Newton, Darwin, Einstein ... were all wrong

And, add to the list of scientific greats people such as Michael Faraday, James C. Maxwell, Neils Bohr, Ludwig Boltzmann ... the list is virtually the Who’s Who  list of physicists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. These giants of physics were all wrong.

Once I was in a reasonably large enough meeting of great minds (I did not belong in that group but somehow I came to be in it - a source of great consternation to me even today).

One of the great minds, without relevance to what was being discussed, just blurted out that Darwin got it all wrong. There was not even a murmur of protest; this was most surprising as the group comprised many of great accomplishments from life sciences.

I duly noticed the irony of the claim from a professor of mathematics, far removed from life sciences. I could have intervened as I knew where that Darwin-bashing was coming from, but I desisted. You see, I am supposedly from the physical sciences, and not too accomplished at that. I must be merely thankful for having been invited to this gathering, not roil its proceedings.

The source of the claim that Darwin was wrong is a straight lift from a cover title in the British magazine New Scientist, in 2009. Its title was incendiary: Darwin was wrong. A much worse thing was said in the strap line: Cutting Down the Tree of life, and to add insult to injury, super imposed on the Tree.

Now, some digression. Get to sometime in the 1980s.  Stephen Hawking was told by his editor that each equation in his book Brief History of Time, which became a best seller, would reduce sales by half. Yet, the author went ahead and put in the equation E=mc² that would come to define Einstein in the minds of even the layest of layman, and I do not believe the sales of the book suffered.

It might not have been even the closest of situations when Darwin wrote his seminal book Origin of Species. But, drawing a parallel with the advice Hawking got, Darwin may have been tempted to include only one figure in his book and it came to be called the Tree of Life. It is this iconic diagram that the editor of New Scientist was taking aim at.

The title of the article Axing Darwin’s Tree is sensationalism nonpareil.

What had happened was the tree metaphor did not catch the intricacies of what were found much later, indeed nearly a century later. Evolution was not in any sense linear, that a branch remains branched off whence it sprung. There were genes jumping between branches – horizontal gene transfer. In popular lingo – Jumping genes.

The article thus found fault in Darwin’s Tree. Fair enough.

Let us take a parallel track and see who else among the great scientists took a beating subsequently. I will start with Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton swore by alchemy. Fie!

But, more significantly he imagined a cosmic dance on a fixed stage – the movement of planets and stars against a never changing background. This was wrong, and terribly so.

Einstein took a leap of faith that space and time were interwoven (he was helped by mathematicians of a much higher order) and he landed safely on the other side – Theory of General Relativity. So, Newton was wrong – QED.

Take Neils Bohr. He imagined that electrons revolved around the much more massive nucleus just as planets revolved around the star, our Sun. He was proved wrong. His was a deterministic proposition and it turned out one can only predict a region in which an electron could be found with certain amount of probability (uncertainty) – Schrodinger’s equations put paid to notions of planetary motion of electrons around the heavy nucleus. So, Bohr was wrong.

Einstein’s EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox has been resolved to the extent that the Hidden Variables promoted by him cannot be realized, at least to the extent it has to be to negate, or even cast doubts on quantum theory. So, Einstein was wrong.

More significantly his supposedly and admittedly greatest blunder - the cosmological constant that he reluctantly introduced in his equation - is no blunder at all. That is, Einstein did not know that he was right! This downright classifies him among the non-geniuses, if not the greatest of them all!

What the above proves is that science progresses when scientists, particularly of the genius category, make mistakes.  

Now, come to Darwin. He was wrong but without his theory subsequent researchers would not have found out his mistakes! Blue Ribbon irony.

When Darwin propounded his theory at the time when genetics as a field did not exist – Gregor Mendel’s experiments were recognized as genetics much later, in the beginning of the 20^th century. Then came cellular biology, molecular biology, the double helix of the DNA and then in the 1970s, the fourth Kingdom of life – archaea.

The man behind this fourth Kingdom of life started with questioning Darwinian mechanism of heritability. And he and subsequent researchers (one of whom was a woman) found that the Tree is lot more complicated than what Darwin showed.

Darwin was not wrong, only a little too simplistic. He had to be, as his method of doing science was observational. But, the late comers had tools to work with hands and they did, much to their credit. But the credit going to them does not reflect as discredit to Darwin. No zero-sum game here.

The whole century – from 1860s to 1970s – was a Darwinian century just as 250 years plus from mid-seventeenth century till Einstein came was Newtonian era. Later success does not dilute Newton’s work, Einstein being proved wrong dos not dilute his genius.

So, the provocative cover page title does no harm to Darwin, but a lot to the magazine’s credibility.

Now, coming back to the grand meeting of the sages of the times, not one scientist stood up to the nonsensical claim that Darwin was wrong. That is scientific integrity flowing down the intellectual sewer. And, these scientists are grooming scientists of the next generation!

Where are we heading?

Raghuram Ekambaram