Posted on 02/22/2006 7:01:15 PM PST by gobucks
On Charles Darwin’s passing in 1882, influential friends intervened to thwart his wish to be buried in a humble coffin in his parish. Such an interment, they felt, would deprive England of the privilege of honouring one of its great men. So it was that the professed agnostic was buried with high ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Canon Frederic Farrar’s eulogy assured his countrymen that the views of the deceased did not menace the Crown with the boisterous materialism promoted in the free thought press. Darwin’s life-long service to his parish, and his occasional acknowledgement of the Creator, proved his loyalty to Britain’s noble values.
This adroit evasion was not the beginning of the Darwin legend, but it was a landmark in his sanctification as the presiding spirit of scientific enlightenment. Signs abound that the celebration of his bicentennial will reverberate with new hymns and hosannas. Indeed, it has already begun with the opening of the lavish Darwin Exhibition at New York’s American Museum of Natural History in November last year. In June the exhibition will move successively to Boston, Chicago, and Toronto before finally opening in the London Natural History Museum in time for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth on February 12, 2009. A quality online version of the exhibition is accessible at www.amnh.org.
The print media are also in the stream. In conjunction with the exhibition opening, leading science publisher W.W. Norton issued two beautifully produced volumes. One is by the exhibition’s curator and innovative evolution scientist, Niles Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. The second is the issue of four of Darwin’s publications under a single cover. This massive tome, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, is beautifully done with no cost spared on typography, layout, and graphics. Norton recruited the world’s most honored naturalist, Edward O. Wilson, to serve as editor and to write glosses on the “four great books of Charles Darwin”.
The hosannas of these distinguished scientists provoke awe and adulation. We learn that the Origin is the “greatest scientific book of all time” that “fully explained” the struggle for existence (Wilson). The Voyage of the Beagle “is today regarded as intellectually the most important travel book of all time” (Wilson). Darwin “demonstrated without a shadow of doubt that life evolved”; “no idea in science has shaken society so much as evolution”; “Darwin did more to secularise the Western world than any other single thinker” (Eldredge).
The sanctification continues: Darwin revolutionised the biology of his day; he fashioned a new concept of humankind; he challenged basic philosophical and religious ideas about the nature and meaning of life; so profound was his insight that his thought remains relevant to contemporary biology. These surpassing achievements brought a “revolution” equal in importance to the Copernican revolution. Smitten with reverence, my eye falls on the dust jacket to contemplate the photo of the dignified aged Darwin: yes, he looks like a prophet!
As is wont with preaching, no evidence for this litany is offered: evidence implies evaluation and critical scrutiny. But outside the cathedral, old habits disturb my rapture. What grading system ranks Origin as the greatest book in science? What titles were runners-up? What were those signal discoveries that transformed the biological sciences of his day? What was his new concept of humankind? Did it support the actively canvassed universal suffrage and gender equality? What was the secularising element of Darwin’s thought, and how did it relate to the well-established influence of irreligion, industrialisation, engineering marvels, the free press, socialism, positivism, and the notorious laissez-faire doctrine of survival of the fittest?
These questions are not asked because answering them requires returning Darwin to his context, where the Legend’s claims are readily seen to be baseless. Darwin’s secularising influence is said to stem from his rebuttal of the creationist explanation in natural history. But the refutation was largely redundant. Secularisation was deeply entrenched before his birth (his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was an energetic secularist, as were utilitarians, free thinkers, and socialists): by 1860 it had achieved a massive base, including important elements of the Anglican clergy.
As for the sciences, they had been purged of non-mechanical causality long before. Only Darwin’s fellow naturalists, many of whom were clergy, continued to invoke divine causality. The voyage of the Beagle was one among many explorations. It isn’t obviously superior to those that came before or after. The Challenger expedition of 1880, for example, was an oceanographic survey whose results were published in 50 volumes, including, incidentally, a refutation of Darwin’s theory of the origin of coral reefs.
The most grotesque distortion is the claim that Darwin’s discoveries reformed the biological sciences of his day. The reality: Darwin’s science was in the amateur mode of the naturalist, whereas the physical and biological sciences had shifted into the precision instrument mode of the modern laboratory. This difference was well established in the public mind.
Real science was the sort of thing that Lord Kelvin, the maestro of the transatlantic cable and of the physics of the steam engine, did. In the biological sciences, the hero was Louis Pasteur, the conqueror of infectious agents and epidemics. The focus of those sciences was cellular biology, microbiology, biochemistry, and neurology, using constantly innovating experimental equipment and processes. They poured forth a stream of practical and profitable innovations, the most celebrated being vaccination, which was made legally obligatory in most European countries.
Darwin the country gentleman was in complete disconnect with this world. His measuring tool was a seven-foot ruler calibrated by the village carpenter, and his microscope was an ancient Smith and Beck model of low resolution. He had no instruments for measuring speed or for reducing tissue to smallest parts. He felt no need to acquire up-to-date equipment, whose cost he reproached, despite his great wealth.
The contrast might be put this way. Darwin made no discovery of Nobel Prize caliber, whereas Louis Pasteur made two such discoveries. Or more tellingly perhaps, when Darwin’s son Francis wished to pursue advanced botanical research, he migrated to a high-tech institute in Germany. There he learned first hand that his father’s science was amateur.
The legend-credulous express dismay when challenged to produce just one instance of a Darwin discovery that was taken over by experimental biologists. “How can you doubt what everyone knows?” goes the response. Darwin, after all, proved evolution! So they say in fulsome certainty, but what are we to make of his failure to make the discovery central to his theory? I mean the science of heredity. He lavished attention on domestication, conducting many plant and animal breeding experiments, because he believed that such induced changes were evolution in miniature.
The lead chapter of the Origin argues this case. But, in a singular demonstration of the limits of even great minds, he didn’t notice that domestication evidence massively contradicted his theory. It disproved his key premise that continuous selection of a single trait would evolve a population of better adapted organisms. Domestication shows on the contrary that selection for a single trait results in changes in numerous traits - changes that are usually maladaptive.
Domestication also provided abundant documentation of events that Darwin stoutly declared cannot happen: single generation “leaps”, such as the two-headed calf and other “sports of nature”, that disprove his “gradualist” theory of organic change. The correct conception of inheritance was published in 1866 by Gregor Mendel. His carefully controlled experiments on hybrid garden peas (Pisum savtivum) enabled him to formulate the laws of segregation and independent assortment, which explain why the variations of pea traits (round and wrinkled, yellow and green) occurred in the ratios that he experimentally observed.
These trait variations are “leaps” that Darwin’s theory denies. It was the beginning of genetics and the first discovery of a quantitative biological law. Mendel believed that his discovery disproved Darwin’s theory. He was right.
Mendel’s publication enjoyed none of the braggadocio of “revolutionary” enlightenment. Indeed, it had no uptake whatever during his time. Yet eventually biologists rediscovered his work and embarked on a course leading to the discovery of chromosomes, genes, alleles, and sexual replication. It is a lesson worth repeating that Darwinians of the day recoiled in horror from these splendid discoveries. They proudly declared their “faith” in the master while hurling themselves vehemently at the new science. One, the brilliant Karl Pearson, persisted in dogged opposition to genetics until his death in 1936! So much for evidence.
The Darwin Exhibition doesn’t mention Mendel and Pasteur. Bringing them into the picture would spoil the halo over Darwin’s head and cast doubt on his singularity. Nor does it mention that the introduction of genetics, today considered the experimental core of any possible evolutionary theory, was accomplished over the bodies of true Darwinians. This silence about fundamental history of science underscores the regrettable faith-based orientation of the Darwin bicentenary, together with the implication that science is based on authority.
Creationists, alas, will probably conclude that the exhibition’s symphony to the legend confirms their conviction that to refute evolution one need but refute Darwin. This nonsense may be cast out by discarding the legend, which in any case has no business in science.
Hiram Caton is a former professor of politics and history at Griffith University in Queensland and an associate of the US National Centre for Science Education. He is working on a book titled Evolution in the Century of Progress. He can be contacted at hcaton2@bigpond.net.au.
He tried to cut the fads to get more reliability to his sources. Murray's "Kronbach's alpha[?]"- [quoting from memory, do not have the book at hand right now] coefficients - some statistical measure of reliability - were in the 0.95 range for his meta-studies. On the face of it, 0.95 sounds decent. Besides, his results tend to confirm the general idea of who is hot and who is not, so they are neither revolutionary nor particularly contradictory, but merely provide a measure of quantification. You could get his book ether from Amazon or from public library, it is a pretty decent book.
Read your link again.
NO WHERE does Magic give claim to the drug. In Fact he does the opposite and so does his wife who said, the doctors THINK it's the medicine. See Who they give the credit to. They have no idea if he really took the medicine. Johnson gives NO credit to the medicine.
Do you want to correct your post that reads...See, you were just complaining about creationists being called liars. And I replied that the problem is, people post falsehoods without any apparent attempt to check on their truth.
Don't worry, he will dis Nobel Laureates too. A legend in his own mind....
All in good fun Perfessor.
DK
You're delusional.
''Earvin is doing very well,'' Drs. David Ho and Michael Mellman said in a statement. ''However, we must emphasize that 'undetectable' doesn't equal 'absent.' It would be premature and incorrect to say Earvin is 'virus-free.''' The doctors added: ''We are very pleased he has adhered to his daily drug regimen and that is reflected in his good health
So you're cliaming the doctors lied?
Just one Nobel laureate, Kary Mullis. You do know Mullis claims to have been spoken to by a 'glowing raccoon' who accosted him on his way home one might, and said 'Good Evening Doctor'.
Of course it might have just been an LSD flashback.
"See, you were just complaining about creationists being called liars. And I replied that the problem is, people post falsehoods without any apparent attempt to check on their truth. And you just illustrated what I said beautifully."
Uhm, you are the one who is playing fast and loose with the facts. You have just illustrated what I said.
1) Magic Johnson has never had any sypmtoms of ARC (AIDS-related complex)
2) He never had any symptoms of ARC even BEFORE he started taking the drugs.
3) Yes, he has had the markers for HIV infection but as you well know that's not the same thing as ARC (the HIV virus infected him with flu-like symptoms for awhile).
4) The whole point of Mullis, Duesberg, et. al. is to point out that people in other parts of the world have symptoms of ARC without being HIV+. They have never said that HIV does not exist.
5) Some of the researchers were widely published and received research grants prior to calling into doubt the HIV causes AIDS theory. Once they expressed their doubts they have not been able to get published, even when they have had valid critiques. After all, if scientists were so open to critical thought why is someone considered a "good" scientist all the way up until they attempt to publish something that doesn't agree with the status quo, and then afterward they are considered "nutcases" unless they repent and express the error of their ways (just like Galileo)?
6) Many of the evos on FR claim that there is much open debate in the scientific community. The way certain researchers have been treated when they dare to question the current dogma argues against this. There are many examples in history of dogma overcoming scientific reasoning, and not just persecution by religious zealots but by other scientists. Do you assert that this is no longer the case? It's more likely that the same influences that drove the adherence to dogma in the halls of academia in the past is still in operation today.
7) Closed-mindedness is not the exclusive right of religious zealots but often of scientists, too.
Are you saying the Magic and his wife are lying?
No where do they claim medicine helped him - IN FACT - they say the opposite - ...the doctors THINK.
That's a bit of a stretch. The broad professionalizing of science only got going well into the 1860s. Darwin was not at all behind the times as the article seeks to suggest. Plus Darwin did plenty of lab type work, e.g. his extensive dissections, especially of barnacles.
Magic and his wife are not doctors, and have no idea what reduced his virus levels.
And he got a Nobel prize and you didn't. Nobel envy, your aspirations too small? You went to a UFO site to dis him. Kind of mingy even for a world class guy like you.
Did he claim these experiences were scientific? No. Did he use these to further his scientific theories? No.
Ad Hominem is the best you got perfessor.
Lame.
DK
It's time for you to beam up to the mothership, guy.
Interesting article. At one time, Freud was adored by the psychiatric community. Times change.
You brought up UFO evidence. Beam yourself up.
Lame is lame.
Nobel envy is sad.
Get a Nobel, and maybe I'll listen to your antics.
Are you up to the challenge?
DK
Aww, you're no fun at all ;-).
Thanks for earlier proving my point, though: you will call people liars when what is really happening is a disagreement.
And the corollary to that is what I stated:
"Closed-mindedness is not the exclusive right of religious zealots but often of scientists, too."
Have a nice day.
Magic and his wife are not doctors, and have no idea what reduced his virus levels
No one knows anything but the doctors! LOL
What are you so adamant in discounting what Magic and his wife say about THEIR OWN experience?
I would say "spectacularly" ignorant, but it's peculiar too. Also quite bitchy. The author needs a Midol drip.
Simply stunning eruption. Can the appearance of holocaust deniers in a CREVO thread be far behind?
"What are you so adamant in discounting what Magic and his wife say about THEIR OWN experience?"
The supposedly "hard-core" scientists on these threads always crack me up. When they have no answer to certain facts they just start calling people crackpots.
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