Of Matters Great and Small by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2010-05-22T00:24:42.003000+00:00

Lamarck was wrong in his notion of the evolutionary mechanism, but his book made the concept of evolution well known in the scientific world and it inspired others to find a perhaps more workable mechanism."

The man who turned the trick was the English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (grandson of Erasmus Darwin), who spent nearly twenty years gathering data and polishing his argument. This he did, first, because he was a naturally meticulous man. Secondly, he knew the fate that awaited anyone who advanced an evolutionary theory, and he wanted to disarm the enemy by making his arguments cast-iron.

tAntievolutionists usually denounce evolution as "merely a theory" and cite various uncertainties in the details, uncertainties that are admitted by biolo- gists. In this, the antievolutionists are being fuzzy-minded. That evolution has taken place is as nearly a fact as anything non-trivial can be. The exact details of the mechanism by which evolution proceeds, however, remain theoretical in many respects. The mechanism, however, is not the thing. Thus, very few people really lmderstand the mechanism by which an automobile runs, but those who ate uncertain of the mechanism do Dot argue from that that the automobile itself does not exist.

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When he published his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, he carefully refrained from discussing man in it. That didn't help, of course. He was a gentle and virtuous person, as nearly a saint as any cleric in the kingdom, but if he had bitten his mother to death, he couldn't have been denounced more viciously.

Yet the evidence in favor of evolution had kept piling up. In 1847 the largest of the anthropoid apes, the gorilla, was finally brought into the light of European day, and it was the most dramatic ape of all. In size, at least, it seemed most nearly human, or even superhuman.

Then, too, in 1856 the very first fossil remnants of an organism that was clearly more advanced than any of the living anthropoids and as clearly more primitive than any living man was discovered in the Neander valley in Germany. This was "Neanderthal man." Not only was the evidence in favor of evolution steadily rising, but so was the evidence in favor of human evolution.

In 1863 the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell published The Antiquity of Man, which used the evidence of ancient stone tools to argue that mankind was much older than the six thousand years allotted him (and the Universe) in the Bible. He also came out strongly in favor of the Darwinian view of evolution.

And in 1871 Darwin finally carried the argument to man with his book The Descent of Man.

The antievolutionists remain with us, of course, to this day, ardent and firm in their cause. I get more than my share of letters from them, so that I know what their arguments are like.

They concentrate on one point, and one point only the descent of man. I have never once received any letter

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