The entertaining bit is the anti-evolutionists are still wanting Darwin exhumed so he can be crucified when another observational scientist, Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, studying a completely different branch of the animal kingdom in another part of the world just a few years after Darwin’s field research, and who had never been privy to the bulk of Darwin’s work, came to the EXACT SAME CONCLUSIONS.
Darwin had a famously sour stomach and as he aged he grew highly averse to stress. He intended not to have On the Origin of Species published in his lifetime because he didn’t want to be at the eye of the sh1tstorm he knew it would cause among the fixed and rigid fundamentalists. But when Lord Wallace consulted with him about publishing his own work on the same subject, Darwin knew he’d have to publish right away, else Wallace would “scoop” him.
If that had happened, today Darwin would be little more than a footnote in Lord Wallace’s magnum opus and it would be Wallace the fixed and rigid fundamentalists would be clamoring to have resurrected so they could kill him.
It was Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, who coined the expression, “survival of the fittest.” One of the reasons Darwin took the position on the voyage of the Beagle was that he believed in the immutability of species, and he hoped his research would prove Grandpa wrong.
Everyone focuses on Darwin’s work with finches in the Galapagos, but the voyage of the Beagle lasted nearly five years, and they were only in the Galapagos for three weeks. The majority of what he saw that served as inspiration for On the Origin of species he observed elsewhere. In fact, he’d begin doubting the “immutable creations of God” dogma long before they’d ever reached the southern tip of South America.
In Brazil he found parasitic wasps that laid their eggs on other arthropods and those eggs eventually hatched and devoured their host. This was such a cruel and grotesque process for the host that Darwin could not make himself believe that a kind and loving god would have created them (or their tormentor, the parasitic wasp) specifically so they could suffer this fate. So if it was not God’s handiwork, there must have been some other ‘natural’ mechanism at work. The parasitic wasp was “priming the pump,” to coin a phrase, for the revelations of the Galapagos finches, tortoises, and cactuses.
The thing I find most astonishing about Darwin’s insights into how the process must have worked is that when he wrote OTOOS, not a single hominid fossil had ever been identified. One or maybe two had been found in his old age and before he died, but I doubt he felt vindicated because it would be years before the theory that these fossils were of human ancestors be accepted in the scientific community. Forget about gene theory, forget about DNA, forget about alelles and background radiation, he wrote OTOOS before it was even discovered that the remains of any of our ancestors had survived to the modern era, much less whether they showed any proto-human physical traits.
And all this vitriol over Darwin seems a bit farcical because the evolutionary science hasn’t been about Darwin for well more than a century. And we’d still have the exact same science, even if Darwin had never been born, because other scientists, most notably Lord Alfred Russel Wallace, have independently come to the same conclusions.
Well, sure, because there were people out there trying to get rid of God. Think about it: if God exists, then we are beholden to Him, and if we are beholden to Him, maybe we should obey His commandments, which a lot of people don’t really want to do.
Not to mention the allure being gods ourselves...
The reality is that materialist evolution is impossible, as Darwin noted, because of the complexity. We are relying on random mutations, which are usually bad, and we are relying on multiple complementary, but random and good, mutations to occur in the same being. And we are relying on this having happened an untold number of times in order to bring about everything we see around us.
This is why I agree with the scientist, whose name unfortunately I did not catch and have never been able to find, who said that he realized it took more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in God.
“ This was such a cruel and grotesque process for the host that Darwin could not make himself believe that a kind and loving god would have created them”
Quite the scientific reasoning.
You: “ If that had happened, today Darwin would be little more than a footnote in Lord Wallace’s magnum opus and it would be Wallace the fixed and rigid fundamentalists would be clamoring to have resurrected so they could kill him.”
Article: “ 14 years after the founding of this magazine, Charles Darwin published the most important scientific book ever written.”
Why the Darwin worship?
Wallace? His ideas were in line with the left of today, particularly his environmentalism. He was a self-admitted social justice warrior (to use a modern term). Take him seriously at your own peril.