The Significance of the Darwinian Revolution
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
"Modern science is the product of two great revolutions in thought, one that we call the Newtonian revolution, the other the Darwinian. It is often implied that the principle distinction between these two is that one took place in physics"
Garrett Hardin, Nature & Man's Fate, p. 259.
Who: The people who drove the change in our conception of life.
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Charles Robert Darwin, 1809-1882 Alfred Russel Wallace, 1823-1913 Edward Blythe, 1810-1873 |
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A taste of the response
ridiculing the idea. |
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
What:
"it is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds…"
Origin of Species, p.489
"nature makes things make themselves"
Scientific assumptions with respect to the Darwinian Revolution
varieties and species
artificial breeding
Natural Selection
"Natura non facit saltum" or gradualism referred to in Latin and hence
"saltationism."
"Nature makes no leaps" (The living world makes no great changes quickly)
fossils
immutability of species
special creation of beings
humans are made in God's image
Darwin's contribution rests on three significant concepts that Stephen Gould call "three central features of Darwinian logic."
pp. 12-13, 116-192
"His theory was a bleak theory of elimination."
Janet Browne, The Power of Place, p.37
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
When
(1833) 1859, 1871
"man discovered he was an animal."
"It is my genuine belief that no greater act of human intellect,
no greater gesture of humility on the part of man has been or will be made in
the long history of science."
a "miracle, considering the nature of the human ego,"
Eisley, Darwin's Century,p.257
Where
Life on Earth
"to seize on as many and as diverse places in the economy of nature"
"struggle for existence" was an old concept popularized
by Lamark & Linneaus as a pruning device
inheritance of acquired traits
[some]"law must have made for increasing organic diversity."
"natural & sexual selection"
Eisley, Darwin's Century, pp. 182-3
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
How
"Natural Selection"
according to Darwin
"the modifications are accumulated by natural selection for the good of the being will cause other modifications, often of the most unexpected nature."
"no reason to doubt that the swiftest & slimmest wolves would have
the best chance of surviving"
Darwin, pp. 96,98.
Sexual Selection
according to Darwin
"Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural
selection."
"female birds, by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most
melodious or beautiful males ... might produce a marked effect."
"the view of plumage having been chiefly modified by sexual selection."
Darwin, pp. 96-97.
"In social animals it [natural selection] will adapt the
structure of each individual for the benefit of the community; if each in consequence
profits by the selected change."
"…shall not be in the least degree injurious for if it became so,
it would cause the extinction of the species."
Darwin, p. 96.
White, Science & the Human Spirit, 1989
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
Methodology
"I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale, more especially with respect to domesticated productions."
artificial
"selection was the keystone of man's success in making useful races."
Darwin's notebook
July 1837
Darwin's worldview
"These several facts accord well with my theory. I believe
in no fixed law of development, causing all the inhabitants of a country to
change abruptly,...
The process of modification must be extremely slow."
Darwin, Origin of Species, also p. 206; "Natura non facit saltum."
"Conditions of Existence is the higher law;"
"It is generally acknowledged that all organic beings have been formed on two great laws -- Unity of Type, and the Conditions of Existence."
"For natural selection acts by either now adapting the varying parts of
each being to its organic and inorganic conditions of life,..."
Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 206.
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
Impacts
"At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not ( it is like confessing a murder) immutable. . . . species become exquisitely adapted"
Darwin to Joseph Hooker
January 1844
Hardin, pp. 42-43.
Human ancestry & Darwin's reluctance to write the Descent:
"I think I shall avoid the whole subject,
as so surrounded by prejudices, though I fully admit it is the highest and most
interesting problem. . . ."
"With respect to man, I am very far from wishing to obtrude my belief;"
"The Darwinian revolution involved a far more profound reassessment of
the sense of the world, resulting in a view that no merely verbal substitution
could make consonant with the old."
Garrett Hardin, Nature & Man's Fate, pp. 1-21.
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
On the success of scientific truths
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Max Planck
Garrett Hardin, Nature & Man's Fate, p. 101.
Methodology | Worldview | Impacts | Darwin's own words | Who | What | When | Where | How | Character | Conclusions
Mayr | Thomas | Wilson | Hardin | Darwinism | Margulis | Steingraber | Carr | Keller | Watson
