The Charles Darwin bicentenary

[VANCOUVER - June 18, 2007] – Canadians strongly believe humans developed through evolution, but they don’t quite understand what the theory means, a new Angus Reid Strategies poll has found.

In the online survey of a representative national sample, three-in-five Canadians (59%) agree that human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years. Just 22 per cent believe that God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years—the theory of creationism espoused by the new Big Valley Creation Science Museum in Alberta, the country’s first creationist museum.

However, when asked if humans and dinosaurs co-existed on earth—a central tenet of creationism on display in the Big Valley Museum—42 per cent of respondents agree. Over one-third of Canadians (37%) disagree, in line with fossil records indicating that man developed millions of years after dinosaurs.

Respondents in Quebec are especially disbelieving of creationism. Just 9 per cent agree with the theory behind creationism, while seven-in-ten Quebeckers (71%) agree that the process of evolution is how humans developed. However, the province wound up being as split as the rest of the nation over whether dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

But Albertans were not more likely to believe in creationism than the rest of the country. Their views came very close to the national numbers, with 58 per cent registering belief in evolution as the process driving human development, and 42 per cent agreeing that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.

As well, younger Canadians, those living in households earning $100,000 or more a year, and those with university education are more likely to strongly believe in evolution, and more likely to disagree that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

He was no social Darwinist. He never claimed progress was inevitable or those who survived and succeeded were inherently superior. Survival of the fittest wasn't even his phrase; it was Herbert Spencer's.

Although Darwin's theory can be applied to much beyond the evolution of organic life, I want to counsel against a different sense of Universal Darwinism. This is the uncritical dragging of some garbled version of natural selection into every available field of human discourse, whether it is appropriate or not.

Maybe the "fittest" firms survive in the marketplace of commerce, or the fittest theories survive in the scientific marketplace, but we should at very least be cautious before we get carried away. And of course there was Social Darwinism, culminating in the obscenity of Hitlerism.

 

Darwin’s great idea has moved on. Twenty-first century evolutionary science, if Darwin could return to see it, would enthrall, excite, and amaze him. But he would recognize it as his own. We are just coloring in the details. For my money, the most important thinker the human species has ever produced was Charles Darwin.

I’ll end on a subtler legacy of Darwin’s big idea. Darwin raises our consciousness to the sinewy power of science to explain the large and complex in terms of the small and simple. In biology we were fooled for centuries into thinking that extravagant complexity in nature needs an extravagantly complex explanation. Darwin triumphantly dispelled that illusion. There remain big questions, in physics and cosmology, that await their own Darwins. Why are the laws of physics the way they are? Why are there laws at all? Why is there a universe at all? Once again, the lure of “design” is tempting, but we have the cautionary tale of Darwin before us. We’ve been through all that before. Darwin raised our consciousness, and we are emboldened to seek true explanations of genuine power.