By Dr. Robert Thorson

‘Let it be, let it be.

There will be an answer, let it be.”

That is from the chorus of the title track for “Let it Be,” the last original album produced by the Beatles before their breakup.

Though I’ve been singing that song in the shower for years, it was only while writing this week’s column that I figured out why. That lyric contains the central message of Darwin’s greatest work: “The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection.”

Today the entire world is celebrating the bicentennial birthday of Charles Robert Darwin and the 150th year of the “Origin of Species.” In the United States, we are also celebrating the bicentennial birthday of Abraham Lincoln, who was born the same day. Lincoln emancipated the slaves. Darwin emancipated our minds from the fallacy of a world created from the top down in all its details by some benevolent deity. In place of this fallacy, Darwin showed us that Earth’s beauty arose from the bottom up through natural selection.

Darwin did not rule out a divine creation for life itself. What he did was explain how a single mysterious act of creation could account for the diversity of life more parsimoniously than multiple acts of creation, one for each species. The condemnations of Darwin’s theory came mostly from those with a vested interest in top-down control via spiritual authority; in his case, the Anglican high church.

Anticipating criticism, Darwin wrote in the conclusion to the “Origin”: “I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.” Indeed, there is no reason to be shocked, unless one assumes that the Biblical mythology of the late Bronze Age Hebrews explains the facts of life better than natural selection.

In the next sentence, he cautioned his potential critics that “the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked . . . ‘as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.’ ”

Should physics throw out its immutable law of gravity because it diminishes the control of a creator? Should biology throw out the immutable law of natural selection because it does the same with living creatures? No, no and a thousand times no! Science in general, and physics and biology in particular, is consistent with and independent of religious spirituality.

Darwin was saddened by criticism from those who felt threatened by his purely scientific treatise. I am saddened that Darwin’s main message is still misunderstood after 150 years of repeated verification by anatomy, taxonomy, paleontology, ecology and genetics.

Beyond the excoriation of Darwinism for political reasons, I believe the root cause of public misunderstanding of natural selection results from translating Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest” as a struggle between ego-driven individuals. This is a mistake. The main unit of selection is not the individual but the breeding population, which changes through culling of individuals.

In other words, natural selection is less a creator than an editor whose job it is to read whatever diversity shows up on the desk of life, rejecting most of it, and accepting that which fits the mood of the readership at that moment.

Following this analogy a step further links Darwin’s natural selection to the song “Let It Be.” The answer to the phrase “There will be an answer” is the moving target called biodiversity, which in the last tenth of 1 percent of Earth history added Homo sapiens to its grand list. The beautiful complexity of life and the origin of our species emerged spontaneously from individuals breeding and being prevented from breeding, typically because of early death – individuals who were simply being their natural selves.

This logic extends to modern human beings as well. To follow your heart is to be your natural self – to “let it be.” “The answer” that will be is the moving target of societal change. By being yourself, you allow the natural selection of culture to take place. And it is not you who will evolve, but the greater whole.

In Darwin’s honor, please sing, hum or whistle “Let It Be.”