Roush+Week+5+assignment

A huge number of writings have chronicled the effect of Darwin’s theory of Natural selection on Victorian society, and there isn’t much more light that anyone can shed on the already overexposed situation. However, like all great scientists, Darwin is more known for the myths around his life than for his actual work. In Darwin’s case, however, it is definitely notable that the myths of his life are much closer to his actual life than are the myths of Galileo’s life, for example. Those myths include the idea that Darwin created the idea of evolution. The reality is that the idea that species change over time was first proposed a few generations before Darwin, with the advent of new focus on geology and, shortly after, paleontology. The revolutionary idea of Darwin, then, was the mechanism by which evolution occurs, namely Natural Selection. Another common misconception about Darwin’s life is that his theory shook the foundations of Victorian society. As with most new revolutionary scientific theories, it was only the very upper class who even knew what Darwin’s theory was, and it was only the very learned who understood Darwin’s theory. The average Victorian citizen did not really know anything about Darwin’s theory except that most other scientists strongly disagreed with it. If the common people didn’t understand it and the scientists disagreed with it, then the common people just ignored it, much like they would today with a similar theory. There was no rioting over Darwin’s idea when it was first proposed. If anything, there was laughing. More than being disgusted or enraged by Darwin’s theory, the most conservative scientists just thought of Darwin as a laughable fool. It would have gotten the same reaction if Darwin’s theory was that biological diversity occurs because aliens throw new species at us every once in a while. After the theory of evolution by natural selection had gotten a fair amount of evidence behind it, which happened just a few years after the //Origin// was published, the scientists started to see that there must be some kind of truth to the theory, and so they started to believe in it, and then the common people started to believe in it. Something about Darwin’s life and theory of natural selection comes from a quote by Theodosius Dobzhansky, an evolutionary biologist from the mid-twentieth century who said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” In this sense, Darwin is not just the naturalist who came up with the idea of natural selection, but more importantly he is the founder of modern biology. This is the legacy that Darwin should chiefly be remembered for. Darwin’s proposition of natural selection predicts some very important fundaments of modern biology. First, it predicts that there must be a form of genetic material that does not change throughout an organism’s lifetime and can be passed on to the organism’s offspring. This is the idea that led to Thomas Hunt Morgan’s fruit fly experiments, which became the basis of modern genetics. Modern genetics later became the basis of modern medicine, which has led to a huge increase in average human lifespan. Most people think of Darwin’s theory as only affecting them in the sense that we came from apes, but it also affects people in the sense that it led to modern medicine. There are many powerful ideas in Darwin’s theory of natural selection that people ignore, and thus they do not realize what a powerful theory it really is.