It is the anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. It was one hundred and sixty-one years ago, in 1859, that Charles Darwin’s revolutionary book was published. Darwin had reached his conclusions twenty years previously, and only decided to share his research when he realised Alfred Wallace was about to publish a similar set of findings.
Darwin was always a heroic figure for me, someone prepared to stand against the establishment thinking of his time.
Attending a secondary school run by fundamentalist, evangelical Christians, I remember times when as an ignorant teenager I felt I had to stand up for science. I remember being taken to task by a teacher for telling younger boys that I believed in evolution.
There have been moments since when I have wondered if it was worth struggling to argue for science when there were people like Richard Dawkins who were prepared to dismiss the faith of religious people as naïve nonsense.
Dawkins has sometimes written in terms that were as much a fundamentalist in one direction as my teachers were in the other.
In 2006, here’s how he answered the question “What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it?”
“It is an established fact that all of life on this planet is shaped by Darwinian natural selection, which also endows it with an over-whelming illusion of ‘design’. I believe, but cannot prove, that the same is true all over the universe, wherever life may exist. I believe that all intelligence, all creativity, and all design, anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of a cumulative process equivalent to what we here call Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.”
The teachers at my fundamentalist school would have given a similar answer, just substituting their own words.
“It is an established fact that all of life on this planet is created by God, who also endows it with an over-whelming illusion of ‘evolution’. I believe, but cannot prove, that the same is true all over the universe, wherever life may exist. I believe that all intelligence, all creativity, and all design, anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of a cumulative process equivalent to what we here call Creation. It follows that evolution comes late in the universe, after a period of Creation. Evolution cannot precede Creation and therefore cannot underlie the universe.”
Darwin might have wondered at the polarisation of opinions based on personal beliefs that arose from his scientific observations.