Remembering Darwin
As it turned out, it was the 197th anniversary of Darwin’s birth yesterday, February 12th. I would have totally forgotten about it if not for that article on Slashdot about Christians celebrating it as their own. Nothing really wrong or bad about it, but I wish they can be more vocal against their co-theists - the fundamentalists - and help stop the demonization of science in general and this person in particular, who in one fell swoop unified the many but disparate life sciences of his time - biological sciences, social sciences, anthropology, et cetera, and made it fit snugly and in complimentary fashion with the other theories of the non-life sciences of his time by discovering (Alfred Wallace discovered the same theory at about the same time) his theory of Natural Selection as the main driving force of speciation as put forth methodically in his landmark book Origin Of Species first published in 1859. Darwin himself did not publish anything concerning the origin of life. His book dealt with how species came to be diverse, after the first organism started to exist. Being a true scientist and given the lack of data to make a conclusion, he could only speculate on the possible origin of life itself, as in a private letter to his friend, Dr. Hooker, he wrote that life may have started in a “warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights, heat, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.” The implication of his theory on human origin, although not at all touched in his Origins book was just too obvious and after twelve years of controversy, he published the book Descent of Man in 1871 to finally put it on record. But the controversy didn’t stop there as we all know. Almost half and a century has passed since his book was published and evolution is still to be accepted by most people but mainly for a religious reason, primarily Christian. And why not? Evolution is just one of the many steps of what the late Carl Sagan says, “the great demotion of human significance” which started roughly with the Copernican theory. Atheism owes a lot to Charles. With his theory of evolution by Natural Selection, the first nail of the coffin inside which the literal Biblical Creationism will someday be buried and laid to rest.
Thank you and Happy Birthday Charles!
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