Posted on 02/22/2006 7:01:15 PM PST by gobucks
On Charles Darwins 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 Farrars 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. Darwins life-long service to his parish, and his occasional acknowledgement of the Creator, proved his loyalty to Britains 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 Yorks 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 Darwins 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 exhibitions curator and innovative evolution scientist, Niles Eldredge, Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. The second is the issue of four of Darwins 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 worlds 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 Darwins 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 Legends claims are readily seen to be baseless. Darwins 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 Darwins fellow naturalists, many of whom were clergy, continued to invoke divine causality. The voyage of the Beagle was one among many explorations. It isnt 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 Darwins theory of the origin of coral reefs.
The most grotesque distortion is the claim that Darwins discoveries reformed the biological sciences of his day. The reality: Darwins 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 Darwins son Francis wished to pursue advanced botanical research, he migrated to a high-tech institute in Germany. There he learned first hand that his fathers 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 didnt 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 Darwins theory denies. It was the beginning of genetics and the first discovery of a quantitative biological law. Mendel believed that his discovery disproved Darwins theory. He was right.
Mendels 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 doesnt mention Mendel and Pasteur. Bringing them into the picture would spoil the halo over Darwins 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 exhibitions 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.
OK - a "belief" then. You can hardly describe creationism as a scientific fact.
The Triumvirate of Modernism were Darwin, Freud, and Marx. Marx and Freud are already on the skids, which leaves Darwin as a primary target of the Post-moderns--that's us.
But it's just one more thing you two have in common, DK!
Nobel issues perfesser? Small dreams, and small pants, RWP? He won a Nobel, you aren't in the competician.
Envy is not your best suite, RWP.
Get a Nobel RWP...
It can't be that tough, you carp on others that got the prize.
Get something big guy.
Earn your ability to dis a Laureate
Third tier scientist, how nice?
DK
Is that like a beautician?
You couldn't make it in the movies, why would you want to try in television?
DK
I'm not sure the monkey men are really offended actually, so you can stop holding your breath...; and besides, it was actually an accurate portrayal of who we are from their pov, no?
That's a bit like arguing about whether the engine or drive train is more important to an automobile.
Mendel and Pasteur ... don't have any idea about their writings regarding Christ, but now I have a bit of researching to do... Thanks.
I'm not sure that Mendel's work was ever accurately represented, much less in this article.
I liked the article because of the historical details. I'm not saying all the details are correct, just that the names and publications are available to anyone who wants to look for themselves.
Your call though.
So if you were to chose whether evolution of antelopes was more important to gasoline or diesel engines you would say...
WTF
Moron.
DK
Beware the dark and stormy knight.
If a simple scientific theory can harm your faith, it may be time to re-examine that faith.
Oh, like most 'special people', he's really quite gentle.
The AIDS wackjobs are out in force this morning, not just the ID wackjobs.
Magic and his wife have no idea how to judge if the antiviral drugs are working
Really out in force, it's crowded. It's good the evo's are in their cage.
So what category do you put Magic and his wife - you know, those clueless people, that give God the glory and not the medicine.
I would throw in Nietzsche who is as popular and prophetic as ever. Freud isn't going away anytime soon either.
What a pantload. If your faith is so weak that you can't imaging a creator using evolution to meet his ends, you have your own problems to deal with.
Trying to pin all the moral ills of the world on a research biologist, observering and speculating of the origins of species, is such a copout that it would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic.
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