(HOST) An exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science through April 27th has reminded commentator Ted Levin of Charles Darwin’s contribution to human knowledge. He says it’s almost beyond comprehension.
(LEVIN) In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus drove a stake through the heart of conventional thinking when he published On Revolutions of Celestial Spheres, a radical view of the universe. For fear of upsetting the church, which believed the Earth was the center of the universe, Copernicus delayed publication for two decades. Copernicus revealed that there is no center of the universe.
Last week, I stood on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and watched a crescent moon that looked like a celestial canoe, float across the Florida sky. Home in Vermont the following night, I noticed that the moon looked like a canoe standing on end, pointing east apparently capsized, by my shift in latitude. If I had viewed the moon that same night from deep within the Southern Hemisphere, it would have still looked like a canoe standing on end, but it would have been pointing west. And Copernicus figured this out without the advantage of air travel.
Charles Darwin, another critical thinker, showed us that humans do not reside in the center of the universe either. In fact, he included us in the struggle of life with everything else. And like Copernicus, Darwin so changed the way we see our world and ourselves, he delayed publication of The Origin of Species for more than twenty years.
Yet even today, a recent Gallop poll has concluded that eighty-three percent of Americans continue to reject Darwin’s view of life. Forty-five percent believe that God created human beings in our present form within the last 10,000 years. The other thirty-eight percent believe we evolved over the past million years with God’s guidance. A mere thirteen percent of Americans agreed with Darwin, far and away the lowest total of any technologically advanced nation.
So what exactly did Darwin say? Like Copernicus, he denied us special status. Darwin perceived how species evolved from one to another by means of “natural selection,” a process in which those traits best suited for survival and reproductive success are passed on to the next generation – a sort of biological arms race forged in the furnace of evolution. As a product of natural selection humans are no more special than a flounder, and are subject to the very same trials and tribulations as every other species. Or to put it another way: all of life, past and present and future, is related. Now, how cool is that.
Darwin actually never used the word EVOLUTION, opting instead for the term “decent with modification,” the unifying theme of biology that reveals every species as an ever-changing, unfinished work of art.
“Thus, from the war of nature,” wrote Darwin in the conclusion of Origins, quote, “from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life…and that whilst the planet has gone cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” End quote.
Like gravity, evolution is a planetary law, not a theory.
Ted Levin is a writer and photographer and winner of the 2004 Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing.