problem that concerns all of us, not just readers and writers of novels. Curiosity has been confined to scientists—professionals of curiosity, if you will—and the rest of us are not supposed to bother with it.

Science, meanwhile, has been cartooned into a sideline in our culture, reflected in the cartoon science we see both in novels and even in popular science itself (painfully pompous TV dramatizations, the ‘Nazi bomber found on darkside of the moon’ sort of sensationalist headlines that appear with depressing zeal these days on the covers of science magazines).

I think George Eliot and Robert Brown—one a novelist, one a scientist, but surely closer to each other than many novelists and scientists come these days—would have been disappointed, not to say shocked, to see the low value we place on curiosity about the natural world in our culture today.

My example of George Eliot might be countered with the point that the leisured classes of the 19th century had the time to be curious—because the servile majority were suffering in slums and poverty. I can’t argue with that. But--all the more reason why we have a duty to take advantage of our increased quality of life nowadays! We owe it to the servile majority that most of us are descended from not to be content to be dumb incurious animals. We owe it to them to strive to be curious, demanding, alert members of a fortunately (in some ways) better world.

A literature of curiosity would be a better literature. But more importantly, a culture of curiosity would be a better culture. And perhaps we would stand a better chance of survival.