My friend Tom Hayden has a great new piece in Smithsonian magazine on how Charles Darwin’s work remains relevant 150 years after the publication of The Origin. It includes a nice brief history of Darwin’s early years, the development of his thinking on common descent and natural selection, and most interestingly how new findings extend, but do not refute, Darwin’s work from a century and a half ago. Even when new findings in epigenetic inheritance are redeeming Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
While biologists are sometimes criticized for turning Darwin into an icon, we do owe our fundamental understanding of life to his (and Alfred Wallace’s) once revolutionary ideas. Perhaps no one experiences that fact as much as the practicing biologist.
And Darwin was a nice guy too (from Tom’s article):
As towering historical figures go, Charles Darwin does not provide much by way of posthumous scandals. The liberty-extolling Thomas Jefferson was slave master to his longtime mistress, Sally Hemings; Albert Einstein had his adulterous affairs and shockingly remote parenting style; James Watson and Francis Crick minimized their debt to colleague Rosalind Franklin’s crucial DNA data. But Darwin, who wrote more than a dozen scientific books, an autobiography and thousands of letters, notebooks, logs and other informal writings, seems to have loved his ten children (three of whom did not survive childhood), been faithful to his wife, done his own work and given fair, if not exuberant, credit to his competitors.
In another take on the man, Desmond and Moore’s new book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, argues that Darwin’s abhorrence of slavery was an important driving factor in his work. Critics of evolution try to argue that Darwin’s ideas about human origins support the racist view that some “races” are “higher” than others. But on the contrary, Desmond and Moore argue that Darwin’s view of shared ancestry meant that all human populations are equal tips on the branch of life. Furthermore, Darwin’s abolitionism helped give him the moral courage to publish what he know would be socially controversial and uncomfortable ideas in Victorian England.
I second the niceness thing. I have been researching a book coming out later this year about Darwin and his pets and some of the letters about his dogs are almost too cute… And when he started studying pigeons, at one point he writes to a colleague for help because he can’t bear to kill them, even though he needs to study the anatomy.. he really was a nice man, in the best sense.