Hello everyone and I’m sorry about the lack of a Friday Pic last week. I’ve been having some computer/internet issues lately which sort of ruined my will to blog. But, today is Darwin Day, which means I have to post something. Unfortunately, what I have to post is, at the moment, outrage - or at least annoyance.

Kevin Padian, president of the NCSE and expert witness in the Dover trial, has written an excellent essay in Nature about Darwin’s contributions to science. PhysOrg “reports” on it, and manages to grossly misrepresent both the author and Darwin:

“Perhaps no individual has had such a sweeping influence on so many facets of social and intellectual life,” Padian wrote in an essay published in this month’s issue of the journal Nature.

Padian wrote Darwin “has been invoked as the demon responsible for a variety of heartless ills of society,” including atheism, Nazism, communism, abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research and same-sex marriage.

Among Darwin’s critics are creationists, who insist the Bible’s descriptions of the world’s beginning are literally true, and some scientists who argue that life is the product of intelligent design.

That is pretty much all of what they write that in any way reflects what the original article is about, and it completely misses the mark. Padian obviously doesn’t in any way endorse Darwin as the cause of Nazism (or atheism as an “heartless ill”). Padian does mention that Darwin has been used for various ills in the introduction to the essay, but then goes on to discuss what’s actually interesting in the context - his scientific contributions. The original quote reads:

In the past century and a half, Darwin’s ideas have inspired powerful images and insights in science, humanities and the arts. Meanwhile, countless commentators ignorant of his meaning have borrowed his eloquence to plump their own chickens — from capitalism to ‘evolutionary psychology’. Darwin has been invoked as the demon responsible for a variety of perceived heartless ills of society, including atheism, Nazism, communism, abortion, homosexuality, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, and the abridgement of all our natural freedoms. One can scarcely imagine the horror that Darwin would feel at the misunderstanding, misappropriation and vilification of his ideas in the 125 years since his death. (emphasis added)

What the hell went wrong, PhysOrg? Are you creationists, or what? It’s one thing to neglect to mention that Padian (and the rest of us) consider it wrong to “invoke Darwin” as the cause of bad stuff, but when you also remove the very important word “perceived”, putting homosexuality, abortion and atheism on the same level as Nazism… And on Darwin Day? This is like decapitating Santa Claus in a public square on Christmas.

Towards the end of the essay, after having listed some of the many important contributions Darwin made, Padian writes:

Darwin moved intellectual thought from a paradigm of untestable wonder at special creation to an ability to examine the workings of that natural world, however ultimately formed, in terms of natural mechanisms and historical patterns. He rooted the classification of species within a single branching tree, and so gave systematics a biological, rather than purely philosophical, rationale. He framed most of the important questions that still define our understanding of evolution, from natural selection to sexual selection, and founded the main principles of the sciences of biogeography and ecology. His work is still actively read and discussed today, inspiring new students and scientists all over the world. Few authors can claim so much.

Personally, I am celebrating Darwin Day by immersing myself in Darwin’s book “The Voyage of the Beagle”. His writing is, to use his own two favourite adjectives, singularly wonderful. The awe he expresses as he explores an unfamiliar world so different from the English countryside is both inspiring and endearing, and the way he meticulously observes and notes down everything he sees is absolutely incredible. Sometimes I wish I had been born in a different era, when valuable natural science could easily be conducted just by going out into the world and writing down everything you see… Of course, I would have needed a Y chromosome to have mattered, but time travel’s a little more difficult than sex change.

darwin, biology, evolution, nature