Origin of Species

I recently started reading Darwin's Origin of Species, - a Kindle freebee by the way - and it's interesting to see him struggling in the first chapter with the limitations of his knowledge. As he sees clearly, there was an awful that lot he doesn't know, and nothing in his ignorance was more fundamental than the fact that he did not know anything about the mechanism of heredity or the generation of variation. That knowledge was nearly a century away when he wrote, but the instincts of the great scientist are already much in evidence. He knows about the occurrence of "sports" in horticulture and guesses that there is a connection with the details of breeding.

One of the favorite lines of the anti-Darwinist is the claim that Darwin is not predictive or falsifiable. The absurdity of this claim is demonstrated every time a new discovery becomes a piece to set in vast puzzle map Darwin set before us. Thousands and quite likely millions of discoveries since Darwin could have refuted him, but didn't. Instead the whole vast world of biology and biochemistry confirms and reiterates his insight. The discovery of the mechanisms of heredity and variation are the most fundamental confirmations of all. These mechanisms reveal the gears and wheels whereby variation and selection act, and they form a thing of beauty and wonder.

Blind chance, or rather chance guided by selection, do the work of creation and destruction, but what a wonder they have created.

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