The Greatest Emancipator: Reflections on Charles Darwin’s Birthday
12th February 2019
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Today marks the birth of one of history’s great emancipators, who freed people and minds from the shackles imposed on them by centuries of dogma and ignorance.
Well, this statement could apply to either of the two great men born on 12th February 1809, two hundred and ten years ago: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. But I think, to echo writers such as Christopher Hitchens, that Darwin was the more important of the two.
This year also marks the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s great idea in On the Origin of Species (published 24th November 1859). Since then, Darwin’s theory has been vindicated and expanded: it is no longer, and has not been for a long time, possible to deny that evolution by natural selection is a fact (though, naturally, there is some debate among scientists over the exact role of natural selection in the process of evolution, which, incidentally, was a general idea predating Darwin: it was his genius to provide evidence for it and explain its main mechanism). Why is Darwin’s theory so important, so powerful? It is beyond me as a lowly humanities student to expound on the intricacies of this most important of scientific ideas, but the basics are these: organisms change over time, and those which are best at surviving, and therefore reproducing, pass on the characteristics which enabled them to survive and reproduce. Survival of the Fittest This simple idea at a stroke explains the complexity and diversity of life on Earth. Before Darwin, the sheer baffling complexity of life suggested to most that there must have been a designer god- as William Paley put it, if we came across a watch we would assume it has been designed, so intricate is it, and so it goes with nature. Darwin showed that this was false, that there need be no designer: instead, adaptive complexity can come about through the slow, gradual, step by step cumulative process of evolution by natural selection. He used artificial selection as a case in point- over the centuries humans have created a diversity of dog breeds by choosing which dogs bred and which didn’t, and thus which characteristics were passed on. This is how you get Rottweilers and chihuahuas from wolves. The insight which Darwin added was that there need be no agent, human or otherwise, to do the selecting. In nature, selection is automatic: those organisms which have the best characteristics for escaping predators, catching prey, rearing young etc. are the ones who pass on those characteristics and thus organisms, through the incomprehensible aeons of geological time, become adapted to their environments and lifestyles. Impact

Original image credit: Pixabay
Background This may seem a bold, even brazen, claim, but I think it is justifiable. While Lincoln emancipated black Americans from the horrors of slavery, Darwin’s ideas emancipated all humanity from supernatural ignorance by proposing with elegance a theory explaining all life, including human life: the theory of evolution by natural selection. (Let us not, however, fail to mention the great Alfred Russel Wallace, independent co-discoverer with Darwin of natural selection.)This year also marks the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s great idea in On the Origin of Species (published 24th November 1859). Since then, Darwin’s theory has been vindicated and expanded: it is no longer, and has not been for a long time, possible to deny that evolution by natural selection is a fact (though, naturally, there is some debate among scientists over the exact role of natural selection in the process of evolution, which, incidentally, was a general idea predating Darwin: it was his genius to provide evidence for it and explain its main mechanism). Why is Darwin’s theory so important, so powerful? It is beyond me as a lowly humanities student to expound on the intricacies of this most important of scientific ideas, but the basics are these: organisms change over time, and those which are best at surviving, and therefore reproducing, pass on the characteristics which enabled them to survive and reproduce. Survival of the Fittest This simple idea at a stroke explains the complexity and diversity of life on Earth. Before Darwin, the sheer baffling complexity of life suggested to most that there must have been a designer god- as William Paley put it, if we came across a watch we would assume it has been designed, so intricate is it, and so it goes with nature. Darwin showed that this was false, that there need be no designer: instead, adaptive complexity can come about through the slow, gradual, step by step cumulative process of evolution by natural selection. He used artificial selection as a case in point- over the centuries humans have created a diversity of dog breeds by choosing which dogs bred and which didn’t, and thus which characteristics were passed on. This is how you get Rottweilers and chihuahuas from wolves. The insight which Darwin added was that there need be no agent, human or otherwise, to do the selecting. In nature, selection is automatic: those organisms which have the best characteristics for escaping predators, catching prey, rearing young etc. are the ones who pass on those characteristics and thus organisms, through the incomprehensible aeons of geological time, become adapted to their environments and lifestyles. Impact
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