I am excited to announce the launch of Blog For Darwin, a web-based project to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who discovered that evolution through natural selection explains the origin of all species. Along with other great scientific achievements such as the Theories of Special and General Relativity, the Germ Theory of Disease, and Newtonian Physics, Darwin's is one of the greatest in history. Eventually, the theory of evolution also came to draw from--which is also to say that it is further proven by--the field of genetics. Today, evolution informs not only all of the life sciences, but a wide range of disciplines.
Blog For Darwin is my small attempt as someone who is not a professional educator or scientist to help create some manner of educational resource, however modest, that might aid teachers, students, and others in examining the life and work of Charles Darwin, his application of the scientific method, and how he discovered the theory of evolution through careful observation and experimentation.
I am particularly hopeful that this project might be of value to students in my own country, the U.S., where students (and the general population) too often demonstrate a lack of scientific literacy, especially when it comes to the theory of evolution and to the scientific process itself.
Wide-spread American misunderstanding about evolution is due, at least in part, to a sort of epistemological relativism demanding that evolution be treated as if it and non-scientific ideas such as Creationism or Intelligent Design--ideas ultimately relying on faith suppositions interpreted from religious texts--were all faith-based choices, all somehow equally rational and merely a matter of personal preference. Heaven forbid it be suggested that one idea is better than another as an explanation for the origin of species.
Heaven forbid, indeed!
This relativism devalues the fact that scientific concepts are based on overwhelming data carefully examined, challenged, and then either verified or disproved by knowledgeable peers who, frankly, would often like nothing more than to disprove another scientist's ideas in part or in whole.
The theory of evolution has been confirmed against not only the aforementioned rigorous standards of evidence and peer review, but has been so confirmed for nearly 150 years. Its key predictions have been and continue to be validated by new data, including data from fields of inquiry that didn't even exist in Darwin's day.
The great man who first articulated evolution's reality surely deserves some special recognition in our age.
(Photo: Natural History Museum, London, 2008.)
