Quote of the Week - John Henry Newman

Newman                              Darwin

In 1868 John Henry Newman wrote to a fellow priest regarding evolution. Newman was open to Darwin’s theories, and was not intimidated by modern science. This is what he said:

“As to the Divine Design, is it not an instance of incomprehensibly and infinitely marvelous Wisdom and Design to have given certain laws to matter millions of ages ago, which have surely and precisely worked out, in the long course of those ages, those effects which He from the first proposed. Mr. Darwin's theory need not then be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill. Perhaps your friend has got a surer clue to guide him than I have, who have never studied the question, and I do not [see] that 'the accidental evolution of organic beings' is inconsistent with divine design – It is accidental to us, not to God.”


(John Henry Newman, Letter to J. Walker of Scarborough, May 22, 1868, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)

H/T to Bishop David Chislett

Human Evolution and Media Attention

Darren Curnoe


It’s probably a truism to suggest that the study of human evolution gets more that its fair share of media attention and hype.

Brace yourself!

There’s more on the way this week, with a set of seven papers out in the journal Science providing new details about the anatomy and evolution of almost 2.0 million-year-old Australopithecus sediba specimens from South Africa.

The find raises many questions about the scientific and public prominence of human evolution research and about the remarkable and unprecedented space provided to sediba in one of the scientific establishment’s top journals.


Unprecedented exposure

Many of my palaeontology and evolutionary biology colleagues wonder why it is that fossils belonging to the human evolutionary bush (“hominins”) get so much space in prestigious scientific journals like Nature and Science when sometimes scientifically more significant discoveries struggle to get a look in at these high profile outlets.

Read it all here.

Related reading:  Saga of ‘the Hobbit’ highlights a science in crisis; Thomas Nagel: Neo-Darwinian conception is false

Savulescu and Harris on Enhancing Morality

Julian Savulescu (Oxford) and John Harris (Manchester University) debate whether technology should be used to enhance morality at the UK Institute of Art and Ideas. They assume that humans have the psychology of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and this makes us unfit for modern life.

Besides having bought into the whole Non-Essentialist evolutionary argument, they appear to be ignorant of how sophisticated our ancestors were.


Related reading: Theories of Change and Constancy; Dawkins: Humans Have Outgrown Natural Selection; The Science Guy Reveals His Ignorance; The Evolution of Darwinian Evolution; Biblical Anthropologists Discuss Darwin