celebrating a late Darwin day tomorrow

[RagnarLodbrok666]

Charles Darwin the scientist who found out the biological process of natural selection and inheritance. Showing the world that an imaginary sky ghost didn't shape the first two humans out of clay like previously thought. :)

What are your plans for Darwin day everyone? I'll be stuck with homework and I'll try to make plans to go to a friends house.

[Loddfafner]

I will be reading On The Origin of Species.

[Argyll]

I will not recognize this day and I will certainly, without a doubt scorn it and not celebrate it.

[Loddfafner]

Darwin actually assumed that God breathed life into the first species and established the laws of nature, which then allowed that life to branch out into the many species we know today.

He did not invent the idea of evolution but showed a more plausible mechanism for it than his predecessors, and backed it up with evidence, and sharpened it on examination of those cases that first seemed most inconvenient for his theory. In that spirit of looking unflinchingly for evidence against his own case, he was a model scientist.

He provides a model for thinking without cut and dried categories. For earlier biologists, each species is the result of a separate act of creation. Darwin's break with Aristotle and Plato is more important than that with Genesis. Darwin's species do not need clear membership boundaries and that is how one species can slowly morph into another without crossing a definite line from one category to another.

[Loddfafner]

I will not recognize this day and I will certainly, without a doubt scorn it and not celebrate it.

I highly recommend that you use the day to remedy your ignorance about one of the greatest Englishmen ever.

Here is a good place to start: http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Also: http://www.aboutdarwin.com/

[Loki]

Charles Darwin .. where shall I start?

A man way ahead of his time, the finest embodiment of what the Anglo-Saxon intellect has given the world.

I shall go to the nearest Cathedral and light a candle in his memory .. to the unknown aliens who seeded life upon this planet of ours.

:hail:

[Mercury]

This irrational Darwin hatred... is not healthy. The man merely proved evolution and natural selection, something that multiple science fields support (including genetics) and would've been discovered eventually. But it's impressive Darwin did it when he did and dedicated a large part of his life to his research. It's not his fault that you worldly people have such little faith.

[Amapola]

This irrational Darwin hatred... is not healthy. The man merely proved evolution and natural selection, something that multiple science fields support (including genetics) and would've been discovered eventually. But it's impressive Darwin did it when he did and dedicated a large part of his life to his research. It's not his fault that you worldly people have such little faith.

I think it's obviously based on ignorance... they don't even know what his theory is or the real implications of it means. Darwin is not an anti-anything scientist. Others' conlusions on his theories can be a world apart though.

[Mercury]

Evolution doesn't contradict the Bible in any meaningful way. One could say God created the world with it's animals and allowed them to evolve and adapt, which only makes sense, otherwise they would be extinct whenever the climate changed. Interestingly enough, creationists are more than willing to accept natural selection but still reject evolution, because "an animal can't change into another animal" or some craziness. I really can't take Creationism and the Creationist movement anymore.. it's just pure ignorance.

[Loddfafner]

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us ... Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
- Charles Darwin, at the close of the Origin of Species.

[Peasant]

He also had an awesome beard, and I am blessed with his image every time I have a tenner in my hand.

http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/schools/files/2011/03/darwintenpoundnote1.jpg?w=300

Shouldn't this thread be in some kind of Science sub forum instead of Athiesm?