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June 2, 2005
Darwin's Harmful Books
I'm a little late in writing about Human Events' list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th century. It has taken me a while to get over the fact that we did not have all of them in our home library. I want to talk about two of the books that didn't quite make the break and were listed in the Honorable Mention section of the list. This section listed books that "won votes from two or more judges." Those books are Origin of the (sic) Species and Descent of Man, both by Charles Darwin and both in our family library.
Ed Brayton has already noted that the "conservative scholars" who voted for On the Origin of Species, didn't get the title right. This is a common mistake that is often made by people who do not understand or want to belittle the theory that Darwin proposed. The full title is, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
I don't want to quibble about the title. What I want to do is note that of Darwin's ten or so books these two, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man are most closely associated with his contribution to the scientific theory of evolution. Why did at least two of the "conservative scholars" put two science books in the same category as Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto and Hitler's Mein Kampf? It's hard to know the motivations of people one knows well; it is even harder to know the motivations of anonymous "conservative scholars." But one can take a guess based on the facts that are before us. First, these two books were seen by some as among the most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century. Second, except for two books by Marx, the other being Das Kapital, they were the only set of books by a single author. In terms of the general public, my guess is that On the Origin of Species is much better known, but not necessarily better read, than The Descent of Man. Neither one is much read by the general public. So I tentatively conclude that to some extent it is Darwin as an evolutionist that is the real target rather than the books themselves.
Many conservatives and most creationists act as if evolutionary theory, "Darwinism," is a cult of an individual in the same way that many religions are cults of an individual. If Darwin and his infernal books would just go away evil would go away with them. As an example read this from Answers in Genesis,
Darwin knew, and virtually all the world’s foremost students of his idea know, that belief in his concept quite simply spells materialism with a capital ‘M’. The idea of no designer, no purpose, no guiding intelligence, no progressive plan — these are not afterthoughts to Darwin’s evolution, but form the very core of it. Accept Darwin’s ‘baby’, and this ‘bathwater’ has a nasty habit of coming along, as the drastic decline in belief among evolution-compromising churches attests.
This paragraph refers to Darwin's students, among whom is, as the article from which this paragraph was taken says, Stephen Jay Gould. These students are not just Darwin's immediate followers, but also the whole line of biologists who have enhanced the original theory to form the basis of modern day biology.
Here's the problem, Darwin is one, but not the only, discoverer of evolution by natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace had nearly the same idea and both their ideas were made public at the same time at the same meeting of the Linnean Society meeting in London on June 30th, 1858 with Charles Lyell and J. D. Hooker presenting their joint paper, "On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection." It is true that Darwin developed most of the theory before Wallace. However, Wallace actually came to the theory completely independently and by a somewhat different line of reasoning and with some different evidence than Darwin. And if either one or both of them had not made the discovery, someone else would have. This was not a one-man show. But even if it had been, the evidence in support of the theory was so great and growing so rapidly that anyone of a dozen naturalists might well have developed the theory. The fact that these two did it independently and in the same general time frame indicates just how ripe the science was at the time. But if the time had not been ripe, then subsequent discoveries would have certainly led to the same theory.
Those who wish that Darwin had never been somehow hope that modern evolutionary theory is a Darwin cult. By demonizing him, they hope that the theory will collapse. It will not. The theory does not depend on any one person. It depends on the facts of nature as they are known to a wide range of scientists with diverse specialties. Even if On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man had never been written, we would no doubt still have one of the best supported scientific theories ever developed.
Via feministe
Posted by Duane Smith at June 2, 2005 8:15 PM | Read more on Evolution |
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