Love letter to The Origin
Today on Hullabaloo, tristero writes an affectionate post about the marvelousness of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It’s cool to see interest and enthusiasm for this work outside of science media. The inspiration came from Olivia Judson’s piece in the The Times, which confesses that lots of biologists haven’t actually read it. Both posts are appeals to correct that. I’d like to add another argument to theirs: the most impressive thing about The Origin is Darwin’s staggering amount of observation and inference, and its explanatory power is a delight to non-scientists and a thrill for modern biologists.
The Origin is one of the most important theoretical accomplishments in science, yet it is entirely accessible to lay readers. This simply doesn’t happen anymore. In fact, Darwin’s entire process would be unusual today. Although he did some tinkering, particularly by breeding animals, Darwin was not really an experimentalist. Mostly he was a naturalist: he kept his eyes open, recorded everything, and synthesized it all to produce his cohesive—and largely correct—theory of natural selection. Now, experiments, often complicated and expensive experiments, test hypotheses. (This is called the scientific method.) Even observational studies are formally executed, with carefully circumscribed parameters—and certainly they are published that way, unlike Darwin’s creative assemblage of facts, insights and conjectures. But even as hypotheses are carefully chosen and experiments painstakingly designed, the ultimate synthesis still takes place in the brain. Darwin’s beloved book will always be relevant, because it is an inspirational reminder to keep the breadth of observation as wide as possible.
July 9th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I am for this evolution stuff.
Socially, we are dieing to evolve and that’s no pun.
We can fly but we can’t think speak feel, coherently:
almost as a rule - not allowed to think - not a fair
trade.. Tired of the so-called scientific age egging on
another pre-enlightenment period/s.
What’s with that?
Illiterates, all. And proudly. I’d say since most know
almost nothing of the mechanics of flight or somewhat other
than their branch or field CONTEXT valuable, I say missing
along w/ much of ’sciences’ disconnect with the remainder of
western thought generally and otherwise - JETSETTING LIARS
WITH COLLEGE EDUCATIONS INSTEAD? and few fly about
with much use or the world wouldn’t be such a backwards
sh(tpile, given the efficacy of the scientific method when
applied more rigorously in previous sections of our
supposed information (and controls) age. Guess were done
with the Information age and onto the Controls one?
Anyway. This is interesting thanks for the trackback.
Would it?