Adaptable to Change

"A politician opens his journal," said the Moon when she arised after saying Basmalah dan greeting with Salaam.

"On his journal, it has written some summaries,

31 December 2022: Didn't jog

31 Januari 2023: Still didn't jog

28 February 2023 : Nope, didn't jog

31 Maret 2023: Didn't jog too

Then he adds on his journal:

30 April 2023: This is becoming a running joke now."

Then the Moon carried on, 'Darwin said, 'It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.' Although I don't subdcribe to this Darwin's theories, but there's something interesting about it.

Serious confusions and controversies still plague Darwin’s theories in scientific as well as in lay circles, says Paul R. Lawrence. It is generally well known that the first major attack, and the most persistent attack, on Darwin’s theories came from organized religion with its millions of adherents. The response of the religious establishment at the time of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species can best be summarized as horrified. The debate was energetically engaged not only by the most distinguished prelates of England but also by many of the most famous naturalists, also on religious grounds. The theory seemed to undermine the most basic of religious beliefs, the very existence of God. Over the years the debate quieted down somewhat, but recently it has heated up again. It is clearly not resolved. A recent poll indicated that a significant majority of Americans favor creationist theories on the origin of all living things over Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is true even though many major religious leaders, including the late Pope John Paul II, accepted the general idea of Darwin’s evolutionary theory as an explanation of how God created living species.

The second wave of controversy and confusion over Darwin’s theories, says Lawrence, has been attributed to Herbert Spencer with his ideas on Social Darwinism. These ideas were and still are a major obstacle to the understanding of Darwinism. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the vivid but misleading phrase “survival of the fittest.” Darwin might have agreed on the condition that 'fit' was understood to mean 'adaptable' (as in 'fit in'). Darwin said, 'It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.' But in fact, the phrase is almost universally understood to mean 'survival of the toughest and most ruthless.' As applied to humans, this is very clearly not at all what Darwin meant, yet it has come to summarize, for most of the public, what Darwinism is all about.

The next source of misunderstanding, still accordin to Lawrence, about Darwin has come, rather surprisingly, from the evolutionary biologists themselves. As a prime example, consider Richard Dawkins, whose widely read and respected writings, especially The Selfish Gene, have inadvertently served to reinforce the erroneous 'most ruthless' interpretation of Darwin. So has some of the popular work of Stephen Jay Gould. This has all happened over the years in a rather complex way that has been clearly explained by Ernst Mayr, a key contributor to the modern synthesis of Darwin’s theories with the theories of genetics. In his book One Long Argument, Mayr explains how confusion arose among biologists.

Darwin’s theory of the “common descent” of all organisms from a primordial ancestor was quite quickly accepted by biologists. After Darwin’s death, however, his theory of “natural selection” remained controversial among biologists for several decades. This controversy, while eventually resolved in the confirmation of Darwin, had led biologists to focus on the natural selection mechanism as if it were the one and only mechanism that Darwin used to explain the process of evolution. While natural selection was the most prominent evolutionary mechanism for Darwin, it was by no means the only one. Darwin emphasized the mechanism of “sexual selection” as a crucial mechanism in explaining evolution. Sexual selection is the focus of his second major book on evolution, The Descent of Man, which also is, of course, the book that offers almost everything that Darwin had to say about humans.

A fourth source of massive misunderstanding of Darwin has come from the social sciences. Ever since Darwin’s work became available, social scientists have essentially given it the silent treatment. They have, of course, accepted that Darwin was right about the evolution of our bodily parts, but they have almost entirely denied that his theory can in any way explain human behavior. This is what has become known as the “blank slate” assumption. The idea is that the brain is a passive (blank) organ at birth that gradually fills up over our lives with things learned from our cultures and other aspects of our environment. This is also known as the social construction of reality. There is little doubt that this early and persistent rejection of Darwinism was triggered by Social Darwinism with its tooth-and-claw determinism, a broad worldview about the human condition that horrified and revolted the social scientists for totally understandable reasons. It clearly could be used to advance racist and sexist agendas—and it was in Hitler’s Germany. Social Darwinism was totally at odds with the view of social scientists that humans are flawed but have a capacity for compassion and cooperation and are always striving to improve their condition. If Darwinism denied all of this, social scientists wanted no part of it; this aspect of Darwinism struck very deeply into the essence of their professional outlook, triggering a visceral reaction that persists in many circles today. This was the response to Darwinism that created the “blank slate” doctrine, and these ideas are still mainstream among social scientists, even though they are currently under vigorous attack from evolutionary psychologists and from a few behavioral economists.

As it is widely known, Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 to major reaction in several sectors of society, from science to religion. Darwin’s ideas immediately attracted the interest of Karl Marx, who was also trying to bring a revolution to society with his own work. According to Gerald Runkle in his Marxism and Charles Darwin (1961), Marx read the Origin of Species and became enthusiastic supporter of his author. Marx wished to dedicate the first volume of Das Capital to him, but Darwin declined. A particularly important disagreement between Marx and Darwin refers to religion. Marx clearly expressed his position against religion in the schematic but significant assertion that it is 'the opium of the people.' Most Marxists would subsequently support this idea. In turn, Darwin expressed his opinion against attacks on religion in a letter that, for most of the 20th century, was seen as both addressed and not addressed to Marx. Darwin’s letter clearly states that he did not wish to be associated with direct attacks against religion.

Communism has deeper Darwinian roots than many of us realize. In fact, even though Marx had already begun sketching the outlines of his ideas before Darwin published the Origin of Species—the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the Origin in 1859—he is fairly called a Darwinist.

Bertrand Russell was both a liberal and a socialist, he was not an admirer of the communist state. A visit to Rusia in 1920, during which he met Lenin, convinced him that communism would become a form of oppression rather than a liberation.

While the physicists and chemists of Darwin’s time did not notably attack Darwin’s ideas and have not done so since his time, the fact is that many of the well-established scientific ground rules for pursuing knowledge about physical phenomena could not be applied directly and consistently to biological phenomena. To develop his ideas, Darwin was forced to invent his own ground rules and methods, tailored to the emerging study of biological phenomena. This caused problems and confusions concerning appropriate scientific methods, which greatly delayed the acceptance of Darwin’s ideas in some scientific circles.

So, in talking about this Darwin's theory, is it simply I become fascinated with Darwin’s insights? I'm afraid not. And Allah knows best."

It's time to go, the Moon took her leave by singing.

Something changed inside me

broke, wide open

all spilled out

'Til I had no doubt

that something changed *)

Citations & References:
- Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Gillian Beer, 2008, Oxford University Press
- Paul R. Laurence, Driven to Lead: Good, Bad and Misguided Leadership, 2010, Harvard Business School
*) "Something Changed" written by Sarah Groves

Bahasa