The northernmost city in Australia is Darwin. Darwin is in the Northern Territory and is the only large city in the world named after one of the cleverest humans who ever lived, Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species and most famous for his brilliant idea on how evolution works.
Darwin’s Theory (as it has been fully developed during the last 150 years) has explained more about life in the universe than any other idea ever produced by any other thinker from St Paul to Steven Hawking.
In my personal opinion, Darwin’s publication of his book The Origin of Species ensures that he is easily the #1 Thinker of the Second Millennium.
NOTE: The word theory has a different meaning in science than it does in everyday use.
So, why may Darwin’s idea be regarded as the most powerful theory in all of science?
In science, the power of a theory is the number of things it explains divided by the number of things it assumes. The more things that can be explained by a theory that assumes as little as possible is what gives the theory its power. So, a theory that explains 10 things but needs to assume 5 things is not as powerful as a theory that explains 8 things but needs to assume only 3 things.
Darwin’s Theory (meaning the elaboration of his theory as it has evolved in science today) explains the existence of a billion well-adapted species by simply assuming genes exist. Why? Because what follows from the existence of high fidelity replicators like genes is the process of mutation, competition, selection and … evolution.
Before Darwin, in the Western culture, the only explanation for the origin of the diverse array of different species on earth was the JCI Monotheistic Theory of GOD.
In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic (JCI) religious theory, each species was seen as a separate direct line of member creatures originating from the first of its kind which was created personally by GOD.
If you see an elephant, it was thought to have descended from a long line of ancestor elephants going all the way back to the first ‘Adam elephant’ which GOD made. The same applied to any dragonfly you could see, or dolphin, or insect, or rattlesnake. Each member of a species was thought to have descended from it’s own Adam prototype which was created by GOD in a momentous and strenuous burst of designer energy.
Darwin provided an alternative explanation for the origin of all species. His theory of evolution was explained by the survival of fitness. His theory showed how over evolutionary time–which is very, very, very, long in the billions of years through millions of generations–random mutations or variations in the copies of each generation allowed for the fittest copy to survive and pass its adaptation on to the next generation.
For an exciting yet easy to understand description of Darwin’s explanation of evolution read The Magic of Reality.
The same idea can explain much of what happens in the marketplace over time. Only those offers that are good enough at getting themselves copied–the fittest–survive.
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