The Foundational Irony
The foundational text of this book Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking anthem of evolution, The Origin of Species. The author notes the eye-popping irony of that title:
“The Origin of Species says very little about the origin of species.”
Darwin’s Screw-Up
The entire centerpiece of the story rests upon a historical irony. That centerpiece is the study of the ground finches populating the Galapagos Islands, famous for being where Darwin’s road to evolutionary theory began. The focus of that study is the rate at which natural selection takes place; a rate determined by Darwin to be glacially slow and conventionally accepted for more than a century. Darwin himself had studied the ancestors of these very same finches but the results did not make it into his study of natural selection because he assumed all the birds were representatives the same species.
Cotton Karma
The book even touches upon the political irony. Its section examining the evolutionary changes to moths which are stimulated by their becoming resistant to pesticides focuses on the damage that moths do to cotton crops in the south. That region is known as the Cotton Belt, but also goes by another nickname: the Bible Belt. Or, in other words, the section of the United States which has been and remains most steadfastly resistant to very idea that species even evolve.
“These people are trying to ban the teaching of evolution while their own cotton crops are failing because of evolution. How can you be a Creationist farmer anymore?”
More Creationist Irony
Perhaps the most gallingly ironic assertion made in the book for creationists has nothing to do with actual evolutionary theory. Instead, it is a comparison made between iconic symbolism of two opposing ideologies:
“Darwin’s finches…have become such a universal symbol of Darwin’s process, so that their beaks now represent evolution the way Newton’s apple represents gravity, or the apple of Adam and Eve represents original sin. The standard textbook description of speciation sets the story in the dim past, like a scientific book of Genesis.”
Darwin’s Finches
That phrase “Darwin’s finches” is also steeped in the irony of history. As indicated, the birds have become a leading character in textbooks on evolution where they are routinely referred to “Darwin’s finches.” Even in this book, that phrase records over and over again. The irony is that—because he did mistake them for being a single species—“Darwin’s finches” were considered to be of so little significance that they never even made it into the book that made has made them famous and forever linked to the author who overlooked their significance failed to account for their eventual importance.
