A question for biologists

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Phil Skell, a retired biologist, says he has asked many biologists the following question:

Would you have done the work any differently if you believed Darwin's theory was wrong?

and the response was unanimously "In my work it would have made no difference, but I am certain it would for others."

Any comments?

~~ Paul

 

[The Don]

Depends on what you mean by "Darwin's theory wrong". If the question is whether creationism or ID would make any difference he clearly didn't ask any evolutionary biologists.

If they took it as "if there is a better version of evolution" then I can see that there may not be a great deal of difference.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Good points, Don. I asked him whether he had queried any evolution researchers.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I just determined that Skell is a retired chemist, not biologist, at Penn State University.

~~ Paul

 

[Soapy Sam]

Paul- by "their work" do we mean field research? It seems to me that studying what (say) a bird does in life, or dissecting a frog, is not affected by the underpinning theory.
What is affected is the context in which the data from that study are interpreted.

But it's the concept of evolution that is critical, not evolution by natural selection.

I suspect though, that any living biologist takes natural selection so totally as a given that unless also a historian of science, he may not realise how totally he is dependant for his world view on Darwin, Jameson, Fisher et al.