Darwin 200: Great expectations
Brendan Maher
Friday, 14 November 2008 12:40 UTC
Nature prodded some notable thinkers and commentators on what they hoped to see happen in the comming year of Darwin, and what they would consider a success. In addition to the range of opinions expressed in our commentary I’ll be posting additional thoughts below.
Use this space to respond to our commentators or provide your own wishes for what you’d like to see happen in during Darwin’s bicentenia.
Updated 19 November 2008 19:38 UTC
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Replies
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Kevin Padian, professor of integrative biology and curator of the museum of paleontology at UC Berkeley had this to say:
The Year of Darwin would be especially effective if our students began to learn what scientists actually do instead of what textbook writers imagine they do. Public education could begin to reflect what is known and practiced in science, instead of a cargo cult recitation of outdated Victorian concepts and prejudices. Evolution would become the central unifying theme of biology in public school curricula and textbooks, so that subjects such as physiology, anatomy, ecology, and classification would be taught in that light.
But this is America, where about 40% of the populace seems to think that The Flintstones is a documentary. Maybe some presidential leadership could change that. -
Stephen P. Hubbell, distinguished professor at the dept. of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA had this to say:
A major goal of “The Year of Darwin” should be for science educators to organize their efforts nationally to resist the antiscientific agenda of the religious fundamentalist right. I support the establishment of a society or nongovernmental organization with the mission of providing organized resistance to the efforts to desecularize science education, one of whose major goals is to elect school board members across the United States who understand science, evolution, and their fundamental importance as a core part of the curriculum in all secondary schools. -
Paul Rainey, professor of evolutionary genetics at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study & Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Massey University had this to say:
I imagine Darwin sitting in the seat opposite me, and asking me where next? I would imagine engaging him in discussion about individuality (in the sense that populations of entities that have variation, reproduction and heredity have the fundamental requirements — both necessary and sufficient — for evolution by natural selection). I suspect that Darwin would be amazed to realize that individuality (in the sense that he realized) exists at different levels of biological organization. I suspect that we would discuss this at great length. -
I look forward to more in-silico simulations of the process of evolution. As our knowledge of the genetic structure of a wide variety of living things explodes, it may become possible to actually model how particular phenotypic characteristics developed over time along with the genotypic changes that underlie them…and to replay this process in an animation that everyone can enjoy and understand.
Thanks to the pressure from creationists, evolution will become the best argued and most impressively PRESENTED theory in all of science. Even mathematically rigoruous theories of physics will not have the kind of jazzy educational videos and interactive animations that biologists will be stimulated to develop.
The bad news is that Christian creationism has reached the Islamic world and thanks to pre-existing memes regarding blasphemy and “fundamentalism”, this propaganda will be harder to counter in that region than anywhere else in the world. -
As we look forward to celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species, we can certainly give him credit for being at least the second person to discover the amazing power of natural selection.
The honor for possibly being the first belongs to Edward Blyth, whose 200th birthday we will celebrate on December 23, 2010.
Of course, natural selection cannot select anything that doesn’t already exist. In our Darwinian world, that honor belongs to the god of chance.
But what about Nature which allegedly does the selecting? If Nature was randomly generated then the entire process is random: random noise in – random noise out. Is this the Nature we observe? Was science built upon the idea that all of nature was random? Hardly. Nature only came into existence a finite time ago. It required a moment of Creation.
If one begins with a Creator, outside of time and space, then it is at least theoretically possible to front-load information into Nature’s filter. The bottom line is that evolution is only possible after the creation of an exceedingly intelligently designed and finely-tuned Cosmos.
Mind preceded matter. Creation preceded evolution.
On Blyth and natural selection (from Wikipedia):
Edward Blyth wrote three articles on variation, discussing the effects of artificial selection and describing the process of natural selection as restoring organisms in the wild to their archetype (rather than forming new species). He however never used the term “natural selection”. These articles were published in The Magazine of Natural History between 1835 and 1837. He was among the first to recognise the significance of Wallace’s paper “On the Law which has regulated the introduction of Species” and brought it to the notice of Darwin in a letter written in Calcutta on December 8, 1855:
“What think you of Wallace’s paper in the Ann. N. Hist.? Good! Upon the whole! Wallace has, I think, put the matter well; and according to his theory, the various domestic races of animals have been fairly developed into species. A trump of a fact for friend Wallace to have hit upon!”
There can be no doubt of Darwin’s regard for Edward Blyth: in the first chapter of The Origin of Species he writes “…Mr Blyth, whose opinion, from his large and varied stores of knowledge, I should value more than that of almost any one…”
Loren Eiseley claimed that “the leading tenets of Darwin’s work – the struggle for existence, variation, natural selection and sexual selection – are all fully expressed in Blyth’s paper of 1835”. He also cites a number of rare words, similarities of phrasing, and the use of similar examples, which he regards as evidence of Darwin’s debt to Blyth. However, the subsequent discovery of Darwin’s notebooks has “permitted the refutation of Eiseley’s claims.” Both Mayr and Darlington interpret Blyth’s view of natural selection as maintaining the type:
“Blyth’s theory was clearly one of elimination rather than selection. His principal concern is the maintenance of the perfection of the type. Blyth’s thinking is decidedly that of a natural theologian…” (Mayr, op cit) “What was the work of Blyth?… Blyth attempts to show how [selection and the struggle for existence] can be used to explain, not the change of species (which he was anxious to discredit) but the stability of species in which he ardently believed.”
Natural selection, in this negative formulation, acts only to preserve the type, constant and inviolate, by eliminating extreme variants and unfit individuals who threatened to degrade the essence of created form. The theologian William Paley had earlier presented this argument, doing so to refute (in later pages) a claim that modern species preserve the good designs winnowed from a much broader range of initial creations after natural selection had eliminated the less viable forms: “The hypothesis teaches, that every possible variety of being hath, at one time or other, found its way into existence (by what cause of in what manner is not said), and that those which were badly formed, perished”.
_____________________________________________________________________In short, natural selection acts as the primary mechanism in a Theory of Conservation which describes what might be termed “macrostasis” and the preservation of basic body plans through time.
As Darwin himself admitted in his Origin of Species:
“I am well aware that there is scarcely a single point discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result could be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts on both sides of each question, and this cannot possibly be done here.”
_________________________________________________________________________For more details regarding the conflicts between Darwinian theory and natural history see www.charlesdarwin.org
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PZ Myers noted Pharyngula blogger and associate professor at the University of Minnesota Morris had this to say:
Individual places are doing a great job of organizing local events. I do have some reservations, however. First, these are not projects that are going to change things right away. A lot of these events are University focused events, which means that people from the University will be attending them mainly. They were pretty much already largely on our side.
But the positive thing that these things can accomplish is really two fold: It will get the pro-science public better informed. They will be better able in coming years to help us out in things like science education and keeping creationism out of government. The other thing of course is that ideally it would stir up a little more passion in the scientists who are involved. They would realize that public outreach is important and we would see an increase in the assertiveness and aggressiveness by the scientific community in getting the message out there to people at large.
The clearest sign that this has been achieved would be if they keep on going. If we get to the end of the Year of Darwin and people say, “OK, we’re done”, then it’s failed.A P.S. on PZ: He’s talking at a Darwin event at the University of Pennsylvania tomorrow (Nov. 21).
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The first of the Nature debates on Darwin will take place in London on Monday 9 Febryary 2009. See the London Nature Network forum for all the details.
All the fantastic content in Nature celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday is available from this page, which is being updated with links to newly published articles as the year progresses.
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