From time to time, at Skeptics events, or in comments sections of blogs and livestreams, when debunking creationism many will reply with a pithy “hail Darwin”. It’s a sarcastic phrase mocking creationist dogmatism. While the majority of creationists are just regular people with a particular religious belief, many of the famous creationists— the ones who have turned it into a profitable industry and who make grand displays out of mocking scientists— are often acting in bad faith (including a few who go as far as outright fraud). Engaging with them, validating them with debate, is not worth our time, it’s what they want. They benefit, we don’t. So why not say “Hail Darwin!” and move on? It is, after all, a bit. Nobody worships Darwin.
There is no doubt that Darwin was more than impressive, and more than clever. Darwin’s achievements are honestly quite hard to overstate. The obstacles he overcame, the insights he had, his perseverance and hard-work and ability to condense brilliant observations into genius theory and then communicate it — all superb.
But unfortunately, while it may be fun to nod in the direction of a tongue in cheek act of worship, there are three points that I think are worth consideration.
Firstly, this “Darwin above all” mentality can slowly and subtly blind us to new theories and data. The late Stephen Jay Gould discussed the history and the then-current state of evolutionary theory in his 2002 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. In it, he mentions how even though random genetic change was known to exist in the form of genetic drift, it had been mostly ignored or side-lined because selection was considered to be the forefront at every scale. So when Motoo Kimura (and later Tomoko Ohta and others) came around showing that a lot of DNA changes are neutral or nearly neutral, often entirely invisible at the level of the whole organism, this was resisted. While the existence of neutral mutations is now accepted widely, there still stands much debate over their importance compared with selection. Barbara McClintock got similar treatment for her work on transposons, which are now an important part of most undergraduate biology degrees.
Gould’s book as a whole is an examination of the question: Did Darwin merely lay a foundation on which evolutionary biology was built, or did he build up a structure and a framework still essential today? Gould’s answer (one which I get the impression is the most common though there is still plenty of debate) is that Darwin provided a framework, much more than a mere foundation, but just as the structures of real buildings can be adapted and changed over time into new designs, so too has evolutionary theory developed in ways Darwin didn’t (and simply couldn’t) have predicted. Which is cool. Science is always progress. There’s always more.
The second thing we ought to bear in mind is that Darwin not only held, but wrote and promoted, views about human nature that we might now regard as somewhat racist and sexist. In many ways, this is to be expected; whatever heroes we choose to have, they will always be human. And while I’m all for championing human heroes, singing their praises and their accomplishments, it’s very easy to reject these realities about particular persons when we over-invest in them. Darwin’s body of work includes racism and sexism. Of course, by and large his work was noticeably, often commendably, less racist than many of his contemporaries. He didn’t go down the same routes as so-called “scientific racists” who came after him. Many of those later “scientific racists” misunderstood and misrepresented Darwin, to his dismay. But, Darwin himself still very much saw other human beings as evolutionarily separate from his race.
We often say it’s possible to celebrate the good in someone’s life while recognising the bad, but too often that means a quiet recognition and a loud celebration. We need the bad to be acknowledged with a proportionate volume. To not do so leads us down a path of delusion, one which can only serve to entrench us in a wilful ignorance about the history and present state of racism in science. And moreover, we have so many other people who’ve contributed to science whose contributions have been ignored as part of these biases. Which actually ties into point three.
Finally, science is collaborative. It always has been, and always will be. Newton himself wrote in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants.” And frankly even that isn’t sufficient, that implies past people did some work, then Newton came around and took the reins. But even Newton was working closely with others, like Hooke (who eventually criticised him and thus got Newton’s enemies’ list— scientists can be such babies sometimes). Einstein gets sole credit for General Relativity, but he wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far had it not been for his collaboration with Emmy Noether, who he met through David Hilbert and Felix Klein who were already helping with relativity. For more on both Noether and McClintock, see also the book Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries by Sharon McGrayne.
Darwin too, not only built off the works of others, but collaborated and discussed and debated with his contemporaries in biology, geology, philosophy and more. And again, off of his framework grew so much more by so may others.
This isn’t to spoil anyone’s fun, perhaps even after considering all of these, “hail Darwin” chants are still harmless fun. But perhaps there is also an alternative. At the very least, we should all stop to reflect on these points.
