Posted by kapanalig_sa_wala on Feb 12th, 2009
Today we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. The man most responsible in illuminating us about human origins. Happy birthday Charles!
Below is a picture and caption from Wiki about the first documented sketch of the Tree of Life drawn by Charles Darwin.
Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch, his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837) on view at the the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
Posted by kapanalig_sa_wala on Feb 12th, 2008
Today the 12th of February marks the 199th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Darwin is arguably the most important naturalist who has ever lived. He has shown us that we are products of a natural process and not by some magical power of god. This is why unlike the other giants of science like Einstein and Galileo, Darwin continues to be demonized by religious fanatics. Darwin’s ideas are the most powerful there is in exposing the lies and myths that religions seek to perpetuate. In the book What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr, he enumerated five theories of evolution that Darwin postulated:
1) The nonconstancy of species (the basic theory of evolution)
2) The descent of all organisms from common ancestors (branching evolution)
3) The gradualness of evolution (no saltations, no discontinuities)
4) The multiplication of species (the origin of diversity)
5) Natural selection
Although new ideas and new facts have been discovered in the last century and a half since Darwin published his most important work, Origin Of Species, the above five theories have withstood the assault of scientific thinking but instead reinforced by new discoveries. We owe it to this great man the answer to one of man’s most important question: Where did we come from? We are not specially created by some cosmic being somewhere. The human species is, like any other extant species, but a leaf in the great Tree Of Life.
Posted by kapanalig_sa_wala on Feb 12th, 2007
We celebrate today, February 12th, the 198th birth anniversary of our dear friend Charles Darwin. Happy birthday!
Posted by kapanalig_sa_wala on Feb 13th, 2006
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. Continue Reading »
