But Darwin argued in order to have a deep evolutionary by large and
deep evolutionary genealogy, that is classifying organism naturally in
terms of the way in which they evolved and the course of evolutionary history.
One had to distinguish between trivial characteristics and
the essential characteristics of an organism.
Again, Darwin's world was a world of plants and animals and
how you did this with animals was easy.
Well, it was not easy, but it was easy in the sense that there were morphological
traits that were deep in the organism.
So Darwin argued the best way to do it was to look at embryonic characters,
because those characters would evolve very, very gradually.
And they may, in fact, be stable, highly conserved in evolutionary time.
Whereas adaptations would be piled on top of these deep,
highly conservative developmental characteristics.
Well, none of that was available from microbes.
Microbes didn't have NPO's.
They didn't have great morphologies and the way in which one classified,
ever since Darwin was a comparative morphology.
So now we're caught in another false dichotom, just like the plant animal one
that we tried to group all of life into or one between the prokaryote and
the eukaryotes that we tried to group all life into,
even in our evolutionary concepts or conceptions of life on Earth generally.
We have this other dichotomy and that dichotomy is are you a Darwinist?
Or are you a creationist?
Creationist meaning that you invoke supernatural phenomena on Earth to account
for the course of evolutionary time that you don't believe we are of this Earth.
We're created in some other fashion, but not by natural processes on this Earth.
So, the problem with that dichotomy is that evolution and
Darwinism are conflated.
They're seen as one thing.
To pose the question, are you a Darwinist is to say, you are an evolutionist.
If I say, are you an evolutionist, the automatic response is you're a Darwinist.
And so what I'm saying is that we have to break away from that dichotomy,
because it's a false one and that we can be evolutionists without being Darwinist.
And we have to understand that our principles of evolution have to evolve and
they evolve with the data, and we've only got begun to have access, and
we're just scratching the surface of the great diversity in the microbial world,
and there may be other things afoot.
Like Carl Rose likes to talk about a cosmic evolution.
I mean, I've always believed that evolution is bigger than life,
way bigger than life.
You have evolution first and then you think about life.
And if that's true,
then we have to think of cosmic principles through which life is formed.
Life is not an accident.
>> So, I think a hundred years down the line,
people will know Woes' name,
just like we know Darwin's name a hundred years down the line.
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