The reason we all remember Darwin's name and not Wallace's, the reason why Charles Darwin is a world historical figure is the fact that he not only developed the theory of natural selection but documented it in a way so thorough, so meticulous, so well-ordered and in such overwhelming detail that to read Origin of Species and come away still thinking that the earth is only 6000 years old would be a bit like spending the day at the Uffizi and denying that there had ever been a Renaissance.
http://www.amnh.org/...
http://www.nileseldredge.com/
To put yourself in the right mind to go see the Nile's Eldredge's Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, I suggest doing the following. Make sure all of the data on your computer is backed up to DVDs. Then open the case of your computer and run a magnet over the hard drive. Throw the hard drive in the trash, go to a CompUSA, buy a new one and spend the better part of a weekend copying the information from the DVDs back onto the new hard drive. Unless you're a remarkably ordered, meticulous person, the unorganized data you have stored on DVDs will mean something very different from the organized data you had on the hard drive before you destroyed it. If, like me, you own three Nikon DSLR bodies that you use relentlessly, you will find yourself quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data you've created.
Charles Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution. In fact, his grandfather Erasmus had speculated on the transmutation of species decades earlier and a man named Robert Chambers had published a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation that had become a best seller shortly after Darwin returned from his voyage around the world on the Beagle. Darwin had not even been the only person to propose the theory of natural selection. Another naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin's, had developed the same theory almost simultaneously. In fact, it was Wallace's letters to Darwin announcing his intentions to publish his own work that finally motivated Darwin to publish Origin of Species, over 20 years after he had essentially finished work on the theories of evolution and natural selection.
The reason we all remember Darwin's name and not Wallace's, the reason why Charles Darwin is a world historical figure is the fact that he not only developed the theory of natural selection but documented it in a way so thorough, so meticulous, so well-ordered and in such overwhelming detail that to read Origin of Species and come away still thinking that the earth is only 6000 years old would be a bit like spending the day at the Uffizi and denying that there had ever been a Renaissance. Indeed, Eldredge has created his own mini Darwin museum within the Museum of Natural History documenting Darwin's power to document, his passion for detail and his astonishing ability to gather evidence and generalize from what he's found. You come away in awe at Charles Darwin's powers of observation and almost conclude that you're in the presence of an intellect of an almost entirely different species from your own. Origin of Species, simply put, is the greatest piece of detective work in history.
But the Uffizi can be burned to the ground. Books can be burnt. Libraries can be destroyed. Culture's erased. It's happened many times before in history. The Alexandria Library was destroyed with hundreds of thousands of scrolls and thousands of works of art. Eastern European Jewish culture was all but wiped out by the Nazis. The Taliban blew two giant statues of Buddha off the face of the earth. The Nazis desecrated the grave of Leo Tolstoy and shamefully, our own neoconservative Arab haters stood by and did nothing while the national museum in Baghdad was looted and as history disappeared right before our eyes.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan had been attacked before. Genghis Khan had take shots at them and Aurangzeb the last Mughal emperor had dragged heavy artillery up to the spot where they were carved into the side of the mountain and tried to blow them off the face of the earth. But it wasn't until Mullah Omar and the Taliban were able to enforce the most literal interpretation of the Koran with 20th Century weapons that they finally met their end.
The great cultural tradition embodied in Origin of Species, the repository of natural history built up by Darwin himself, the body of medical knowledge that depends on knowing how natural selection works for its very existence, the methods of observation, cataloguing, and the language he used have also been attacked before. We all remember the Scopes trial, the attempts to label biology texts, the silly "Creation Science" debates from the 1980s, all of the previous attempts to blow Darwin's image from the face of the cliff that just bounced off the hard rock of scientific fact.
But now, like with the Buddhas at Bamiyan, Darwin's opponents are armed with the latest weapons, partly developed by the very scientific methods they reject. A refined version of "Creation Science", "Intelligent Design" has been developed as a way to make teaching the Bible in science classes look reasonable. The corporate media in its "fair and balanced" way would rather assume that there are two sides to any "debate" and talk to "spokesmen" for both rather than take the time to do the research necessary to distinguish between fact and fiction. The President of the United States is busy sticking his nose into medical and scientific research and carefully vetting it against his reading of the first few chapters of Genesis.
No, the Christian right isn't literally throwing books into bonfires (yet) or blowing up gigantic statues of Buddha (yet) but their attacks on the theory of evolution and on natural science can almost be looked at as a kind of "virtual book burning".
This is not an attack on religion. The Catholic Church, reactionary institution that it is, while promoting ideas that are impossible to explain using the scientific method, does not attack the scientific method. Rather, it claims that faith and science are two separate realities. Every mainline protestant church, as far as I know, accepts the theory of evolution and the scientific method, as do all but the most ultra orthodox sects of Judaism. Indeed, John Stevens Henslow, Darwin's mentor at Cambridge was an Anglican clergyman and Darwin himself at one time considered becoming a Church of England vicar.
What makes Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, Charles Colson and George Bush different from the Vatican or the Archbishop of Canterbury is the fact that they are trying to radically remake the way we acquire and evaluate information. Instead of throwing copies of Origin of Species into a bonfire and burning down repositories of fossils and natural specimens, these Christian fascists are attempting to shout down spokesman for evolution through the media, use the democratic process to make natural science subject to the standards of a barroom shouting match, to transform reality by preemptively outlawing any way of approaching reality that doesn't match their own.
Indeed, to talk to any Christian fundamentalist about the theory of evolution is to realize that their project is basically a destructive one. Any inability of any individual to explain why natural section works the way it does, any flaw in Darwin's methodology, any new information not yet assimilated into an evolutionary framework means that the entire explanation for the beginnings of humanity defaults to the King James Bible. So they attack and they attack and they attack because the more of evolutionary theory and natural science they can discredit, the more credibility (in their eyes) the King James Bible ultimately has.
The real danger here is that, once they realize that they won't be able to shout down every spokesman for evolution or indeed to explain how very much about medical science works without the theory of natural selection, the Christian fundamentalists will start burning books, blowing up museums, and killing biologists. This is almost as inevitable as killing Catholic priests in Poland was for the Nazis, once they decided that they needed their land as lebensraum.
In this sense, Niles Eldgedge and the American Museum of Natural History would qualify as "conservative" in the classic sense of the word and Falwell, Perkins, and Robertson as "radicals". Evolutionary theory is not only an educated guess about reality. It's a body of work, a repository of knowledge, a living body of work, an intellectual tradition, a physical reality. By gathering up so much of this rich this tradition in one place Eldredge has made the case better than any talking head in a debate on Fox News, and, what's more, he's made it obvious what the stakes are, protecting civilization from barbarism.