Lessons still to be learned (Charles Darwin and ideology over evidence)

[moobu2]

The Daily Telegraph called him "the greatest naturalist of our time, perhaps all time". For the Morning Post he was "the first biologist of his day". The Times saluted the rapid victory of Charles Darwin's great idea and said that "the astonishing revelations of recent research in palaeontology have done still more to turn what 20 years ago was a brilliant speculation into an established and unquestionable truth". The Manchester Guardian said that "few original thinkers have lived to see more completely the triumph of what is essential in their doctrine". The St James's Gazette predicted that England's children would one day be taught to honour Darwin "as the greatest Englishman since Newton".

These responses appeared in print on 21 April 1882, after the news of Darwin's death at his home in Down, Kent. The writers were people who knew the Bible, and they addressed readers who had grown up in an overtly devout society. Many remembered the religious and scientific uproar following publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. It argued, with detailed evidence, that life's extraordinary variety had stemmed, over an enormous period of time, from a common ancestry, and that the mechanism was the operation of natural selection upon tiny variations in heredity.

But Darwin's audience heard only part of the story. The clinching discovery of the biochemistry of genetic inheritance and therefore of random genetic mutation - the famous double helix of DNA - was not made until 1953. The mostly anonymous contributors who rushed to judgment that morning had before them only a fraction of the findings that now support the theory of evolution: a theory as confident as the predictions of Newtonian physics at speeds significantly lower than the velocity of light, as sure as the thesis that matter is composed of atoms. They could have been forgiven for their sometimes equivocal salutes.

There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin's theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other's beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin's reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin's contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.

The Guardian

[TlalocW]

1. While not much of a biologist and hardly a scientist

I do know that much of modern biology - including genetics - would not work if the Theory of Evolution did not.

TlalocW

[struggle4progress]

2. It would be interesting to know how answers to polls about evolution

depended on the particular question asked

It would also be interesting to know the correlations between attitudes towards evolution, attitudes towards science, and quality of general scientific knowledge

It is my impression that in the US a rather large number of people "complete" their education without learning much science at all -- and since the general quality of scientific information available through mass media is limited, most people who do not get some scientific background, as part of their general education, will not be able to make up the deficit easily later in life. Evolutionary theory is a "grand synthesis" that involves arguments from a number of disciplines; marginal familiarity with basic ideas, in at least one of the disciplines, provides some foothold to anyone interested in understanding something about the current state of the theory; but to a person, who lacks the most basic scientific concepts, it must appear as an arbitrary edifice, whose proponents bewilderingly switch argument style with lightning speed