11.18.05
Is Niles Eldridge really a Darwinist?
Edward Rothstein reviews the new Darwin exhibit at the Natural History museum Enough to Make an Iguana Turn Green: Darwin’s Ideas.
But the exhibition actually domesticates Darwin and his theory. Think, instead, of the theory’s daring. Darwin was asserting that over the course of millenniums, miraculous bodily organs have taken shape out of prehistoric crudities, species have changed their characters and turned into completely different creatures, and human beings have come into existence, all because of accidental events and the brute forces of nature. Chance, in league with danger, created both the eye and the orchid, the ocelot and the man. Now imagine asserting these ideas when no one knew anything about genetic inheritance or mutation. Darwin’s digestive discomfort makes sense; in a way, so do contemporary discomforts with his work.
The theory’s daring? Could chutzpah be a better term, or brazen theory mongering. Remember, Darwin didn’t discover evolution, his only chance for fame was to be able to claim he had solved the question of theory. So he had to make it good to take the credit away from Lamarck.
No, Mr. Rothstein, chance didn’t do all this. You have been bamboozled the way the next generation of kids is getting bamboozled by these propaganda exhibits.
In an 1844 letter on display, Darwin said that beginning to write about his ideas was “like confessing a murder.” He did not publish them for well over a decade, until he was spurred by the prospect of competition, when a young novice naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, sent Darwin a letter that eerily echoed some of his long-gestating ideas. After generously sharing some credit and helping to arrange for simultaneous publication of their primary ideas in 1858, Darwin set to work on his magnum opus, “On the Origin of Species.”
Confessing to a murder indeed. If we count the number of dead due to Darwin’s egregious and bad theory in the hands of lunatics who thought this was science we would be less sentimental about Darwin’s crocodile tears and sanctimonious ‘regrets’.
Yes, Darwin was upstaged by Wallace, and the history still isn’t straight on what happened when Darwin received Wallace’s letter. ‘After generously sharing credit?’ After rigging the priority booby prize with his cronies Darwin generously shared the credit indeed, Wallace was unable to stop what had happened, and had the choice to play ball with this devious scheme or else. Wallace should have sent his Ternate letter to some independent journal. Too bad he trusted Darwin! It took Wallace a long time to figure out how he had been swindled.
But the point would have been even stronger had the museum acknowledged that Darwin’s theory has indeed been subject to scientific modification, and still is. The exhibition does not draw attention to these issues, though Mr. Eldredge’s own biography on the museum’s Web site points out that he was one of the scientists (including Stephen Jay Gould) “challenging Darwin’s premise that evolution occurs gradually,” asserting instead that it occurs in spurts with long periods of stasis.
Theory evolving? Or frozen in time since Darwin. As a matter of fact, the theory is able to go backwards: look at Niles Eldredge. Read his Myths of Human Evolution. He once exposed the false claims that Darwin’s theory explained the descent of man. Along with Gould he was on the verge of the ‘end of the synthesis’. But history went backwards at that point. Since the Darwinists couldn’t do their job, the ID folk saw their window of opportunity.
Niles Eldredge reminds me of George Johnson at the Times, two suspected Darwin hypocrites who promote one thing public, but have doubts about Darwin in private.
Thanks a lot, guys. Tortoises indeed.
Garland Rudolph Upchurch, Sr. said,
March 3, 2007 at 2:14 pm
My belief in God was strengthened–not weakened–by reading “The Miner’s Canary” by Niles Eldredge. He has done an excellent job of showing how existing forms of life were destroyed, and new forms of life created at a higher level in relatively short order, throughout the eons. In spite of Dr. Eldredge’s opinions to the contrary, I see God’s mighty hand at work here. Without those mass extinctions, we would not be here. I would recommend Dr. Eldredge’s book to all believers, who should ask themselved this question: Are we pleasing to God? If not, what is our future?