Happy 200th Birthday Charles Darwin!!!

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Today is the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. This year it’s also 150^th anniversary of the publishing of his masterwork On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (The man had the presence of the mind to publish the book when he was 50 – this made all the round anniversaries really round – in 2059 it’ll be 250 and 200).

Charles Darwin is an icon. Everyone heard his name. That guy with beard who said we are apes not dirt. And that’s about it. Because number of people who know what the theory of evolution is all about is much, much smaller. Most people don’t even understand the difference between evolution and the theory of evolution. It leads to them agreeing with pseudoscientist when they say that since scientist discuss theory of evolution then evolution itself isn’t real and therefore myths are as valid theories.

This comes back to the basic problem of confusing the description of the object with the object itself. The belief in the magical properties of words, especially written ones. This is how magic works. Like in Earthsea – change the name of the thing and you can change the thing itself. This is the Bible – with the Word becoming the reality. And Jew myths with golems made animated by writing. The underlying belief that if you tell people something, and write it down, and convince everyone it’s true it will be true. That there is some magical connection between thing and the words describing it. That if you change the description of things you can change the things you are describing. After all it works for social stuff, in human interactions. Why not the universe? If we close our eyes and really believe the Earth is flat and lying on the backs or four elephants that are standing on the giant turtle, it will be. Or something like that.

Unfortunately words are just words. They don’t change the nature of reality. They are describing it. The process of evolution was going on for billion of years before it was described. It took Darwin decades to put the words together. But when he did it he didn’t make evolution. He didn’t invent it. He described what he saw in the world. He made us understand where we came from and how it happened. He showed us how evolution works and how a simple process can lead to incredibly complex results. But it was always there.

The evolution theory changed since it was first postulated. The most important was the discovery of DNA as the inheritance factor. It allowed us to explain things Darwin could only say happen but didn’t know how. As we learn more evolution theory is still changing to accommodate the new information but the core stays the same. We get a more detailed description. Not a different one.

Not believing in evolution working because not all details of phylogenetic tree are resolved or we don’t know what and how exactly happened is like if people would insist the gravity didn’t work before it was described by Newton or that it stopped working when Einstein presented new version but it wasn’t widely accepted yet. And angels kept us from flying into space in the meantime. Theories are just our description of reality – the best approximation we can make – not the reality itself. Some day there will be better theory of gravity. And a more detailed evolution theory. But I doubt angels or any other beings will be involved in either one of them. The beauty of these theories lies in the fact that no one has to be involved.

So thank you Charles Darwin (and Alfred Wallace) for giving us a great description of the basic natural process that captured the minds of many. May it one day get to the minds of all (besides maybe the Flat Earth Society – they have bigger problems).