About

Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

Darwin - Right or Wrong?

Although two weeks later, it was good to see Richard Dawkins and other eminent scientists picking up the theme of our ‘Our brother, Darwin’ post (below, February 4 ) in an angry letter to ‘New Scientist’.

 

“ What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that “Darwin was wrong” (24 January)?
First, it’s false, and second, it’s inflammatory. And, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure, but about evolution.
Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from “a few forms or… one”, as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.
Of course there’s a tree; it’s just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA.

 
(Daniel Dennett, Medford, Massachusetts, US , Jerry Coyne, Chicago, Illinois, US , Richard Dawkins, Oxford, UK and Paul Myers, Morris, Minnesota, US Letters . New Scientist.18 Feb )

All these points were made in our blog; but then the writers understandably move to the political (creationist/evolutionist) implications of New Scientist’s gaffe.

“The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology. Indeed, within hours of publication members of the Texas State Board of Education were citing the article as evidence that teachers needed to teach creationist-inspired “weaknesses of evolution”, claiming: “Darwin’s tree of life is wrong”.


You have made a lot of extra, unpleasant work for the scientists whose work you should be explaining to the general public. We all now have to try to correct all the misapprehensions your cover has engendered.”

 

Their intervention is very welcome; but as I point out in a letter of my own to the Editor, they omit one crucial element of the CVN criticism, notably “ The extent to which cross-disciplinary ideas, metaphors, similes can drive the basic processes of hypothesis, experimentation and discovery; and it is these which were central to Darwin’s own approach and achievement…..Uproot Darwin’s Tree – his acknowledged ‘ simile ‘- and you destroy not only the critical element of his method, but also the wider processes behind significant learning and discovery; what Koestler, in ‘The Act of Creation’ called ‘creative synthesis’.
I was delighted to have in a positive reaction to ‘Our brother, Darwin’ from Ashley Nichols, of Dickinson College in the USA  whom I mentioned there. I want to revert again to Ashley’s work on another occasion. In the meantime, if it isn’t already on your reading list, note his New Riverside Edition‘Romantic Natural  Histories( Houghton Mifflin 2004) which brings alive the exciting literary and natural science context in which Darwin lived and thrived.