John Maynard Smith

charles darwin stamp india.jpg
Charles Darwin on India postage stamp
Photo by rook76 on Adobe Stock

The Deniable Darwin

Charles Darwin presented On the Origin of Species to a disbelieving world in 1859 — three years after Clerk Maxwell had published "On Faraday's Lines of Force," the first of his papers on the electromagnetic field. Maxwell's theory has by a process of absorption become part of quantum field theory, and so a part of the great canonical structure created by mathematical physics. By contrast, the final triumph of Darwinian theory, although vividly imagined by biologists, remains, along with world peace and Esperanto, on the eschatological horizon of contemporary thought. Read More ›