Personally, I love Darwin. He is absolutely freaking the coolest. The point of science from my understanding is never really to prove that an idea is correct, but to collect and provide such an obnoxiously overwhelming amount of evidence to support an idea that you’ve basically proven it. This is what Darwin did when he wrote On The Origin of Species, he basically said “I can’t prove to you that Evolution occurs by means of Natural Selection, but I can sure as heck give you a ton of scientific fact-based and common knowledge reasons why I think it does”. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m buying it. Darwin’s argument has everything that a good argument should: evidence, examples, respectful debunking of other points of view, and really fantastic wording. Mr. Darwin uses many different kinds of evidence to support his argument. These range from the simple mention of time; saying that the idea that there simply hasn’t been enough time for Evolution to occur is rather ridiculous, since there’s literally been so much time that we as humans can’t even fathom it (paraphrasing of course from Darwin, p.486), all the way to geographic evidence, species-specific evidence and examples, evidence regarding domestication, and various animal body-part evidence.
Specifically, I like the examples Darwin gives about woodpeckers eating insects off the ground and upland geese having webbed feet because it is clear he gives a lot of thought to phenomena like this and I understand how these peculiarities simply don’t make sense without the context of Evolution (Darwin, p.492-493). In supplement to this, I recall in David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin a mention of Darwin being fascinated by insects whose delicate wings were encased in thick coverings, never to be used and the fact that men have nipples. Quammen comments on Darwin’s pondering of why the Almighty God would do something so wasteful, unless of course these things originally had a purpose, but descent with modification has caused this purpose to diminish out of existence. In Darwin’s own words, “Organs in a rudimentary condition plainly show that an early progenitor had the organ in a fully developed state” (Darwin, p.503). Well-worded, sir. Overall, I’d say that the most convincing part of Darwin’s evidence is the sheer amount of it and its nature. The evidence is tough to dispute and very clearly understandable since it refers to things in our world which we can tangibly experience and it adds the feeling that Darwin’s theory exists all around us. Smooth move there, Charles.
Other Garbage Title Ideas:
Mr. Darwin, Would You Mind Writing All My Papers For Me?
Darwin: He’s Like The Beyoncé of Science
Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist…