It's Darwin Day Again!

"Nature And Nature's Laws

Lay Hid in Night

God Said Let Newton Darwin Be

And All Was Light"

Two years ago, Darwin's day was celebrated here with a blog commemorating his qualities and personal life, so things are bound to be different this time.

The theory of evolution, and that of natural selection are two very subtle statements of knowledge. No wonder then that creationists who set out to disapprove either, if they can tell the difference in the first place, end up mostly making a farce out of their comprehension and reasoning abilities.

But this applies equally well to some proponents of the two theories, especially when it is journalists, or screenwriters we are talking about; alas, the two major sources of information for most of us nowadays. Thus, perhaps, dispelling common misconceptions of the proponents will make for a proper celebration this year, given that debunking creationist nonsense is becoming too hackneyed a topic to write about.

Three misconceptions in specific will be dismantled today; to wit, that natural selection is intrinsically cruel; the evolution as a ladder metaphor; and, finally, the mis-employment of natural selection as an overarching explanation of life. Here goes:

Nature red in fang and claw: Natural selection is exclusively understood by many as a perpetual arms race between different individuals. We are told, for instance, that the gazelle's magnificent agility would have never come to be if it was not for the cheetah's unusual speed, and vice versa. While this might be true, it definitely can't be extended unconditionally, for cases of cooperation are present in nature as well.

Luckily, we don't have to look far away to demonstrate this. Our human body's existence owes much to mutualistic agreements struck with other species. One of these is the mitochondria, which in exchange for the protection offered to them as inhabitants of our massive Eukaryota cells - long before we even were humans - have happily ever since reciprocated with powering our cellular activities, among providing other services. There is also the relatively less stable agreements our bodies have forged with a host of other microbes - i.e. scientifically referred to as the "Human Microbiome" - which while not always essential, have nonetheless made our existence a lot easier.

It remains to be noted that the above is not an exhaustive argument against the misconception of concern here. I remember once watching a fine documentary that shows how we are better off understanding natural selection, and the whole of nature for that matter, in the context of a complex mesh of connections, as opposed to trying to tease out the overall picture from mere dyadic relationships (you can watch the said documentary here).

Evolution likened to the scaling of a ladder: Or put alternatively, the idea that recently evolved species/phenotypes are superior to their earlier counterparts. Not only has this particular misconstruction fueled many extreme ideologies, but has also formed the basis for one of the most worn-out themes in the sci-fi genre of literature and movies!

Scientifically speaking though, every evolutionary biology professor I have met is of the opinion that evolution exhibits some sort of progression - namely, a tendency towards achieving higher complexity - but that this in no sense translates to what the layman would think on hearing or reading such a thing. One doctor even told me that some taxas - unfortunately he did not mention the name of any - had come to develop a brain at some point in their evolutionary history, only to lose it all together when it seized to confer on them any survival advantage.

Hard to swallow, but think of it like this: many wild felines - a group of animals the names of which alone strike us with awe - are eking out their existence at the moment. Roaches and insects in general, on the other hand, are faring exceptionally well, and will probably continue to, outliving humanity in the process. What I'm trying to get across here is the fact that the poetic value of a species is of no concern to nature. The only thing that matters is whether or not the species can adapt fast enough to perturbations in its ecosystem. This in essence is what separates the extant lines from the extinguished ones.

Stretching natural selection beyond its legitimate domain of application: One eccentric professor I had in the past used to end his lecture with an inexplicable smile while teasingly stating that "a fool with a tool is still a fool". Natural selection is no exception; to be applied properly, it requires scrupulous attention to the particulars of the case, or else, it degenerates to become just another pseudoscientific explanation.

Prof. Coyne aptly explains this with the following concrete example: hemoglobin is red not because this is a color of any survival value at all, but rather because it happens to be an unintended, dependent property - like spandrels in architecture - of an oxygen-carrying molecule that has been selected over other potential carriers solely for its efficiency in delivering oxygen (and probably Carbon dioxide as well). Yet, it is not in any sense removed from reality to imagine that some sociobiologist might try to explain the redness of blood with a tortuous link to some survival advantage - e.g. it produces a blushing effect that helps to attract high quality mates. Actually, if you think about it, natural selection is known to most people nowadays through similar titillating explanations of human behavior.

To get things straight, this is not to deny that some aspects of the psychology and sociology of a given species can be the product of natural selection. But due to the unique epistemic properties of the theory, we have to be extremely cautious before declaring one trait or another as advantageous. The gist is, next time you read an article explaining in natural selective terms why teens act as such, or why women are so and so, then you'd do science a favor taking them with a liberal amount of salt.

At the end, we should stay reminded that no celebration is commensurate with this day other than upholding those traits and values that comprise an essential foundation of scientific inquiry. But if you are looking for an excuse to pop a bottle of beer, then by all means, have a one for the old man!

Happy Darwin Day

It is probably a mild hyperbole saying that almost any of the several pieces of Darwin’s writings that I came across were radiating with an overwhelming intellectual presence, of the kind that intrudes into the deepest and most private corners of your mind without permission, imposing awe and eliciting recognition of his far-reaching genius, in the highest sense of both words.

This impression stays at first inexplicable. But in taking few steps back from any of these texts, considering it in a wider context, reengaging it and disengaging again, then repeating as needed, the conundrum suddenly gives way. The answer put simply, but aptly conveying the most sobering of its implications, is that a distinguished flair for writing is only second nature to profound thinkers. In a letter to his father, Darwin seems to have been well aware of this talent when he wrote "Whenever I enjoy anything, I always either look forward to writing it down, either in my log-book, or in a letter". Yet he also showed diffidence and harshly practiced self criticism when in his correspondence with others he would occasional write things like "I find it unutterably difficult to write clearly", "I am disgusted with my bad writing", or "How I could have written so badly is quite inconceivable".

Darwin's opinion notwithstanding, two of his books, in particular, stand out together as a most vivid and exhilarating incarnation of the whole spectrum of the higher order mental processes, which are: The Voyage of the Beagle, and his magnus opus, On the Origins of Species.

The Voyage of the Beagle can be thought of as a stereoscopic visualization of Charles’ trenchant faculty for perception. This can be realized by superposing a context in which the book is a travels-journal only and another where it is viewed as a herald of the theory of natural selection. In the former, this faculty expresses itself in a unique ability to efficiently winnow down a drowning range of details that could have certainly stupefied the senses of any other naturalist (Alfred Wallace, the unsung hero of NS, excluded). But with the eventual emergence of natural selection added to the backdrop, the token of a frightening capacity to intuit becomes the salient feature of this work.

In producing The Origins, Darwin established himself as one of the finest virtuosi of the thought process to have ever existed. Throughout the text you would find him busy not only weaving line after another of cogent arguments, preempting much of the debate spurred by its publication, but you would also find him confidently pointing out where his reasoning might go awry, acknowledging his own wants of knowledge, or describing what might constitute a destructive counter-observation to his theory.

The most telling feature of this book though is its striking consistency. This might sound odd, since a consistent structure is a strict prerequisite that any explanatory effort should satisfy before it can be taken seriously. It is that the coherence in Darwin’s arguments can’t be a mere happenstance, but only the product of a mental construct of the original phenomenon that undergirded his thinking in its regards. And since the conceptual scaffold for Darwin’s original formulation of the theory had passed largely unscathed into the modern evolutionary synthesis, we can easily infer the veracity of this mental model. Therefore, given the crippling lack of knowledge about heredity’s real substance and mechanisms that was characteristic of his time, one is bound to be overwhelmed while she is reading the book!

Put in another way, The Origins, just like its predecessor, can’t be fully appreciated without the advantage of hindsight. Darwin might have known close to nothing about the DNA, but with an unusually keen mind, he captured many of its features, even if in crude terms, and embedded them into the core of his theory. This is clearly the reason why out of all the different accounts of natural selection that were advanced by others in its wake, Darwinism was the only one conducive to the modern synthesis; with the rediscovery of Mendel’s genetic laws, and the successive conciliatory efforts of several bright minds, most notably those of Fisher's, the birth of neo-Darwinism was only a matter of course.

Since this is in a sense a celebration of a person, an extraordinary person, perhaps something about his idiosyncrasies is due. A strong affinity with science and nature ran like a dominating gene in Darwin's family, which spawned 10 fellows of the Royal Society, him included, and beginning with his parental grandfather, Erasmus, who himself was a theorist of evolution. The first expressions of this gene in Charles took the form of reveling in beetles collecting, and a more extreme one of his founding a club at Cambridge University for the sole purpose of consuming birds and animals "unknown to human palate" before. According to Darwin’s autobiography, this was the reason behind his father's utterly failed prediction when he once reproached him saying: "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family".

But judging by this sample of his early life, it might be justifiable to claim that if it was not for the Beagle, this day would have passed unobserved. However, this celebrated expedition was not all bliss on Charles. Little after its return to England, he started suffering a mysterious debilitating illness that haunted him, with frequent respites, until his death. The nature of this affliction was never diagnosed during his life, a thing that later gave rise to much speculation about its origin.

To make things more complicated, there is enough evidence in literature to substantiate many different explanations for this illness. For instance, the proponents of a physical cause like to cite Darwin's descriptions of his potentially morbid encounters with disease vectors, such as the "Benchuca", or his granddaughter's memoir, Gwen Raverat, in which she notes that "it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill [at Charles']", possibly indicating an underling genetic disorder. On the other side, advocates of a psychological root have at their disposal an adequate repertoire of accounts on Darwin's antisocial and phobic behavior to draw on. But since this is not a crucial point anymore, there seems to be an emerging general consensus converging on a multifactorial origin of the ailment, a blend of physical and psychiatric etiologies.

Anyways,this celebration should be consummated by reminding ourselves of our old man's philosophy of solid reasoning and intriguing inquiry. Many happy returns!

Source: www.darwinday.org (image adapted)