Sunday, February 08, 2009
Don't give up on Darwin
Christian Trejbal
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From the RoundTable blog
For science fans, 2009 is a special year. Thursday is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, and, in a pleasant temporal coincidence of round numbers, this year also is the 150th anniversary of the publication of his "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," the book so few people have read but everyone seems to have an opinion about.
Evolution fanatics are calling Feb. 12 "Darwin Day," a global celebration of rationality and an orderly universe. In its bluntest form, evolution tells us that species change over time. Successful genetic traits survive at a higher rate from generation to generation, and the species adapts to its environment.
Evolution is a beautifully simple explanation for the diversity of life. It offers layers of complexity, but the basic idea is the same one Darwin described 150 years ago.
Virginia Tech has no big parties scheduled for Thursday, but later in the year, the campus will host a series of lectures on evolution and its place in society. There will even be a play written specially for the occasion.
Meanwhile, a number of Radford University students will travel to England in May for a study abroad course on Darwin and the origins of evolutionary biology.
People sometimes get depressed around the holidays. Around Darwin Day, it is hard to blame them. Despite all of the research, confirmation and explanatory success, the attacks on evolution continue, especially in America.
Deniers trot out fallacious, ill-informed arguments and creation myths to reject an immense step forward in human understanding. They pretend that ethics and evolution are incompatible, hoping to scare people into their narrow view of the universe.
There have been some victories for rational thought. The courts repeatedly have rejected the infusion of religion into science education. Nevertheless, the evolution debate remains alive and well.
What is it about this one particular bit of science that so distresses people? They are not anti-science about everything. They do not worry that gravity is just a theory. They do not demonize Isaac Newton like they do Darwin. They board airplanes, trusting their lives to the Bernoulli principle. Evolution does not ask that much.
It has been 150 years. How long does it take a theory to catch on?
My spirits flagged as Darwin's birthday approached, so I called Matthew Goodrum. He is a professor in Tech's department of science and technology in society. One of his specialties is the history of biology.
Full disclosure: Goodrum and I were both graduate students in the History and Philosophy of Science program at Indiana University at the same time more than a decade ago.
He is optimistic about the future and reminded me that even the best theories usually face fierce opposition for a long time.
Nicolaus Copernicus never saw widespread acceptance of his theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. A century passed after publication of his "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres" before a majority of professional astronomers bought into it.
"These really profound transformations of the way we understand fundamental things about nature, it really takes a long time for the scientific community to rally around them and an even longer time for the general public to accept them and understand them," Goodrum said.
"One of the biggest problems with Darwin is that many people don't understand the basic principles of evolution," he said.
The theory, for example, does not say humans descended from apes. We just share a common ancestor somewhere in the distant mists of history far, far more than 6,000 years ago. Nor does evolution rely on random forces for the progression of species. On the contrary, modern evolution, which has merged with genetics, describes a very orderly process at work.
Goodrum pins his hope on the genetic theories that are increasingly important to bioengineering and medicine.
"One cannot accept modern genetics without understanding the evolutionary process," he said. "Practical application of genetics will necessitate understanding evolution because there is no other way to understand what genetics is telling us."
When that day comes, people will look back on the controversy today and wonder what the fuss was about, the same way we look back at people who thought the Earth was the center of the universe.
Christian Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
