Darwin Day At Last!
by Pappy February 12th, 2009 , Posted in: science
Happy Darwin Day!
What is Darwin Day? Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around February 12th each year. Named after evolutionary biologist, Charles Darwin, this year is an especially bright Darwin Day, as it’s the 200th anniversary of Mr. Darwin’s birth.
Personally, I owe a great deal to Charles Darwin. I was raised first in a conservative Church of Christ environment, and then later we transitioned into non-denominational “fundamentalist” christianity; that is to say the form of belief that defines you as a person, and tears you down if you are found lacking when comparing your own life to the dogmas of “Truth without Proof”.
By the time I was 26 I’d found the church just didn’t fit into my experiences in the real world any longer: I was caught in an un-winnable war between immovable faith and the realities of daily life. When a person raised in the faith reaches this kind of impasse, at the very core you will almost always find the subject of Creation. If God created the Earth, then surely he is the center of your own being and reason for existing. Questioning one always leads you to question the other.
At the point I finally confirmed to myself I no longer believed in God or any of the tenets of christianity it had been such a part of my life that I felt empty and angry. Life with God had become hypocrisy, but life without him was incomplete. My wonderful wife finally kicked me in the ass and said “You know what you don’t believe anymore, so go out and find what you DO believe.”
Darwin’s incredible descriptions of his uncovery of evolution were the starting point that eventually led me to my own “Truths”. Here were words I could not only read and understand, but that were observable in the real world as well. Each new scientific discovery since then seems to only further confirm the relevance and accuracy of Darwin’s evolution, in turn confirming my own place in life. Darwin found the Mechanism of life, freeing me from a need for a Source.
Another evolutionary scientist that shaped the next stage of self discovery for me was the controversial figure John Stewart, of the Free University of Brussells. In his seminal work, Evolution’s Arrow, he postulated that evolution was not just the result of random changes that succeeded, but rather it followed a course. Not a course layed down by deities or beings from space, but a course whereby cooperative changes would always be more successful than uncooperative.
Stewart suffered significant ridicule from the “in crowd” of evolutionists like the late Stephen Gould who insist that the Mechanism of evolution is made up of pure chaos and does not favor any one change over another. In many ways, these believers represent the mentality of only having a single way to interpret science more typical of religious scholars. For me at least, however, Stewart’s interpretation of evolution as being cooperative in nature speaks true on every level, be it biological or social.
The Mechanism of evolution is the “staged development of progressive changes leading to new forms of organization”.
The Energy that powers the Mechanism is “cooperation at greater and greater scale”.
The final mental leap that has brought me to where I am today came as I finally reached the point where my new found beliefs became as ingrained and natural to me as my christian brainwashing had been. Believe it or not this became manifest mostly due to the requirements of my job as a software systems architect.
I’m often called upon to analyze and then find solutions for business problems. The first step is of course to see how things are currently done and define which processes work and which ones don’t. Once this is done, it’s normally quite easy to see where current processes need to “evolve” to better meet the business need. Defining how to structure and implement that evolution is where the “ah hah” realization comes in.
If you use cooperative evolution as a basis, then defining how to build the better fruit fly, mouse-trap, or software system is universal:
- Identify the parts
- Organize them based on their roles within the whole
- Identify interaction between the roles
- Segregate interactions that require cooperation between the parts
- Define the responsible part for coordinating the cooperation
- Rinse and repeat steps 1-5 until all interactions between all roles have been completely mapped out
- Consider how this system integrates with other systems
- Integrations are only larger parts of a larger whole system, so repeat all previous steps at the next greater scale
Viola! When finished, you have achieved the “staged development of progressive changes, forming a new level of organization based around controlled cooperation at increasing scales of complexity.” I call this process Systemic Thought, but when you look at it closely it is just cooperative evolution by design.
I’ve used this Systemic Thought process to solve communication problems between myself and my daughter’s elementary school teachers, and to find and fix fraudulent marketing promotions costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. It has now become such a universal way of thinking for me that I couldn’t “unplug” from it if I wanted to.
All my gratitude to you, Mr. Charles Darwin, not for teaching us the mechanics of evolution, but for teaching us that we can evolve the way we think, and thereby evolve ourselves. Happy Birthday.
- Tags: Darwin, evolution, systems, thought
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Today’s rant: Wife Beating
And so were born the Sons of Liberty.


