So, it's Darwin Day tomorrow my time. So what? What's so great about Darwin?
I mean, Darwin did some very cool science, and often was remarkably perceptive about the nature of biology, but he's not the only one in his day. In fact, he was beaten by a great many people on various notions like the Tree of Life (Heinrich Bronn), Natural Selection (Patrick Matthew, and possibly Alfred Wallace), universal common ancestry (his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin), transmutation (Pierre Maupertuis, Lamarck) the struggle for existence (de Candolle), division of labour (Adam Smith, of course), biogeographic distribution (definitely Wallace), sexual selection (Erasmus again) and his erroneous views on heredity (Lamarck, Buffon, and various others). In fact the sole biological theories and results that I think he was original in are:
1. The origins of coral reefs and atolls;
2. The effects of worms on bioturbation;
3. His studies of plants that can move;
4. The systematic relationship of barnacles to shrimp and other crustaceans, based on embryonic form.
And we are not remembering him for these achievements, excellent as they are.
No, what we are remembering Darwin for is a synthesis and the empirical support he brought in its defense. He brought together many ideas that were "in the air", so to speak, reading more widely than almost anyone else as well as doing his experimental and anatomical work, and more importantly, mostly managed to filter out the bad ideas.
Darwin's achievement was to identify crucial questions and offer a coherent theoretical account that answered them. For instance, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the reasons for the systematic arrangements of plants and animals, why they were arranged "group within group" as he put it, was being explored by idealists like Swainson and Macleay, who offered Pythagorean accounts based on similarities and magic numbers. He offered a general account - which we call common descent - that explained why this was a fact, but also why it was not regular (extinction is not evenly distributed across all taxa).
I have an essay here at the Talkorigins.org archive on what Darwin was, and was not original in. But the broader point I want to make here is about the nature of science. Often as not, it is the synthesisers who reorganise how we view things, and as David Hull and others have shown, within 10 years of the publication of the Origin, nearly all specialists in the sciences concerned had adopted common descent and transmutation (descent with modification). It was the closest any science has ever come to an actual Kuhnian paradigm shift.
Darwin defined subsequent research programmes, not least in his erroneous theory of heredity, the "pangenesis" theory by which information that caused structures and organs to develop was passed into the gametes according to how well used they were, which increased their heritability. This was widely rejected as soon as he published it, but the notion of particles of heredity got people going, and by the 1890s this was being actively researched, such that in 1900 when these factors were rediscovered (and Mendel retroactively given credit for them), they were called "genes", shortened from Darwin's "pangenes".
Very few of Darwin's disciples agreed with everything he wrote. Huxley was a saltationist, Wallace held that selection, and therefore in his view evolution, could not account for the human mind, Mivart became a theistic evolutionist par excellence. Asa Gray held that some of the adaptations were done by God actively, for providence's sake. And so on. Various people thought that selection wasn't the cause of speciation, such as Moritz Wagner and J. T. Gulick. But people continued to both appeal to Darwin, even when they were what we'd now call "Lamarckians" (a much abused term that has little meaning in my view, without further clarification), and to return to his ideas for inspiration. Even now debates continue over the modes of speciation, with at least some speciation thought to be of the kind Darwin thought was true of all.
Science doesn't depend on authority, as, say, religion or literary criticism might. Darwin's authority is limited in the extreme, because we know things he didn't. But even if someone disagrees with Darwin (and all modern biologists must, at least over heredity), they are still entitled to call themselves "Darwinian", even if they reject selection as a major factor in evolution. I say this, because in the popular mind, selection is regarded as the core of Darwin's ideas. We've moved on somewhat, and now we all accept that some of evolution is random, and some is neutral. What we are now doing is arguing over the proportions.
So remember Darwin not as the discoverer of anything (apart from the crustacean nature of barnacles, etc.), but as the guy who set off a fruitful, active, complex and ultimately explanatory research program in biology, which continues to become ever more active. Don't make him a saint, an authority, or a hero. He's just a damned good scientist.
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John, on the technical points I would be foolish to dispute someone as learned as yourself.
But Darwin is a hero of mine, and not just because he was a damned good scientist, and certainly not because he got everything right. I find Darwin heroic not because he held priority on the notion of common descent (which he didn't), but because of a preeminent conscience and powers of concentration which he brought to that topic. Few prior to Darwin brought comparable energy to any attempt at synthesis within biology (Linnaeus comes to mind), and of those, none focused on the multiple lines of evidence for common descent with the scholarship revealed in Darwin's papers. Perhaps even more importantly, Darwin privately agonized over the meaning of evolution. He took first his faith, and then his growing doubt rather seriously. He fretted over what effect his ideas might have on his marriage, his friendships, his social standing, his reputation within the scientific community. He was cautious to a fault, but I think this was in part because what he came to call 'one long argument' was a narrative of his own struggle, and I think it is presumptuous of those of us who live in a secular society to imagine that we could understand the full dimension of that struggle. As a Christian who has wrestled with Darwin's thought, I think I have an inkling of what that struggle entails, and that is why, first and foremost, that Darwin is one of my heroes.
Well, I consider him a hero because even though he was aware that the implications of publishing origins meant that he would come under attack from many sources, he decided to publish it, anyway; and he weathered a great storm for it.
Of course, he couldn't have predicted that John C. West would be linking The Descent of Man to the 20th century eugenics movement.
Happy Darwin Day, John!
We need Darwins even today, and also in other fields than biology.
Nowadays science is mostly published in short articles. With the Internet, incremental publishing is easier than ever before (think PLoS). The big picture disappears under the flood of detail.
The Origin of Species was a monograph that collected together observations and conclusions from a vast area. Today the art (and will) of writing monographs is dying out.
I think it's stretching a point to say that Darwin didn't come up with the idea of Natural Selection because Patrick Matthew got there first. Matthew didn't realise the true significance of his own theorising and did very little about developing it or publicising it - which is perhaps why Darwin never came across his work and had to 're-discover' Natural Selection for himself. (In fact, I heard in a BBC podcast this week that an early Arab scientist got there several centuries before Matthew.)
You're right about Darwin's being a great synthesiser, but he had to have a framework to build his synthesis on, and that framework was his own 'original' idea of evolution by means of Natural Selection. Darwin was also a fantastic observer, but he needed his Natural Selection framework to guide him as to what to look out for.
But yes, a damned good scientist - and a hero, in my book.
As ever Mr Wilkins a thought provoking and highly informative posting on the history of science I particularly enjoyed the essay at Talkorigins which I had not read before. I think almost all of the truly great scientists are synthesisers, thinkers who possess the clarity of vision, the patients, the determination and the concentration to filter various ideas out of a confused sea of concepts that already exists within an area of scientific investigation, to sort and improve those ideas and to put them together in a new and revealing way thereby leading others to view those ideas from a new standpoint. This certainly applies not only to Darwin but most obviously to Newton.
"...a damned good scientist..."
"...We need Darwins today..."
I've always wondered what Darwin's chances would be of getting government funding these days. It seems to me that modern funding criteria aim for the popular and money making fields with fast turnover, rather than the long, considered sort of work that he did. Perhaps there are fewer 'big discoveries' left out there to be made, but surely such funding criteria actually actively avoid such work in their selection machinery (of course, such long term studies can't always guarantee amazing results)...
...And after all that paper work...he wouldn't have made it on Vogsphere, that's for sure (disregarding the locals' contempt for poeple with his sort of ideas).
...that he pisses off creationists and that he was not just, as you say, "a damned good scientist" but an archetypal scientist. He seems to have been a kind, decent - almost ordinary - personality with little of the crankiness or quirkiness associated with a lot of other great scientists.
Actually, it was only a measly abstract ;)
So what's wrong with books like Coyne and Orr's Speciation? Or Burt and Trivers' Genes in conflict? (what's wrong with them as monographs, I mean, not what might be wrong with their arguments :)
Happy Darwin day to all.
Should also mention Lyell and Hooker in any account of Darwin's circle.
Lyell was a big influence on Darwin early on; in some ways Lyell was heroic too, in that he found it terribly hard to abandon the idea of God's agency in biology, and go the way Darwin was pushing him; but he had the intellectual honesty to recognise the force of Darwin's theories, even if he probably never totally accepted them.
Major opponents would include Owen and Agassiz. The French in general were not too keen on Darwin for many years, either.
The role of Wallace is another fascinating story. Another man could easily have made things quite difficult by objecting to the way his letter to Darwin outlining natural selection was taken over; but he was very gentlemanly about it.
Anyway, Darwin certainly goes way up there as a science hero - not only a terrific and meticulous theorist but also a much nicer character than some others (eg Newton).
Is anything further known about Darwin's maddening ill-health in later years?
@windy: I was refering to other fields than biology. In biology things are in a sense easier, because the species evolve so slowly. Essentially you are dealing with a sitting target.
In my own field - engineering of computer and communication systems - things are developing so fast that nobody has a grasp of the whole. For example, the last wide-ranging monograph about software was "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth. The current prints are still based on his work in the '60s...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming
It's Not Darwin's or Wallace's Theory!
Both Darwin and Wallace admitted that Patrick Matthew and Charles Wells beat them to the idea of natural selecton.Darwin described Matthew's ideas as PRECISELY the same as his own(Search "wainwrightscience" on Google for details) What is more,all of the ideas(as opposed to examples)given in "On the Origin of Species" were published by other naturalists before 1857. Darwin produced the last and best synthesis of Victorian ideas on transmutation(i.e.evolution)
Dr Milton Wainwright,Dept. Molecular Biology and Biotechnology,University of Sheffield,UK.