Say Hello To Darwin!!

Well, first of all, Happy Thanksgiving, y’all! It is a wonderful day to be thankful about a lot of things, and I started this blog today as a tribute to my gratitude towards science. To science, for making my life that much more interesting, for giving my eyes the capability of being enthralled by the world around me, and making my brain that much more inquisitive about the little things in Nature.

I am an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major, so this blog will be mostly dedicated to fascinating research in those fields (with maybe a digression ever now and then!). But for me to believe that you guys are down for the ride with me, heart, soul and brain, I need you to feel the same wonder that I do when I think about the slightly misunderstood, and widely debated theory of evolution.

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
                                - Evolutionary Biologist and Russian Orthodox Christian, Theodosius Dobzhansky

Charles Darwin, after years and years of meticulous research and study, wrote the Origin of Species in 1859. More than 150 years later, his revolutionary ideas have been rejected, vilified, accepted, rejected and accepted again. Natural selection at the group level is slowly gaining acceptance in the scientific circles by high-profile advocates like E.O. Wilson. Sexual selection was finally accepted only recently in the later 19^th century.  His notion of the evolution of human morality is finally being resurrected by animal behavioralists. 

Imagine having theories so incredibly advanced that the world needs almost two centuries of scientific advancement to come to terms with them. Ideas so revolutionary that the world is divided into two very distinct halves based on whether you accept them or not. Ideas so central to the laws of nature, that even without having the technology most scientists have today, they still effortlessly remain pivotal to nearly all biological discoveries made since then.

Darwin was only 22 years old when he set out on the Voyage of the Beagle, a journey that can be compared to Odysseus’ mythological journey back to Ithaca. Candy-floss history records state that the different beak shapes of finches and the different sizes of the tortoise shells that Darwin encountered in the Galapagos Islands inspired him to write the Origin of Species, the Bible for all evolutionists in history. The truth is only slightly more convincing than this idolatry of a superhuman Darwin who “veni, vidi, vici” the Islands and scribbled the Origin of Species on a mere whim. He was inspired by fossils of armadillos and sloths found on the northern Coast of Argentina, followed by the incident on the Galapagos islands some 400 pages later, and the final book followed nearly thirty years after the fateful journey.

Think about that when you think about Darwin.

This is not to say that Darwin has not been the subject of much debate, ridicule and controversy, even in scientific circles. Religion and politics aside, there are many scientists, geneticists and academes who resist Darwin’s omnipresence in the field. Most notable of these attempts is Phillip E. Johnson’s 1991 book, Darwin on Trial, based on the premise that evolution as a theory could be “tried” like a defendant in court. He refutes the theory of evolution by using molecular biology, paleontology records, fossils and scientific arguments about natural selection, stating that the basis of evolution is the assumption that natural selection is inherently true, and that creationism is inherently not. Amid general scientific outrage and popular media frenzy, Johnson coined the term “scientific creationist” and earned himself the title of the Father of the Intelligent Design Movement.

 A recent study published in Biology Letters also explores the possibility that Darwin may have been wrong in concluding that competition drives all natural selection. Instead, states the study, evolutionary patterns have been driven by favorable “land space”, i.e., animals have historically, according to land fossil records, migrated to place where food was more abundant and the weather more comfortable. But this study seems to have missed the link between land space and competition. Competition is the reason that animals migrate to more favorable “land space”, because other animals in the previous land space lead to deteriorating food situations.

Have I piqued your interest? Has your appetite been whet (Thanksgiving pun!)?This weekend, watch the amazing movie "Creation" - about Darwin, not the revolutionary scientist, but the father, the husband and the man of religion.

Creation

See you soon, my friends! We will journey together, henceforth, into this wondrous world which has no boundaries, and animals and forms meld and merge in time that treats billions of years like mere seconds.