Last Thursday was Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday. We threw a little party for him at my university, but alas, the guest of honor didn't show up. We played Darwin trivia, listned to talks about Darwin's life and work, and then had Darwin snacks. A good time was had by all.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Okay, Just a Bit Late, Happy Darwin Day.
Last Thursday was Charles Darwin's 200th Birthday. We threw a little party for him at my university, but alas, the guest of honor didn't show up. We played Darwin trivia, listned to talks about Darwin's life and work, and then had Darwin snacks. A good time was had by all.
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11 comments:
Darwin snacks? I think I'm afraid to know...
All naturally selected maybe?
I realize this is a time for celebration, but I'd like to be theoryous for a moment, and share with you a story:
There was a biology student who was studying equilibrium in sea birds with a specific focus on Terns. He proposed that giving measured doses of THC, and observing their flight patterns, would give some
insight to the problems of equilibrium in three dimensional space.
This proposal being given in a more liberal era, the student got the funding. He filled out mountains of forms, set up a lab with a ready supply of terns, and proceeded on his way. After a year of diligent work, groveling monthly before the review committee to get his stipend, and living with drugged Terns, he completed his study.
With trembling hands, he delivered his 247-page report, complete with charts and graphs, to the review committee. The august body perused his study, asking penetrating questions and reducing our student to jell-o. Finally, the
department head stood up. The light reflected off her steel-rimmed glasses as she stared down at our student.
"There is a lot of good work here," she declared. "But we can't accept this report. You have detailed marvelously the effects of THC on Terns but you forgot one essential step: you have no control group."
The biology student went pale, and said, "No. You don't mean..."
"Yes. I'm afraid so. You left no Tern unstoned."
The Darwin snacks included the cake in the picture, along with a variety of differently sized seeds, as we attempted to influence bill size in the attending students (okay, it was mixed nuts, but still).
Cat, you know I love the bird jokes.
I was working on a theory that Leos Tolstoy and Da Vinci are actually the same person as Charles Darwin,. Clearly I've understimated the magnitude of this conspiracy.
Keifus, you can see why I went with the Young Darwin instead of the Old Bearded Darwin. I didn't want to fan the conspiracy flames.
On a totally unrelated note, did you know that Darwinists were behind 9-11? Them and the Joooooooos!
Lately I've been listening to "10 Books that Screwed up the World" while using my treadmill. When the author started talking about Darwin, I was afraid Origin would be one of the ten books. But he didn't talk about Origin, he talked about The Descent of Man. I guess I should read Descent myself, but from the quotes and analysis given, I was surprised just how far Darwin actually did go toward social Darwinisn, to the extent of ranking the races according to their closeness or distance from apes. I realize that we have to judge Darwin according to the time, and much has been made about his anti-slavery stance, but still it does seem that at least some social Darwinism actually did come from Darwin.
Kev, you can't take Darwin out of the context of his time any more than you can take anyone else out of their times. And it'd be pretty difficult to argue that Descent has done much to screw up the world. It's a lot more influential for its ideas on sexual selection than anything else. You certainly don't see anyone seriously citing it as a support for eugenics, and Darwin would have been horrified had somebody done such a thing.
I agree that you can't judge anyone apart from their time; except that, in the case of Darwin, he had a great hand in creating his time. I would not judge harshly someone in the 1880s who was a social Darwinist; but Darwin contributed to creating the world in which being a social Darwinist was very easy. And he seems to have done it directly, not merely through the misuse of his ideas. I don't blame Darwin for the misuse of the idea of "descent with change", which is by itself neither a good nor evil idea. However, when Darwin went to the extent of ranking the different human races according to how evolved they are, that is a pernicious idea. I might not fault someone in 1880 for believing that aboriginal Australians were not as evolved as white people; but I do fault Darwin for advancing that theory.
Eugenics is not gone, it has simply gone underground. For example, there are almost no Downs Syndrome children born anymore because people have decided to abort them. As we go on, how many more lives will simply be thought of as "not worth living" and terminated before birth? With the new SCHIP expansion, within a few years, virtually all children will be covered by a government insurance program. With budget constraints eventually coming into play, how much pressure will be put upon women to have genetic testing and then to abort non-optimal fetuses? My guess is there will be a lot. I would not even be surprised to see children born with known anomalies be excluded from coverage, so that parents would be virtually forced to abort for financial reasons.
I don't blame Darwin for this, and the social Darwinism was pushed much more explicitly by others, but ideas do have consequences. The idea that people are just another set of carbon-based DNA hosts to be controlled, modified, or terminated according to some misguided utilitarianism does have large societal implications.
It might be appropriate to blame Darwin for Social Darwinism if he had invented the idea of evolution, or had been the first to rank the races as to which was most evolved, or had he believed that any innate differences in the races meant that those various races should have any less in the way of human rights. Instead, Darwin and his family put their considerable fortunes to work to fight slavery. (Darwin was almost thrown off the Beagle when he argued to Captain FitzRoy that slavery was unholy.) Darwin was as far from racist as a rich, white Englishman of his day could be. He explicity stated that humans should not use evolution as an excuse for racist views.
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