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Forget Darwin?
By Robert H Olley | February 2nd 2009 06:25 AM | 5 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Robert H Olley

I work in the Polymer Physics Group of the Physics Department at the University of Reading.

I would describe myself as a Polymer Morphologist. I am not an astronaut, but I am a "Real


... Full Bio

This morning I woke up to read this in the Daily Telegraph:

Can we please forget about Charles Darwin?


As we celebrate Charles Darwin's anniversary, a leading geneticist argues that our understanding of evolution would be much improved if we removed Darwin's life - and pointless references to religion - from the equation.

What do you all think?  I'm in the middle of a working day, so I can't put my own thoughts down right now.

Comments

Hank's picture
I have argued both sides of this in the last week - that's just how I roll.    I don't think Darwin should be left to the baying hordes just becaue he didn't know everything (a leading geneticist has even fundamental knowledge Darwin did not have) but the obsession evolution detractors have with him borders on madness - no one sits around writing papers and funding entire institutions on the incompleteness of Bernoulli and insisting therefore planes do not fly, for example.

Here we'll be chock full of evolution stuff, some 40 articles of it without even counting all the places we will link to.   And, we're going to have a cool contest, I think.  So people may get sick of Sir Chuck but we're a science site so it's to be expected.  I agree that mainstream folks will get sick of it.

Oddly, biologists may often wish Darwin got less attention but astronomers are trying like crazy to generate the same buzz around Galileo.

Hank Campbell | 02/02/09 | 10:24 AM
adaptivecomplexity's picture
our understanding of evolution would be much improved if we removed
Darwin's life - and pointless references to religion - from the
equation.

Did the 2005 Einstein celebrations damage our understanding of relativity? It's fun to have scientific heroes.

On top of that, I've hardly heard any of Darwin's references to religion this year. In fact, we here more of Einstein's (admittedly flippant) references to God than we do of Darwin's.


Michael White | 02/02/09 | 12:22 PM
It can be easy to poke holes in books that were written over 100 years ago. But I think that people sometimes forget that they were written over 100 years ago. Had Darwin witnessed the scientific advancement that's occurred since his time, plus had access to the technology that we currently have, I'm sure he'd completely with the geneticist. But it's no coincidence that Darwin didn't have the insight into his field that we now have today, particularly because there was no Darwin before him for him to build off of.

Knowledge comes from people not from textbooks - I think that in the textbook teaching mentality these days, even professionals sometimes forget this. Which isn't to knock on the system, it certainly has its pros, but it creates many situations in textbook or curricula where you'll have 2 thematically related facts, which each legitimately speak poignantly to each other, but were established in completely different times in history under completely different contexts.

kerrjac (not verified) | 02/02/09 | 19:30 PM
Anyone who reads the "Origin" or anything else about Darwin would realize that Darwin recognized just how little he, and his contemporaries, actually knew. He thought that the fossil record would never provide enough information to confirm evolutionary charge. Yet the transformation of everything from forams and brachiopods to even the major Classes of Vetebrates are being unfolded daily. Darwin was wrong (creationists will applaud), evolution is confirmed by the fossil record all the time (now their heads explode).

Darwin, ultimately, was a bit lucky at being one of the first two individuals to truly recognize the power of Natural Selection (the other being Wallace). So he was able to get a head start on seeing all the relationships with the other realms of biology (he also studied these for almost 20 years with his secret...giving him even more of an advantage). He could apply his theory to embryology, vestigial traits, ecology, behavior, sexual selection, classification, biogeography, anatomy, and behavior. He pondered kin selection (in sterile social insects) and even neutrality theory almost a century before they became hot topics again. Still he was never able to resolve the puzzle of genetics, remained a semi-Lamarkian, and never quite settled in on a clear speciation theory. But in all these things he pointed the way to the research areas that still live with us in biological research. Even today Natural Selection models are being applied in organic chemistry research to try and puzzle out the conditions that might have led to the origin of life, and whether it's plausible it exists elsewhere.

cinnamonape (not verified) | 02/02/09 | 19:49 PM
To call Darwin ultimately "a bit lucky" I think misses the point entirely, unless if by luck you mean intensely studying a field for decades, and at the end of your study stringing together a plethora of phenomena about the world into a theory that would revolutionize the world. If that's luck, I'm not sure what else there is to life. I'm also not sure what you mean by his secretive ways, you can see all of his correspondence here http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/content/view/15/108/. The term "Lamarkian" only takes on meaning these days in contrast to Darwin. Calling Darwin "semi-Lamarkian" would be like calling George Washington a Republican.

kerrjac (not verified) | 02/02/09 | 20:13 PM

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