Celebrating the Darwin bicentennial – personal-professional reflections

This is the second half of my newspaper column for this week, adapted and expanded.

Hundreds of millions of Americans will celebrate the historic milestone of the Abraham Lincoln birth bicentennial Feb. 12. Especially with the connections between Lincoln’s role in ending slavery and Barack Obama’s recent inauguration as the nation’s first African-American president – not to mention both of them being from Illinois – the celebrations take on an additional historic depth.

But, for Americans in the know, there’s a second birth bicentennial to be celebrated on the same day. The person in question isn’t American, but has just as much importance as does Lincoln.

In one of those quirks or twists that make history so interesting, Charles Darwin was also born Feb. 12, 1809.

And, he and Lincoln have some connections in spirit or character.

Both of Darwin’s grandfathers were active in the British movement to abolish slavery in its colonies and possessions. And, Darwin started his study on the theory of evolution in part to refute people who claimed whites and blacks had enough different heredity to be different races, with whites as a superior race.

I have already looked at Lincoln.

Now, Darwin.

The biggest thing that people get wrong about him begins with bad language use by pollsters and much of the media.

First, “theory,” as in “theory of evolution” – or, “theory of gravity”; more on that in a minute – does not mean “theoretical” in scientific usage.

Second, the theory of evolution is not something one “believes in.” Professional scientists always talk about “accepting” (or not) the theory of evolution.
Let’s spin out the analogy with the theory of gravity. Have you ever heard anybody talking about “believing in the theory of gravity”? I didn’t think so.
Third, evolution is not atheistic. And, Darwin wasn’t personally an atheist.
In his famous “warm little pond” comment in 1871, he did speculate about the origin of the building blocks of life from purely chemical means, but made no intellectual commitment to the idea, known as abiogenesis.

Today, many professional biologists have no problems accepting the theory of evolution while still holding religious beliefs.

Fourth, evolutionary theories started before Darwin.

Actually, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, he of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” proposed a comprehensive theory of evolution 50 years before Darwin.
And, evolutionary ideas were in the air already 2,500 years before that, starting with the Greek philosopher Anaximander.

Fifth, Darwin hasn’t been refuted.

True, he knew nothing about units of heredity. Gregor Mendel’s work with pea plants wasn’t done until after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” and there’s no indication he had heard about it even when he wrote “Descent of Man,” although Mendel had a German translation of “Origin” later in his life. In the light of Mendel’s work, followed by the discovery of chromosomes, then genes, and the use of statistics, in population genetics, Darwin’s theory has been expanded and refined, not refuted.
As for claims pushed forward today about things like “irreducible complexity,” on the other hand, those ideas have been refuted, every time a new claim is brought up.

That said, some ideas that have sprung up under influence of the theory of evolution have been refuted.

Social Darwinism, whether in a financial sense, like that of the robber barons of the Gilded Age or investment bankers of today, or as “proof” of some other social distinction, is totally untrue. Evolutionary psychology, the claim that human psychological characteristics have evolved, is often shaky and sometimes makes overblown claims.

But the basic edifice is far more intact. From the modern theory of evolution, incorporating genetics into Darwin’s original idea, we’ve learned about categorizing species, how bacteria and viruses evolve to infect people (and how we might vaccinate against that) and much more.