… Sergeant Pepper… oops, sorry, wrong theme.
150 years ago tomorrow, people suddenly became smart, observant and able to understand the world. Right? Right?
Well, look, I have enormous respect for Darwin, and I think the Origin is a cool and interesting book, but really, no. People were working on understanding the world before Darwin, and in fact Darwin saw what he was doing as very much in the same mould as his scientific mentors and heroes. His ideas have turned out to be, if not quite right, then productive and useful in the progress of science, but measured carefully, Darwin’s theories and ours are not really the same, if you are thinking of the content.
Let us by all means celebrate the man and his achievements. But let us not make him into a demigod, either (nor any scientific hero – if Pasteur discarded 90% of his data, and he did, that doesn’t belittle his contributions to science, and if Mendel made his data fit his model, and he probably didn’t but might have, that doesn’t change one whit the facts of genetics as we now understand them). Darwin did not invent the ball point pen, antibiotics, the iPhone (all hail the Prophet Jobs!), or BLTs, either. What he did is what he did, and more power to him.
