When 26-year-old Charles Darwin sailed into the Galapagos Islands in 1835 aboard the HMS Beagle, little could he have imagined that nearly two centuries later, citizens around the globe would be marking the bicentennial of his birth on Feb. 12, 1809 – the same day that brought into the world Abraham Lincoln.
Darwin’s bicentennial year also marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of his magnum opus, “On the Origin of Species,” which, in 1859, brought human nature – for the first time – out of the province of God and into the realm of scientific discourse. Neither science nor religion have since been the same.
In “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin gave the world the idea – worked upon, it must be said, by others before him – that life in its myriad forms evolved through a natural process of adaptation to changing conditions.
The life we see around us, he postulated, the life that we call our own, evolved from previous life forms, and they in turn descended through the majestic might of natural selection from ancestral species before them.
Darwin’s simple idea has since withstood 150 years of scrutiny by tens of thousands of scientists all over the world. Despite tactics of the religious naysayers to foster illusions to the contrary, evolution is widely regarded as one of the best-supported ideas in science, grounded in incontrovertible evidence, bedrock-solid, unassailable and uncontroversial.
In fact, absolutely nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
What is evolution not? It is not a religion or a philosophy, nor an outlook or a dogma. It is simply an explanation that makes sense of the data – as any good theory should do.
Evolution does not explain the origins of life on this, our remarkable planet, or the origin of the universe, a titanic ocean in which this planet is but a drop of water. But evolution does explain a nature so full of wonder that a simple, primitive life-form, no more than a germ, could evolve across the ages into a butterfly, a tiger and a man.
And yet Darwin’s theory does not claim that man descended from apes, but only that today’s humans and today’s apes share a common ancestor in the distant, prehistoric past. Chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas are our cousins, not our ancestors. The theory of evolution never did, does not now, and never will teach that man came from monkeys.
So why does evolution matter?
Not to teach the science of evolution is to demonstrate contempt for scientific evidence in favor of political and religious ideology. A society in which ideology supplants evidence is a society where future imagination, innovation and advancement are seriously at risk.
This is a great danger to a society where future comfort, progress and economic success depend on continued scientific, medical and technological innovation. Science is inspiring and beautiful, but science is also a human endeavor essential to our survival as a nation in a globally competitive world.
Perhaps it is worth considering the words of Thomas Huxley, often referred to as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his passionate defense of Darwin’s ideas, who said: “Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future.”
Todd Huffman, M.D.
Eugene, Ore.