Some evolution refutation?

This article--Times Online - Britain--says that some researchers have refuted parts of Darwin's theory based on their researches into tits, a type of bird. I haven't gone through it carefully enough to talk about it intelligently, but I think, if you asked them, these researchers would still say that Darwin was right in the big picture. And a lot of Darwinism is taken up with refinements by the likes of the late Stephen J. Gould, anyway. So it is unlikely to affect evolutionary theory at all.

One of the problems with evolutionary theory whatever its merits for biology, and most scientists accept it as a given, a "fact," is that it is applied to everything else under the sun. Sociologists apply it to societies, political scientists apply it to governments and to the polity, for two cases. And that results in conclusions that certain societies are where they are inevitably based on the impersonal forces of nature or society. Individual action is devalued because it was the result of these forces and not because of initiative or thinking or any type of moral considerations. It is like the apple falling form the tree, they would say. It fell inevitably because of the nature of the apple and the nature of gravity. It had nothing to do with anything else.

That is what is going to happen, if it hasn't already, with analysis of the Ukraine revolution. I have said this before, maybe too often for some, but it will come to be seen as inevitable. An evolution of the society. It happened in Czechoslovakia; it happened in Poland; it happened in Georgia; and now it happened in Ukraine. That means it will eventually happen in Russia, Belarus, and the countries of Central Asia.

But these latter countries are problematic at best. It is not clear that Russia is moving in the direction of greater democracy. It may be moving toward more authoritarianism. And this downplays the fact that real people here took to the streets and risked real danger to do it. They did this because they had had enough and stood up like men, to put it in the old, un-PC way. That makes them heroes. This needs to be remembered when the histories are written.