[It’s the Darwin bicentennial; it’s time to party like primates.  I’ll tip my bit into the punchbowl by serializing, sip by sip, a talk I gave at the 2006 “Fortean Times” UnCon and the 2007 INFO (International Fortean Organization) FortFest.  It’s mostly about the confused interbreeding of evolution and American culture.  I’ll update it a bit as I post it; it was originally dangled forth in the full fracas of the culture wars of that time.  I will touch on the Scopes trial, its reworking as “Inherit the Wind,” the puzzling story of the brontosaurus, and the evolution of the caveman cartoon.  Happy birthday, Charles!]

People are still squabbling over Darwin.  Both Creationists and Evolutionists wax passionate on the subject — even though many in both camps have never gone near a book by the old man.  He’s fought over in schools; he’s a plank in partisan politics.  Inherit the Wind even popped up anew on Broadway.

So much of this furor has bupkis to do with Darwin, or even with biology.  I wanted to figure out for myself what it was about.  I originally unloaded the following remarks at the “Fortean Times” UnCon in London, where I was tag-teamed with Ian Simmons, who spoke on the dubious science of the “Intelligent Design” movement.  He had the science angle covered, so I concentrated on the culture of the controversy.

But it’s helpful and refreshing, here at the outset, to savor some of the popular confusion about Darwin.

One is that he thumped his tub for atheism and a universe of randomness.  He wasn’t a theologian; he was a biologist — and wrote on the origin of species, not the origin of life.  And far from saying nature worked by chance, he stressed that it boasted predictable laws.  He had enough homework cut out trying to understand those laws, and didn’t bother with speculations on first causes.

Nor did he say that all was ruled by competition.  Organisms both compete and cooperate to survive: bees work together, sort of, to build hives; species aplenty benefit by interaction.  Unfortunately, natural selection is often mixed up with Social Darwinism, with the idea that human behavior works by the same laws as speciation.  Obviously, it doesn’t; and biologists pooh-poohed that idea long ago.

Another crucial point is that we simply can’t define what a species is.  Each plant and animal has different genes; and the lines we draw between one species and another; between species and sub-species, sub-species and variety, one individual and another, is fluid and arbitrary.  Nature joyfully breeds away, constantly varying and adapting; and hybrids between species, or even genera, are sometimes fertile — and there are varying degrees of fertility, too.  As Charles Fort put it, we like to draw a circle in the ocean, and insist that the waves inside the circle are different from the ones outside.  Nature is more interested in the breeding than in the classification.

(Posted by Doug Skinner; more to follow.)