Preface
Mark Twain once quipped, “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is a classic. I’m pleasantly surprised that it is not as boring and dry as I expected, but quite the contrary. It’s fascinating to observe how Darwin works, how he collects facts from nature and draws inferences, how he judges between diverse theories and chooses the one that gives the best explanation of the facts. In particular, how he decides between the theories of creation and evolution.
As a scientist, Darwin is both meticulous and imaginative, and his magnum opus is as intellectually stimulating today as it was over a century ago. Although some of his conclusions may be erroneous due to incomplete knowledge and/or unwarranted assumptions, the process he goes through to reach his conclusions is commendable, for it guards against biases.
The Necessity of Intercourse: Why We Need Others
Darwin posited that in order for a species to thrive, individuals of one subspecies (or variety) must cross with individuals in a different subspecies, and he observes that nature has made it possible even for hermaphrodites to cross with other hermaphrodites perhaps for that very reason.
I think it is easier now to understand why that is true from a genomic perspective: A species is defined by its genomic sequence, i.e., its DNA. For a species to survive, the genomic sequence must be transmitted from parents to children, from generations to generations. However, due to accidents in the process of duplication, transcription and translation, the genomic sequence might undergo changes over time, some of them are injurious. If one subspecies doesn’t cross with other subspecies, the injurious changes in their genomic sequences would have no chance of being corrected, and damages to the species would accumulate, eventually resulting in extinction.
We may learn a social lesson from nature in this regard, and understand why diversity in our society is important: We are shaped by the beliefs and practices of our ancestors and elders one way or another, whether we realize it or not. It is also likely that we’ve inherited their biases and prejudices, and that there are inveterate defects in our society. One advantage of living in a pluralistic society, or failing that, reading or travelling widely, is that we get to see things from different perspectives, and hopefully identify and overcome our own blindspots and prejudices.
Interestingly, even though individuals of one subspecies have vast opportunities of intercourse with individuals from other subspecies, even from different species, species somehow manage to survive and remain distinct from one another, and are not changed into one homogenous intermediate species. In other words, diversity doesn’t threaten the preservation of species, on the contrary, diversity contributes to the preservation of species.
References:
- Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Project Gutenberg. March 1, 1998. Accessed July 1, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1228