Jane Austen, Darwin's favorite author who inspires scientific research

When Charles Darwin was to embark on the Beagle To travel around the world, one of her sisters told her to take a copy of PersuasionBut he hesitated because, he said, he knew the novel by heart. Darwin was passionate about Jane Austen's works and was fortunate enough to share that enthusiasm with Robert FitzRoy, the ship's captain. Perhaps that's why the naturalist wasn't so pleased to see the writer's image replace his own on the ten-pound note in 2017. In fact, it gave way to one of his favorite authors.

When Austen died, Darwin was eight years old. The Origin of Species It was published in 1859, a few decades later. This hasn't prevented the English author's novels from being analyzed through the lens of evolution and labeled pre-evolutionary, because everything seems stable and changes are slow and small—except for romantic relationships. In her book Darwin and the NovelistsIn a 1988 book, George Levine of Rutgers University in New Jersey argues that Austen reflected pre-Darwinian approaches to natural theology. Mansfield Park The system is stable, and the characters can regroup and recombine like substances in a reaction, but the overall alterations are minimal. In later authors, such as George Eliot, societies with many changes and profound interactions between their characters appear.

The similarities between the two characters were pointed out by Peter W. Graham, an English professor at Virginia Tech, in his book Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists Published in 2008. Perhaps these similarities aren't convincing enough because they could be found in other authors: both were keen observers, seeing the big picture and the smallest details in the microcosms they analyzed. Another link between Darwin and Austen appeared in the 1990s with a controversial school of thought called literary Darwinism. The idea was to analyze literary works within the context of evolution, natural selection, competition, collaboration, and adaptation. There are many publications critical of this approach, and many will find it exaggerated or absurd. But Austen's novels have been analyzed from this perspective. It has been argued that women's search for marriages with high-status men aligns with the Darwinian theory that females seek males who will ensure the success of their offspring. And if men seek attractive women, it is because, again according to Darwin, they see youth and beauty as desirable traits for ensuring reproduction. However, in Austen's novels, many characters also demand that their character and mind stand out. This may be highly controversial and seem far-fetched. But perhaps not as far-fetched as the thesis of Michael Chwe, a professor of Political Science at the University of California, who in 2013 claimed in a book that the English author anticipated game theory. One of his arguments was the presence in the novels of strategic thinking, in which a person makes goal-oriented calculations based on their expectations of others' rational calculations.

In the minds of readers

More concrete and tangible examples can be given of how Jane Austen's novels have been used in scientific studies. In 2012, Natalie Philips, a literature professor at Michigan State University and an Austen enthusiast, wondered whether different ways of reading a novel involved different parts of the brain. In collaboration with neurobiologists at Stanford University, she conducted a test with Mansfield ParkHe had a group of English graduates read excerpts from the novel, first for pleasure and then more attentively and critically. Each participant underwent an MRI machine equipped with a screen to display the text. The scanner captured brain activity, and another system tracked eye movement and measured heart rate and respiration. The results indicated that, as hypothesized, each reading mode activated different parts of the brain. The surprising finding was that in the more attentive reading, in addition to areas related to short-term memory and planning, circuits normally involved in spatial and motor skills were also activated, as if the reader were imagining themselves within the action. Furthermore, the changes in the brain persisted for several days. The following year, a study led by Gregory Berns of Emory University in Atlanta corroborated that reading novels enhanced brain connectivity and caused changes in the left temporal lobe, involved in visual memory and language comprehension. Neuroscience confirms what we already suspected: reading novels is good brain exercise.

Chemistry has not been on the sidelines ofAustenologyIn 2021, researchers at the University of Texas used polymers to encode and decode a fragment of Mansfield Parkwhich begins like this: "If one scheme for happiness fails, human nature resorts to another." To overcome the binary system, in which only zeros and ones exist, the authors created a 16-character molecular alphabet, which provides many more possible combinations and increases storage capacity. It is based on the synthesis of 18 oligourethanes, plastics like polyurethanes but with shorter chains. Each one has 10 monomers, joined in different orders.

As they explained in the journal Cell Reports Physical ScienceThe idea is to construct, using an algorithm, a code that establishes the equivalences between each oligourethane and letters or words. Thus, the synthesis of the different molecules with monomers in a specific order became a secret key that hid the text. Anyone wishing to recover the information can do so by using the algorithm in reverse: identifying the molecules by chromatography and translating them into text.

At the same time that Jane Austen continues to gain readers, she also generates all these scientific studies and theories, some more consistent and others more dubious. In any case, to paraphrase the well-known opening ofPride and PrejudiceWe can say that it is a universally accepted truth that literary works have multiple, and often enriching, readings.