Greg+Silva+-+Week+5

In the United States, a precedent exists, which, until recently, existed primarily in the form of laws against teaching natural selection or laws that required teachers to offer alternatives to natural selection, suggests that natural selection is a contentious theory and that other valid explanations exist which would better explain how species came to be. The generally accepted alternative today, intelligent design, suggests that the many parts of organisms today are far too complex for them to have occurred by chance, and that a higher intelligence created these parts to serve specific functions.

Contrary to this precedent, the scientific community generally accepted Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection relatively quickly after his publication of //The Origin of Species// in 1859. Despite some early scornful criticism from some of Darwin’s mentors, including John Herschel who called natural selection “the law of Higgledy piggledy” (American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)), the scientific storm concerning Darwin’s theory, which the zealous evolutionist T. H. Huxley and not Darwin himself had largely publicly defended, quickly subsided. By 1871, when Darwin, who feared hostile response to his ideas especially from religious authorities, had published the //Descent of Man//, which suggested that man had evolved from apes, other biologists, including Huxley, had already published the idea, so it was “no longer as shocking as Darwin had feared” (AMNH).

The idea, in fact, had become popular very quickly, and society has applied the concept of natural selection and survival of the fittest to applications beyond biology, despite Darwin’s intent to use it to explain the similarities and differences between species. Perhaps the most common extraneous application of evolution is known as “social Darwinism,” an idea that reigned supreme in the capitalistic western world through the late 19th and early 20th centuries that attempted to justify the efforts of the strong to dominate the weak in society. While these applications of selection are misguided (scientific conclusions do not necessarily fit within discussions of ethics), they indicate that the public, at large, had accepted natural selection as a concept that was valid enough to misuse.

Today, natural selection is supported by various forms of evidence such as DNA analysis and radiological dating that Darwin could not observe in his time. Evolution by natural selection remains the strongest plausible scientific explanation for the differences (and similarities) between different species of living things.