More on Darwin

I have been listening to the Librivox recording of The Origin of the Species. I blogged about it earlier. Here are further impressions.

The argument for natural selection is primarily agrarian. This is to be expected since the most closely observed animals and plants were and are those that we live closely with and depend upon. The term "natural selection" is, itself, an analogy and alignment with man-made selection, which would have been a familiar topic to anyone making a living on a farm in Darwin's day. The variability of stock was an observable fact as was the inheritance of traits. Farmers made practical use of these facts every day. Breeders and horticulturalists made systematic use of selection of small improvements to create new varieties of animals and plants. All Darwin did (not that this wasn't an achievement) is to recognize tha the common truths of rural life could operate without human intervention. The stuff of this argument must have been most manifestly plain to those who lived and made their living in the country.

Thinking about this, it is strange that in America in our time, Creationism and Intelligent Design have the strongest hold in the rural South and Midwest. Why would this be? After all, the results of man-initiated selection are everywhere to be seen. There are whole industries bent on giving the farmer the better yield from their corn or cow. The livestock auctions at every county fair are an exercise in man initiated selection. I have two theories:

1. People will believe what they need to believe to survive and the evangelical churches are so important a part of rural society that it makes people disbelieve their lying eyes.
2. Rural America has become industrialized to the degree that knowledge is no longer distributed among the millions of individual farmers, but is rather stolen from the farmer and locked up in labs and protected by patents.
   

I don't know enough about rural America to take this topic much further, but I think #2 could lead to #1.

- J