February 12,
2019, Max Planck
Society
Celebrations
are held on the 12th of February each year to commemorate the birthday of
Charles Darwin, the 19th-century British naturalist, who achieved major
insights into the process of evolution thereby completely revolutionising
traditional concepts of life on earth and human's position in it. For Diethard
Tautz and Paul Rainey of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in
Plön and Ralf Sommer of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in
Tübingen, Darwin laid the foundations for evolutionary science, a field of
research, which no longer solely considers the past but, instead, increasingly
looks to the future.
Diethard
Tautz:"Darwin was a revolutionary!"
What, in
your opinion, was Darwin's central insight?
Darwin's
greatest achievement was recognising the fact that natural selection is the
driving force behind evolution. His explanation for the incredible diversity of
life on earth was that those individuals that manage to reproduce and pass on
their genes to future generations are locked in a struggle for scarce
resources. As a result, these individuals are continuously adapting to new
environmental conditions thereby spawning a wide range of different phenotypes
and survival strategies. An astonishingly simple principle for such an
incredibly diverse phenomenon as life!
Was he a
revolutionary?
In a way he
was: after all, his realisation of the fact that life does not require a
supernatural creator came at a time when religion still played a central role
in the lives of many people. So, the fact that he freed his mind of religious
concepts of the genesis of life could certainly be thought of as revolutionary.
The level of blasphemy that this represented is still evident in the degree to
which he continues to be castigated by believers in the Biblical genesis myth
to this day.
What can
Charles Darwin still teach us today?
He was an
incredibly close observer, who analysed the insights he had gained on his trips
around the world with extreme care and verified them experimentally before
going on to draw a wide range of conclusions. His books are virtually bursting
with ideas. Whilst that does make for difficult reading in some passages, they
continue to provide a rich source of ideas.
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