Darwin, not outdated, still prescient today

In fact, in many ways, biology had to spin to catch back up to Darwin, after naively rejecting his ideas on the mechanism of evolution — primarily natural selection but also sexual selection and even some sort of group selection.

He even appeared to have some good ideas about some form of evolutionary psychology:

Darwin “never felt that morality was our own invention, but was a product of evolution, a position we are now seeing grow in popularity under the influence of what we know about animal behavior,” Frans de Waal says. “In fact, we’ve now returned to the original Darwinian position.”

Perhaps part of why Darwin’s mechanisms were rejected is that they didn’t always fit into late 19th century ideas of “progress.” For that matter, I charge that ideas like Pop Evolutionary Psychology may still get snared in issues of “progress.”