Unfinished business

Unfinished business
Feb 5th 2009 From The Economist print edition
Charles Darwin’s ideas have spread widely, but his revolution is not yet complete
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Correction to this article
THE miracles of nature are everywhere: on landing, a beetle folds its wings like an origami master; a lotus leaf sheds muddy water as if it were quicksilver(mercúrio); a spider spins a web to entrap her prey, but somehow evades entrapment herself. Since the beginning of time, people who have thought about such things have seen these marvels as examples of the wisdom of God; even as evidence for his existence. But 200 years ago, on February 12th 1809, a man was born who would challenge all that. The book that issued the challenge, published half a century later, in 1859, offered a radical new view of the living world and, most radical of all, of humanity’s origins. The man was Charles Robert Darwin. The book was “On the Origin of Species”. And the challenge was the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Since Darwin’s birth, the natural world has changed beyond recognition. Then, the modern theory of atoms was scarcely six years old and the Earth was thought to be 6,000. There was no inkling(idéia) of the size of the universe beyond the Milky Way, and radioactivity, relativity and quantum theory were unimaginable. Yet of all the discoveries of 19th- and early 20th-century science—invisible atoms, infinite space, the inconstancy of time and the mutability of matter—only evolution has failed to find general acceptance outside the scientific world. Few laymen(leigos, lay=não professional)) would claim they did not believe Einstein. Yet many seem proud not to believe Darwin. Even for those who do accept his line of thought his ideas often seem as difficult today as they were 150 years ago.

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