Listen to Your Mother

In later life the eminent physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington recalled that, as a young man in 1873, as he was departing his home for a summer holiday, his mother persuaded him to take along a copy of the Origin of Species, saying “It sets the door of the universe ajar!” (quoted in Young 1992, p. 138). Sherrington's mother was right. No other scientific theory has had such a tremendous impact on our understanding of the world and of ourselves as has the theory Charles Darwin presented in that book.

This claim will undoubtedly sound absurd to some familiar with the history of science. Surely the achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Bohr, and other scientists who developed revolutionary views of the world are of at least equal, if not greater, significance. Aren't they? Not really. Although it is true that such scientific luminaries made fundamentally important contributions to our understanding of the physical structure of the world, in the final analysis their theories are about that world, whether or not it includes life, sentience, and consciousness.