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WillowOne's Positions

Darwinian Evolution

My Positions

  1. Darwinism, understood as evolution by natural selection acting on heritable variation, remains the most robust scientific explanation for the complexity and diversity of life. While incomplete in some respects (it does not, on its own, fully account for phenomena such as epigenetic inheritance or horizontal gene transfer), it forms the core framework of modern evolutionary biology.
  2. Modern evolutionary theory, often called the Modern Synthesis or, in its recent developments, the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, has built on Darwin's model by incorporating genetics (Mendelian and molecular), population biology, developmental biology (evo-devo), and epigenetics, among others. These are refinements of Darwin's theory, not departures from it.
  3. The term "Darwinism" is used by creationists as though evolution were an ideology or a personal following. It is not. Biologists do not call themselves Darwinists any more than physicists call themselves Newtonists. I use the term here only to refer to the specific mechanism Darwin proposed.

Notes

  • Charles Darwin (1809–1882) formulated his theory of natural selection without knowledge of genetics, which had not yet been established as a scientific discipline. Alfred Russel Wallace arrived at the same theory independently, and the two were presented jointly to the Linnean Society in 1858.
  • Gregor Mendel published his foundational work on inheritance in pea plants in 1866, but it was largely ignored until around 1900, well after On the Origin of Species (1859). As a result, Darwin lacked a mechanism to explain how traits were inherited without blending away, which he acknowledged as a weakness in his theory. Had he known of Mendel's work, the problem would have been solved in his lifetime.
  • The Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s (R. A. Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, and others) resolved this by combining Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics and population mathematics, forming the basis of contemporary evolutionary biology.
  • The discovery of DNA's structure (1953) and the subsequent development of molecular biology supplied the physical basis of heredity and, with it, the most powerful evidence for common descent: every living thing uses the same genetic code, and the pattern of similarities and differences between genomes matches the tree of life inferred independently from anatomy and the fossil record.
  • What natural selection explains that nothing else does is the appearance of design. Before Darwin, the only available explanation for the fit between organisms and their environments was a designer (see Teleological Argument - Argument from Design). Darwin showed how a blind, cumulative process of variation and differential survival produces the same result, and does so with the characteristic imperfections (vestigial organs, inefficient routing of nerves and blood vessels, the shared bad design of related species) that a designer would not produce.
  • Darwin's theory has since been applied beyond biology, to the evolution of languages, technologies, and ideas (see Richard Dawkins on memes, and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995), with varying success. The core insight, that any system with heredity, variation, and differential replication will evolve, is substrate-independent.

Also see