A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Apparently Never-Ending Evolution Debate: Reconsidering the Question

Abstract

Somewhere the eminent twentieth-century historian of philosophy Étienne Gilson contends that most philosophical mistakes arise from badly-framed questions. This article takes Gilson’s contention as a proximate first principle, a starting point. Its major thesis is that Charles Darwin’s failure to understand the complicated nature of the question he was considering in his two famous works (i.e., The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Existence and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex) could likely be responsible for the apparently endless debates that have ensued since his time in Western culture about the question of the origin of species. Many people today claim that these two works are studies in modern “physical science,” “biology,” that prove the evolution of the