Well, I'm not in the business of preserving the memory of a man who is long dead, unless we are to believe that Darwin was more than just a man ~ a hero in the mould of Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces ~ and must then be worshipped!
Others can mount guard at Darwin's grave if they want to. But it's the truth that matters, and I'm sure that is everyone's primary goal here.
Digit, if you would but read the article, you will know that it says this:
“Enduring legacy” seems to indicate aspects of Western thinking that are posited on the ideal of Charles Darwin as a dazzling hero, a leader in the way of “right thinking”, even though much of what has been attributed to Darwinism, Darwin never said.
I also don't take my science or archaeology from anything I see on the telly, Min. There has never been any evidence for the 'one trunk'. It was an idea of Darwin and Haeckel’s, and has never been shown to exist. Yet it is stuck in our collective consciousness and repeated ad infinitum, over the centuries, like a mantra.
That was because Darwin had Huxley as his PR man, Mr Soundbite of the day. Huxley was an advertising man ~ great at working with visual archetypes that resonate with the deepest consciousness. It cannot have escaped his awareness that the Tree of LIfe is one of the oldest mythological symbols and so had already been seared in our race memories for thousands of years. But that's why they paid him the big bucks. He had a way of coming up with memorable metaphors, so memorable in fact that they have stuck in our minds for hundreds of years.
Remember this one:
“Six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum'.
It turns out that if you filled the entire universe with atom-computers, and let them calculate at the speed of light for 20 billion years, they would produce just 90 characters … not even enough for a decent length sentence. And so how in heaven could this same random process produce an organism so complex that if you laid its software language (DNA ) out in a line, it would stretch from here to Pluto and back?
Computer generated programmes have shown that increasing gradients of complexity can never happen by chance. Random chance always gets the wrong answer and the more you scale the experiment up, the more mistakes you get. You don't gain information by chance mutation, you always lose some. Thus the idea of everything developing neatly and to order from one trunk is not compatible with how random processes work.
So the TOE guys cannot have it both ways.
If life is a random, chance generation from inorganic matter which gradually, over time, grew more complex, there must be millions of trunks and even more branches. And there must be ‘mistakes’ all over the place, infinitely more than the number of ‘successes’.
This is from the article:
Tree of life: Genetic findings in bacteria show that the stages of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms always comprise ramifications. Therefore, inbreeding must occur frequently, even in higher vertebrates. As a result, there cannot only be one “Tree of Life” with continuous ongoing branching.
The genealogic tree does not only have one root. It is manifold. The principle of increasing gradients in complexity [over time] which is dependent on the environment and connected to geobioenergetic balances has to be stressed further. There is no benefit and utilisation because there are different stages of adaptation which work by lower and more complex mutual correspondences, as seen in symbiotic structures like our own intestinal bacteriae.
