Atomic Nerds

This definitely falls under the category of “bothers me way beyond all good reason and sense”, but I’m really getting sick of seeing evolutionary theory constantly referred to as “Darwinian evolution”.

Don’t get me wrong, there IS a reason to do it in some contexts; Darwin wasn’t the first person to propose biological evolution, he just supplied the necessary mechanism. If you’re talking about the history of science, or science fiction, it’s useful to distinguish “Darwinian” evolution from “Lamarckian” evolution. (Let’s just leave Lysenko in his own little corner of disgrace for now…) It’s also useful to distinguish it from more colloquial uses of the term, like “the evolution of technology”, though for that purpose “biological” is just as good.

And it’s certainly not as if I’ve got a single thing against Darwin or don’t think he doesn’t deserve mountains of credit; if anything, I think Darwin’s genius is popularly underestimated. He was a champion observer who could focus in on the smallest of details about the least interesting of species (barnacles anyone?), or view the vista of all life on earth and see the patterns. Forest? Trees? Too piddling- he could see the whole green earth or just the leaves without apparent strain. I’ve even vaguely considered getting a portrait of the man tattooed somewhere; the biggest reason why I don’t is that it would clash aesthetically with the work I’ve already had done.

But I’ve seen two cases where the author of an article had a huge and burning need to put “Darwinian” in front of “evolution” today, and while I don’t really see the reason for doing so with one of them, the reason for the other is the usual one. It’s by the infamous Discovery Institute- a “think tank” that purports to study “intelligent design” but doesn’t actually seem to do anything that isn’t strictly political- and it’s a VERY common creationist thing. By tacking evolutionary theory onto Darwin, you imply that it’s the hobbyhorse theory of one man that the rest of the scientific establishment jumped onto because they didn’t have any better materialist explanation for the origin and diversity of life. Nothing could be further from the truth; while Origin of Species still makes for interesting reading, evolutionary theory was as primitive in Darwin’s time as the Tin Lizzie was in Henry Ford’s heyday- not least of which because he hadn’t found the material for his mechanism to make complete sense with, genes. (He might have- Mendel was a contemporary of Darwin’s- but Mendel was shy and retiring, and his work wasn’t really recognized until after his death.)

It can be argued that evolutionary theory didn’t really take off, remaining a backwater discipline associated with naturalists, until the Modern Synthesis welded evolutionary theory and genetics together. Until then, it wasn’t yet what it is now- the uniting theory of all of biology. Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous quote about “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution” dates from this period, as he was one of the major players.

In Isaac Newton’s time, the contributions he made were almost the whole of advanced physics at the time. Now, when we say “Newtonian physics”, we’re talking about a relatively small subset of what is now known, but much of which would not be known without his work. Modern evolutionary biology is fed by every single sub-discipline; genetics, population biology, ecology, developmental biology, taxonomy, morphology, everything. This is why “questioning the credibility of theory of evolution” sounds so ridiculous to a biologist’s ears; once you get far enough in your studies to be learning much about these fields, you’ve realized that none of it DOES make much sense except in light of evolution, but it all screams “evolution!” from dozens of different directions. You can’t take it out and have the whole thing still make any kind of coherent picture any more than you can take atoms out of chemistry and expect that field to still make sense.

The evolution of today is a massive edifice of science, a hundred and fifty years old with literature so vast you could spend a lifetime reading it and still only have sipped a few mouthfuls from the sea. The evolution of Darwin is a relatively small beast that looks much easier to challenge, which is why creationists keep calling it that. We who know better should not imitate them.

Posted Ranting, Science: we'll fuck you up |