Free The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 by Ashley Hay Page A

relationship between science and religion. The beak of a finch thus seemed connected to the salvation of a human. In popular discourse, Darwin’s idea became condensed into a contest between apes and angels.
    Charles Darwin delayed publication of his insight into the transformation of species because he feared its effect on the religious beliefs of his society, and those of his devout wife, Emma. We have a compelling picture of Darwin as a tortured soul,bunkered down with his barnacles in Kent, and meticulously gathering a fortress of detail with which to defend his idea when the time came to reveal his secret. It was, he wrote, ‘like confessing a murder’. He applied scientific scepticism to his theory with the double force of his critical faculties and his emotional fears. In his wife’s religious faith he had the loving embodiment of all that he wished not to upset. If you visit the museum that was once Darwin’s home, you can open a hall cupboard and see a replica of the securely wrapped parcel labelled by Darwin: ‘Only to be opened in the event of my death’. It was the first account of his great idea, a 200-page manuscript completed in 1844, a ticking time-bomb at the centre of the elegant Georgian home.
    The publication of On the Origin of Species 15 years later did indeed unleash a storm – but it was ultimately not quite as bad as Darwin had feared. By the time Darwin died, 23 years after the publication of Origin , he was celebrated enough to be buried in Westminster Abbey and he was hailed as a hero and icon. As Iain McCalman’s compelling collective biography, Darwin’s Armada , reminds us, the key battles within Victorian Britain for acceptance of Darwin’s theory and its associated scientific culture ‘were over in a surprisingly short time’. By 1868, Joseph Hooker could address the British Association, as president, and conclude that few scientists now openly rejected the theory.
    Of course, the idea of natural selection continued to be refined by scientists and, in the 20th century, was challenged and ultimately strengthened by the discovery of the gene. And religious resistance to evolutionary theory continued; indeed, at times it has even grown. In the United States today, polls keep telling us that up to 40 per cent of Americans reject the theory of evolution and believe that the Earth was created less than 10 000 years ago. Since the 1960s, ‘creation science’ has become active and politically powerful, challenging not only Darwin but alsothe scientific method, and seeking ‘equal time’ in the US school curriculum.
    During a Q&A discussion on ABC TV in 2011, an audience member disparaged climate change science as ‘just a theory – like gravity’. Inadvertently, he was making a good parallel. Our understanding of anthropogenic climate change is indeed a theory – like gravity, electricity, germs, the heliocentric solar system, evolution, relativity and plate tectonics. But in science, ‘theory’ is a very strong word. It does not mean an untested hypothesis; it does not mean a vague, esoteric concept. Rather, it describes a consistent form of scientific knowledge not yet disproved by experiment. Resilient scientific theories describe complex phenomena extremely well, continue to be refined and improved by experimentation and observation, and have impressive explanatory and predictive power.
    Good scientists subject their own work, and that of others, to rigorous scepticism: it is the scientific method. Darwin’s methodical analysis of the possible weaknesses of his theory gave him the structure of his book. ‘I have felt these difficulties far too heavily during many years to doubt their weight,’ he wrote near the end of Origin . And at the beginning of the book he explained: ‘No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if