Darwin The Fittest Idea 1860 to the future 36 Most people today don’t realize that natural selection, Darwin’s greatest and most troubling idea, fell into disfavor among evolutionary biologists for fifty or sixty years. Most people imagine that the Darwinian revolution, so called, was a relatively quick campaign fought and won in the late nineteenth century. It wasn’t. It was an up-down-up scuffle for decades. There were two principal questions, contested almost independently: (1) Has evolution occurred? and (2) Is natural selection its main causal mechanism? Despite some horrified outcries from religious leaders and pious scientists, the descent of all species (even humans) from common ancestors became widely accepted rather soon after The Origin of Species was published. Despite his careful arguments in the first half of the book, Darwin’s hypothesis as to the causal mechanism did not. Why not? Because the idea of natural selection seemed profoundly materialistic and gloomy—that is, it was both literally and figuratively dispiriting—whereas the idea of evolution seemed merely insulting (as applied to the human species) and bizarre.
What do You think about The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006)?
