Happy Birthday, dear Charles

Tiny naturally selects a niche fit for play. In this case an empty laundry basket on top of the dryer evolved into a Kitty Play Center as she jumped in and started rubbing her cheeks and then her whole body along its perforated sides. Her enthusiasm crescendoed in a controlled somersault within its confines, her eyes wide with excitement and purrbox turned on high. Our funny bone, tickled close to extinction, survived intact.

In honor of our hero, Charles Darwin's 197th birthday, we are republishing one of our many posts reflecting upon the significance of the great naturalist's work, "Render unto Darwin those things that are Darwin's."

"Famously, Darwin and his shipmates had started dismembering and eating what later turned out to be a new species of ostrich for their Christmas feast at Port Desire in Patagonia, when he recognized its possible significance and recovered its remains. After Gould had confirmed its distinctness (and named it for its discoverer), the Patagonian rhea appeared among Darwin's notebook speculations as one of his first test-cases in his attempts to explain species differentiation," according to The C. Warren Irvin, Jr., Colection of Charles Darwin and Darwiniana at the University of SC ("Rhea Darwinii," from The Zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle: pt. III. Birds)

We were dismayed to see Power Line's Hindrocket lump together Charles Darwin with Marx and Freud, dismissing Darwin's monumental achievement by asserting that the great nineteenth-century naturalist had sought "to secularize science." Darwin was a religious man who sought scientific truth. While Marx and Freud have rightly receded in light of subsequent developments, Darwin's principal thesis of natural selection remains central to modern scientific thought, as historian Roger Mortimer has written:

Similarities between man and other vertebrates have been noted and discussed by Western thinkers since Classical times, and numerous theories, many of an evolutionary nature, have been formulated to account for those resemblances. It was not until the early nineteenth century, however, that knowledge of existing plant and animal morphology, coupled with the study of the record of past life preserved in the geological time scale, permitted the scientist to begin to draw precise parallels between present-day life-forms and to relate them to fossil antecedents.

Assisted by this scientifically definable methodology, Charles Darwin was able to formulate a theory of evolution free of the theological or metaphysical implications inherent in earlier evolutionary theory. His theory of evolutionary selection holds, simply, that variation within species occurs randomly and that the survival or extinction of each organism is determined by that organism's ability to adapt to its environment. Though aspects of the mechanism of natural selection continue to be debated in the scientific community, Darwin's pincipal thesis remains central to modern scientific thought.

Back to the present, we were delighted to learn that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809. Cosmic convergence? An argument for intelligent design? But speaking of intelligent design, "defenders of Darwin's theory of natural selection are planning hundreds of events around the world Sunday [today], the 197th anniversary of his birth, saying recent challenges to the teaching of evolution have re-emphasized the need to promote his work." And it isn't just the secular scientists:

Nearly 450 Christian churches around the country plan to celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin on Sunday with programs and sermons intended to emphasize that his theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science.

A commenter to our "There is a grandeur in this view of life" post last summer said it best:

Secular fundamentalists exhibit an intolerance for diversity of thought and theory and promote their propaganda talking points reducing faith to church -- thus allowing their faith-based world view to be integrated in the public marketplace of ideas and policy while banning the faith-based worldviews of others as "church" and -- thus -- to be separated.

It's that fear-society thing again, raising its ugly head.

Comments

[Orson2]

Sissy-

I'm just discovering your exceptional blog and getting acquanted with you many varied interests. Boffo!

So interesting, catholic, serious, topical, and deep! Wow.

Am I guessing wrong in thinking history and biology are among your core academic interests, aided and abetted by politics, of course? (And now as a GSD grad, practicing?)

Later.

T J Orson Olson