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2009 Sees The 200th Anniversary Of The Birth Of Charles Darwin

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Bianca
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« Reply #15 on: February 08, 2009, 01:17:51 pm »










In On the Origin of Species, however, he used flora and other fauna, not Man, to demonstrate the principle of evolution. He hated controversy: what he wanted to get across was the principle – that evolution worked by natural selection. The debate about human origins was taken up by younger biologists like TH Huxley so that by the time Darwin addressed it in The Descent of Man (1871) all responsible thinkers had accepted evolution – including leaders of the Church.


Lord Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, whom I interviewed for my radio programmes, pointed out that in 1860, only one year after Origin came out – the year of Huxley's clash at Oxford with Bishop Wilberforce – a sermon was preached by Frederick Temple, headmaster of Rugby and later Archbishop of Canterbury, which effortlessly squared evolution with religion. No problem, said Temple: Darwin has simply shown us how God moves by natural processes over unimaginably long distances of time. And in the same year Darwin got a fan letter from the devout novelist Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, along the same lines. Evolution? A great idea for Christianity. "Even better than making the world," write Kingsley, "God makes the world make itself!"


In 2009, we need to know Darwin better because he is increasingly being identified with one small bit of his work. Ironically for someone who worked by Darwinian method, always led strictly by evidence, always testing ideas in the field, that bit is often called "only a theory".


"Something funny is happening to my generation," said my daughter, aged 22. "They seem to think you can choose to believe evolution or not, like choosing Orange for your mobile not Virgin. If people hear I'm related to Darwin they ask, 'do you believe his theory?' They don't object to evolution on religious grounds, they just have an emotional block about accepting that our ancestors were apes. They just don't want to believe that."


My daughter is much better at biology than me. In normal speech, "theory" can mean a guess or unproved fact but even a poet knows that in science a theory is the highest thing there is: a principle, or a law, drawn from a large body of testable evidence. Try telling someone hit by a slate from the roof that gravity is only a theory.


For these 22-year-olds, knowledge has regressed 150 years because of the rise of creationism; and the Eighties revival of an 18th-century theory ("theory" in a non-scientific sense) called Natural Theology. (It is now called "intelligent design"). But, for 60 years, until the rise of fundamentalism in 1920s America, evolution and religion got on fine.
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Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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