Darwin at 200: The Ongoing Force of His Unconventional Idea

[groovedaddy]

I can’t help wondering what Charles Darwin would think if he could survey the state of his intellectual achievement today, 200 years after his birth and 150 years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” the book that changed everything. His central idea — evolution by means of natural selection — was in some sense the product of his time, as Darwin well knew. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, who grasped that there was something wrong with the conventional notion of fixed species. And his theory was hastened into print and into joint presentation by the independent discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace half a world away.

But Darwin’s theory was the product of years of patient observation. We love to believe in science by epiphany, but the work of real scientists is to rigorously test their epiphanies after they have been boiled down to working hypotheses. Most of Darwin’s life was devoted to gathering evidence for just such tests. He writes with an air of incompleteness because he was aware that it would take the work of many scientists to confirm his theory in detail.

I doubt that much in the subsequent history of Darwin’s idea would have surprised him. The most important discoveries — Mendel’s genetics and the structure of DNA — would almost certainly have gratified him because they reveal the physical basis for the variation underlying evolution. It would have gratified him to see his ideas so thoroughly tested and to see so many of them confirmed. He could hardly have expected to be right so often.

Perhaps one day we will not call evolution “Darwinism.” After all, we do not call classical mechanics “Newtonism.” But that raises the question of whether a biological Einstein is possible, someone who demonstrates that Darwin’s theory is a limited case. What Darwin proposed was not a set of immutable mathematical formulas. It was a theory of biological history that was itself set in history. That the details have changed does not invalidate his accomplishment. If anything, it enhances it. His writings were not intended to be scriptural. They were meant to be tested.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/opinion/12thu4.html?th&emc=th

[InvisibleTouch]

1. Happy birthday Charles Darwin!

He always struggled with the means by which his inherited characteristics were passed on. He thought it was a mingling of the "blood," but knew that couldn't be quite right, because offspring aren't necessarily a blend of their parents' traits, and often a trait will "skip a generation" and show up full-blown in a grandchild. So that was a major source of frustration for him.

Ironically, he had a copy of Mendel's work on his bookshelf. It was in German, and Darwin didn't read German, so he never read it. The answer was right there within his reach all along, with the help of a friendly translator.

In any case, On the Origin of Species is a fascinating read, if you can handle Darwin's careful and meticulous prose, which seems to mirror the nature of his personality. Lots and lots of examples, all precisely documented.