Endurance of Good Ideas

I have just finished reading, or perhaps rereading, Darwin's, "On the Origin of Species". I thought I had read it before, but there are things I think I should have remembered that I noticed this time. There was a lot that Darwin didn't know.

I have about decided, though, that the next time someone starts a debate with me over the Theory of Evolution, I will insist that she read Darwin first. Most of the people who have made effort to convince me of the errors of my ways in "believing in evolution" would have a very hard time reading Darwin. His breadth of knowledge in the natural sciences was impressive, and his writing is rather dense and has big words in it. He writes like I think, sometimes.

Darwin was writing a hundred and fifty years ago. The edition I read was the last one, I think, and included chapters responding to criticisms of his earlier editions. A hundred and fifty years ago, there was debate over the age of the earth. Some would say there still is, but that is not true among geologists and other scientists, at least in the main stream of thought. But in Darwin's day, the majority even among naturalists hadn't thought much about the age of the earth, and kind of just accepted the biblical history uncritically. Darwin knew that his idea of natural selection required much more than six thousand years of biology to account for modern species. Some geologists and astronomers were coming out with theories about the age of the earth based on thermodynamics that extended that age into the millions of years, which helped Darwin, but he realized it was still probably not enough. Lord Kelvin (who hadn't been given the title yet) calculated a rate of cooling for the earth from a mass of liquid lava to the condition in the 1800's, and estimated the earth to be 20 million years old.

Darwin speculated, correctly, that the earth was older than that, because he saw evolution from natural selection as being very slow. If the rate of variation and selection could be estimated, he said, then time could be estimated even in the fossil record based on the changes seen in species in different layers of rock.

The big change in estimates of the age of the earth came from the discovery of radiation, and the contribution radioactive decay made to the energy balance and cooling of the earth. The current estimate is 4.54 billion years. And the fossil record has filled in a lot since Darwin's day, confirming his predictions.

I was a little surprised, though thinking back I should not have been, to see that in 1859, the distribution of electrons, which explains the organization of the periodic table of the elements, hadn't been discovered. That came from the Rutherford nuclear model of the atom, and the Bohr model of electron configuration in the first decades of the 20th century.

It is rather remarkable that Darwin got so much right, based on his limited data set. Okay, he had studied thousands of species, at least to some extent, and was familiar with detailed descriptions, including careful measurements of various parts of plants and animals. He knew about the debates over classification of species and varieties, and the patterns of distribution of a lot of species. He found the necessary patterns to support his ideas, with help from other naturalists, including Alfred Wallace, who actually wrote a paper about natural selection before Darwin had published his own. But he had no idea about the source of variation, at least at the cellular and molecular levels. That took another hundred years. It pretty well nailed down Darwin's theory, though. Now we can trace genealogies of species in changes in DNA. And we have. That makes it hard to argue honestly against common descent, but there are those who still claim Darwin was wrong. Usually, they ignore what Darwin really said, or ignore the obvious consequences of acknowledging the observable facts.

So, having read Darwin, I am convinced that I have been right all along to believe in the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

I do not know how quickly modern changes, both by natural and technological mechanisms, will occur, or what directions they will take. I have still not seen much cause to be afraid of the Rise of the Algorithms. They still send me ads for colleges and programs, as if I were shopping for programs to pursue another degree. I am content with my formal education. I will continue to read and think and learn, but I don't know about taking classes. After all, I teach college. I also get a lot of ads for medications I don't need. If I develop a disease that can be treated by these medications, I may start thinking differently, but for now, the algorithms seem completely off in their analysis of what might catch my attention.

If I tell them there is no history of diabetes mellitus in my family, and I have two doctoral degrees, will they change the ads I see? If I say I like reading science fiction and fantasy, will I get ads for those? Hah. The algorithms are pathetic weaklings, and I expect they will still be when I stop caring.