Our reader Jeff Poggi sent me a sonnet he wrote in honor of Darwin’s 200′th birthday, and kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. How many hidden Darwin references can you spot?
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Archive for the 'Evolution' Category
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I love evolutionary biology, so I love this argument: Beauty is more valuable to girls than it is to boys, so beautiful parents should have more daughters than sons. You want (or at least your genes want) to pass on your assets to children who can make the best use of them.
So I was delighted by recent news reports that beautiful women do indeed have more daughters. But I was stunned by the reported magnitude of the effect: According to one report, beautiful people are 36 percent more likely to have a daughter than a son!
Continue reading ‘Beauty’s Daughter’
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It is well known (to the sort of people to whom such things are well known) that the Scottish engineer Fleeming Jenkin was the first to formalize a toy model of Darwin’s evolutionary theory—with results that were most unfavorable to Darwin: The model predicts that random improvements, even when they confer survival advantages, still tend to disappear over the course of a few generations. This was in 1867.
It seems to be far less well known that Jenkin’s model also predicts that all life on earth dies out after a few generations, which would seem to cast doubt on its assumptions. Jenkin was apparently unaware of this, and so, presumably, was Darwin, who gave considerable credence to the Jenkin model in the final edition of The Origin of Species. This was in 1872.
It seems to be even less well known that the inadequacy of Jenkin’s model was identified in a little-noticed letter to the editor of Nature by the mathematician Arthur Sladen Davis. In that letter, Davis corrected Jenkin’s error and supplied an alternative model that he believed was favorable to Darwin. This was in 1871, but apparently Darwin never heard about it.
And it seems to be known only to me (and now, to the readers of this blog!) that Davis’s model is also flawed, in the opposite direction from Jenkin’s, in that it predicts that any species population must grow without bound following the appearance of a beneficial mutation. And as a result of this, the Davis model undercuts Darwin more than it supports him.
I’ve adjusted Davis’s model much as Davis adjusted Jenkin’s, and gotten a result that could be considered favorable to Darwin. In fact, it’s more or less the result that Davis thought he’d gotten, but hadn’t.
Here comes the more technical part. If this is not your cup of tea, stop reading now. Do come back tomorrow though. I’m not always like this.
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Among the things you’re sure of, which are you surest of? For Richard Dawkins, writing in the Wall Street Journal, it’s the theory of evolution:
We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that [evolution] is the process that has generated life on our own planet.
Now, I would be thunderstruck if the theory of evolution turned out to be fundamentally wrong, but not nearly so thunderstruck as if arithmetic turned out to be inconsistent. In fact, I can think of quite a few things I’m more sure about than evolution. For example:
1. The consistency of arithmetic. (This amounts to saying that a single arithmetic problem can’t have two different correct answers.)
2. The existence of conscious beings other than myself.
3. The fact that the North won the American Civil War. (That is, historians are not universally mistaken about this. I am not interested in quibbling about what constitutes a “win”; I mean to assert that the North won in the everyday sense of the word, as reported in all the history texts.)
Continue reading ‘What Are You Surest Of?’
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I said this in The Big Questions and I’ll say it again: Richard Dawkins is an international treasure and one of my personal heroes, but he’s got this God thing all wrong. Here’s some of his latest, from the Wall Street Journal:
Where does [Darwinian evolution] leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must be at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.
But Darwinian evolution can’t replace God, because Darwinian evolution (at best) explains life, and explaining life was never the hard part. The Big Question is not: Why is there life? The Big Question is: Why is there anything? Explaining life does not count as explaining the Universe.
Continue reading ‘There He Goes Again’
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