Today is the 149th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species," one of the most important books ever published and containing certainly the supreme scientific insight of the last two hundred years. Even those few who will read this who are creationists have benefited from the consequences of Darwin's insight in ways large and small.
It is an amazing book, and one I highly recommend. Darwin builds his case logically beginning with the familiar forms of artificial selection used by farmers and breeders, and moving to the vast sweep of life on Earth. He begins hesitantly, laying out his ideas cautiously. As his case builds, he becomes more and more confident, and the accumulated weight of evidence in his argument gives it unstoppable momentum. There are individual things he gets wrong, but on the one big idea he is absolutely right. And by the end, you can tell that he knows it.
The single best encomium to Darwin and the theory evolution by means of natural selection that I have ever read was written by Ian McEwan, a writer whom I both love and loathe. I love him, because he is possibly the finest living writer working in the English language; I loathe him because he's so much better a writer than I can probably hope to be. This is from his 2005 novel "Saturday."
"What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities-- and the unprecedented bonus of being demonstrably true."
Don't let the talk of myths fool you; this is how it happens. It is no less beautiful than any other idea that has been proposed and fills me with the sense of awe that religion never gave me. And don't get hung up on the word "theory" either. There are those out there who would have you believe it means the same thing as "conjecture." In the sciences, it does not. It means a hypothesis that is so supported by data and experiment that it is accepted as true. One reliably reproducible counter-instance sends the whole edifice tumbling down. Keep waiting...
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I heard a geologist say that it was the Social Sciences fault that the general public did not understand what a scientific theory meant. I think he gives us far too much credit--when was the last time anyone actually listened to an historian?
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