When 26 year-old Charles Darwin sailed into the Galapagos Islands in 1835 aboard the HMS Beagle, little could he have imagined that nearly two centuries later citizens around the globe would be marking the bicentennial of his birth, on February 12th, 1809 – the same day as brought into the world the 19th-century’s other most famous personage in Abraham Lincoln.
That two such remarkable men share the same day of birth is truly one of modern history’s most remarkable coincidences.
Darwin’s bicentennial year also marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species (actually, the abbreviated title), which in 1859 brought human nature – for the first time – out of the province of God, and into the realm of scientific discourse. Neither science nor religion have since ever been the same.
2009 is truly a Darwin Year, and it seems therefore a worthwhile endeavor that we this week reflect on the significance and impact this man and his theory have had on the sciences, on modern society, and on our view of ourselves on this planet.
In Origin of Species, Darwin gave the world the idea – worked upon, it must be said, by others before him – that life in its myriad forms evolved through a natural process of adaptation to changing conditions.
The life we see around us, he postulated, the life that we call our own, evolved from previous life forms, and they in turn descended through the majestic might of natural selection from ancestral species before them.
In its time and still today this was and remains a radical – even blasphemous – idea to some. The idea that animals, plants, and human beings had not been created fully formed, as the Bible implied, but had developed slowly in a long period of evolutionary adaptation to their environment was and remains an idea that shakes many fervently faithful – most of all in these United States – to their very core.
And yet Darwin’s simple idea has since withstood 150 years of scrutiny by tens of thousands of scientists all over the world. So overwhelming is the body of evidence, that Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection is the correct and best explanation of the great cornucopia of living creatures with which we share this planet, that science now knows Darwin’s theory to be not just the most important concept in biology, but perhaps the most revolutionary scientific idea in history.
Evolution by natural selection is an absolute principle of nature, underlying and interlocking all earthly life. It operates everywhere, and it is astonishing. It explains life on Earth in its outrageous entirety, all the tens of millions of species here today, and all the hundreds of millions of creatures that have arisen and vanished in the several billions years since life first appeared.
Nothing, absolutely nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. It can safely be said that the theory of evolution is and will forever be the vibrant foundation for all biology.
The tactics of the religious naysayers to foster illusions to the contrary, evolution is widely regarded as one of the best-supported ideas in science, grounded in a dizzying array of incontrovertible evidence, bedrock-solid, unassailable, and, perhaps most importantly to the non-scientist, uncontroversial.
Science accepts evolution as the logical conclusion of countless experiments and observations stretching back more than a century. The evidence for evolution abounds, within us, beneath us, and surrounding us. The National Academy of Sciences has in fact declared the theory of evolution to be "the central unifying concept of biology", and has definitively (if plainly) stated further that:
"Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred, or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence."
Yet while Darwin was right about most things, he made a fair few mistakes. Modern evolutionary biology is built on some – but not all – of Darwin’s ideas, but has gone far beyond them. Scientists alive and not yet born will continue to bring mankind further evidence and understanding of how complex life arose from simple life over the course of our planet’s four billion-year history.
What is evolution not? It is not a religion or a philosophy, nor an outlook or a dogma. It is simply an explanation that makes sense of the data – as any good theory should do.
Evolution does not explain the origins of life on this our remarkable planet, or the origin of the universe within which this planet is but a drop of water in a titanic ocean. But the theory of evolution by natural selection does explain a nature so full of wonder that a simple, primitive life-form, no more than a germ, could evolve across the ages into a butterfly, a tiger, and a man.
And yet Darwin’s theory does not claim, as has been simplistically and sarcastically portrayed, that man descended from apes, but only that today’s humans and today’s apes share a common ancestor in the distant, prehistoric past. Chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas are our cousins, not our ancestors. The theory of evolution never did, does not now, and never will teach that man came from monkeys.
Darwinism has enemies mostly because it is not compatible with a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. Though Darwin’s theory is an intellectually satisfying and empirically supported account of human existence (for man is an evolved species whose behavior makes no sense unless evolution is comprehended), it clashes with the religious beliefs that many people hold.
Darwin’s name, in fact, has become a byword for atheism in fundamentalist circles, yet Origin was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober, careful explanation of a scientific hypothesis. Belief in evolution can be entirely compatible with religious faith: an omnipotent God, whose existence if believed, could have created a universe in which life subsequently evolved.
When it comes to evolution, the secular reader is here reminded not to paint our religious neighbors with too broad a brush. The Catholic Church, for instance, long ago came to terms with evolution and accepted it as the mechanism by which God created life on this planet. Among the world’s most Catholic nations are nations with the highest percentages of acceptors of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
It is largely fundamental Protestantism, predominantly within the United States, that most dogmatically objects to Darwin. Yet another of America’s bizarre paradoxes, that we are a nation at once so puritanical and so permissive, so authoritarian and so anarchist, so technological and so flat-earth.
So why does evolution matter?
At an individual level, it might not matter much. However, any society which bases its scientific education of its youngest citizens on anything other than reality is heading for disaster. Not to teach the science of evolution is to demonstrate contempt for scientific evidence in favor of political and religious ideology.
A society in which ideology supplants evidence is a society where future imagination, innovation and advancement are seriously at risk. Failing to teach our children the facts of evolution leaves them unprepared to critically assess the world around them.
While there exists no scientific controversy about the facts of evolution, nor about the importance of natural selection as the dominant explanatory process of evolution, there undoubtedly remain fascinating details to be worked out regarding additional mechanisms of evolution.
But students who are not given the opportunity to acquire an understanding of evolution, or who are deliberately confused by ideology disingenuously disguised as "teaching the controversy," cannot achieve a basic level of scientific literacy.
This is a great danger to a society where future comfort, progress and economic success depend on continued scientific, medical and technological innovation.
Among industrialized counties in the world, the United States today ranks 33rd — just above Turkey but below Latvia and Bulgaria — in public acceptance of the most fundamentally profound scientific concept we have — evolution. Science is inspiring and beautiful, but science is also a human endeavor essential to our survival as a nation in a globally competitive world.
Perhaps it is worth considering the words of Thomas Huxley, often referred to as "Darwin’s Bulldog" because of his passionate defense of Darwin’s ideas, who said: "Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future."
Last December, Barack Obama gave a radio address that succinctly discussed the essential compatibility of science, truth and democracy:
"Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.
"It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us."
Well said, Mr. President.
Evolution provides a scientific basis for understanding our human ancestry and how we connect to the story of life on Earth. Not only are we part of life on this planet, but we are intimately connected to it. Let us all support the scientific effort toward greater understanding and appreciation of the beauty, complexity, diversity and interconnectedness of all of us on the good Earth.
Thank you for reading, and Happy Darwin Week!