Why Darwin
Darwin’s Legacy in the XXI Century
American philosopher Daniel Dennett stated in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:
“If I were to give an award to the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose, with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law”
As a matter of fact, during the last 40 years, the evolutionary perspective has become the most influential paradigm for understanding human beings as a whole, as well as a key to unravel their individual and social behavior. That is why psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, morality, neuroscience and even medicine and psychiatry are being increasingly tackled from this perspective. Recently, this view has also reached the field of public policies. Darwin’s outlook allows for a common conceptual framework and for a coherent understanding of all these different disciplines. This emerging vision of human beings and their nature unifies all different areas of their behavior, in an integrated, cohesive and harmonious conception.
“The Origin of Species”, published by Darwin in 1859, described their biological evolution through a mechanism he called natural selection. DNA’s discovery, almost a century later, detailed natural selection’s inner workings, confirming Darwin’s theory and grounding it on a coherent platform with physics and chemistry.
Similarly, the process of cultural development - culture is information not transmitted genetically, but rather through imitation, education or learning - also evolves in an analogous way. Ideas are transmitted from one mind to another, in a process in which “fitter” ideas, that is, more “useful” to the minds they inhabit, in a broad and open understanding of the word, are retained and thus selected.
From a Darwinian perspective, a unified vision of human beings emerges, through which individuals must be understood as the result of a co-evolutionary process. Their genetic heritage - the physical and psychological traits naturally selected in evolutionary time and retained in their gene pool - interacts with the cultural environment they inhabit. That cultural environment is formed not only by their geographical surrounding, but mainly by information elaborated by human beings themselves: technology, scientific theories, moral, legal and penal codes, works of art or religious beliefs, all of which mold the fundamental ecological niche in which people live. This outlook not only has great explanatory power, but also adjusts nicely to the growing empirical evidence collected in the field.
The concept of “natural selection ” has proven to have an amazing descriptive power. In addition to being the nucleus of our understanding of human behavior, as already stated, it has been used in other areas of knowledge, as in mathematics, through the so called genetic algorithms and their applications to Artificial Intelligence, or in medicine, to understand the deepest causes to many illnesses.
In 2009, 200 years will have elapsed from Darwin’s birth, and 150 years from his publishing of “The Origin of Species”. This will be celebrated in different parts of the world, and more than 32 of these celebrations can be counted to date. In addition to this, there is an initiative called “Darwin Day Celebration”, with a council formed by world class scientists: Patrick Bateson, William H. Calvin, Helena Cronin, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, William Durham, Steve Jones, Robin McKie, Steven Pinker, Eugenie C. Scott, Michael Shermer, Frank Sulloway, Colin Tudge, Edward O. Wilson y Carl Zimmer.
The importance of Darwin’s intellectual legacy in the XXI Century, calls for the kind of worldwide agitation this anniversary is generating, and for the celebration of it in different parts of the world. The question emerges: Why also in Chile?
