From scientist to saint: does Darwin deserve a day?

He was the originator of the most dangerous idea in history. He disenfranchised God as our creator and revealed the animal origins of humanity. Many believe his influence was pernicious and evil.

But now a campaign has been launched to establish an international day of celebration on 12 February: birthday of Charles Darwin, author of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

'Along with Shakespeare and Newton, Darwin is our greatest gift to the world,' said Richard Dawkins, honorary president of the Darwin Day Organisation. 'He was our greatest thinker. Any campaign to recognise his greatness should have a significant British contribution.'

The Darwin campaign was launched by US activists two years ago to resist the anti-evolution campaigning of fundamental Christians. Now the aim is to create global celebrations by 2009, the bicentennial of his birthday.

'We have little chance of getting a national holiday for Darwin in the US - there is far too much anti-science and pseudoscience,' said project organiser Amanda Chesworth.'We are more likely to get one established in Europe, particularly in Britain, his birthplace.'

Celebrations will include seminars and lectures, and the showing of films and plays on Darwin's life, though other ideas include an atheist giving Radio 4's Thought for the Day, and a lesson on evolution being preached at Westminster Abbey. 'I'd do it like a shot,' said Dawkins.

Darwin was originally religious. He saw nature's diversity as proof of God's existence. Only a divine creator could be responsible for such marvels, it was then thought. But, after travelling the world in the Beagle, and after years of thought and experiment at his Down House home in Kent, he concluded that natural selection offered a better explanation.

Life forms better suited to their environments live longer and so have more offspring, thus triggering an evolution of species moving into new ecological niches. As philosopher Daniel Dennett said, it was 'the single best idea anyone has ever had... ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else.'

It is also remarkably simple. 'You can explain natural selection to a teenager,' said UK biologist John Maynard Smith. 'You have difficulty with Newton and little chance with Einstein. Yet Darwin's idea is the most profound. It still haunts us.'

Nor is opposition to Darwin confined to religious figures. Sociologists, psychologists and others involved in social policy hate natural selection, said Maynard Smith. 'They deny human behaviour is influenced by genes and evolution. They want to believe we are isolated from the animal kingdom. It is damaging, intellectual laziness. That is why we need a Darwin Day.

This point was backed by biologist Steve Jones. 'If you look at Africa, US fundamentalism, and the Muslim world, you realise evolution supporters are outnumbered by creationists. Yet these are people who have deliberately chosen to be ignorant. They are flat-Earthers without the sophistication. We need a Darwin Day to counter that ignorance.'

Of course it is. Just because there is a punishment involved for what is agreed upon to be evil behavior, does not mean that we have no freedom. It just means there are consequences.

But nice try though, in trying to load your argument by speaking of a dictator, his tyranny, and his reeducation camps.

Let's try applying your argument to a family, or to America say? Instead of a dictator, it's a father telling his son that if he comes home past curfew, he will be punished. The son can either choose to come home on time, or come home late, knowing full well the consequences. He has free will, free enough to decide that suffering the punishment is not enough to deter him from doing what he wants.

Or let's talk about the 1st Amendment, which grants free speech. Well, I can decide to go out and slander President Bush, and call him a rapist and a child molester. Well guess what, slander is punishable in a civil court, and the President can sue me for everything I am worth for damaging his reputation.

In your world, I assume the President and the father are both repressive cretins.

You seem to wishing that no laws, morals, or ethics should exist. Only then would there be free will, because only then will there be no consequences.

You sound like those whiny kids who say "There ain't no God 'cuz he's so meeeeeeeean!!!!" C'mon, man, really.

Evolution does not contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics. At all.

Let me quote from a book on a different subject (The Age of Spiritual Machines - When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, by Ray Kurzweil. The book is about the exponential growth of computing power, but it's really the same concept):

"How do we reconcile the emergence of intelligent life with the Law of Increasing Entropy? There are two answers here. First, while the Law [...] would appear to contradict the thrust of evolution, which is toward increasingly elaborate order, the two phenomena are not inherently contradictory. The order of life takes place amid great chaos, and the existence of life-forms does not appreciably affect the measure of entropy in the larger system in which life has evolved. An organism is not a closed system. It is part of a larger system we call the environment, which remains high in entropy. In other words, the order represented by the existence of life-forms is insignificant in terms of measuring overall entropy." (pps 12-13)

Evolution DEPENDS on the increasing entropy in the environment as the kicker for change. The disorder caused by the asteroid crash (or whatever caused the mass-extinction event) 65 million years ago, while it took out the dinosaurs, created just the environment necessary for the rise of mammals.

Look at how much STUFF there is on earth. Look how *little* of it can be considered the result of evolution even by the most atheistic scientists out there - most of it is water and rock. The universe, our planet, our solar system are open systems. If they were closed, you would be right. Please don't use crappy science to say evolution is bunk. If you want to call evolution bunk, do it on the religious arguments, or find some better science.

You can even watch evolution in action. Find some plant (or fungus, or insect) with a short lifespan and breed it through several generations. Through the environment that surrounds it (or, for a more dramatic effect, through you killing those that don't provide the traits you desire and cultivating those that do express them) you can cause evolution. In that case *YOU* are the entropy in the environment causing it to happen.

You just make other religious folks look backwards when you get things that wrong.

No one proved anything of the sort. No one refuted the COMPLETE LACK OF FOSSIL EVIDENCE.

As far as the 2nd law goes, if the big bang occurred and all matter thus came, or was in exisitance, then the entire universe at that instance was a closed system before the big bang. How then did it arrange it self in ordered life giving solar systems as we now see today? Why didn't the big bang desenigrate into chaos as the law applies. Shouldn't the universe be a gigantic black hole. What caused the big bang? The universe is far to ordered and organized for the simpleton/non-explainations that have been offered to prove evolution. Even Einstein knew this.

At least PatrickHenry offers some explainations and a joke I couldn't understand becuase Intelligent design is based on the laws of probability, and yes this includes sets, but the statistical probability of competing events is what needs to be addressed before evolution can be seen as anything other than foolishness.

Note to others, my personal comments in this post is only directed to this poster and no others, I respect your differences of opinion.

(CCing a few Turkophiles I know for comment...)

Creationists are like Marxists
With only two slight differences. We weren't responsible for the murder of 100 million people over the past century and we don't don't believe in evolution.
Oh, but we did excommunicate a few people from the church 500 years ago. Oh, the horror, the inhumanity of it all. Will you ever forgive us? Please?

For me, I'll give the Protestant Reformation credit: By breaking the monopoly of the Catholic Church and teaching that we all have the ability to find out the true meaning of the Bible on our own, they paved they way for the understanding that we each have the ability to reason our way to the Truth about anything. Thus paving the way for the Enlightenment, and for America itself.

What scares me about creationism in the middle east is, since there doesn't seem to have been any major reason-friendly reformation movement in Islam, the creationists' attempts to smuggle creationism into Turkey puts our one secular ally in the region at risk. It can only help the cause of Islamic fundamentalism, & help snuff out the one bright light in the Islamic world.

A snippet from this extended article on creationists in Turkey:

Cloning Creationism in Turkey
by Taner Edis
... While this is a reasonably accurate picture of "creation science" in the Western world, the emergence of an Islamic creationism, which is practically a clone of ICR´s "scientific" vision, means we have to reassess our picture of creationism. Though Turkish creationists hail from a very different religious culture and history, their wholesale adoption of ICR-style arguments means that we cannot explain creationism by narrowly sectarian factors alone. Creationism mobilizes traditional Abrahamic convictions about the moral significance of the natural world against the threat of social modernity. Hence successful variants of creationism have a potential to spread beyond the environments in which they originally evolved.
A New Wave of Turkish Creationism
Turkey has been the most Western-oriented among Muslim countries, a legacy of modernization efforts going back more than 150 years. Most significantly, the early years of the new Turkish Republic, spanning the 1920s and 1930s, saw aggressive state-sponsored efforts to bring the European Enlightenment to a country with a traditional Islamic culture. While this revolution created some enduring modern institutions and an urban secular elite, a religiously-tinged conservative populism came to dominate politics in the 1950s. However, until the 1980s, explicitly Islamist political movements remained mostly submerged. Evolution was not a flashpoint, flashpoint, partly because it was a religiously unpalatable element in secular public education, and so did not receive major curricular emphasis.
The aftermath of a military coup in 1980 presented new opportunities for Islamist politics and for creationism. Concerned that secular government allowed too much space for left-wing dissent, risking national fragmentation and social unrest, the military junta and subsequent governments promoted a more religious ideology. This naturally affected education policy. While compulsory religion courses and the teaching of a conservative view of history were its most visible results, natural science did not escape untouched. The 1980s saw the state-sponsored translation and distribution of ICR material, explicitly creationist high-school textbooks, and a general anti-evolutionary climate in secondary education (Edis 1994). In 1992, ICR´s Duane Gish and John D Morris appeared at a creationist conference held in Istanbul.
Recent years have brought important political changes that affect the creation-evolution conflict in Turkey. Islamists have grown stronger, even tasting power on their own instead of through factions within more moderate conservative parties. Although the Islamist Party lost some support to a more nationalist ultra-right party in the elections of April 1999, there is still a powerful constituency that objects to "polluting young minds" with Darwinian biology. However, the Turkish military has emerged as a counterbalancing force. Freed from the need to promote religious conservatism for anticommunist purposes, in the past few years the military has once again acted in defense of the secularist ideals of the early republic. This has extended to applying pressure to remove an Islamist-led government from power in 1997 and insisting upon educational reforms aimed at undercutting the base of Islamist politics.
In this highly charged environment, 1998 brought a new wave of creationism to Turkey. Unlike previous efforts directly aimed at public education, this wave is much more an exercise in popular propaganda through the media. By producing a series of scientific-appearing meetings and books, creationists organized in the Bilim Arastirma Vakfi (BAV; the Science Research Foundation) caught the public eye — not only through the extensive Islamist media which cheered them on and secularist newspapers which expressed concern, but also through the wider commercial media with a nose for controversy. As John Morris observes, BAV has considerable media clout: "As a group, they have access to more than adequate financial resources, as well as to the media, and are able to blanket the country with creation information. They choose to invite international creationists for their publicity value, but especially welcome Christian creationists in the ICR mold rather than those who hold merely an anti-Darwinian stance" (Morris 1998).

Can you just imagine the harm that ICR-style creationism could do to the world if it ever took hold in rational, responsible Turkey?

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