Darwin -- Ahead of his time

With Darwin's 200th Birthday just two days away, we'll be seeing lots of information, lots of comments, both pro and con. Darwin wasn't perfect. There were many elements of evolutionary theory, or elements that affected its interpretation that had yet to be discovered at the time he wrote -- things like plate tectonics, DNA, etc. So, he didn't know everything, and anyone who thinks that he was "wrong" because elements of his theory have been modified, simply doesn't know what science is or what it's supposed to be doing.

Still, despite the limits on information available, he made remarkable interpretations and conclusions, many of which were very much ahead of his time. Only later have they been confirmed. But key to his fame was the discovery of the mechanism of natural selection. But this key component of evolutionary theory had a difficult time getting affirmed. Nicholas Wade writing in the New York Times says of Darwin:

Biologists quickly accepted the idea of evolution, but for decades they rejected natural selection, the mechanism Darwin proposed for the evolutionary process. Until the mid-20th century they largely ignored sexual selection, a special aspect of natural selection that Darwin proposed to account for male ornaments like the peacock’s tail.

The question is: why was he so successful? What were the traits that allowed him to do this?

Well, as Wade notes in his New York Times article, published today, that part of his success depends on his knowledge. He simply knew a lot about biology. But perhaps more important than even that was his persistence. Unlike others who pursued similar tracks, he didn't give up when obstacles came his way. Wade writes:

He brought several intellectual virtues to the task at hand. Instead of brushing off objections to his theory, he thought about them obsessively until he had found a solution. Showy male ornaments, like the peacock’s tail, appeared hard to explain by natural selection because they seemed more of a handicap than an aid to survival. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick,” Darwin wrote. But from worrying about this problem, he developed the idea of sexual selection, that females chose males with the best ornaments, and hence elegant peacocks have the most offspring.

Darwin also had the intellectual toughness to stick with the deeply discomfiting consequences of his theory, that natural selection has no goal or purpose. Alfred Wallace, who independently thought of natural selection, later lost faith in the power of the idea and turned to spiritualism to explain the human mind. “Darwin had the courage to face the implications of what he had done, but poor Wallace couldn’t bear it,” says William Provine, a historian at Cornell University. (Read commentary by Dr. Provine on passages from "On the Origin of Species." )

Darwin still has his detractors, but now, 200 years after his birth, that persistence paid off, because he's still at the center of things!