Dinner with Darwin

To celebrate the 199th birthday of the father of evolution, New Humanist magazine asked a selection of scientific commentators what they’d like to say to Charles Darwin round the supper table.

Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics UCL begins:

What would you tell him? I’d tell him that the thing which defeated him all his life, the mechanism of inheritance, had been solved and it didn’t destroy his theory -- as he had thought it might -- but actually supported it. He was a very rare thing, an honest scientist. Scientists are often extremely unwilling to accept that some of their ideas might be wrong and will go to any lengths to deny that possibility. But when Darwin wrote the Origin of Species he was written to by a Scottish engineer called Fleming Jenkins with what Darwin thought was an absolutely fatal enquiry.

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