So the surname "Darwin" goes down in History, as the one with the least need of further evolution?

Gottservant · Mar 2, 2020

Hi there,

The argument goes "we have Evolution, we don't need anything else" but there are ramifications to this, right?

For one thing discovering "Evolution" means that you don't have to rediscover it, right? Unless of course you have a certain endless fascination with it, in which case your fascination becomes obsessed with that from which Evolution sprang - in principle being an obsession with Nature?

Another ramification, is that if Evolution was right, you would cease to have to defend the theory or yourself, right? You would just receive the praise that was won by your theory and you would retire with it, true?

A last ramification for the sake of discussion here, is that your place in History would go uncontested - even if people who took the theory on for themselves started to belittle your place, they would still attest you had a place in principle, short of having the theory taken from them, out of incredulity at your treatment? The History book would still hold your picture and name and you would no longer need to compete with other people not there yet, true?

But what does reality bear out? Jesus had every reason to be praised; once He had made a name for Himself, people lavished Him with praise - then they crucified Him and started to kill His followers? God too, is believed by many to be good natured - yet they continue to pollute His Earth and rubbish anyone claiming to have His Life? History it would seem is belieing a greater danger, that the Day is coming when men will not regard History as strength? Even while men purport that those great among them have a place (in principle), they will destroy that place, to get back at God?

So does Darwin acknowledge God? Fundamentally he believed that God did not desire suffering. But will that save History? No. Therefore Darwin, will continue to have to "adapt"? Apparently, so. But how will Darwin adapt? Only if taking inspiration from "Evolution" is in its own right "more evolved, by purview of greater inspiration yet". This does not need a name of its own, we have the word "inspiration" in the language already - what it does mean, is that some things may be considered more evolved, in their own right: such that diverging from Evolution is considered a strength, not a weakness.

Is diverging from Evolution, a strength,, to you?

JackRT · Mar 2, 2020

Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live --- By CARL SAFINA

"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching," Robert Darwin told his son, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him. Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more. By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one "theory." The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too. In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after "Origin." He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical. Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.

Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term "dinosaur." Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved "spontaneous generation," the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things. Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. "Darwinism" implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And "isms" (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. "Darwinism" implies that biological scientists "believe in" Darwin’s "theory." It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

Using phrases like "Darwinian selection" or "Darwinian evolution" implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, "Newtonian physics" distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So "Darwinian evolution" raises a question: What’s the other evolution? Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the "isms" imply equivalence. But the term "Darwinian" built a stage upon which "intelligent" could share the spotlight.

Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science. That’s why Darwin must go.

Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. "Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?" he wrote in "Zoonomia" in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how. Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter "natural selection." What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.

But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin. Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered "genetics" met Darwin’s natural selection in the "modern synthesis" of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.

Darwin’s intellect, humility ("It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance") and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right. But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.

Cimorene · Mar 2, 2020

I have a friend named Darwin! That's his first name! He was born in Darwin, Australia which is named of course in honour of Charles Darwin. I love his name!!! I think Darwin was brilliant!!!!

Gottservant · Mar 2, 2020

Cimorene said:
I have a friend named Darwin! That's his first name! He was born in Darwin, Australia which is named of course in honour of Charles Darwin. I love his name!!! I think Darwin was brilliant!!!!

Three cheers for your friend.

At least they won't be calling their children all the same thing?

SkyWriting · Mar 3, 2020

Gottservant said:
So does Darwin acknowledge God?

I think he fully supported God as the Creator and engineer.
He just thought he'd get more impact if he didn't mention God
as the engineer of the natural selection process he proposed.

Jimmy D · Mar 3, 2020

Gottservant said:
The argument goes "we have Evolution, we don't need anything else"

No it doesn't.

Case closed.

Shemjaza · Mar 3, 2020

Gottservant said:
The argument goes "we have Evolution, we don't need anything else" but there are ramifications to this, right?

I don't think anyone makes that argument.

Gottservant said:
For one thing discovering "Evolution" means that you don't have to rediscover it, right? Unless of course you have a certain endless fascination with it, in which case your fascination becomes obsessed with that from which Evolution sprang - in principle being an obsession with Nature?

Evolution isn't a single thing, it's a whole field of scientific investigations with details about the past and help for the future to be discovered.

Characterising it as "an obsession with nature", is insulting and unreasonable.

Gottservant said:
Another ramification, is that if Evolution was right, you would cease to have to defend the theory or yourself, right? You would just receive the praise that was won by your theory and you would retire with it, true?

False.

Evolution is true and useful, but people still try to interfere with it being researched and taught.

That is also false in general. Something being true or right doesn't prevent people disagreeing with it.

Gottservant said:
A last ramification for the sake of discussion here, is that your place in History would go uncontested - even if people who took the theory on for themselves started to belittle your place, they would still attest you had a place in principle, short of having the theory taken from them, out of incredulity at your treatment? The History book would still hold your picture and name and you would no longer need to compete with other people not there yet, true?

Maybe. But certainly not a guarantee. It's difficult to imagine Charles Darwin being forgotten, but on a long enough time scale and in a big enough social upheaval he could be forgotten while the scientific theory continued.

Gottservant said:
But what does reality bear out? Jesus had every reason to be praised; once He had made a name for Himself, people lavished Him with praise - then they crucified Him and started to kill His followers? God too, is believed by many to be good natured - yet they continue to pollute His Earth and rubbish anyone claiming to have His Life? History it would seem is belieing a greater danger, that the Day is coming when men will not regard History as strength? Even while men purport that those great among them have a place (in principle), they will destroy that place, to get back at God?

I don't think very many people are destroying the Earth to get back at God. I think it's only out of selfishness and greed.

Even the horrors that the first Christians faced was mostly motivated by bigotry against a new religion and a cruel desire to maintain political control,

Gottservant said:
So does Darwin acknowledge God? Fundamentally he believed that God did not desire suffering. But will that save History? No. Therefore Darwin, will continue to have to "adapt"? Apparently, so. But how will Darwin adapt? Only if taking inspiration from "Evolution" is in its own right "more evolved, by purview of greater inspiration yet". This does not need a name of its own, we have the word "inspiration" in the language already - what it does mean, is that some things may be considered more evolved, in their own right: such that diverging from Evolution is considered a strength, not a weakness.

Is diverging from Evolution, a strength,, to you?

I'm not certain I understand what you mean by "diverging from Evolution", but in most cases of Creationists it seems to mean refusing to learn about evidence, and insulting their fellow Christians.

So, that doesn't sound like a strength at all.

Ophiolite · Mar 3, 2020

JackRT said:
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live --- By CARL SAFINA

"You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching," Robert Darwin told his son, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him. Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more. By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one "theory." The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.

That all life is related by common ancestry, and that populations change form over time, are the broad strokes and fine brushwork of evolution. But Darwin was late to the party. His grandfather, and others, believed new species evolved. Farmers and fanciers continually created new plant and animal varieties by selecting who survived to breed, thus handing Charles Darwin an idea. All Darwin perceived was that selection must work in nature, too. In 1859, Darwin’s perception and evidence became "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." Few realize he published 8 books before and 10 books after "Origin." He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical. Credit Darwin’s towering genius. No mind ran so freely, so widely or so freshly over the hills and vales of existence. But there’s a limit to how much credit is reasonable. Parking evolution with Charles Darwin overlooks the limits of his time and all subsequent progress.

Science was primitive in Darwin’s day. Ships had no engines. Not until 1842, six years after Darwin’s Beagle voyage, did Richard Owen coin the term "dinosaur." Darwin was an adult before scientists began debating whether germs caused disease and whether physicians should clean their instruments. In 1850s London, John Snow fought cholera unaware that bacteria caused it. Not until 1857 did Johann Carl Fuhlrott and Hermann Schaaffhausen announce that unusual bones from the Neander Valley in Germany were perhaps remains of a very old human race. In 1860 Louis Pasteur performed experiments that eventually disproved "spontaneous generation," the idea that life continually arose from nonliving things. Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. "Darwinism" implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And "isms" (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. "Darwinism" implies that biological scientists "believe in" Darwin’s "theory." It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.

Using phrases like "Darwinian selection" or "Darwinian evolution" implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, "Newtonian physics" distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So "Darwinian evolution" raises a question: What’s the other evolution? Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the "isms" imply equivalence. But the term "Darwinian" built a stage upon which "intelligent" could share the spotlight.

Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science. That’s why Darwin must go.

Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor. "Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?" he wrote in "Zoonomia" in 1794. He just couldn’t figure out how. Charles Darwin was after the how. Thinking about farmers’ selective breeding, considering the high mortality of seeds and wild animals, he surmised that natural conditions acted as a filter determining which individuals survived to breed more individuals like themselves. He called this filter "natural selection." What Darwin had to say about evolution basically begins and ends right there. Darwin took the tiniest step beyond common knowledge. Yet because he perceived — correctly — a mechanism by which life diversifies, his insight packed sweeping power.

But he wasn’t alone. Darwin had been incubating his thesis for two decades when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to him from Southeast Asia, independently outlining the same idea. Fearing a scoop, Darwin’s colleagues arranged a public presentation crediting both men. It was an idea whose time had come, with or without Darwin. Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution.

Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered "genetics" met Darwin’s natural selection in the "modern synthesis" of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance.

Darwin’s intellect, humility ("It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance") and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right. But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.

An interesting, elegant and erudite post. I had to Google "Carl Safina", as I am unfamiliar with his work. Based on a quick scan of the Wikipedia article I think I would find myself in agreement with most of his writing, but not with his central theme here - no matter how well argued it is.

I offer these thoughts of mine that I've posted on a couple of forums before (and quite possibly on CF). They should explain my objections to his conclusion. They may also address Gottservant's points.

"
Evolution – Is Darwinism Dead?
What we call something is, or at least should be, less important than what it is. Our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms is still far from complete and not fully integrated. Large steps have been taken over a century and a half. Is it important to mark those steps through different terminology? Important yes, but not necessarily essential.

Darwin's idea was accepted with surprising alacrity by the scientific community, supporting the claim by some that it was an idea whose time had come. (And Wallace’s independent derivation of the theory served to offer confirmation of that notion.) Yet by the turn of the century Darwinism was all but dead as people gravitated to mutation and the concepts of Mendel rediscovered by Bateman, de Vries and Corren. When the two concepts were fused in the 1930s and 40s did the resultant concept merit a new name? One could hardly call it Haldane/Huxley/Dhobzhanksy/ Fisher/Simpson/Stebbins/Wright/Mayrism, so the Modern Synthesis was born.

And now, more than half a century later, we've learnt even more about the mechanisms and processes, so much more that some people think a new name is in order. Is it?

I said at the outset that what we call something is, or at least should be, less important than what it is. But is this true? Darwin may have been the right man in the right place at the right time, but he ignited a revolution that is arguably of greater scientific importance than any other. His handful of principles still lie at the heart of evolutionary thought – descent with modification from a common ancestor. So my view is simple. Let's just call the current hypothesis and those that will develop in future, Darwinism. Direct, concise, effective.

And it has the secondary advantage that it will annoy the creationists"

Warden_of_the_Storm · Mar 3, 2020

I'm just going to preemptively say 'no'.

SLP · Mar 4, 2020

Gottservant said:
The argument goes "we have Evolution, we don't need anything else" but there are ramifications to this, right?

I have never heard such an argument.
Sounds fake.

For one thing discovering "Evolution" means that you don't have to rediscover it, right?

Another ramification, is that if Evolution was right, you would cease to have to defend the theory or yourself, right? You would just receive the praise that was won by your theory and you would retire with it, true?[/quote]
Like the discovery of the ideal gas laws.

Problem is, no scientifically-ignorant, brainwashed religious fanatics have been ordered to hate the Ideal Gas laws and do their best not to understand them, the way sects of religious groups have done with evolution.

Jesus had every reason to be praised;

Beg the question much?

once He had made a name for Himself, people lavished Him with praise - then they crucified Him and started to kill His followers?

Sounds like a popular guy.

God too, is believed by many to be good natured - yet they continue to pollute His Earth and rubbish anyone claiming to have His Life?

Good natured? The deity that ordered the slaughter of fetuses for being in the uteri of women living in an area that did not worship him? Wow... you and I have very different ideas regarding what "good natured" means.

Is diverging from Evolution, a strength,, to you?

No, it is a mental disorder.

Astrophile · Mar 17, 2020

JackRT said:
He wrote seminal books on orchids, insects, barnacles and corals. He figured out how atolls form, and why they’re tropical.

Darwin also wrote a book on volcanic islands, which contains (I think) the first description in English of a tektite.

JackRT · Mar 17, 2020

Astrophile said:
Darwin also wrote a book on volcanic islands, which contains (I think) the first description in English of a tektite.

He also proposed a second theory --- of genetics. It was promptly shot down because it was wrong. It was over a century later that DNA was discovered confirming Darwin's ToE in spades.

Kylie · Mar 21, 2020

JackRT said:
He also proposed a second theory --- of genetics. It was promptly shot down because it was wrong. It was over a century later that DNA was discovered confirming Darwin's ToE in spades.

Darwin wrote about genetics? What book was this? I've never heard about this.

JackRT · Mar 21, 2020

Kylie said:
Darwin wrote about genetics? What book was this? I've never heard about this.

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/charles-darwins-theory-pangenesis

Kylie · Mar 21, 2020

JackRT said:
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/charles-darwins-theory-pangenesis

I'd hardly say that this was genetics. At best, it was a hypothesis about some unknown mechanism for inheritance. Still, very interesting! Thanks!

So the surname "Darwin" goes down in History, as the one with the least need of further evolution?

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