Censorious Academics Forget that Their Hero Darwin Wanted an Open Debate
By Herman B. Bouma | February 12, 2020 | 3:07pm EST
Source/Fonte: Quotes
Recently the chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis called on Google to take action regarding YouTube videos promoting “climate denial and climate misinformation.” Not surprisingly, many strongly criticized this attempt at censorship.
Most reasonable people believe that when it comes to disagreements on policy and scientific theory, the best approach is to promote debate rather than censorship. Open and honest debate has always been “the American way.” However, in the case of Darwinian theory, the scientific establishment has been promoting censorship rather than debate for quite some time now – contrary to Charles Darwin’s expressed wishes.
The first edition of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species was published in 1859 and set forth his theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection. Darwin’s theory was at odds with the theory of design, which was the dominant biological theory of the time.
Many eminent scientists of Darwin’s day had strong objections to Darwin’s theory, including Louis Agassiz, a world-renowned professor of geology and biology at Harvard University known as a “founding father of the American scientific tradition;” Adam Sedgwick, a professor of geology and paleontology at Cambridge University and one of Britain’s most distinguished geologists; and Karl Nageli, a Swiss professor of botany at the University of Munich who was famous for his work on plant cells. Darwin took great care to reply thoughtfully to the scientific arguments against his theory and, by the time of the sixth edition of his book in 1872, approximately one-third of the book consisted of his response to numerous scientific arguments against his theory (all of which still have merit today).
Darwin clearly took his critics seriously, and did so even though most were proponents of design. He never considered the theory of design to be unscientific and in fact stated that it “has been ably maintained by many authors.” (Even he theorized that the first forms of life were the result of design.) Darwin treated his critics with respect, referring to them as “the most eminent paleontologists” and “our greatest geologists”. Darwin acknowledged that there were “a crowd of difficulties” with his theory and that a number of objections carried great weight.
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