While On the Origin of Species is one of the most influential scientific books of all time, it actually (despite the popular narrative) speaks little of human evolution. Darwin visited that issue in the Descent of Man. The question arises, how well regarded is it today as a scientific book? I know its been criticized for some pretty racist tracts, but how sound is the science in it? With regards to 1871 when it was published and the modern day.
Anybody?
I don’t know directly, since my focus has been History and not biology. However, what I do know, is that MOST older, much lauded works, of all kinds, are not so much revered for their ongoing functional usefulness, as for the role they played in providing a firm starting point for the serious studies and discoveries which followed.
No help here. I thought this was going to be about the Darwinist Winwood Reade’s ineffably gloomy The Martyrdom of Man, a secularist work admired by Orwell, Sherlock Holmes, Churchill, H. G. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Isaac Asimov and other merry pranksters.
Reade’s other secularist work, The Outcast (1875), is a short novel about a young man who must deal with being rejected by his religious father and the death of his wife.
If George More was a more depressing Thomas Hardy, Winword Reade seems to beat them both.
Sorry, I meant George Gissing, not George Moore, who was comparatively cheerful.
I think it’s a case of Asimov’s “the relativity of wrong.” Whatever Darwin got wrong, from lack of knowledge, prejudice, misunderstanding etc., he got the primary points and the general idea correct, and was more or less the first to lay out the theories of evolution and natural selection. So he was right, even if later science was ‘righter.’
Two big, important points he got right:
Humans evolved in Africa (not a particularly popular idea at the time). Even in the 1950s, a lot of folks thought Leakey was crazy looking for human fossils in Africa.
Sexual Selection (the book was also about sexual selection as an evolutionary mechanism).
How did Darwin predict an African origin?
Apes look most like people and apes live in Africa. Though that’s a simplification.
Quote pulled from me Googling (from Descent of Man):
Keep in mind that all of Darwin’s works were written at a time of near complete ignorance of biology. Read them as a matter of historical fascination, not as a matter of science. Biology is nothing at all like Darwin’s ideas thought it to be.
Actually…no. Darwin’s work was remarkably scientific. He was even able to discern the “granularity” of genetic heritage, seeing the shadows of genes. His work paralleled Mendel’s to some degree: he was able to show that the chemical basis of heredity was not infinitely smooth, but came in clumps and clusters.
That’s amazingly astute observation and reasoning.
A great many of his other observations remain true to this day. He was the first (IIRC) to publish on the means by which circular coral atolls form. He truly deserves our respect as a pioneer of science, and his work stands up to the challenge of the years.
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