Final Thoughts on Darwin

I finally finished The Origin of Species. (See previous posts here, here, here, here, and here) It truely is an amazing intellectual feat. When one thinks about how few of the tools of modern biology were available to him or his peers it is incredible that he got so much right. Darwin had only the outwardly observable facts about variation to work with, those facts known to systematic breeders and horticulturalists. He had no way of knowing anything about its mechanisms; about DNA or the genome. The principals of statistics were only beginning to be worked out. Viruses could not even begin to be understood. The chemistry of biological processes was still a mystery.

If the case for evolution had to be made today, it would be made based on the mechanics of variation and a statistical analysis of the genome. It would make a very precise argument. Because Darwin wrote when he did, the argument is built on the relationship of natural selection to other similar observable systems all built on distributed selection: systematic breeding, unconcious breed selection, economics systems, and social systems. But, because of this limitation, the Darwin's observations are applicable to, and enrich our understanding of these other systems. If the tools of modern biology were used, it would be unlikely to shed light on other realms.

-- J