The Charles Darwin bicentenary
February 12 is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin.
Why Darwin Matters, by Richard Dawkins
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Darwin's Living Legacy by Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Darwin Day 2009 is a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin Of Species. Darwin Day in any year is always a celebration of the many triumphs of the human mind over backwardness, ignorance and superstition.
How Edinburgh inspired Darwin's Origin of Species
Darwin came to the city as a 16-year-old who had enrolled to study medicine. He lived in a house on Lothian Street, behind the new Robert Adam-designed university buildings, now known as Old College. The hospital where he was to study was on Infirmary Street, just yards away.In Edinburgh he discovered a medical faculty whose lustre was dimming, though the subject still accounted for almost half the students of the university roll. The department was held to be corrupt (posts were often inherited) and lessons were regarded, certainly by Darwin, as boring. In 1828, the university was rocked by the scandal of Burke and Hare, whose murderous exploits were found to have been supplied corpses for anatomy classes.
Darwin soon gave up his medical studies. He disliked his lecturers and was squeamish about blood and bodily fluids. Instead, he turned to the city's astonishing array of clubs and societies for intellectual sustenance. Most importantly, Darwin fell in with Robert Edmond Grant, 16 years his senior, an eminent naturalist and freethinker who was to have a profound influence on his life.
Darwin's new mentor, taking his cue from French revolutionary scientists, believed that the origin and evolution of life were the result of chemical and physical forces, obeying natural laws. Grant was fascinated by sponges and other marine life, and took Darwin as his companion to Leith and Newhaven. The two befriended fishermen: they sailed out into the Firth of Forth to collect specimens, explored the Isle of May, even sheltered from a storm under Inchkeith Lighthouse.
Back on dry land, Grant rented a house close to the rocky shore at Prestonpans where, with Darwin, he collected and studied sea-pens, sea-mats and sponges, primitive creatures he believed held clues to the origins of all life. All this research prompted the young Darwin to make original observations, and he gave his first paper to the Plinian Society on the subject of sea-mat larvae and oyster shells.
[...]
Darwin spent much of his free time in the College Museum of Natural History, which was run by Robert Jamieson, an eminent natural historian. It was here that Darwin learnt taxidermy, taught by a freed slave, John Edmonstone. The relationship between a man of Darwin's class and a former slave was unconventional, yet Darwin's theories on natural selection owe much to this friendship. His consideration of all races being equal was a starting point for his theories on evolution.
Jamieson's keen interest in geology encouraged Darwin to explore around the city. Along Salisbury Crags, the extraordinary outcrop which dominates the skyline to the east of the city centre, he studied the formations which had fascinated James Hutton, the 18th-century geologist. These volcanic extrusions through sedimentary rocks undermined the prevailing "Neptunist" view that the Earth's rocks had been deposited in a great flood, and the world created in 4004 BC.
aside: my partner is organizing the sold-out event here in Edinburgh on Thursday. It was originally slated to be a 100-person-maximum gathering of a few academics. It has now switched venues and is more than fifteen times the originally expected size!
''Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman. It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.''
Fidel, your anti-scientific grasping at straws and attacks on Darwin remind me of those who try to attack the NDP by referring to Tommy Douglas's thesis on eugenics and his description of homosexuality as a "mental illness" in 1968.
Neither the legacy of Darwin nor that of Tommy Douglas will suffer from such ahistorical and prejudicial attacks.
Keep trying, though. Maybe we'll get back to "God created heaven and earth".
Fidel, your anti-scientific grasping at straws and attacks on Darwin remind me of those who try to attack the NDP by referring to Tommy Douglas's thesis on eugenics and his description of homosexuality as a "mental illness" in 1968.
Where did I say anything unscientific? Let's see you back that up, please.
But that's okay, because while Tommy was the first western politician to denounce the Nazis, old Mackenzie King said after meeting with him that Hitler's eyes were "liquid pools of sincerity"
And old Prescott Bush held dear his views on eugenics right into the 1950s at a time when those views became widely recognized as based in racism. Political conservatives tend to resist change moreso than anyone
Unionist wrote:yep. Von Daniken's origin of species.Fidel wrote:
What's this - your alternative to Darwin's theory of the origin of species?
Yesssss!!! Thank you Heywood, I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of that fraud who was making the rounds back in the early 70s or so. Ahh, the memories!
HeywoodFloyd wrote:Unionist wrote:yep. Von Daniken's origin of species.Fidel wrote:
What's this - your alternative to Darwin's theory of the origin of species?
Yesssss!!! Thank you Heywood, I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of that fraud who was making the rounds back in the early 70s or so. Ahh, the memories!
What's this, two old line party supporters propping one another up on a lefty forum? Where does that ever happen in reality? Forget I said that. We KNOW where that occurs on a regular basis for the last 140 years in a row.
And we're pretty sure Darwinian market forces wont be working to affect survival of the fittest banksters or corporate friendsters of the two old line parties in either the USSA or its northern colonial outpost, that's for sure. 
I read his stuff when I was a kid. I didn't know until I was about 19 that it wasn't written as fiction.
I knew too many people who didn't realize that it wasn't written as fact! I argued myself hoarse ridiculing it, but to no avail. Once the MSM picked up on him, it was like challenging the Gospels.
So Darwin was a male chauvinist and probably a Whig supporter. Who knew?
By the same token, I wonder which two slavish old line party supporters here couldnt care less about gender equality in Canada at the same time Darwinian market fundamentalism falls down around their ears?
<-- all-knowing cheeky wink
Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton must be gods (or at the very least god like) because they have never done anything wrong in their lives according to Fidel.
They are the prefect beings.
(Sorry for the thread drift)
______________________________________________________________________________________________ We are like cloaks, one thinks of us only when it rains.
Darwin may sound like a chauvinist but included in that link from Fidel is this:
Nothing could be further from the truth, for one of the fundamental points of Darwin's book is that males and females are inexorably linked in their evolution, and that differences between the sexes must be viewed as responses to selection pressures that we may not yet understand.
I'd say his theory is holding true:
It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes prevails with mammals
But for the word, "ultimately". And for a man like Darwin it was a faux pas as would anyone believing in evolution use "ultimately"? Chauvanistic for sure, but his theory also shows why.
Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton must be gods (or at the very least god like) because they have never done anything wrong their lives according to Fidel.
They are the prefect beings.
Compared to colonial administrators past and present, that sounds about right. The high water mark in Canada isnt as high as slavish old line party supporters let on.
We are like cloaks, one thinks of us only when it rains.
I think of the Canadian army and what their next mission might be with every corporate US news update.
On Darwin’s Birthday, Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution
PRINCETON, NJ -- On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they "believe in the theory of evolution," while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don't have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity.
It's my mom's birthday today too! And Abe Lincoln's! Not that that has anything to do with anything.
Interesting stat re: 61% of Americans either not believing in evolution or not "having an opinion either way". I guess the next time someone on babble says that most Americans are idiots, I won't be able to chastise them for making generalizations.
I think one of the more interesting aspects of Darwin is his methodology, and how he anticipated criticisms. It's amazing just how patient he was in presenting the theory, and how whole it was due to this.
Few people remember that Wallace also came upon the theory at the same time as Darwin, yet they both agreed that Darwin's presentation was more complete.
And, if one reads literature from the period before Darwin published "The Origin of Species", we find people were sort of all around the idea, but lacked the discipline, observational skills and all the things that were wrapped up in Charles Darwin to be able to see it in whole, and express it.
Yes, Darwin was not the first to posit the evolution of species from other species. But while his work was the first to provide a correct explanation for how species evolve, building on the work of other scientists, it was by no means a scientific consensus position. Darwin knew his theories were unacceptable to the scientific elite, which led him to voluntarily suppress them for 20 years before he finally published them.