February 12, 2009
Happy 200th birthday to Dr. Charles Darwin. Later this year (in November) we will also be saying happy 150th anniversary to the release of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Indeed today, Darwin Day, is a special day.
Today is also the celebration of the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States and a person largely responsible for the ending of slavery in the U.S. in the 1860’s. Kudos on this day go to you, too, Abe.
(Note: Today is the “celebration” of Academic Freedom day by proponents of Intelligent Design. Lets just say for now that Academic Freedom is being misused and misinterpreted by the ID crowd. I’ll have a post about that soon, but we’ll let it go for now).
November 11, 2008
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward errors is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
–Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Ironic that Darwin, of all people, should have stated this. We are now nearly 150 years on from the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution in The Origin of Species. But despite this, the false views, supported only by false evidence, presented by proponents of Intelligent Design continue to do injury to science. However, the harm is great, as our young students continue to be caught in the middle where they suffer the consequences of religion…again. To starve them of the education that they and we are worthy of is a sin of the most unholy kind. I only hope that as time goes on the road to truth does, in fact, open up to the minds of all people.
