Poor Charles Darwin whose birth 200 years ago we are now commemorating with piles of books and columns. He was an exquisitely sensitive man who was wary of all the fuss he brought about. Sometimes history picks odd characters to play its most important roles.

This Victorian gentleman couldn't stand the sight of blood and, at university, ran from operating theatres, so he would never be the doctor his physician father would have liked him to be.

A 19th century caricature of Charles Darwin. (CBC Archives)

He was also tormented by the death of his favourite daughter Annie, at 10. What's more, his beloved wife, Emma, was a fervent Christian and Darwin understood that his theory of natural selection would question the entire premise of a God-directed universe (as it certainly did for him, at least privately).

He avoided publishing his On The Origin of Species for two decades. He would rather study beetles and coral reefs than get into a terrible public spat.

Natural selection

But terrible spats were his legacy, even to this day. In his own time he had great champions like Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") and today he has a host of other boisterous advocates, such as the scientist Richard Dawkins and writers Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist triumvirate.

Somehow, many churches and religious believers have managed to resolve (or should I say massage?) their problem with evolution. Of course, evolution by itself isn't the issue. As any farmer or dog breeder knows, species change.

You certainly can have a God-directed evolutionary plan. That's essentially what the approach known as Intelligent Design is all about.

Creationists believe species are set in stone. (I suppose they never went to dog shows.) But natural selection, the mechanism that drives Darwinian evolution, was the truly radical element of the theory and still is today.

Roll the dice

Natural selection is radical in two ways. First, it seems to be blind. That's what frightened Darwin about his own theory and why he was reluctant to discuss it with his wife.

As he documented, species evolve by accident, not by design. They adapt to their local environments. Contingency rules.

As my favourite evolutionary biologist, the late Stephen Jay Gould, liked to say, replay the tape of evolution and you can get another story entirely.

That throws out a God-directed evolution unless you believe that the Creator is a stage manager who sets the universe in motion and then watches the story action unfold from the sidelines. This would be a God who is hardly omniscient, but a divine dramaturge.

In fact, some people speculate about this reality-TV sort of God. Paul Davies, the cosmologist and popular science writer, likes to theorize about a creation in which freedom is built into its design. In that sense, reality is a great game, a divine crap shoot.

Not necessarily better

The second way in which natural selection is radical was actually Gould's favorite. He constantly saw how people misunderstood the whole idea of natural selection.

Evolution, he would point out, didn't have an upwards goal or direction.

The old ad that proclaimed "the evolution of bottled beer" was a profound but common mistake. Evolution didn't mean things became better.

Species simply adapt to their immediate circumstances. Just ask your neighbourhood cockroach, which may well survive us humans (those buggers are estimated to be up to 350 million years old!).

Actually, Gould's idea of no-direction is now under attack. In a recent article in The Economist, some biologists argue that far more species move in the direction of complexity than in the opposite direction.

Natural selection may in fact create more complex creatures as it moves forward in history.

Ambling along

Still, the fact that natural selection yields complexity doesn't necessarily mean there is a divine plan. It could be just the way it thoughtlessly works itself out.

Nevertheless, there is another way the excellent Charles Darwin could be dangerous for many, if not most of us. We have the pugnacious Richard Dawkins to thank for that.

In an afterwards to a book entitled What is your Dangerous Idea: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable, Dawkins reviews all the supposedly wicked ideas put forth in the volume. Many are merely thought experiments (we are entirely alone; groups of people may be genetically different).

But one idea that he notes is still unpalatable is eugenics, the proposal that people should selectively breed "favourable" characteristics into their offspring.

Dawkins acknowledges that eugenics has been given a historical black eye, thanks to Adolf Hitler and his ilk.

But, asks Dawkins, if you can breed sheep and dogs, why not human beings? Dawkins doesn't advocate this. He just observes that it's a topic you can't even talk about. To prove his point, it is barely mentioned in this book devoted to so-called dangerous ideas.

Selective design

Should a society encourage the selective breeding of, say, intelligence, athletic ability or hearty bodies (as we do with disease-resistant plants)? Now, these are truly dangerous ideas that may well produce new forms of inequality and racism.

Still, some people do broach this subject. Ray Kurzweil, the futurist and artificial intelligence designer, thinks human selective design is inevitable (he was on Ideas a while back and I wrote about him here).

Kurzweil argues that the pressure will only increase: if there is a way to give your kids an extra 20 IQ points by implanting a bio-chip, and others are doing it, would you resist?

That would lead to a whole new arms and brain race that would make the current debate about mere athletic doping look like child's play.

If cyclist Lance Armstrong is said to have a unique metabolism that enables him to burn oxygen more efficiently than other athletes, how much would you pay for something like this for your child? Want your son or daughter to be an Olympic swimmer? Give them gigantic hands and feet and a smooth, seal-like body like Michael Phelps.

A whole new age of daring, troubling choices lay before us. The gentlemanly Charles Darwin has created enough dangerous ideas for us to chew on for the next while.