The Theory That Changed Everything

The first chapter, “Strawberries,” presents the formative experience: the voyage of HMS Beagle that formed Darwin’s views on the common humanity of all people and set the stage for his life’s work. In a similar, lesser manner, the treks on which my wife, Marcia, and I walked off the map into remote regions of Nepal, was time-travel that changed the way that we viewed life and focused our work.

The first pages of “Strawberries” demonstrate the mechanism and impact of Natural Selection. The strawberries on your plate are the result of natural selection practiced over hundreds of years; not God’s gift. GMOs are nothing new, suggesting, as noted in the concluding chapter of my book, that Darwin’s reaction to the debate on GMOs and other current issues would not be what many readers might expect. It puts Darwin’s experiences in the Galapagos islands into perspective. Darwin collected birds there but forgot to label where they had lived. An epiphany revealing the theory of evolution did not occur.

The chapter also presents examples revealing the process of Natural Selection and how it is tied to environment and culture. It shows why Darwin did not realize that Natural Selection can act rapidly. The germ theory of disease was then unknown and Darwin could not have realized that Natural Selection was acting in a savage manner to preserve people whose with robust immune systems or who were lucky to avoid infection. Marcia and I found that it still was unknown when we walked to Inner Dolpo, Nepal. Doctors in developed nations disputed the germ theory throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Pages 30 to 44 of Chapter Two, “No Cats, No Flowers “ present the other major elements of Darwinian evolutionary theory in text that avoids jargon. It also presents the theory in George Chambers’ 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation; a mixture of intelligent design and phrenology. Chambers’s theory, surprisingly, is at the heart of Noam Chomsky’s views concerning the evolution of language, morality, and art. Chomsky, like Chambers, views evolution as a process directed by some vague unspecified criterion. To Chomsky, Natural Selection is a meaningless concept; in his view, language suddenly came into being about 80,000 years ago through an unknown process that is unique to humans.

I hope that what Darwin actually proposed will sink into the consciousness of inquisitive readers, enhance support for evolutionary biology, and bring it to the attention of the next generation of potential scientists.

Darwin’s insights apply to matters of general interest, such as population growth and global warming; both crucial to our and the planet’s survival. My book might convince some people born into families holding to a literal interpretation of the bible to become open to other views, though they, most likely, would not read it. However, it might convince some linguists and psychologists to re-evaluate theories such as Chomsky’s to pursue more productive lines of inquiry.