ave problems with Darwinian evolution. I think he would be surprised and disappointed that society, frankly, has not made more progress in absorbing the power and, in many ways, the beauty of his theory."
But Darwin would be very pleased to find that there is no controversy in science today about whether evolution occurred, despite continual attempts by creationists to manufacture one, said science historian Richard Milner.
"He would have been delighted, I believe, that the debates within evolutionary biology are now about the why and how of evolution — a continuation of some of the disputes he had with his friend Thomas Huxley about the limits and efficacy of natural selection," Milner said.
Milner continued: "Also, I think he would have been astounded at the some of the twists and turns of modern theory: endosymbiosis (cells made up of combinations of critters), lateral gene transfer (a challenge to the vertical tree of life), self-organization (the mystery of how cells combine into larger entities).
"Also, the science of genetics, which originated after his death, would have opened a whole new window for him: how genes work, either as 'blueprints' or 'switches,' the 'junk DNA' that turns out not to be junk at all, and the question of whether organic forms are shaped as embryos by some kind of organic origami."
What would Darwin do?
Novacek and Beard offered the following visions for how Darwin might spend his time as a scientist if he were alive today.
Beard: "If I were to speculate, I would think that Darwin would be a modern field biologist, which is what he was in his own time. He devoted a huge amount of his youth to the Beagle voyage and he clearly loved going out in to the field and collecting living animals and plants and collecting fossils, and he enjoyed observing living animals and plants and figuring out how they adapted their anatomy to the environment ...
"By the same token, it is possible that he could be fascinated by scientific and technological advances, and morph into somebody who wears a white lab coat all day long and mixes chemicals in test tubes and tries to figure out the genetic sequences of some strange organism. But that is too much too imagine. I think he'd be a field biologist, collecting information on living plants and animals and collecting fossils too."
Novacek: "He might go crazy ... the embarrassment of riches in biology would probably overwhelm him. He loved beetles. Maybe he would just continue to describe beetles. He got very interested in human evolution as his work went along. He might be interested in studies of paleoanthropology and human evolution.
"One area of biology that might intrigue him is the emergence of evolution in development and the way that development plays a role in more ways than we appreciated before.
"Finally, there is the tree of life. He drew the first tree of life in his notebook. The fact is that today that is one of the most important biological missions, to map tree precisely from genes to structures, all the information we have on this vast diversity of life.
"Clearly, this would have excited him, because the tree we have now is a little bit more refined than that sketch he drew, but nonetheless it is basically the fleshed out version of that sketch. The spirit of it was there in Darwin's work."
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