The Genius and Courage of Charles Darwin

Darwin's genius is really understood by very few people. He was obviously a great biological observationist and thinker, and fathered one of the most successful fields of science in the history of mankind. But he is under-appreciated. He really should eclipse Einstein as the pre-eminent thinker model. His work was, in many ways, more successful.

Here are a couple of things about Darwin that probably very few people realize...

The idea of evolution pretty much predicted DNA (as a physical way of transmitting data between generations). With an understanding of DNA, evolution makes much more sense than it did before we knew how traits were passed along from generation to generation. The fact that Darwin figured it out WITHOUT knowing the mechanism is impressive.

Evolution also required more time to explain the world than the age of the solar system, as it was believed to be at the time. In fact, Lord Kelvin believed the sun was only -- if I remember right -- tens of millions of years old, and that was not long enough to explain the current state of life on earth. I have read that this troubled Darwin. Well, Chuck, it turns out that you were not only write about biology, you nailed cosmology, as well. We now know, through the benefit of our much greater abilities to measure and calculate both huge and tiny quanitities of matter and energy, that the solar system is over 4 billion years old. And that works just right with Darwin's observations.

So even without knowing the mechanism for biological evolution, and with his work conflicting with the work of the era's greatest physicists, Darwin got it right. That not only requires genius, but courage.