Late Hits on Darwin: Getting It Wrong

I know, Darwin's bicentennial was last Thursday, but the guy's too big a topic to cover in one weekend, even a long weekend with no mail delivery to distract us with bills and colorful catalogs.

One interesting feature of the theory of evolution by natural selection is how closely it is linked to its originator. We don't refer to electrodynamics as "Maxwellism" or quantum mechanics as "Planckism." The only parallel -- and it is strikingly close -- is the way Albert Einstein came to personify the theory of general relativity. Both Einstein and Darwin are honored like intellectual saints by physicists and biologists respectively. Moreover, both men have seeped into the public discourse as iconic figures. But that's where they diverge. Einstein is a generally benevolent figure with his basset-hound eyes and unruly hair, a symbol of scientist as pacific sage, perfect fodder for bumper sticker slogans about war and technology. Darwin is the scientist as rebel, still a controversial figure after 200 years, and a villain to biblical literalists.

Unfortunately Darwin doesn't lend himself to good bumper sticker slogans. He lived and wrote in an era when sentences, as expressions of complete thoughts, were long and often exceedingly complex, containing many dependent and subordinate clauses, a great deal of punctuation, and frequently words of a polysyllabic nature, all organized according to the most formal strictures of grammar in the service of clarity rather than felicity of expression or brevity. In other words, Darwin didn't do sound-bites.

Which hasn't prevented people from trying to extract them from his work. Here is a piece by Marlowe Hood on bogus Darwin quotations, generally invented by people who admired him but didn't have buildings big enough to engrave a genuine Darwin quote over the portico.

Meanwhile, people who disagree with Darwin are no slouches at making up bogus quotes, either, as this story about Lady Hope and her imaginary deathbed conversation with the founder of evolution indicates. I was interested to note that her lie first saw the light of day at Northfield Academy, which is just a few miles as the Galapagos finch flies from Science Made Cool World Headquarters.

Finally, both his admirers and detractors have not only misquoted Darwin over the years, many of them have flat out misunderstood him. Arch-skeptic Michael Shermer describes how the terminology we use to express Darwinian ideas includes a great many semantic land-mines -- "natural selection" implies that someone or something is doing the selecting, while the idea of competition among species suggests to some people a ruthless, deadly battle. We even use the word "Darwinian" to describe life-or-death struggles.

Let's hope this year's frenzy of Darwin biographies and celebrations leaves everyone with a slightly better understanding of the man and his work, so that some of these misinterpretations and outright falsehoods can perhaps go extinct.

Comments

[Jordan]

just wait until relativity is used as evidence supporting evolutionary theory.

[Cambias]

I've deleted the mysterious comment consisting of nothing but text pasted from the post. If the commenter wants to try again, that's fine, but if it's just comment spam, no thanks.