Feb 12 2009
Why did nobody tell me this??
Today is the day! Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin!
Since creationists are attempting to co-opt what should be a celebration of the life and work of a very great man (one Canadian site using Darwin’s name is owned by creationists who are spamming a lie-filled movie pretending evolution isn’t true) - a whole bunch of us are writing about Darwin over the next four days, to drown out the falsehoods.
And that’s where this book comes in: The Origin of Species, that Darwin published on November 24th, 1859, to demonstrate the evidence in support of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Which introduces the key word about this book: evidence. I’ve already posted about how I own the abridged version of Origin and haven’t yet read it. But in the last few days, hearing scientists and educators commenting about the book, I’m struck by one thing: everyone seems to agree that the original is daunting and a bit heavy, and the reason for that is that it is full of evidence.
Evidence from butterflies, from snails, from frogs, insects, birds, dogs - evidence collected and collected and classified and logged and recorded and built up, mound by mound, mountain by mountain.
When I was raised as a creationist fundamentalist, nobody told me about all that. They told me that Darwin developed his theory because he was rebelling against God, and looking for excuses to believe God didn’t create the world.
But when I attended the Darwin Exhibit last year at the Royal Ontario Museum (the same exhibit now showing in England, to mark this 200th birthday), I wandered through it with my jaw almost dragging on the floor behind me. Because I saw the same thing - notebook after notebook, full of observations, day after day after day after day - specimen samples collected from all over the place, year after year - I saw mountains of evidence. And what was displayed here was just a tiny part of what actually exists.
All I could think, going through that exhibit, was, “Why did nobody ever tell me about this??”
Charles Darwin was above all things a scientist. He looked honestly at the evidence he found, and followed where it led. The one thing you absolutely can not accuse him of is trying to twist the evidence to fit a preconceived theory with rebellion at its secret heart. Just not.
Creationists, on the other hand… (And I can make that criticism with absolute certainty. I was one of them. I studied with the head creationist honchos in San Diego.)
If I still had any residual doubts from my creationist background, they wisped away like tendrils of noxious fog when I saw that exhibit, and saw those notebooks and those specimens, and read the actual history of Darwin’s work.
I am determined. I will read my Illustrated Origin of Species, with its introduction by Richard E. Leakey, before the end of this 200th anniversary year. I, too, taught people lies about Charles Darwin, for many years. So I owe him.
I’ll make it a birthday present.
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[If you want to participate in Blog for Darwin (but you’ll need to hurry, because it ends on Sunday), check here , and follow the instructions. See also Lisa’s entry at Minds Alive on the Shelves.]
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The notion that all scientists are anti-God has always amused me. Most scientists that I know - and I do know quite a few - will tell you that it’s impossible to study nature and physics and science without coming to a far deeper understanding of the Divine.
They don’t tell you this because they don’t have a real knowledge themselves of what evolution is or isn’t. They just know it’s about monkeys turning into people and they’re agin it - because that’s what somebody else told them when they told them to be agin it. But they don’t dare to actually do research on it because they might actually learn something and be convinced.
I got a fairly good grasp on evolutionary theory early because I was a dinosaur nut in my childhood, not because of anything I learned in school. I read Darwin in high school for an extra-credit project, and I kept up my reading as an adult, but I know I’m not exactly normal - I’m a science geek. Even in a good, secular public high school in a non-fundie dominated area of the U.S., even in the science honors program, we didn’t get a whole lot of information on evolution, and you have to specifically opt for it in college. It’s easy not to know what it is, and much harder to actually find out.
I think I caught it almost in its last week, myself, Melanie. There are so many things I “mean to go to,” and then suddenly realize I’ve missed. (So many good reasons to have a calendar program somewhere, ha!)
It was both a wonderful display in itself, and a fantastic use of the new basement Weston Gallery at the ROM. It’s so oddly shaped, with beams slanting down at weird angles, that they can be marvelously creative in how they set up their exhibits down there. It’s become my favourite space at the ROM.
Chameleonsdream, thanks for commenting. I had heard something similar. Certainly every scientist comes away with an expanded sense of wonder, when they explore the universe. “Wonder” doesn’t necessarily equate with “religious” (as Richard Dawkins points out), but it’s very mind-expanding, however it’s interpreted.
Ishtar, I know what you mean. And bizarrely, then you get the kind of bifurcation I had when I was going through school. In one part of my mind, I knew everything had evolved, and in another part of my mind I knew it was all created in six literal days. It wasn’t until the creationists started making noise that I suddenly recognized the contradiction between the two halves of my beliefs. I could be pretty dense sometimes.
Editrix, I’m not laughing. Not really! But will it help with the cringing if I mention that my purpose in starting university was to become an astrophysicist, go to work at NASA, and show them that the earth and universe were no older than 10,000 years??