No Apologetics For Darwin Poem by gershon hepner

Not going into that good night as gentle
as the Romanian monk called Gregor Mendel,
Charles Darwin never understood genetics,
but when attacked by bishops, he required
more than the help of Huxley who admired
his theory. Today apologetics
are still part of the program that is used
when men of faith defined God, who’s accused
by Darwin of relating them to primates,
Good Bishop Wilberforce prevailed, Darwinian
dissent prevails and, like death, has dominion
in other-worldly, claustrophobic climates.
Discoveries of Franklin, Watson, Crick
ought to have punctured with a fatal prick
creationism, which still causes trouble
by claiming that intelligent design
explains how we got here, though there’s no sign
of God within the helix that is double.

Inspired by an article by Carl Safina which underscores that everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, notably Gregor Mendel, Franlin, Watson and Crick (“Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live, ” NYT, February 10,2009) :
“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, ” Robert Darwin told his son, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Yet the feckless boy is everywhere. Charles Darwin gets so much credit, we can’t distinguish evolution from him. Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work): the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages): developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism): studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact): evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic): and more. By propounding “Darwinism, ” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” The ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin… Darwin penned the magnum opus. Yet there were weaknesses. Individual variation underpinned the idea, but what created variants? Worse, people thought traits of both parents blended in the offspring, so wouldn’t a successful trait be diluted out of existence in a few generations? Because Darwin and colleagues were ignorant of genes and the mechanics of inheritance, they couldn’t fully understand evolution. Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, discovered that in pea plants inheritance of individual traits followed patterns. Superiors burned his papers posthumously in 1884. Not until Mendel’s rediscovered “genetics” met Darwin’s natural selection in the “modern synthesis” of the 1920s did science take a giant step toward understanding evolutionary mechanics. Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Francis Crick bestowed the next leap: DNA, the structure and mechanism of variation and inheritance. Darwin’s intellect, humility (“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”) and prescience astonish more as scientists clarify, in detail he never imagined, how much he got right. But our understanding of how life works since Darwin won’t swim in the public pool of ideas until we kill the cult of Darwinism. Only when we fully acknowledge the subsequent century and a half of value added can we really appreciate both Darwin’s genius and the fact that evolution is life’s driving force, with or without Darwin.

2/10/09