Celebrating Darwin's Errors1

I am here today to help celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, the great hero of biology — and of our culture — born the very same day as Abraham Lincoln: February 12, 1809. Here he is as usually envisioned, an icon in his venerable old age, once he had achieved fame. — And here he is at age 31, closer to the time when he made his great discoveries. Does he look like someone who would revolutionize biology? —But he did just that. His understanding of descent with modification by means of natural selection, introduced in 1859 in the Origin of Species, helped unify biology: linking taxonomy and heredity, for example, or biogeography and comparative anatomy, or paleontology and ecology, or human psychology and natural history. Darwin explained organic "design, " and also how structures revealed an unplanned historical process — the whale's blowhole or the feathers and vestigial wings of flightless birds. He also helped situate humans more fully in their natural history, transforming a view of ourselves, our distant cousins, and the origin of our moral sentiments. Yet Darwin's achievements do not end there. Indeed, his contributions are wider and more theoretically unified than usually known (Ghiselin, 1969). For example, h