Introduction to the book "Darwin's Slow Evolution"

Darwin's Slow Evolution by Dewey Comey. The book was published by Aryeh Nir, 2007

• On the same subject: Darwin was determined to publish the origin of species"
• to the first part of the first chapter
• To the second part of the episode

Introduction: Safe Beach

In the history of science and society, Charles Darwin has a special place. His name is familiar to everyone, but his ideas - with the exception of one - are not known to everyone. He is a central figure, he is a symbol, but this does not mean that many understand him well. If the scientific community were to issue banknotes, it would undoubtedly be Darwin's portrait that would be stamped on the dollar bill. His face is good, peaceful and pleasant, similar to the face of George Washington copied from Gilbert Stuart's painting. But like Washington's face, Darwin's also reveals deep veins of complexity and tension. Everyone knows something about Darwin: who he was, what he did, what he said, and the thing most people think they know is: Darwin invented the "theory of evolution". It's not completely incorrect, just slightly inaccurate. But such a statement misses those points in Darwin's work that are so original, dangerous, and exciting.

Darwin is seen as both a hero and a threatening figure; People take him for granted, unlike how they treat other great scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Linnaeus, Charles Lyell, Gregor Mendel, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Alfred Wegener, Frederick Hubble, c James Watson and Francis Crick. The seemingly close familiarity with his work is easily expressed - the opinion with which the popular discourse uses the terms "Darwinism" and "Darwinian", when it claims to reduce a diverse scope of work, which cannot be easily summarized, into something completely simple. Forget Darwinism, it doesn't exist; Unless you define it arbitrarily by including certain terms in it and omitting others, which Darwin himself never did.

And what is "Darwinian"? "Darwinian" is to be enamored of the pigeons of the generations, as our man, at a certain time in his life, was fascinated by his aviary full of pigeons, peacocks and dwarfs. "Darwinian" means a fondness for long walks alone, not far from home. Repeated and unexplained bouts of vomiting are very "Darwinian". The point is: Charles Darwin did not found a movement or a religion. He never compiled scientific axioms and engraved them on a stone tablet by examination: so said Darwin. He was a reclusive biologist who wrote books. Sometimes wrong. Sometimes he changed his mind. Sometimes he worked on small issues and sometimes on big issues. True, the theme underlying most of his published writings is the uniformity of all forms of life, which reflects the process of evolution. But Darwin broke this subject down into a variety of concepts, some of which are closely intertwined and valuable to biology, and others which are not. It is better to examine his ideas one by one than to try to bundle them into one package.

Copernicus, one of the great scientists mentioned earlier, is among those whose power of influence is closest to that of Darwin; Darwin actually continued the revolution that Copernicus started, the main purpose of which was to draw attention to the fact that human beings do not have a central position in the universe. Darwin extended this recognition from cosmology to biology. "People often talk," he grumbled to himself, in one of his early notebooks, "about the wonderful event of the appearance of the 'intellectual man.'" Darwin himself was not so impressed by the rise of the "intellectual man", and on the contrary, he added that "the appearance of insects with other senses is even more miraculous". This heretical remark shows that already when he began to ponder the question of the origin of species, Darwin rejected the status of demigod that man had given himself, and included us in the concoction of struggle and change. He was not a humanist (although he was always human). What caused him real admiration was not the brain of Homo sapiens, but the instincts of the honey bee, which enable it to navigate the terrain and build architectural structures.

I argue that Darwin "continued" and did not "complete" the Copernican revolution against the anthropocentric approach, which sees man as the center of the universe, and this is because his struggle is still ongoing. Many people, even among those who would claim to accept Darwin's theory of evolution (as they understand it), do not actually grasp all the implications of what he wrote. His biggest idea, bigger than evolution itself, was too big, cruel and threatening. This idea is what Darwin called "natural selection" and recognized in it the main mechanism for evolutionary change. According to Darwin's view (which has since been revised and supported by additional biological evidence for a hundred and fifty years), natural selection is a purposeless, but highly effective, process. It is impersonal, blind to the future, it has no goals, it has only results. The only indicators for its evaluation are survival and reproductive success. Among the variations scattered over large areas, she chooses unity, gathers them together and produces pragmatic forms that have order. The factors driving it are excess fertility and competition for life and death; Its products and by-products are adaptation, complexity and diversity. It profoundly embodies chance, which is contrary to the view that the creatures living on earth, their abilities (including human abilities), their histories, their unique belonging to certain regions and their mutual relationships - all of these reflect a certain type of divine pre-arranged plan. The creationists are right, therefore, those who preach faith in divine creation, and strive for a religious political agenda, when they treat it with aversion and fear.

These creationist preachers are not alone in their opposition to evolutionary thinking. In recent years, they can draw encouragement from the high intensity of persistent opposition—at least in the United States—to what Darwin argued as early as 1859. Their political attempts to challenge Darwin's words (within state legislatures and among local school boards) have been consistent but mostly not successful. Important legal cases have been decided against them (such as that of Edwards v. Aguilar, in 1987, in which the Supreme Court of the United States declared the "creativity in schools" law, enacted in Louisiana, unconstitutional, and that of Kitzmiller v. Dover, in 2005). But they are right about one thing: the general public is divided on the issue to an alarming degree. Postmodern America is a hotbed for pre-evolutionary views.

Have you perhaps heard any statements according to which a third of all Americans - or 40 percent, or more? - do not accept the fact of the existence of evolution. Here are some solid numbers: 45, 47, 44. In November 2004, following more than a thousand telephone interviews, Gallup found that 45 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: "God created human beings fairly similar to their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years, or Close to that." In short: creationism. Another, alternative sentence said that humans "evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God directed this process." In short: theistic evolution. This alternative reflected the opinion of 38 percent of the people surveyed. Only 13 percent agreed with the statement that humans evolved from other life forms without God's guidance. In short: materialistic evolution. (And all the rest gave answers that cannot be classified. In short: leave us alone, we're watching TV.)

The most amazing thing about the results of these polls is not that the opposition to the theory of evolution received so much support in this or that poll; The most amazing thing is that it has hardly changed in six parallel models for an entire generation. In 1982, the Gallup company conducted a survey that presented the exact same three alternatives, and found that 44 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that God created humans, and not evolution. In 1999, the percentage climbed to 47, and it never fell below 44. If these polls are to be believed, then almost half of the American population chooses to understand the origin of our species as if Charles Darwin never existed. Another significant percentage, ranging from 37 to 40 over the years, prefer the alternative of "a process guided by God", theistic evolution, which is also completely contrary to what Darwin claimed. Summary of the data: Between 81 and 87 percent of Americans reject Darwin's view of human evolution.

Gallup is not the only company measuring the scope of the phenomenon. A later survey, conducted in July 2005 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, along with a partner organization, found that 42 percent (of the 2,000 Americans surveyed) agreed that "living things exist in their present form since the beginning of time". Another 18 percent sided with theistic evolution, at least in relation to humans, when they explicitly state that the process had to be "directed by a higher being". The results of the Pew Institute's survey are, in summary, slightly less negative than those of Gallup: only 60 percent disapprove of Charles Darwin, in 80th place or so.

Maybe the polls are invalid. In England, or Sweden, or India, different numbers might have been obtained. Perhaps that uniquely American blend of skepticism and evangelicalism, which led to the Monkey Trial in 1925, continues to excite many citizens who prefer to learn biology through scripture rather than science. Perhaps the question of human evolution is misleading and too vulnerable; Perhaps the Gallup pollsters should have asked if God created, say, the woolly kangaroo in its current form. Or... who knows? I do not claim to have any absolute explanations for such an extreme level of skepticism and persistent aversion to such a well-established scientific discovery. To be honest, she intrigues me. But it is certain that the results of these Gallup polls, together with the ongoing political attack against the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools, indicate not only the importance of Charles Darwin at all times, but also his immediate relevance to the education system and government.

A personal word: I come to the topic in an indirect way. I am not a biologist. I am not a historian. I actually have no academic training in the sciences. Still, for the past twenty-five years, I've made my living mainly as a science journalist, and everything I know about biological evolution and ecology I've learned on my own (that is, from reading, especially scientific journals) and from painstakingly researching experts. During all those years, I had the privilege of spending a lot of time in the field with naturalists. As part of tasks I was asked to carry out for various magazines, and while I was doing research for the purpose of writing books, I was invited to wander through tropical forests, climb up rivers from Mongolia to the Amazon, walk across equatorial steppes, look for distant islands, and in general to walk around the spaces with some of the most brilliant and daring naturalists. These experiences, which helped me (slowly) better understand ecosystems and certain species, and also some of the concepts that underlie ecology and evolutionary biology, showed me that naturalists, as a whole, are a guild of extraordinary people - smart, passionate, patient, kind, and strong in terms of both physical and intellectual. Some admire soldiers, surgeons, firefighters, astrophysicists, missionary doctors or cowboys. I admire naturalists.

In part, this is what brings me to Darwin. He himself was a naturalist, of course, during a certain and decisive period of his life: during the four years, nine months and five days during which he sailed aboard the Beagle, a British naval ship sent to map parts of the South American coastline. The journey lasted from 1831 to 1836. Darwin was in his mid-twenties, just the right age for maximum resilience in difficult circumstances and maximum absorption of new facts and impressions. While the Beagle's captain and crew did their work, the young Darwin collected marine species with a plankton net towed behind the ship, making long walks ashore to make observations and collect more species. At first he was inexperienced, but gradually he became a methodical, perceptive and single-minded scientist. He visited Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and several small islands, including Cape Verde, the Hazor Islands, Tahiti, Mauritius, Saint Helena and the Galapagos. Since it anchored in the port of Polmouth in the south-west of England on October 2, 1836, it has not left Britain again. His wandering days as a naturalist are over. He reached a safe beach, and was happy to stay there, at least for a while. Other biologists of his time (such as Alfred Russell Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, whom I will detail later) spent ten years in arduous fieldwork in the Amazon, Borneo, and elsewhere; But for Darwin, five years was more than enough. Most of his scientific work, in the remaining years of his life, consisted of reading studies, correspondence, conducting experiments, analyzing animals for research purposes, observations in the meadow areas and forests near his home, and thinking. Due to health problems, as well as due to his intellectual inclination, he became a stay-at-home.

The house was where he developed his ideas. And so, despite the preference I have for naturalists whose work is done in the field, and despite the importance of the early and vital experiences that nourished Darwin's later thinking, I made a decision contrary to my natural inclination: to omit the journey from my book (it will only stand in the background), and begin it immediately after it. Why would I ignore the most famous event in Darwin's life? There are three reasons for this. First, because it is indeed the most famous event. Regardless of what else you may or may not know about Charles Darwin, what you know for sure is that he sailed aboard a ship called the Beagle, visited the Galapagos Islands, and saw some interesting birds and reptiles there. The second reason is a matter of savings and scope. To put it more clearly: abbreviated. Darwin's life story has already been told many times, by excellent biographers - special mention should be made of Janet Brown, and her two-volume seminal book, Charles Darwin, and the duo of Adrian Desmond and James Moore, and their in-depth 800-page book, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (Darwin: the life of a tormented evolutionist) - and in the hands of less excellent biographers, but most people have not read this story even once. Of course, everyone tells the story a little differently, depending on the choices, omissions, biases and goals of the narrator. My goal is to succinctly describe this huge and complicated subject in a review that is partly narrative in nature and partly in the nature of an article, accurate but pleasant to read. I wanted to outline, in not many pages, the rise and development of a thinker, with a special focus on one of the ideas he came up with. The third reason I decided to skip the Beagle years: I think Darwin's later intellectual adventures are even more exciting than his frolics in Patagonia and the Galapagos.

Chief among these adventures is the discovery of natural selection. This idea, when examined for the first time, with all its implications, is wonderful, stunning and poignant. It is even more wonderful when you consider the source from which it arose: a deep and radical insight of a very cautious person. The shy father of the family, the one with the bald head and the thick beard, the breeder of pigeons and the first spring flowers, the Englishman so private that at the end of his life he was buried in Westminster Church, the one whose face is suitable for being stamped on banknotes, presents to us the image of a comfortable and simple man; But not everything about Charles Darwin is so comfortable. At the center of his work is a harsh and frightening materialism. This is one of the topics I will try to explore in this book. The other issue is the fact that all of this was difficult and scary even for him.