Charles Darwin

plato.stanford.edu/entries/origin-descent

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

~ Darwin

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Dinesh ^club

“I think” wrote Darwin: just those two words, scrawled next to a sketch of a branching tree of life, in a notebook from 1837. That was only a year after returning from the voyage of ‘Beagle.’ Twenty-two years later, a more artfully drawn tree was the only illustration in ‘The Origin of Species.’ The idea of a tree of life was so central to Darwin’s thinking, and to the currency of evolutionary biology ever since, that it’s shocking to be told it is wrong, as ‘New Scientist’ did in large letters on their front cover in 2009, 150 years after the publication of Darwin’s ‘Origin.’ The cover flirted shamelessly with an extended readership, but the article itself was more moderate in tone and made specific point. To a degree that is very hard to define, the tree of life is indeed wrong. That does not mean Darwin’s major contribution to science, evolution by natural selection, is also wrong: it merely shows that his knowledge of heredity was limited. That’s not news. It is well known that Darwin knew nothing of DNA, or genes, or Mendel’s laws, let alone the transfer of genes between bacteria, so his view of heredity was through a glass, darkly. None of that discredits Darwin’s theory of natural selection; hence the cover was correct in a narrow technical sense, but grossly misleading in a deeper sense.

16 months ago. Edited 16 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

16 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

Origin of species www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2009/pg2009-images.html

16 months ago.

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