In an excellent essay in NATURE, Kevin Padian gives his views and concludes (some editing) …
“Has any single individual made so many lasting contributions to a broad area of science as Darwin did to biology? Darwin moved intellectual thought from a paradigm of untestable wonder at special creation to an ability to examine the workings of that natural world, however ultimately formed, in terms of natural mechanisms and historical patterns. He rooted the classification of species within a single branching tree, and so gave systematics a biological, rather than purely philosophical, rationale. He framed most of the important questions that still define our understanding of evolution, from natural selection to sexual selection, and founded the main principles of the sciences of biogeography and ecology.
It is dismaying, then, to note the rise of anti-evolutionism in recent decades. This is a direct result of the rise of religious fundamentalism, whose proponents feel it necessary to reject modern science on the basis of highly questionable (from mainstream historical and theological viewpoints) readings of sacred texts.
One might well ask how such people can accept the benefits of medical research, inoculations, pharmacology, crop improvement and so much more that depends on an understanding of evolution. Most of them reject the evolutionary basis of these advances, regarding it simply as ‘variation’ that can be selected like features of dog breeds. This is why ‘microevolution’ in populations poses little threat to fundamentalists, and perhaps why even most evolutionary scientists (dominated by population biologists) have not been intensely engaged in the defence of evolution against its detractors.
Darwin felt that the changes in species wrought by natural selection and other processes would eventually lead to new kinds of organisms with new adaptations — a premise violently rejected by fundamentalists and other anti-evolutionists.
Happily, in one non-scientific arena at least, an honest, almost organic understanding and appreciation of Darwin has flourished. Thomas Hardy, a child of the Enlightenment was well aware of more ancient world views, and was humbled by what the new investigations of the cosmos revealed. Humans are animals, one species of many on the planet, bound by common ancestry to all other species, part of an ages-old dance of reproduction, accommodation, survival and alteration.
This vision liberates humans from the conceit of special creation.”