I feel awful: Charles Darwin is about to turn 200, and I haven’t gotten a thing for him yet. Apart from the tongue-in-cheek homage to Darwin that has for several years enjoyed pop-cultural currency, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, and ensuing exploration of the significance of his life’s work, is being rightfully feted in some corners of popular media.
Notable are a pair of articles in the current edition of National Geographic. One chronicles his five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle that yielded the observational building blocks for the theory he would later give to the world; a second peers into present-day, cutting-edge scientific inquiry whose findings today serve to support the validity and durability of Darwin’s work some 150 years after its establishment.
We witness the man’s unbridled curiosity and approach to an array of subjects — marine and terrestrial life forms, plant and animal alike, living and fossilized — with an astonishingly keen eye for detail wedded to an arm’s length relationship with preconceived notion. For five years, Darwin looked closely. He noted, and drew. He catalogued with surgical precision. Minute variations among related critters gripped his attention, and fueled the inquiry that would take an additional 20 years following his return to form the basis of his theory of natural selection.
It’s notable that this theoretical underpinning to the biological sciences still in play today arose from five solid years of field observation, with a subsequent pair of decades of further inquiry and cogitation. If we of the betterbiggerfaster Information Age choose to heed, there’s a lesson in patience and persistence to be derived from Darwin’s life and work. Additionally remarkable is to consider that the modern field of genetics — an area of inquiry unknowable to Darwin in his time — delivers finding after finding that can only bolster the validity and robustness of his theory. We have today unlocked and deciphered the biochemical codes that explain how species change, and that explain commonalities and shared heritage among different species.
I aim, in my own way, to honor Darwin on a pretty regular basis: noting that evolution necessarily continues, and that we in our present form represent a single point on a curve that projects well into the future, I often wonder what is in store for the human species. Dietary changes have rendered obsolete our wisdom teeth; I suspect that at some point down the evolutionary road, the human head will feature no more than 28 teeth.
What enhanced, or altogether new cognitive capacities are in store for us? Is the higher human form and purpose to become a legion of guitar solo shredders of face-melting ability? This little guy, then, could well be on the evolutionary vanguard. Quite possibly though, the stakes are higher. Noting the explosion in the number of species extinctions presently underway, I can’t help but wonder to what extent planetary changes underway and yet to be revealed will require selection for traits suited to different conditions among all life, but certainly among the human species.
On February 12, Charles Darwin turns 200, but it is we who receive the gift he has given to humankind.
