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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 14 Aug 2013

Taken: 04 Jun 2011

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Charles Darwin

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
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.

THE VITAL QUESTION
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Beagle
3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Wild Things for Their Own Sake

Dave Foreman

Before Charles Darwin, our thinking was built on the sand of imagination and flights of fancy, not on the hard bedrock of things as they are. Ernst Mayr, perhaps the greatest biologist of the twentieth century, wrote that Darwin overthrew all philosophy before his time, that all must be thought in the bright light of his ‘natural’ world.

Darwin saw that all living thing – all Earthlings, if you will – were descended from a common ancestor.

He saw that the Life descent with modification (evlution) ther is no foretold end or goal.

He saw that there was no guiding hand but rather natural and sexual selection, chance and acident.

But sine Darwin’s time, both those who think and those who only believe have been as though asleep to learning from Darwin’s view of life.

It is time to ask as long last, “Where do Darwin’s insights take us when we struggle with values and ethics?” ~ Page 101

MORAL GROUND
18 months ago. Edited 18 months ago.

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