Evolution theory beyond Darwin (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 13:50 (5196 days ago) @ David Turell

I quoted Mary Midgley's review of What Darwin Got Wrong.-"Charles Darwin complained quite crossly in his autobiography that, despite many denials, people still kept saying he thought natural selection was the sole cause of evolutionary development."-"He saw that the doctrine itself did not make sense. No filter, however, powerful, can be the only cause of what flows out of it. Questions about what comes into that filter have to be just as important."-DAVID: But as I read about Darwin, I find that Huxley warned that saltation should be considered in the theory. Darwin did not and excused the absence of its consideration on gaps in the fossil record, which would give the appearance of saltation.-Many thanks for the website reference on "hopeful monsters", and indeed for all the other enlightening pieces on the latest discoveries. You're quite right. Darwin adheres to the canon 'Natura non facit saltum' and says explicitly that Natural Selection "can never take a leap, but must advance by short and slow steps" (Origin, under 'Difficulties on Theory', my edition p. 219).-Darwin himself was the first to admit that what he was proposing was only a theory, and there were many difficulties. It sounds as if the new book fills in a lot of the gaps concerning what comes into the "filter", though I don't know if it deals with saltation. The point that Mary Midgley makes, and which I loudly applaud, is that a lot of the attacks on Darwin are misrepresentations ... the one mentioned here being the general equation of Evolution with Natural Selection, as if there were no other driving force (though I think Darwin himself was partly to blame for this, by calling his work The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection). Another misrepresentation lies in the fact that both theists and atheists take Darwinism to be virtually synonymous with atheism, although Darwin repeatedly emphasized that his theory was not anti-religious, and he himself was an agnostic.-Under "Evolutionary Catechism" (Jan 12 at 17.45), I tried to split the theory up into various sections. I got the impression that all those who responded still accepted the basic premises. It's the details that are under scrutiny, which include saltation and the mechanisms of heredity, and I'm sure that if Darwin had known then what we know now, his theory would have undergone plenty of modifications. Perhaps James A. Shapiro is the right man to update it, since he doesn't seem to let any personal agenda distort the science.