Charles Darwin: Genius or Plodder?
genetics.org
genetics.org
May I suggest that, the media tends to declare someone a genius if his work cannot be understood by laymen. Physicists like Einstein are declared true geniuses because the mathematics they use look mysterious and magical. But anyone can understand Darwin's prose. Personally, I think they are all human and by defining them as genius we deify them.
That's not particularly true. I don't think there is a single mathematician whose papers are understandable to laypeople (by laypeople, I mean the average person, who remembers some but not all of highschool math). What's really going on here is that Einstein made a tremendous contribution to a tower that was already quite tall, while Darwin's contribution was to the ground floor where everybody could get on. The maths analogy to Darwin would be one of the inventors of Algebra - evolution is taught to children right along with the foundations of math and physics.
Also one of the selling points of relativity in the early days was the difficulty of its math. I think it was Eddington who said that "only three people understood General Relativity."
I see your point, but if Darwin created a new field but Einstein contributed to an existing field, Darwin ought to be considered a greater genius. (Personally, I think it is better not to define anyone as a genius so that we can continue to evaluate their work critically.)
I'm saying that we value things we don't understand more than things we do understand.
I suspect that the media would indeed portray most mathematicians as geniuses, though. In fact most laypeople I know would agree that they were, and I know some fairly well educated laypeople in my opinion.
By mathematician, I mean a publishing academic with a PhD in math (or some rough equivalent to that).
Of course he dashed off another three articles in the same edition of Annalen der Physik, all on the same level of comprehensibility, one of which scored him a Nobel prize.
The difficulty of relativity was and is a silly meme. The basic principles are straightforward. I understood them as a boy, and I am - by a regrettably enormous stretch - no genius.
The book is of course GR bible Gravitation by MTW.
https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/07167...
What marks them both is their willingness to abandon the established dogma when it didn't match the facts, and to set off exploring alternative ideas. Both of them are iconoclasts: Einstein because he proposed time wasn't absolute, which is a seriously batty suggestion to just about everyone unfamiliar with his work because we are very familiar with how time works here on earth. To me Darwin the more impressive in this regard because his idea wasn't just seriously batty (no one had seen evolution at work when he proposed it, despite living in it's midst) but just putting it out there was enough to get others burned at the stake.
Another similarity is neither was your typical extroverted iconoclast. Quite the reverse in fact: they doggedly followed their favoured theories because the felt they did a better job of explaining the facts. Both seemingly didn't care that others would think less of them for their ideas.
You can point to others in the same mould: Galileo for instance. The doctor that endured years of ridicule from his peers for suggest gastric ulcers were the result of a bacterial infection is another.
Nonetheless Einstein stands out for second reason: he did it more than once.
Einstein’s iconoclastic idea was his questioning of Newton’s occult force. That was Einstein’s starting point. He could not accept that an occult notion acting instantaneously at a distance can exist in nature. He set out to fix this situation by trying to explain gravity without the Newtonian force. Did he succeed in this?
Also when we look back, we see that Einstein was chosen as a product to be marketed as genius to unite the post-war Europe. A German Jew whose theories proved by the observations of a British team etc.
I think the idea of evolution was in the air. Lamarck and Wallace wrote about similar things. I don’t know if Darwin knew about them.
Geology has developed a great deal in the past 2 centuries; not many geologists are "stars". How many people can name those among the most influential geologists?
Apart from Darwin, who most people wouldn't think of as a geologist! And yet ... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/darwin-g...
Not everything has to happen at high speed.
Imagine some human male, just old enough to be capable of fathering a child.
Now imagine standing next to him his father, from when his father was just old enough to be capable of fathering children.
Next to him, put his father, at that age, and so on. Go back to their earliest male direct paternal ancestor for which it still makes sense to say it is male (so a little ways past a billion years ago, when sexual reproduction appeared).
Visualize that long line of organisms, each fathered by the one before it, and father to the one after it. The only apparent differences between each organism in that line and its father or child, even under a detailed internal examination, are either very very minor or are cosmetic or size differences.
Yet if you take two organisms far apart in the line, you get massive differences. On one end you have a human, and a good distance down the line you've got something that swims around in the ocean, and differs drastically from the human. Different number of heart chambers, something other than lungs for breathing, and more.
Now go somewhere between those two, where you can find something that lives on land, but uses four legs, not two legs and two arms.
It is not at all obvious how this is possible, because remember, to get from that thing in the water to that thing on four legs, and from that thing on four legs to us, the changes from father to son every step of the way have to essentially be continuous.
Intuitively, that would seem to mean that between the four legged ancestor and the two leg two arm ancestors there had to be many generations where the individuals had two limbs that were somewhere between legs and arms. They would be not as good at four legged things as "normal" four legged animals, and not as good at arm things as "normal" armed animals. Similar argument for every other aspect the differs significantly between them. And yet, despite those disadvantages, everyone in line managed to make it at least long enough to successfully reproduce [1].
It just seems that so many low probability sequential things had to happened for this to work that I don't find it obvious that it is is possible, even taking into account that this possible evolution space was being explored by a huge number of organisms in parallel and taking into account that our end of the line is not special from an understanding evolution viewpoint--it just seems special to use because it is our end.
It's essentially for me like geometry theorems in higher dimensional spaces. I can understand their proofs and know they are true, but cannot find them obvious the way 2D and 3D geometry can be.
[1] Which is kind of sobering, since I do not have kids, meaning that I dropped the ball and ended a direct line of father/son descent going back over a billion years.
I definitely believe in evolution, but wonder if maybe something is missing, especially when it comes to the sort of cross-species changes you’re discussing.
For example, it's very hard to imagine the grand canyon being carved out from water eroding the earth every time it floods little by little. But you can intuitively still get how that works. And I think the basic idea of natural selection is pretty intuitive. Whatever can't survive doesn't reproduce. You can imagine how that simple rule (of course it's more complicated than that) could lead to life to spread out, and adapt to many different niches and take all sorts of forms.
So, like seals, penguins, walruses, mudskippers, and many others? That is, there are many examples of species which don't fit well as sea creatures or terrestrial creatures. But they are just as successful, evolutionary speaking, as you or I.
In any case, the evolutionary argument is our early tetrapodal fish ancestor found that it was (likely marginally) better to sometimes be on land - like a mudskipper. Since there were no other animals in that niche, the descendants who could be more effective on dry land were even more successful in having children, etc.
How well would you do if you had to live in a place which was flooded over your head for a few hours day?
It is really hard to think about "deep time" like this - time long enough for mountains to form and disappear is also time long enough for species to change by quite a bit.