November 29, 2005
The Evolution of Charles Darwin
"A creationist when he visited the Galápagos Islands, the great naturalist grasped the full significance of the unique wildlife he found there only well after he had returned to London."
Frank J. Sulloway in Smithsonian Magazine:
Charles Darwin stepped into a treacherous world of sun-baked lava, spiny cactus and tangled brushwood in September 1835, when he reached the Galápagos Islands with fellow crew members of the HMS Beagle. The Beagle's captain, Robert FitzRoy, described the barren volcanic landscape as "a shore fit for Pandemonium." Darwin's five-week visit to these remarkable islands, when he was 26 years old, catalyzed the scientific revolution that now bears his name.
According to the well-established creationist theory of Darwin's day, the exquisite adaptations of many species—such as the hinges of the bivalve shell and the wings and plumes on seeds dispersed by air—were compelling evidence that a "designer" had created each species for its intended place in the economy of nature. Darwin had wholeheartedly accepted this theory, which was bolstered by the biblical account in Genesis, until his experiences in the Galápagos Islands began to undermine this way of thinking about the biological world.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 01:59 AM | Permalink
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If Young Darwin embraced biblical notions of 'creationism', it would have been in rebellion against his brilliant and well known grandfather, Erasmus. In Erasmus' Zoonomia (1796) he argued that all living things share a common ancestor (forming "one living filament") and that competition for reproduction could cause changes to species over time. And Erasmus wasn't alone. Darwin's real contribution was in formalizing these ideas of selection and speciation, and collecting substantial supporting field data. Darwin credited Lamarck for inspiration in The Origin of Species:
"Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801. . . he first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition."
If Darwin was a creationist, it was in the Lamarckian sense, in which the simplest organisms were assumed to arise spontaneously in nature and then develop without recourse to an intelligent designer into more complex and 'perfect' forms. He was certainly no biblical literalist. Indeed, victorian systems of classification (championed by Lamarck and others before Darwin) were widely understood to have explanatory power (organisms sharing some features likely share lots of other features) and to connect organisms in familial relations which imply conservation of useful characteristics and change/improvement over time.
This is not to devalue the contribution of one of my heroes, but only to point out something I feel is significant: that the idea of evolutionary change and shared ancestry which Darwin named Natural Selection was very much present in victorian science and intellectual thought, and that we owe it's formalization in Origin to the careful and energetic work of a determined scientist rather than simple inspiration, be it geographic or divine. Doing this points up the absurdity of religious literalists and Homo-exceptionalists (a term I hereby coin) and gives us all encouragement that communities of clear-thinking people will eventually find their way toward the truth, with or without a relevatory text. And isn't that what differentiates us from the skeptics? -jb
Posted by: Jonathan B. | Nov 29, 2005 3:43:02 PM
Thanks for the thoughtful comment and interesting info, JB. Ciao for now...
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Nov 29, 2005 6:14:41 PM
Evolution (At least MACRO-Evolution) does NOT work.
Cheers
Posted by: Rich | Jun 8, 2007 4:00:13 PM
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