Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [86]
9. Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage, and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003).
10. Adam Smith (R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, gen. eds., W. B. Todd textual ed.), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 14. Originally published in 1776.
11. Ibid., p. 423. Emphasis added.
12. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 84. Emphasis added. The parallels between natural selection and the invisible hand are salient. Although Darwin does not reference Smith directly, when he matriculated at Edinburgh University for medical studies in October of 1825, he read the works of such great Enlightenment thinkers as David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Adam Smith. A decade later, upon his return home from the five-year voyage around the world on the Beagle, Darwin revisited these works, reconsidering their theoretical implications in light of the new data he had collected. Darwin scholars are largely in agreement that he modeled his theory of natural selection after Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, and there is a sizable literature on the connection between them. See, for example, Toni Vogel Carey, “The Invisible Hand of Natural Selection, and Vice Versa,” Biology & Philosophy Vol. 13, No. 3 (July 1998), pp. 427–42; Michael T. Ghiselin, The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin’s Middle Road,” in The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 59–68; Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand,” in Eight Little Piggies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), pp. 138–52; Elias L. Khalil, “Evolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Economics,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics Vol. 8, No. 4 (1997), pp. 221–44; Silvan S. Schweber, “Darwin and the Political Economists: Divergence of Character,” Journal of the History of Biology Vol. 13 (1980), pp. 195–289.
9. The Real Unsolved Problems in Evolution
1. From Charles Darwin’s diary. See R. D. Keynes (ed.), Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 353. I was able to snorkel in the bay and observe from beneath the waves the remarkable ability of the blue-footed boobies to penetrate several meters of water to nab their prey.
2. The conference was the brainchild of Carlos Montufar, the co-founder of the sponsoring institution—the Universidad San Francisco de Quito—and a reader of Skeptic magazine who invited me to speak on the evolution-creation controversy. The five-day conference (June 8–12) was hosted by the Galápagos Academic Institute for the Arts and Sciences (GAIAS), a high-tech facility flanked by low-tech homes and businesses. GAIAS is operated by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, which obtained additional support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (which paid the way for graduate students in evolutionary biology to attend), Microsoft (which provided computers and Internet technology for GAIAS), UNESCO, and OCP Ecuador S.A., an oil conglomerate that provided additional funding.
3. Donald Rumsfeld quoted in Hart Seely, “The Poetry of D. H. Rumsfeld,” Slate.com, April 2, 2003. Available online at http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042. See also the New Yorker article elaborating on Rumsfeld’s souce for the quote: “Rumsfeld’s work on the ballistic-missile commission convinced him that intelligence analysts were not asking themselves the full range of questions on any given subject—including what they didn’t know. Rumsfeld gave me a copy of some aphorisms he had collected during the process of assessing the ballistic-missile threat. ‘Some of these are humorous,’ he said, not quite accurately. One was ‘There are knowns, known unknowns, and unknown