You can't just mock the Lord like Google is doing in its graphic today (above) honoring Charles Darwin's 200th birthday.Right. Amazing, the astounding ignorance and fear of the religious mind.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor, I think it was Ronald Numbers, pointed out to me some eights years ago that George W. Bush and Al Gore shared a position on teaching evolution in public schools: That the federal government should leave it to local school districts to decide [out of fear of offending the fearful among us] and the candidates studiously avoided taking a position on the merits of evolution as an explanatory theory.
It was worse in Darwin's time, but only in degree. As David Brown writes in the Post in his excellent piece:
In biology's most famous book, ‘On the Origin of Species,’ Charles Darwin steered clear of applying his revolutionary theory of evolution to the species of greatest interest to his readers -- their own.
He couldn't avoid it forever, of course. He eventually wrote another tome nearly as famous, ‘The Descent of Man.’ But he knew in 1859, when ‘Species’ was published, that to jump right into a description of how human beings had tussled with the environment and one another over eons, changing their appearance, capabilities and behavior in the process, would be hard for people to accept. Better to stick with birds and barnacles.
No comments:
Post a Comment