Darwin Darwin Darwin

I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by the amount of attention Charles Darwin is drawing on this, the 200th anniversary of his birth. And although anything I contribute is almost certain to be redundant, I feel obliged to chime in. So:

Yes, Darwin was brilliant. One of the top scientific minds of all time. A man with few peers. Someone everyone agrees belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Science along with Newton, Einstein and some fourth character (about whom there can be no agreement).

Was he a saint? No. But then, no one is a saint. Has popular culture unecessarily conflated evolutionary biology with "Darwinism" as Carl Safina argues? There's nothing wrong with closely associating a scientist with his or her theories, of course. We've got Newtonian laws of motion, and it's common to see "Einstein's" in front of "theory of relativity." Turning anything into an "ism" is probably a bad idea, although PZ Myers points out that "Respect for Darwin is as much for the disciplined and scientific way he addressed the problem as it is for the discovery itself" it's hard to argue with that.

Shouldn't we be waiting to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species this fall rather than augmenting this hagiography? Maybe. But the culture of celebrity is hard to ignore, and I can think of no better a role model in these times of short attention spans, publish-or-perish pressures and a pervasive fear of expressing the slightest doubts.

One more thing: for those who haven't read Darwin's masterpiece, please do. You don't need to be a professional biologist to appreciate or understand it. The fact that one of the seminal works in the history of science can be appreciated and understood by anyone with a high school education should be enough to warrant inclusion on the reading list of anyone who considers themselves well-read. I especially love the final words:

... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Wish I could write like that.