Monday, March 10, 2008

Pevere, Geoff. "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." TORONTO STAR March 1, 2008.

With the publication of his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, the controversy-averse, socially shy British naturalist (described by one biographer as "a reclusive biologist who wrote books") almost single-handedly upended the prevailing paradigm concerning the relationship between man, God and Nature. Where a concept of divine design in nature had prevailed for centuries, Darwin – a non-religious scientific materialist – offered something radically, startlingly and heretically different: a vision of nature processing change in life forms by force of circumstance, a process of constant situational adaptation that saw survival as the only `design' at work. Ergo, dinosaurs go when they can no longer cut it, and man only comes along when natural circumstances permit. Small wonder Darwin himself sat on the revelation for years before publishing it. He knew what was coming. As he wrote in a letter, he felt like he was "committing murder." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/308305.

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