The Smithsonian magazine has a bunch of Darwin special articles up:
The Life and Writings of Charles Darwin | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine
I particularly enjoyed the one on Lincoln and Darwin, as I myself have often wondered if these two great men had heard of each others achievements, and what they made of them.
More on the National Geographic specials coming up:
There are good links to interactive pages on the NatGeo site in the above article. Fun stuff!
George Will gave a nod to Darwin in his column recently:
Quote:
washingtonpost.com
[...]
After Copernicus dislodged humanity from the center of the universe, Marx asserted that false consciousness -- we do not really "make up our minds" -- blinds us to the fact that we are in the grip of an implacable dialectic of impersonal forces. Darwin placed humanity in a continuum of all protoplasm. Then Freud declared that the individual's "self" or personhood is actually a sort of unruly committee. All this dented humanity's self-esteem.
Still, many people of faith find Darwinism compatible with theism: God, they say, initiated and directs the dynamic that Darwin described.
In the end, Darwin, in spite of perfunctory rhetorical references to "the Creator," disagreed. As a scientist dealing with probabilities, and with a profoundly materialist theory, he had no intellectual room for a directing deity that wills a special destination for our species.
Darwin's rejection of premeditated design helped to validate an analogous political philosophy. The fact of order in nature does not require us to postulate a divine Orderer, and the social order does not presuppose an order-giving state. As a practical matter, we cannot expel government from our understanding of society as Darwin expelled God from the understanding of nature. But Darwinism opens the mind to the fecundity of undirected, spontaneous, organic social arrangements -- to Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek.
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As an interesting side-note, Hayek had kind of a strange view of how cultures persisted through history-- a kind of naive group selection. Interesting paper on this by
David Ramsay Steele available
here.
Another short, but still interesting piece appeared in SciAm recently:
Quote:
Darwin 200 years later: Evolution by selection of quotations: Scientific American Blog
"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." So wrote philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. "In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law."
Dennett's musing really hits home to anyone who took introductory biology that did not include evolution: such a course is a giant survey of the different kinds of plants, animals and other organisms of our planet, tied together by a single principle--you needed to know it for the final. But evolution by natural selection ties all life together with process and chemistry. As the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously, and correctly, said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
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Article on acceptance of Darwin's ideas in America vs UK:
Quote:
Darwin, Britain's Hero, Is Still Controversial In U.S. : NPR
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, and to say Darwin mania is gripping England does not overstate the case.
The Royal Mint has created a Darwin coin, the Royal Mail has made a Darwin stamp set, and there are countless lectures and exhibitions throughout the country.
Bob Bloomfield is in charge of Darwin200, a program coordinating the celebration. He says there's even a group of knitters paying tribute to Darwin.
"The group created artistic knitted elements which are evocative of evolution processes," says Bloomfield. "Similarly there's a very small group also doing quilts which are doing a Bayeux tapestry of the Beagle voyage."
In other words, Darwin is not the controversial figure in the United Kingdom that he continues to be in the United States. Bloomfield says the reason for this is science has proved Darwin right.
"Unless you want to disregard the weight of evidence, there's not really a controversy," says Bloomfield. "Most difficulties come from people who have a fixed perspective on either the nature of time or either the created nature of the natural world."
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