"It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection"
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Victorian readers were raised on natural theology, where complex organs and intricate ecosystems were taken as direct evidence of divine design. Into that world walked Darwin and Wallace with a startling claim: patient accumulation of small variations, sifted by survival and reproduction, could craft the fit between organism and environment. Observations everywhere seemed to corroborate it. Pigeons and cabbages morph under artificial selection; fossils trace gradual change; island species resemble nearby mainland relatives yet diverge; embryos echo deep anatomical kinships. With deep time from geology and population pressures from Malthus, the mechanism linked disparate facts into a single, economical principle. The shock was not only scientific but philosophical: purposes gave way to processes, plans to blind yet productive iteration.
The elegance of natural selection lies in its minimal assumptions and maximal reach. It is an algorithm embedded in nature, leveraging variation, heredity, and differential success to yield adaptation without foresight. For many 19th-century thinkers, from Huxley to Asa Gray, this required a reordering of intellectual furniture. Ethics, theology, and humanity’s place in nature were all renegotiated as teleology retreated before a mechanistic yet creative process.
Michael Behe, a modern biochemist associated with intelligent design, invokes this history to acknowledge the genuine power of Darwin’s idea while positioning his own critique. By saying many features of the biological world yield to natural selection, he grants its broad explanatory success, especially at the level Darwin could observe. The implied reservation is that some features, particularly molecular machines and biochemical pathways, resist such accounts. Whether one agrees with Behe or not, the line highlights a living continuity: science advances by confronting shocks, absorbing what works, and testing the boundaries. Since the 19th century, genetics, population biology, and molecular evolution have extended selection’s reach, yet the cultural memory of that first upheaval persists, reminding us how a simple, elegant principle can overturn an era’s deepest intuitions.
The elegance of natural selection lies in its minimal assumptions and maximal reach. It is an algorithm embedded in nature, leveraging variation, heredity, and differential success to yield adaptation without foresight. For many 19th-century thinkers, from Huxley to Asa Gray, this required a reordering of intellectual furniture. Ethics, theology, and humanity’s place in nature were all renegotiated as teleology retreated before a mechanistic yet creative process.
Michael Behe, a modern biochemist associated with intelligent design, invokes this history to acknowledge the genuine power of Darwin’s idea while positioning his own critique. By saying many features of the biological world yield to natural selection, he grants its broad explanatory success, especially at the level Darwin could observe. The implied reservation is that some features, particularly molecular machines and biochemical pathways, resist such accounts. Whether one agrees with Behe or not, the line highlights a living continuity: science advances by confronting shocks, absorbing what works, and testing the boundaries. Since the 19th century, genetics, population biology, and molecular evolution have extended selection’s reach, yet the cultural memory of that first upheaval persists, reminding us how a simple, elegant principle can overturn an era’s deepest intuitions.
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| Topic | Science |
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