Misconceptions about evolution - part XNUMX - who first came up with the idea?

Is evolution random and do only the "strong and powerful survive"?

Smeder Reisfeld | Galileo Magazine

to part a

An example of random change can be seen in the book "Darwin in Ayalon South"
"And such a small change also happened to the proteins from which I [the biologist] make a living, the crystallins. No one would have noticed them, these boring proteins, the lumberjacks and water-suckers of the cells, if they hadn't been disrupted one day, a mutation happened in one of the genes responsible for their production in the eye. A very minor mistake, which didn't even damage the gene itself but only at its edge, where its operating instructions are written, but because of it the gene started going wild, and instead of the normal, moderate amount, it started producing more and more crystallins, which gradually accumulated and piled up in the eye. And as happens many times when material accumulates, it began to crystallize and thus a transparent crystal was formed which became the primordial lens of the eye.
Evolution was not Darwin's original idea. He was the one who provided a large variety of evidence corroborating it from different fields

At first, it must be assumed, it was quite amorphous. It probably took millions more years to polish the lens to its current form, but even in its primitive, crude form, it concentrated the sun's rays to some extent so that an image was formed. And blurry as it was, this image allowed for better vision than before.

A small change in quantity, an improvisation on what already exists, and something new is created. A game, I already said."

(from "Darwin in Ayalon South")

"Darwin is the originator of the idea of ​​evolution"

Darwin was not the first to come up with the idea of ​​evolution. Already his grandfather, Erasmus (1802-1731), noticed the similarity between different creatures and believed that they all had a common origin, from which they developed in different directions. Although Erasmus died before Charles was born, his colorful character left behind the imprints of his original ideas. In addition to being a sought-after doctor who prescribed sex as a cure for hypochondria, a scientist who discovered how clouds are formed and a talented engineer, he was also a poet.

But even Erasmus was not the first to come up with the idea of ​​evolution. The idea, that biological species are not fixed but change over time, was practiced centuries before. The first time was around 550 BC, when the Greek philosopher Oximander claimed that the first life forms were created at the bottom of the sea and developed into new species that came onto land. It is clear that man evolved from primitive animals, Anaximander argued, because under the conditions that prevailed on the earth at the beginning it was impossible for man to manage in his present form.
During evolution, sympathy and compassion gave man an advantage: a society that included members with such feelings prospered, nurtured more offspring and therefore survived

Over the years, more people brought up the idea of ​​evolution, but they all proposed it as a philosophical musing, usually also theological, and not as a claim backed by facts from the field of experimental science. In this respect, Comte de Buffon (de Buffon, 1707-1788) is exceptional, who studied, among other things, different types of monkeys. In light of the extreme similarity he found between them and humans, he proposed a common origin for them, and in addition, relying on the reality of vestigial organs that have no use, he determined that animals were not created in a planned creation but developed from earlier creatures.

The most famous evolutionist before Darwin was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1774-1829), who is often ridiculed for believing in the inheritance of acquired traits. Lamarck claimed that animals change their characteristics due to their desire to change and due to the strenuous use or non-use of certain organs, and then pass on the acquired characteristics to their offspring. His most famous example is the long neck of the giraffes which he claims developed due to their efforts to stretch it in an attempt to reach the high tree branches. To Lamarck's credit, it was the first time in history that someone proposed a mechanism for evolution, and even if he was wrong, Lamarck was endowed with the understanding that the driving force of evolution is the adaptation of living beings to the environment. By the way, Darwin also believed in the inheritance of acquired traits, like all the people of the period before the discovery of Mendel's laws of inheritance, and saw it as a mechanism that preserves the variation that is the basis of natural selection.

The high price of the proponents of evolution

In 1844, 15 years before Darwin published "The Origin of Species", a book titled "Traces of the Natural History of Creation" was published anonymously in England. The book presented evolution as explaining everything: the development of the planets, the appearance of man and even the beginning of life. From a scientific point of view, it was a bad book: not all the facts in it were accurate and it did not present evidence for the existence of evolution, but it presented the idea in such a compelling way that it became a bestseller and was printed in 12 editions. Darwin, whose theory of evolution was already formed in his mind, but had not yet published it, was then exposed to the high price that had to be paid by those who openly sided with evolution.

The attacks on the book were unprecedented: Adam Sedgwick, a geologist who was one of the pillars of Cambridge and an acquaintance of Darwin's, said of the book: "This deformed creature's head must be crushed and an end to his crawling" said about the book. "Uncompromising contempt and mockery, these are the weapons to be used against such things as will wreak havoc and ruin on everything," said the other Cambridge officers. The attacks, by the way, only promoted the book's sales, and spread it among all levels of society: working class people, radical revolutionaries, Whig scientists, Tory churchmen and even the Queen herself.

A publisher named Chambers was finally revealed as the author of the book, and when asked why he published the greatest of his works anonymously, he pointed to his home where eleven children grew up and said, "I have eleven reasons."

Evolution was not, therefore, Darwin's original idea. He was the one who provided a large variety of evidence confirming it from different fields: ecology, anatomy, paleontology, embryology and etiology - but his main contribution was in presenting the mechanism underlying evolution. The mechanism he proposed - natural selection - was a materialistic mechanism that derives from the laws of nature, i.e. from the domain of science, and not from the domain of belief in supernatural powers.

"The strong and the powerful survive"

It is true that sometimes the strong survives, but sometimes the opposite is true. For example, in the case of the AIDS virus. Apparently, the strongest virus is indeed the survivor: viruses attack, reproduce and produce offspring, and of all of them, the most powerful, the most efficient one survives, the one that succeeded over the others, the milder ones. And indeed, when the AIDS viruses arrived in the West, as hidden passengers in the blood of travelers returning from Africa, natural selection worked in favor of the strong. As the virus became more aggressive, it outcompeted its competitors and began to spread rapidly.

And this is exactly where the transformation took place. The AIDS viruses are known to be transmitted through sexual contact, and infection with them occurs before the outbreak of the disease, when the innocent person does not yet know that there is a virus in his blood. He continues his normal life, sometimes for years, infecting more and more people. When the most aggressive viruses, the most efficient of all, took over the population through natural selection, the disease began to break out quickly, so that it often broke out even before the patients had time to infect other people. This is how the victors of the past found themselves, precisely the most violent viruses of all, extinct, and what started as an advantage became over time a disadvantage. The more violent viruses infected fewer and fewer people, and it was the moderates, who waited their turn without causing riots, passed from person to person and survived.

Therefore, the strongest does not always win and not necessarily the fastest, the most beautiful or the tallest. Evolution does not favor anything in advance, and natural selection works ad hoc: today the strongest will survive, and tomorrow maybe the milder; Now the ostentatious and in the future rather the modest. Changes happen all the time, so what was will not be. Those who succeeded today are not sure tomorrow, because what determines is only the degree of adaptation of the living creature to the environment at any given moment. If so, the correct formulation is that the fit survive, not necessarily the fittest, a phrase that, ironically, was not coined by Darwin, but by Herbert Spencer, one of the fathers of social Darwinism.

This is the place to address the misconception, according to which Darwin laid the foundations for this social theory. Relying on the theory of evolution in nature, social Darwinism holds that the war of existence also occurs between humans, and that the course of natural selection, which works to eliminate the weak elements in society in favor of the stronger, should not be opposed.

But not only did Darwin not derive these claims from his theory - he thought that the opposite could be derived from it. He believed that the members of the lower classes would find in evolution an inspiration, a justification for their struggle, for their war of existence in order to survive, because the existing order can be changed and in fact it is natural that it will change. Indeed, during his time riots broke out in England. The poor, the unemployed, and the rest of the lower classes took to the streets and mounted barricades to change the existing social order, while adopting evolutionary approaches of progress and change.

When reviewing Darwin's writings and his biography, one can see that his views and interpretation of natural selection were almost the opposite of the opacity of Social Darwinism, which misleads, for example, acts of charity and kindness. The man, who dared to peer under the cloak of human culture and reveal man's animal nature, strongly argued that the most natural qualities of man are moral feeling and mutual help.


Sympathy and compassion are inherent in the human race

"The realization hit him when he saw, for the first time in his life, a monkey. An orangutan has arrived at the London Zoo. He noticed that when the cage keeper wasn't looking, the box did forbidden things and would immediately hide. When she expected the punishment - whippings from the guard's hands - she would cover herself with a blanket, and when one of the garden visitors gave her a piece of bread, she looked at the guard to make sure he allowed her to bite into it. The human behavior of the cashier - her judgment, her ability to distinguish between good and bad, between what is allowed and what is forbidden, the feeling of shame she may have possessed and the expectation of punishment touched Darwin's heart and made him think about the ancient roots of human morality.

Moral feelings, he said, are a perfectly natural matter and innate in the human race just as instincts are innate in the honey bee. Morality is rooted in our being social beings. The group gives its members a great survival advantage: finding food together, coordinated defense against predators, passing on essential information and learning from each other. When the existence of the individuals depends on their belonging to the group, mutual aid and the punishment of those who hurt one of its members are of great importance. Because of this, said Darwin, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the most significant emotions that developed in this context: sympathy and compassion. Our ability to empathize with the joy and pain of others, and as a result to lend a hand, allows us to offer help to the members of the group, including the weak, the disabled and the sick.

During evolution, sympathy and compassion gave man an advantage: a society that included members with such feelings prospered, nurtured more offspring and therefore survived. Other companies, on the other hand, were defeated. Therefore, said Darwin, sympathy and compassion are not divine entities. They developed during evolution, gradually and in the most natural way, as part of our growing humanity.

And that's what beat Naama. How did Darwin manage to place sympathy as the crowning glory of human nature? Not the intense, overwhelming love that appears in a storm. Precisely sympathy, that humble emotion which is followed by a simple and warm act. The same human emotion that reaches out and says, take." (From the book "Darwin in Ayalon Darom")

Dr. Samder Raisfeld is a writer, the author of the book "Darwin in Ayalon Darom" (Ketar, 2007). In the past, she was a science reporter at Yedioth Ahronoth.

On the same topic on the science website:

• Human evolution continues
• Misconceptions about evolution
• What is evolution?
• Impressions from an exhibition of artists influenced by Darwin in Frankfurt