the true meaning of darwin day…
Today is Darwin’s birthday, a day when atheists and liberals gather in coffee shops to sip $4 lattes and enjoy readings form the an annotated copy of On The Origin Of The Species while singing praises to Darwin and Dawkins. Afterwards, they expound on all the benefits of genocide and eugenics while plotting their takeover of the legal system and going over updates of how well the liberal media conspiracy is working. At least, that’s how the Discovery Institute website describes the event right above Casey Luskin’s latest editorial in which he recounts who called him what insulting names since junior high.
But in all seriousness, Darwin Day is a way to pay respect to a naturalist who made a profound and lasting contribution to modern science. It’s true that he didn’t know a lot of things we now expect middle school kids to understand and be able to explain to anyone who asks. I think it’s both amusing and telling when anti-evolution activists equate Darwin’s original thoughts with today’s science of evolutionary biology. Darwin never even used word evolution. He called his theory Natural Selection which is why the full title of his seminal tome is On The Origin Of The Species By Means Of Natural Selection. Then again, history and research are not their fortes.
He was mum on the subject of how life came to be since he wasn’t an organic chemist and had no idea where to start. Instead, he wanted to explain why on his travels he kept seeing animals that so resembled each other but were different species. Basically, he asked the same thing as Georges Buffon did many decades prior and came up with a plausible mechanism by which one species could become many or how it could change over time. He couldn’t explain exactly what the changes were or how they came about because he wasn’t a geneticist.By the time we found out what DNA was and what it really did, scientists didn’t say they proved Darwin’s theory. They said that Darwin was definitely on to something and when we consider the current elaborations and technical revisions to his ideas, we get the modern theory of evolution.
To those who want to drag Darwins memory through the mud to feel better about a personal ideology or for the joy of thinking theyre so much smarter than the scientists who spend their lives studying our natural world, shame on you. If your faith and devotion are so strong, why is it necessary to to assault people in search of tangible truth? What happened to God sorting out whos good, evil or just mistaken? Did the almighty leave to run an errand or two and leave you in charge? To turn a scientist who’s ideas helped create modern biology into a personification of your fears and nightmares is downright disgraceful. Maybe on the 200th anniversary of his birthday, you should go to your local library and learn something about who Darwin really was and why he waited for two decades before finally unveiling his theory.
