Sal Cordova is promoting this very silly book review on Reddit, which is the only reason I’ve seen it. The International Journal of Organic Evolution published a review of a book titled Rereading Darwin’s Origin of Species: The Hesitations of an Evolutionist, which is taking a deep historical perspective, comparing Darwin’s idea of evolution with the modern theory, and noting serious conflicts between the two. This is totally unsurprising. The reviewer, Alexander Czaja, adds an odd twist to it, though, title the review An approaching storm in evolutionary theory, threatening dire consequences if evolutionary biology continues to promote the cult of Darwin and his flawed theory.
For about 10 years, something important has been brewing in the world of evolution, a great storm that, unfortunately, has so far only made itself felt among a few biologists, historians, and philosophers of biology and evolution (Jablonka & Lamb, 2005, 2020; Laland et al., 2014; Müller, 2017; Pigliucci & Müller, 2010; Skinner, 2015). Reading the work of most practicing biologists, one hardly sees any sign of this gathering storm. On the contrary, in standard textbooks and popular literature, no winds of resistance have been felt, and the ship known as the Modern Theory of Evolution (MTE) sails safely and undisturbed from its usual academic course. It remains to be seen how strong the storm will ultimately be.
Dramatic, much? It’s hard to take the author seriously when he is pushing such an extremely distorted version of modern science. The Modern Theory of Evolution is unconcerned about Darwin’s theory of evolution because we don’t read the Origin anymore. It’s out of date, obsolete, and no longer relevant to the study of evolution. I was never assigned to read the Origin at any point in my academic career, and I’ve never assigned it to my students ever since. It’s a well-written text in an old Victorian style, but since we’re not studying changes in literary English over the last 150 years, it’s not really relevant to an education in biology.
The theory of evolution has evolved significantly since 1859, so it’s no surprise that looking back on the original idea we see discrepancies.
To get straight to the point: The book has no intention of capsizing the MTE ship or to unseating the modern theory but puts forth some provocative theses against the generally accepted view that Darwin was the first modern evolutionary thinker in history: the authors try to demonstrate that there is a wide gap between Darwin and evolutionists today. The most daring of their theses states that Darwin was not an evolutionist in the modern sense of the word. Indeed, the authors question the appropriation of Darwin by proponents of the MTE, who have always placed him and his Origin of Species at the conceptual center of their own model. The book provides compelling arguments that the MTE is based on a highly distorted and anachronistic picture of Darwin, both of his time and main work. Having set forth their case for a fresh look at the Origin, the authors delve deep and meticulously in Darwin’s main work, by uncovering its neglected ambiguities and contradictions. After years of collective Darwin euphoria, in which—as the authors self-critically note—they themselves actively participated, it is now time for a more critical approach. The authors call it “returning Darwin to the human dimension” (p. x) and they wonder “[w]hy has it taken so long for us to realize that Darwin’s commitment to evolutionism was incomplete?” (p. 6)
I fail to see how anyone can claim that “the MTE is based on a highly distorted and anachronistic picture of Darwin”, since it is not based on Darwin at all. Like any scientific theory, it changes to accommodate the evidence, and there has been an astonishing amount of evidence incorporated into the MTE. We don’t worship Darwin, we don’t regard the Origin as holy writ, and we know that Darwin had doubts and errors: witness his reaction to Fleeming Jenkin’s objection that evolution was incompatible with his model of blending inheritance, or the sad debacle that was his promotion of the idea of gemmular inheritance.
We’ve had bigger “storms” than anything modern science has come up with: Darwin missed out entirely on genetics, population genetics, molecular biology, and genomics, and now you want to tell us we’ve been slavishly following a 19th century version of evolution? Psssht, get out of here, ya looney.
This is like looking at 15th Century maps and claiming that there’s a problem with modern geography.
But
her emailshis gemmules!Here : https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2026/02/16/darwin-was-not-the-final-authority-on-anything/
The very idea that any “authority” is or ever could be “final” is just such a religious thing and so very much dismisses thought and evidence and openness to seeing things differently if new facts and understanding comes to light.
As if everything is fixed in stone when were learn so much about atoms then sub-0atomic particles then more.
They want finality as their goal , a last last word and want to cut short any possibility that they and the rest of us could ever find out any more and anything new and especially anything that could change their views.
Stop the world.. they want to get off and freeze the moment – the knowledge we have now as we keep learning ever more all the time – eternal and never face the possibility of being wrong – and of learning more and better.
Or like looking at Aristotle’s version of the universe and comparing it to the universe described by modern physics and saying “uh-oh, science has a big problem.”
@ ^How did my word doc not red underlne and spellcheck – “oatomic”” eh? Dunno.
Do modern K-12 biology books cover the Nearly-Neutral Theory?
Back in undergrad, I took a seminar where we read Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle. The books aren’t exactly pleasure reading, but surprisingly readable considering their age.
But there were lots of laugh out loud moments where Darwin suggested something that is absurd under a modern perspective. For example, I wrote a class paper about flatfish, because Darwin couldn’t come up with an evolutionary explanation, and so instead he suggested that flatfish had strained to move their eyes over many generations. He occasionally offers Lamarckian explanations like that one, because he wasn’t trying to debunk Lamarckianism, he was just trying to put forth an alternative mechanism that may coexist alongside other mechanisms.
IMPORTANT
Off-topic:
If ICE Pulls You Over, Say These 4 Words Immediately
(LAWYER Explains)
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=HAwGbgxhLXg
.. .. .. .. .. ..
(Back to the topic)
.
-It was not until the 1940s with the synthesis of genetics and evolution that the world had a somewhat robust understanding, DNA, RNA and wossname the methylation of DNA came even later.
.. .. .. ..
Incidentally, our understanding of the planets and space is radically different today than during the 1960s. Clearly, astronomy is a worthless mess.
And don’t get me started on medicine. For some reason doctors do not hand over big jars of painkillers these days.
And pregnant women with morning nausea hardly ever get thalidomide.
“surprisingly readable considering their age.”
Victorian authors had a knack to get the information across to the public, as there was not yet a wholly separate scientific field of publishing. Darwin did not work at a university, he adressed the public directly.
You know, Birger, when the clickbait-y headline is about saying a four-word magic spell, you can be just a little less lazy and type the four words.
“Can men get pregnant?” is good fodder for a Congressional hearing, but I don’t think it will get me out of an ICE stop.
Someone should show him how many drafts his bible went through. If one source, constantly honed to increasing levels of accuracy is abhorrent, how can one that has been constantly mutated to 40,000 different simultaneously existing mutations be believed?
@ ^ Trump enabling bad faith troll : I don’t think you’ll ever be pulled over by ICE somehow. You Trump supporting, willfully ignorant, evil piece of radioactive stinking waste scraped off the bottom of a shoe.
But sure would be karma if you were & experienced in person yourself what you were so happy and worked so hard to inflict upon others who do NOT deserve that.
Happy with what you did still are ya?
Still reckon Trump and Kamala were equally as bad & think supporting Trump over her was better given that binary choice you disguisting beyond words disingenuous troll?
@ “beholder” the Trump enablibg troll obvs.
^ NOT HidariMak : Again obvs I hope but still.
Wait, you follow Sal Cordova on Reddit?
And what’s the gathering storm supposed to be? EES? Third Way? Presumably not creationism.
We have “For about 10 years, something important has been brewing in the world of evolution…” then cite:
Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M. J. (2005). Evolution in four dimensions: Genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation in the history of life. MIT Press
Seems the timeline got started wrong.
I thought the storm was already brewing in the late 90s.
Holy crap, Sal “Wormtongue” Cordova is still blithering about evolution? Saddest blast-from-the-past EVER! Did he ever finish his thesis or dissertation in math?
I don’t suppose he’s flashed out any alternative “theory” of
Flat-EarthYoung-Earth Creationism yet…?Raging Bee @ 17
Does he go all the way back to Carl Sagan / Stephen Jay Gould days?
.
Please don’t mention flat-Earthers. God Awful Movies still manage to dig up “documentaries” about the topic. It is profoundly depressing.
.
Retrograde evolution in Minnesota politics? “Mike Lindell Busted Using Campaign As Financial Grift”
-If PZ needs to stay at home longer for his health, following this dumpster fire might be good entertainment.
.https://youtube.com/live/7Ymti1DZ-oo
birger: he at least goes back to Kitzmiller days. He was a regular here and on Ed Brayton’s blog, until he sort-of-retired allegedly to spend more time finishing his big thesis or something. I hadn’t heard from him since, till now.
So is Omphalos, by Philip H. Gosse, of the same era. It isn’t convincing, and it is flawed in its reasoning, but I had no problem with the prose.
I didn’t read Origin of Species until my postgrad year, out of curiosity and because I thought I should. Even in the 60s it played no part in zoology undergrad education in Australia.
It is pushed by creationists because they want to pretend there is just one man and one book of evolution, and this can therefore be weighed against their one book and one man. Useless to point out there have been tens of thousands of biologists working in the field of evolution and similar numbers in related fields like genetics, embryology, geology, biogeography. And that the hundreds of thousands of publications reveal nothing that disproves evolution in a broad sense.
Well, the review does state that MTE has in fact NOT been following Darwin’s ideas.
Apart from that, I believe that perhaps they should have focused on his cousin Francis Galton, whose scientific contributions are either negligible or not really his own. For instance, psychometrics go back to Hippocrates, the nature-nurture debate is due to Confucius and the weather map due to Urbain Le Verrier.
Darwin however seems to have been right regarding the principal idea of evolution, and therefore appears quite deserving of his standing of a world-changing genius.
Does any one else remember back in 2009 when the National Organization for
MoronsMarriage put out a video about a ‘gathering storm,’ and the LGBTQ community came back with some hilarious and entertaining responses, including a version of It’s Raining Men ‽If the organization of information is an artform then a thoroughly annotated copy of The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man could be fascinating. Go through every sentence and provide explanations of what the modern knowledge is and how we know, with links to the important relevant papers. Also, annotations explaining what Darwin was trying to say, but which we might miss or misunderstand due to language/cultural change. (Each ‘temporary endpoint’ of modern knowledge would include an explanation of the origin(s) of the idea – it happened that Darwin and Wallace get the credit for ‘starting’ to conceptualize evolutionary theory, but any modern understanding demonstrates that they were in no way necessary roots for modern theory even though ‘connections can be drawn’.)
[I’ve heard it described that a Master’s Degree is an acknowledgement that one has comprehended the ‘state of the art’ knowledge in a field (or subset of a field), if so – putting together something like this would be an excellent project for someone double-degreeing in Library/Information Science and in Evolutionary Biology – the breadth of knowledge and its presentation would be quite an accomplishment.]
Sal is still active on reddit and youtube. I don’t actually follow him, because he’s a mindless moron, but occasionally run across one of his vacuous contributions.
G.R. Morton’s original list from 2002:
The Imminent Demise of Evolution:The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism
https://web.archive.org/web/20040205171504/http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm
(Oldie but a goodie)
Quite right— that is a silly-ass review which seems to be of a self-important book. The only quibble I would have with your post is with the title of the journal in which it appears: it is actually Evolution. The International Journal of Organic Evolution, usually just called Evolution.
Darwin is not any kind of guide to modern theory but reading Origin I did think it was more insightful than often credited. For instance, there is a part where he is clearly describing the existence of recessive traits (organisms suddenly taking after a more distant ancestor than their parents) even if he doesn’t understand the mechanisms by which they are inherited and come back into expression. That’s already a better answer to Jenkin than I’d been led to expect.
I’ve read large chunks of both Origin and Voyage of the Beagle. Well worth it, some extraordinary passages, masterpieces of synthesising theory from a wide net of observational evidence…but over a century out of date.
It’s stupid to regard current developments in evolutionary theory as a “challenge to evolution” because they don’t 100% agree with a book written >150 years ago.
Chrislawson @ 29
You mean your doctor does not provide leeches to keep the four fluids in balance? I go by the advice by Theoderic of York, the medieval doctor played by Steve Martin.
birgerjohansson @30:
I mean, my grandfather’s doctor did actually prescribe ‘bleeding the patient’ for him.
Then again, my grandfather suffered from haemochromatosis, a.k.a. blood iron overload, and bleeding the patient to reduce the iron levels in the blood to safer levels is actually the scientifically recommended treatment for that. It just doesn’t generally involve leeches these days.