día de manías: the evolution of evolution

All too human

Mientras me entero de que nos pasamos cuatro millones de años curtiendo con los chimpancés, sigo mi instrucción darwinista. Ahora con un artículo de hace algunos meses del NY Review of Books sobre la evolución de la evolución. ¿Sabías que Mengel era un "Czech Monk" cuyo trabajo "first published in 1865, had gone unnoticed in Darwin's day and was only rediscovered around 1900"?

Además: Darwin tenía la misma reacción intuitiva que uno ante la idea en principio delirante de que una acumulación de modificaciones azarosas puede dar lugar a organismos tan complejos:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree...,

pero ahí está la magia de la razón, cuando le gana a la intuición:

Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.