Archive for the ‘What Darwin Said’ Category

Charles Darwin never mentions the 1856 fossil discovery in the Neander Valley limestone quarry located in Germany in The Origin of Species in 1859 nor in any of the six subsequent editions. Even in The Descent of Man, Darwin did not endorse the Neanderthals as a potential ancestral transitional link to humans.

In fact, the discovery was a problem since the Neanderthal skulls are larger than human skulls. Darwin had argued that the advancement of evolution proceeded through “slight, successive changes”.

The Neanderthal fossils created a dilemma for Darwin, how could a larger brain precede a smaller brain? Darwin cautiously noted, that “it must be admitted that some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious [large]”. For Darwin, the Neanderthal skulls were too large to have preceded humans. Continue Reading

Although the Planned Parenthood was not established as an organization until 1916 when Margaret Sanger opened the first clinic in the U.S. in Brooklyn, New York, even Charles Darwin would have expressed outrage over their birth control methods.

Amazingly, birth control was a hot topic during the elections of 1868 in England. Segments of Victorian liberalism lead by Charles Bradlaugh, one of the most famous atheists of the nineteenth century, drove his election campaign in Northhampton on the platform of electoral reform and birth control.

As founder of the National Secular Society established in 1866, Bradlaugh promoted birth control as a means to rescue English working people from poverty. The National Secular Society represented a radical segment liberalism. Poverty was considered the result of over-population based on Thomas Malthus principle of economics. Branded as vicious obscenity, methods for birth control were promoted in his sixpenny pamphlet entitled The Fruits of Philosophy. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species hoodwinks natural selection with alternating unlimited and limited power. Natural selection was Darwin’s “grand” natural law acting through the ages giving rise to ever increasing complex forms of life. This essence of the concept is captured in the title: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Natural selection, the proposed natural law driving the progress of evolution, was envisioned by Darwin, on the one hand, with powers like that of a deity: It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets?
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Charles Darwin in a letter Joseph D. Hooker in February 1871 speculated that life might have originated in “some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”. The search for the origin and essence of life continues.

Central to the origin of life issue is the question, what is life? The journal Astrobiology in December 2010 featured a collection of essays on the topic “What is Life?” organized by David Deamer of the University of California, Santa Cruz, by asking the question, “Can life be defined?” Continue Reading

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin explains how “external resemblances [of moths]… has been gained for the sake of protection” giving the moth “a better chance of escaping destruction from predaceous birds”… “So that we have an excellent illustration of natural selection.”

Bernard Kettlewell in the early 1950’s was the first to design an experiment to test Darwin’s “excellent example of natural selection” in two types of wooded areas in England—polluted and nonpolluted. Kettlewood demonstrated light colored peppered moths survived better than darker colored moths in areas where the tree trucks were of lighter color, and conversely— darker colored moths survived better than lighter colored moths in areas where the tree trucks were of darker color.

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In a letter to botanist Joseph Hooker in 1871, Charles Darwin attempts to explain how life originated from materials, “we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes”

While not specifically address origin of life issues in The Origin of Species, Darwin clearly wrestled with the issue. At the time, concepts of spontaneous generation, the animate arising from the inanimate, dominated the evolution movement. Continue reading

“It seemed to me sufficient to indicate, in the first edition of my ‘Origin of Species,’ that by this work “light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history;” and this implies that man must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearance on this earth.” Charles Darwin, 1872

Darwin envisioned man evolving into existence in the same way as animals. Since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the hunt has been on to find all the missing “slight, successive” transitional links, especially the link from animal to man.

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National Geographic Society over the years, like nineteenth century German embryologist Ernst Haeckel, have taken the same approach—the fabrication of inventions.

Of Charles Darwin’s alleged facts in The Origin of Species, the embryo drawings by Haeckel were “by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of the theory. Darwin explains,

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Of his twenty-five books, Charles Darwin considered The Origin of Species his greatest lifetime achievement. Today rarely is the full title of the book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest in the Preservation of Favoured Races, is rarely ever mentioned.

The long title is actually two titles separated by the word “or” with four separate phrases. Since Preservation of Favoured Races infers racism and Survival of the Fittest was later translated to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, today, rarely is the second half of the title ever used.

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Natural selection is Charles Darwin proposed natural mechanism for the origin of new species, as the title implies—On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was Darwin’s proposed unifying “natural law of evolution”.

What is the evidence for natural selection? Darwin explains -

In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations.

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