Back To The Future

The Brits go mad over Darwin - or at least on the wireless - as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of perhaps the most profound gift to modern science: On The Origins of Species. Alongside the many, many volumes of new non-fiction dedicated to The Genius, the BBC presents 45 minutes of 9AM prime-time each day this week to Darwin's life legacy. I catch some of it driving to wherever - usually yoga or Waitrose - and it is a blessing of understanding into the man and his hardship. Consider that Darwin organised his work, post Beagle, in Cambridge which was then the centre of the Catholic aristocracy. Can you imagine those dinner parties? In a uniquely British way, that is a mixture of genius, snottiness and bull-dog tenacity (think Gibbons perhaps with his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"), Darwin accomplished his task barely nipping Wallace to the finish. Oddly, Darwin's theory delayed so he could complete proof via a comprehensive field test of a barnacle - in his day, any sea-faring fellow would know the barnacle and have some opinion on where it came from (usually not a pleasant place). By presenting something simple and knowable with a short-life span easily adapting to its own element, Darwin showed conclusively that he was onto something big. Finally, note Darwin's title which easily could have been "The Origins of Man" or homo sapien or even: God Is Dead. Darwin knew his work dangerous to many and like any good scientist he wanted his work to be accepted and debated - not rejected as heresay or perhaps worse. And so it has been.

Here is a quote by Darwin which sums up the Bush years; it is actually the reason why I have written this otherwise admittedly shallow blog of an otherwise great man:

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”