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

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Author Topic: 2009 Sees The 200th Anniversary Of The Birth Of Charles Darwin  (Read 1243 times)
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Bianca
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« Reply #15 on: February 08, 2009, 01:20:10 pm »









Darwin never said he was an atheist, only agnostic. He had two grounds for objecting to Christianity. One was lack of proof: he was a scientist to his marrow and the one thing he respected was evidence. The other was pain.


"Disease and pain in the world," he noted in 1838, "and they talk of perfection?" He just could not accept the idea of benevolent divinity: he saw too clearly the wastage involved in the way nature worked. "The universe we observe, if properly understood, has all the properties we should expect if there is no purpose,no design, no evil, and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Each form eternally destroyed while others take its place."


This observation acquired a tragic resonance in the decade before he wrote Origin. Twice in those years he watched nature exercise its pitilessness on two of his much-loved children. In 1851 his eldest daughter, sweet-natured Annie, aged 10, fell sick. It was probably TB but Darwin feared it was hereditary.


"It seems an exaggerated form of my illness. She inherits, I fear, my own wretched digestion." In Malvern, where he took Annie for a cure, he watched her worsen, and wrote a series of harrowing letters to his wife Emma, who was just about to have their seventh child (my own great-grandfather, as it happens.) "The doctor says there still is hope, but you would not recognise her poor, sharp, hard, pinched face. It is, from hour to hour, a struggle between life and death. God only knows the issue." ......... V


C After Annie died, Darwin no longer entered the village church. He left the family at the door and tramped through the lanes, looking for birds. This was when the iron entered his soul. His arguments for natural selection and survival of the fittest were honed as he sorted 20 years of evidence and conducted new experiments in the search for detailed proof, and struggled with his bitter personal experience of these laws. "Nature is prodigal of the forms of life. The fit will be preserved, the weak exterminated utterly – as myriads have been before: battle within battle, ever recurring."


He now knew in his own life the pain and loss involved in evolution. The loss not only of species, in millennia of extinctions, but also of individuals like Annie. "Nature is prodigal of time," he said. "She scrutinises every muscle, vessel, nerve. Every habit, instinct, shade of constitution. There will be no caprice, no favouring."
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Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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