Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
On the origin of the Darwin myths
Ever been told by a ruthless boss that, “as Charles Darwin said, it’s survival of the fittest”?
Rather than answering that it was actually a one-time sub editor for The Economist magazine, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase, or fighting back with an equally wrong comment about someone being descended from monkeys, Darwin academics are calling for a moratorium on the everyday use and abuse of the great naturalist.
Two-hundred years after he was born, and 150 years after he published “On the Origin of Species”, it’s time to check the facts, as “most of what most people think they know about him is not true,” according to Darwin scholar John van Wyhe, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge.
Visiting Singapore for a Willi Hennig Society-organised talk about Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace, who is also the subject of several myths, van Whye ran through a series of widely-believed Darwin misconceptions that make humankind look pretty slow on the uptake. First off, he the pointed out that Darwin and Wallace, were not, really, such iconoclasts.
By the late 1830s, two decades before Darwin’s Origin, the scientific community had already accepted that the world was far older than could be allowed by a literal reading of Genesis, he said.
The “Bridgewater Treatise” by the Reverend William Buckland, the first person to scientifically describe a dinosaur, detailed geology and mineralogy’s relevance to theology by drawing cross-sections of the earth full of the fossils of extinct creatures, decades before the two came on the scene.
Second, Darwin did not hold off publishing his theory for decades out of a paralysing fear of outraging his wife or conservative Victorian society, as the popular “Darwin’s delay” theory has it.
Magical Madagascar worth saving
Scientists have joined forces to save magical Madagascar by using a new method they hope to apply to other hot spots of biodiversity. For full details you can check my colleague Deborah Zabarenko’s story.
As someone who has had the great privilege of visiting this island continent twice I can only say: “Right on!”
Madagascar is a classic example of natural selection at work: most of its species have evolved in splendid isolation because the island broke free from the rest of Africa tens of millions of years ago.
This is what evolution and natural selection are all about. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace separately stumbled upon this profound notion in the 19th century while observing life on islands — or, more specifically, the difference to be found in life on islands often only a few miles apart.
Madagascar, because of its size and the length of time it has been a cast away, is a prime an example of natural selection run riot.
Its snakes have no venom because that is an evolutionary trait they picked up after Madagascar and the rest of Africa went their separate ways.
It has boa constrictors (which I have observed in its forests) which are found nowhere in Africa but are found in South America. Why? How? Because, or so goes one theory I have heard, Madagascar and South America BOTH broke free from Africa at one point. So it stands to reason that they might both keep something that died out in Africa and vice versa.
“Go to Madagascar yourself.”
We second the motion! Although the situation in Antananarivo is not good throughout the vast majority of the island life continues as before the coup d’état. You can easily pass through Tana and enjoy the wonders of the island. We continue to receive visitors and now need you more than ever!
These comments reveal that Darwin’s greatness reflects 1) the synthesis of ideas already around 2) the willingness to defy moral conventions and supplant the then current ‘god theory’ of species development by a scientific and rational one (Wallace was a spiritualist!) 3) persistence and willingness to undertake the sheer drudgery of scientific work to establish his proposition 4) simple humanity and generosity (what is missing from these comments is Darwin the anti-slavery campaigner. Darwin’s ultimate genius is his non-bombastic, cautious and yet ever-questioning thoroughness. Darwin is the model of a scrupulous scientist who knows that this answers to questions will always be partial but resolved in the fullness of time. What a hero!