Born 200 years ago, Darwin has been among both the most celebrated, and the most roundly denounced people ever to have lived. 

Others before him had found evidence that the forms of life on earth had changed over time; so evolution in that sense wasn’t new with Darwin.  It was his account of how the changes take place that was revolutionary.  Darwin’s term for the mechanism was “natural selection.” 

In its essentials, natural selection is

actually quite a simple theory.  It says that animals, plants, and bacteria (life forms of all sorts) tend to produce more offspring than could possibly survive long enough to have offspring themselves.  There’s never enough food for all the offspring to feed on or shelter enough for all to evade predators or some other negative factor in the immediate environment.  This means not all the seeds of the maple trees produce more maple trees and not all the young in the litter successfully mate, etc.  

Since “siblings” are very similar to each other but not identical, the siblings that survive and have offspring themselves are the ones to pass along the characteristics which define that family.  After several generations of this sifting and “natural selection,” the descendents of those similar siblings have now become very different from each other.  Eventually they are different enough to count as different species.

I’m not going to discuss whether Darwin’s account is consistent with Genesis or whether it’s incompatible with Christian theism.  I’ll leave that to others with better credentials.  I will, however, defend him against a line of people who trace their ethics to his theory.  Herbert Spencer was the first of the “social Darwinists.”  Spencer’s view was that natural selection meant “survival of the fittest”—and Spencer was sure we could tell which the fittest were.  Amongst humans surely they were the strongest, brainiest, toughest, and handsomest.  Next step...  If we know where the evolutionary process is going, why wait?  Why not take selection into our own hands and speed up the process of getting rid of the “unfit” members of the species on nature’s behalf?  We know where that thinking led in the early twentieth century; and not all of the “weeding” was done in Nazi Germany.  It is possible that same type of thinking may be resurfacing now in the current enthusiasm for genetic “diagnosis.”

Whether there are any ethical inferences to be drawn from his theory (an unsettled issue, in my estimation), this is emphatically not what Charles Darwin meant by survival of the fittest.  In Darwin’s terms, “fittedness” is entirely relative to an ecosystem.  Flightless cormorants can be just as “fit” in their environment, in which they don’t have to flee predators and fly to find food, as flying cormorants are in theirs. “Fit” is descriptive; it is not a value term.

So, in fairness to a man with whom we might disagree on other matters, on his 200th birthday I say:  don’t discredit him with an ethics that his theory does not imply.