Conservatives – and rightly so – complain about cancel culture. Of course, these are double standards if we don’t mind when it’s the progressives who get cancelled. Such a thing is happening before our eyes in a gigantic country with dynamically growing potential – India. Assuming we consider Charles Darwin a progressive.
It is not necessarily an obvious matter, as today Darwin is often highly inconvenient for some of the most progressive progressives. The theory of evolution itself is not “progressive” in any sense, although it was mistakenly taught as such in various courses for party cadres in communist regimes, and consequently – in schools “behind the iron curtain”. Denying the “struggle for existence” as conflicting with the spirit of collective cooperation also appeared in the blissfully bygone times when Trofim Lysenko’s “theory” was put into practice, claiming that if you put pea seeds in icy water, the plant will become frost-resistant. In other words, that “you can turn oats into threadworms,” as commented by the late Polish geneticist, Prof. Wacław Gajewski.
Setting aside Lysenkoism, it must be noted that natural selection in the Darwinian sense is neither random nor progressive, meaning it does not lead to a predetermined goal called perfection. Organisms are “improved” only in the sense of better adaptation to the environment at a given moment. For evolutionary success (i.e., having grandchildren), plasticity and adaptability are more important than striving for some kind of perfection.
It is also difficult to portray Darwin himself as a progressive figure in the context of our times (not to mention that attempting such mental acrobatics with anyone at any time is anachronistic and unwise). On the 200th anniversary of the birth of the author of the theory of evolution and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species in 2009, Steven Rose, a retired professor of biology and neurobiology at the Open University in London, published the following words in the prestigious scientific journal EMBO Reports: “After all, Darwin was a man of his era, class, and society. It is true that he favoured a monogenic rather than the then-dominant polygenic view of human origins, but he still divided humanity into distinct races based on differences in skin colour, eyes, or hair. He was also convinced […] that white races – especially Europeans – were evolutionarily more advanced than black races […]. Darwin’s views on gender were also completely conventional. He stated that the result of sexual selection is that men are ‘more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than women, [with] a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger […] it is said that the formation of his skull is intermediate between that of a child and an adult male’ (Darwin 1871).”
The theory of evolution removed from saffron textbooks
Increasingly, prestigious scientific journals are voicing opinions on matters that do not concern the historical perspective of scientific development, discoveries, or the directions in which contemporary science is heading. They sometimes express views on policies related to science and education, especially when tensions arise between David from the scientific community and Goliath in power or even the rest of society.
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by Magdalena Kawalec-Segond
Translated by jz
source:
TVP WEEKLY