C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine:
During the fall semester of 2025, I taught a graduate seminar entitled “Darwinian Thought and Society.” While teaching should always derive from generosity and a desire to share knowledge, my motivations were partly selfish. The course was an opportunity for me to re-engage with Darwin’s foundational ideas in the company of some of the brightest junior scientists that I’ve ever come across.
The conversations around the first book we read, Darwin’s 1859 “On the Origin of Species,” were mostly familiar ones. We often discussed his use of evidence and his voluminous knowledge of natural history. But other features stood out. For example, the manner in which the book delivered its theoretical argument is unlike what scientific opuses do today. The book contains no equations and only a single figure, a diagram often described as the world’s first phylogenetic tree. It contains no detailed experimental design. There are no statistical methods, or power calculations. Yet the ideas in it are among the most radical and dangerous in the Western canon. In 2026, science has been forced into a deep reflection phase with regard to its present and its future. Revisiting Darwin offers useful lessons for the terrain we now occupy.
More here.
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