This is a blog to discuss philosophy, chess, politics,
C. S. Lewis, or whatever it is that I'm in the mood to discuss.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Imagine there's no Darwin
What would the world have been like without Darwin? Peter Bowler wrote a book on this, but Michael Flannery of Evolution News and Views begs to differ.
In my humble opinion, there would not be any really substantial difference. The essence of the Theory would have been presented by Wallace and although acceptance would have been slower without the monumental amount of evidence presented in "The Origin of Species", Natural Selection was just an idea whose time had come. I would guess that the neo-Darwinian synthesis would have happened at the time that it did and as such, the twentieth century would be completely back on track.
Do you think the article is drawing that inference directly? I saw it as a rebuttal against a certain positive story about Darwin's impact.
Ideas do have consequences. And ideas can result in terrible harm. But you have to pull things apart some to see what those effects are. Of course, something can be perfectly true, but or acceptance of that truth will harm society.
New Atheists, unlike other atheists, not only think that atheism is true, they also think that widespread acceptance of atheism will be our salvation. That's why they scare me in ways that other atheists don't.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that evolution wasn't just a direct result of Darwin's research, it was also the result of a time period in which key thinkers started asking questions about our "deep history". We probably would have ended up with a theory of evolution, it may have just looked a little different.
6 comments:
In my humble opinion, there would not be any really substantial difference. The essence of the Theory would have been presented by Wallace and although acceptance would have been slower without the monumental amount of evidence presented in "The Origin of Species", Natural Selection was just an idea whose time had come. I would guess that the neo-Darwinian synthesis would have happened at the time that it did and as such, the twentieth century would be completely back on track.
Victor
You two references seem to track to the same Discovery Institute article by Flannery.
I have put in the Amazon link that was supposed to go in there for Bowler.
Do you think the article is drawing that inference directly? I saw it as a rebuttal against a certain positive story about Darwin's impact.
Ideas do have consequences. And ideas can result in terrible harm. But you have to pull things apart some to see what those effects are. Of course, something can be perfectly true, but or acceptance of that truth will harm society.
New Atheists, unlike other atheists, not only think that atheism is true, they also think that widespread acceptance of atheism will be our salvation. That's why they scare me in ways that other atheists don't.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that evolution wasn't just a direct result of Darwin's research, it was also the result of a time period in which key thinkers started asking questions about our "deep history". We probably would have ended up with a theory of evolution, it may have just looked a little different.
I'm a big supporter of separation of church and state, and no fan of the religious right (or the right in general).
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