Darwin's Dangerous Idea Read Free Page A

an opined that "some Christian prince" should suppress this madman, but aside anthropomorphic Handicrafter God, but still a God worthy of worship in their from a few such salvos, the world was not particularly shaken by Copernicus eyes, capable of giving consolation and meaning to their lives. Others ground himself.) The Copernican Revolution did eventually have its own "shot heard their highest concerns in entirely secular philosophies, views of the meaning round the world": Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World of life that stave off despair without the aid of any concept of a Supreme Systems, but it was not published until 1632, when the issue was no longer Being—other than the Universe itself. Something is sacred to these thinkers, controversial among scientists. Galileo's projectile provoked an infamous but they do not call it God; they call it, perhaps, Life, or Love, or Goodness, response by the Roman Catholic Church, setting up a shock wave whose or Intelligence, or Beauty, or Humanity. What both groups share, in spite of reverberations are only now dying out. But in spite of the drama of that epic the differences in their deepest creeds, is a conviction that life does have confrontation, the idea that our planet is not the center of creation has sat meaning, that goodness matters.
    rather lightly in people's minds. Every schoolchild today accepts this as the But can any version of this attitude of wonder and purpose be sustained in matter of fact it is, without tears or terror.
    the face of Darwinism? From the outset, there have been those who thought In due course, the Darwinian Revolution will come to occupy a similarly they saw Darwin letting the worst possible cat out of the bag: nihilism. They secure and untroubled place in the minds—and hearts—of every educated thought that if Darwin was right, the implication would be that nothing could person on the globe, but today, more than a century after Darwin's death, we be sacred. To put it bluntly, nothing could have any point. Is this just an still have not come to terms with its mind-boggling implications. Unlike the overreaction? What exactly are the implications of Darwin's idea—and, in Copernican Revolution, which did not engage widespread public attention any case, has it been scientifically proven or is it still "just a theory"?
    until the scientific details had been largely sorted out, the Darwinian Perhaps, you may think, we could make a useful division: there are the Revolution has had anxious lay spectators and cheerleaders taking sides from parts of Darwin's idea that really are established beyond any reasonable the outset, tugging at the sleeves of the participants and encouraging doubt, and then there are the speculative extensions of the scientifically grandstanding. The scientists themselves have been moved by the same hopes and fears, so it is not surprising that die relatively narrow conflicts among theorists have often been not just blown up out of proportion by their 1. I will not devote any space in this book to cataloguing the deep flaws in creationism, adherents, but seriously distorted in the process. Everybody has seen, dimly, or supporting my peremptory condemnation of it. I take that job to have been admirably that a lot is at stake.
    done by Kitcher 1982, Futuyma 1983, Gilkey 1985, and others.
    Moreover, although Darwin's own articulation of his theory was monumental, and its powers were immediately recognized by many of the scien-20 TELL ME WHY
    Is Nothing Sacred? 21

    tists and other thinkers of his day, there really were large gaps in his theory are carefully left unarticulated, displaced from attention by several layers of that have only recently begun to be properly filled in. The biggest gap looks distracting rebuttal and counter-rebuttal. The disputants are forever changing almost comical in retrospect. In all his brilliant musings, Darwin never hit the subject slightly, conveniently keeping the bogeys in the