Off Topic: Happy Darwin Day!
Amidst all the roiling disturbance within the economy we forget that life goes on. So today I want to call your attention to the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. This year is also, coincidentally, the 150th anniversary of his masterwork “Origin of The Species”. Here’s an Op-Ed from today’s New York Times: Op-Ed Contributor – The Origin of Darwin
Most people committed to the accumulation of knowledge have a moment when Darwin affects their world view. For me it was the realization that he destroyed once and for all time the vanity of humankind. For thousands of years we had built intellectual constructs with ourselves placed firmly at the center. Whether it was religious or secular, superstitious or rational, our thought systems and beliefs were always ‘human centric’. We looked at the earth, stars, plants and animals as if they were here to please us. We treated them with a breathtaking hubris and moved them around in our concepts of being as if it were our right so to do.
Darwin destroyed that. He brought us, literally and figuratively, down to earth. For that we owe him vast and timeless thanks. For it is only when we fully grasp the tenuous nature of our hold on life and our vanishing insignificance within the universe as a whole, that we can deal realistically and competently with our long term survival.
Such is the profound impact of Darwinian thinking, as expressed in his foundation of evolutionary theory, that he deserves to be counted as one of the most important intellectuals in history. That his impact is thus is demonstrated by the continued resistance to the core of his ideas: that we share a common ancestry with all life on earth. We are not special in any way other than that we understand and can embrace our very ordinary origins. That this offends those who would prefer us to have some higher status is meaningless. Especially to science.
It is baffling that America, home to so much of the science that undergirds modernity, is also so backward in accepting evolution as solid science. It is especially sad because non-acceptance prevents the search for a better understanding of reality. The ongoing difficulty that America has with science and scientific education is one of the greatest challenges we have. The vibrancy of our economic future depends largely on our ability to resolve issues within fields such as health and the environment on the basis of modern, competitive, rational science.
Science does not establish ‘truths’, it is far more modest: it merely makes claims about reality that have yet to be proven wrong. So any scientific theory, whether it is about gravity, electromagnetism, evolution, or quantum mechanics is simply waiting to be invalidated by future research. Until the claims of a theory are falsified, to use Karl Popper’s iconic terminology, we accept them as ‘fact’. All our knowledge is thus the accumulation of corrections to previous errors. We do not change our minds, we learn.
Popper went further to make the claim that the action of problem solving is the very signature of life. That all life is problem solving is a thoroughly Darwinian concept. Life is a search.
So on this, Darwin’s birthday, we should honor the success of his personal search and his consequent contribution to our understanding of the grandeur of life and to our very small and temporary role within it.
