Despite the overwhelming evidence for it, evolution generates more controversy today than it did in 1859, when Charles Darwin first dropped the bomb called The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The descendants of groups who objected then are still raging now, and on the same grounds: Evolution denies the existence of God, nullifies the Bible and handicaps man's potential. After all, how moral can we be if we're descended from monkeys? Meanwhile, scientists add their own shrapnel, from their wars over evolutionary mechanisms and pace.
The average layperson could easily dismiss the guild debates as angels-on-a-pin esoterica. So when the hoopla went public in recent years, many assumed that evolution itself was at stake. It wasn't. In his bird's-eye view of the front -- The Evolutionists: The Struggle for Darwin's Soul (W.H. Freeman, 262 pages, $22.95) -- physicist Richard Morris shows that it's not about whether evolution happened, but how.
For instance, since Darwin's steady, self-propelling process fails to accommodate catastrophes, like the meteor strikes that doomed the dinosaurs, scientists are trying to stretch his original concept to fit ecological disasters -- including the influence of humans.
We not only escalate extinction by destroying habitats, we also create new species.
As biologist Stephen Palumbi explains in The Evolution Explosion: How Humans Cause Rapid Evolutionary Change (W.W. Norton, 288 pages, $24.95), our reliance on pesticides and antibiotics mutated new pests that are immune to them.
"Darwin made a serious error about the speed with which evolution can happen," he says.
Pace was also the focus of Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant paleontologist / gadfly who (with Niles Eldredge) developed the radical concept of "punctuated equilibrium" -- evolution that occurs in fits and starts, alternating between quiet and active phases. Gould, who died last year, questioned whether natural selection, Darwin's centerpiece, is universal or even (gasp) necessary, claiming that change can occur accidentally, with no adaptive purpose. As Morris writes, the resulting scientific uproar "appealed to all the people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism."
