Darwins Awesome Idea

It's Charles Darwin's birthday today  – the great man is 204 years young – and I thought we ought to mark it in some way, because, I think, he has a very good shout for being history's most important thinker, or at least for having had history's single greatest idea.

You may disagree: you may think, for instance, that Newton or Copernicus or Galileo should have that accolade, for their wonderful insights into the movements of the heavens and Earth's place in the cosmos. Or Einstein, for relativity, which was really the first time that a scientific theory showed that the universe and our perception of the universe are two extremely different things. Kant and Bentham might be worthy recipients. The Reverend Thomas Bayes or Father Georges Lemaitre would deserve honourable mentions.
But I want to say it should be Darwin. I don't think any of the other great ideas, however much they might change scientists' understanding of the universe or philosophers' conceptions of morality or anything else, had the same impact. You might not realise it, but if you want to understand anything about human life, you must first understand at least the basics of the theory of evolution.

It's true. Everything: why we listen to music and laugh at jokes and yawn when we're tired; why we gossip, and why that's vital to the survival of society; why we can live in large groups; why we are fooled by illusions, why we are biased towards optimism, why we like people like us and fear people who aren't. It's not just the facts of human life: all other ideas need to be seen in the light of evolution. What morality is; why we see the universe in Newtonian rather than relativistic or quantum-mechanistic terms; why we can't intuitively grasp probabilities; what "beauty" is; how words have meaning; why religions exist. We may not have the definitive answer to all these questions, but any answer that doesn't start with the premise "because we evolved from apes" will be inadequate. Darwin changed philosophy more than any philosopher, changed anthropology more than any anthropologist, changed linguistics more than any linguist. There is no human idea that isn't changed by Darwin's great realisation, because Darwin's great realisation explained why human ideas exist at all, and why they are how they are. Daniel Dennett called it a "universal acid", burning into every other field of thought and leaving each one unrecognisable.

That's why it's the best idea ever had by a human being.