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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-09-23 Daily Xml
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CHARLES DARWIN

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (16:02): What astonishing hypocrisy we have just heard from the Hon. Ms Schaefer. I cannot let this go. She rises to speak about her hopes of it being the last remaining form of discrimination in this state, when on three occasions, in my memory, she has voted in this very chamber to support discrimination—in the last week on IVF and lesbians.

When we were voting to remove discrimination against gays and lesbians in hospitals and nursing homes whom did she vote with? Family First—to extend discrimination once more. What hypocrisy, Mrs Schaefer. I cannot believe you could get up and talk about that. You mentioned women, race, disability and ageing as areas of discrimination. Did you mention homophobia? No, not once. I just cannot believe it.

Onto happier subjects. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the world's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin. This anniversary comes in the same year of the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a text which changed forever the way that biology is understood.

The Victorian era must have been an amazing time to have lived through, for some—the wealthy and educated, and the Hon. Mrs Schaefer, possibly. The developed world was modernising and long-held beliefs were being overturned. Against such a backdrop, it is hardly surprising that Darwin's views created debate and controversy and, indeed, in some parts of the community they still do.

Darwin's dogged following of a single thought through to a logical conclusion precipitated so much of modern scientific understanding, for from his theory of evolution we have our modern-day understanding of biology and genetics. How would we view the human past and how it relates to the wider universe would be almost incomprehensible today without Darwin's legacy. In fact, one could claim that Darwin and his now accepted fact of evolution has not only changed what we think about when contemplating the world and nature but also how we think about the world and nature.

This revolution in thinking is based on a number of fundamental discoveries in diverse fields such as physics, cosmology, chemistry, geology, biology, archaeology, palaeontology, psychology, mathematics, anthropology, history, genetics and linguistics. The revolution is this: these various fields are now coming together to tell one story about the natural world. I am currently reading a book called A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson which, on page 3, states:

This story, this one story, includes the evolution of the universe, of the earth itself, its continents and oceans, the origins of life, the peopling of the globe, and the development of different races, with their differing civilisations. Underlying this story, and giving it a framework, is the process of evolution.

In the words of the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, Charles Darwin's idea about evolution was 'the single best idea anyone has ever had'. He was not the first to talk about evolution but he was the first to contextualise it and provide it with the evidence base that it needed to be taken as a legitimate, plausible scientific paradigm.

One of the truly amazing things about Darwin and his discovery of common descent was that he was not the only person to see the birds, the turtles and the variety of other fauna that led him to these conclusions, but he was the first to see them in terms of the new idea of evolution. That is the beauty of science. It opens our eyes to that which is before us, making us see things anew and afresh, from an entirely different standpoint. Darwin, like the great scientists before and after him, did just that. He connected the human condition to the wider world in a very direct way.

Significantly for his time, Darwin was thinking about all humans. Darwin believed in the common descent of all humans, not just white English-speaking humans. He did not accept his contemporaries' belief that black men and white men were of different species. He looked at the experiences of slavery from his travels and was appalled at how one fellow human being could treat another. These sentiments were radical in their time.

Significantly, Darwin inspired others. His experiences showed others that challenging traditional wisdom could reap enormous reward—if not personal, then for society as a whole. His example has encouraged people to explore, question and strive for further understanding. He did not just challenge those in his intimate circles with his beliefs; he tackled the prejudices of an age. The result of his labours was a theory that went on to be accepted as fact and is a fundamental paradigm of science.

He has informed today's understanding of genetics, which is something he had no comprehension of, and this is a magnificent example of the power of his theory. It predated and gave great power to a new field of science—the discovery of the unit of inheritance, the gene.

Before I conclude, I offer members of the chamber a quote from the great man. It is from the introduction to Darwin's 1871 text The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, which states:

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

It is something the Hon. Ms Schaefer might well do to ruminate upon.

Time expired.

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