Darwin's Birthday

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

-Theodosius Dobzhansky 1973

This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). As an archaeologist, a gardener, a birdwatcher, and a largely self-taught naturalist, I have come to embrace Darwin's powerful explanatory idea to understand the world in which I find myself. Retirement has freed my reading priorities from strictly archaeological and anthropological books and articles, and I have had time to read the works of a number of scholars who have written about Darwin and his idea. I just finished reading Daniel C. Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, 1995). This is not an easy book to read, and, in fact, it took me four months to finish. Rereadings and reading pauses, during which I read numerous other lighter books, accounted for some of this time, and there is the fact that the book has 500-plus pages, but the main reason is that there are so many fascinating facets to this idea dealt with by Dennett that absorbing and thinking about them made reading ten to fifteen pages or fewer a usual evening's quota. I was an undergraduate philosophy major, so I have experienced challenging philosophical texts before, but none so interesting as this one. Dennett is well-read and brilliant, and his writing is very readable and has references for addition reading throughout the book. Most importantly, because he deals with a profound idea dealing with the meaning(s) of life, all life, your life, my life, it is a book that is best digested slowly. I have read the works of evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, but Dennett, a philosopher and a Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, in this book, has more thoroughly examined and explained the "Darwinian Revolution" and its implications for understanding who and what we are, at least to this old student.

Finally, on the subject of this blog, Darwin's birthday is February 12, which of course is the same day as President Lincoln's. In fact, they both were born on the same day in 1809. What a good day that was. We know what great importance Abraham Lincoln was to us, and we celebrate his birthday each year on Presidents' Day. Little attention, however, is given to Darwin's, yet Dennett states, "If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else." I hope more attention is given to Darwin's, at least in this year of the bicentennial of his birth.