Posted on 02/09/2007 5:15:20 AM PST by Behind Liberal Lines
ITHACA — In honor of Charles Darwin's 198th birthday — and the 148 years that have passed since the publication of “The Origin of Species” — Ithaca has joined several communities across the nation in celebrating Darwin Day.
The Museum of the Earth, in partnership with Cornell University, will sponsor a series of events through Monday, Feb. 12.
Amy Naim, director of marketing and communications at the Museum of the Earth, said the museum wants to help moderate a community-wide discussion on evolution. “This is a perfect forum to bring us to the public,” she said.
David S. Wilson, a professor of evolutionary biology at Binghamton University, agrees. Wilson said he urges those who believe in evolution to apply it to their lives. He hopes this celebration will accomplish that.
“Evolution is more than just a explanation of how the world began,” he said. “It provides a way for thinking about human life.”
Wilson will speak at 7 p.m. today at the Statler Auditorium in a lecture titled “Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.”
Rob Ross, director of education at the Museum of the Earth, believes Darwin Day provides an opportunity to share knowledge with the Ithaca community.
“Evolution is a unifying principle in biology. Darwin Day gives an opportunity to share information on how biology works,” he said.
Ross said the museum plans to help host the event every year with a special presentation in 2009 to celebrate the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the Sesquicentennial of “The Origin of Species.”
Events are planned daily at Cornell University and the Museum of the Earth, 1259 Trumansburg Road in Ithaca.
* “Evolutionary Psychology,” 10 a.m. today at the museum.
* “Evolution, Eugenics, and Beyond,” 2 p.m. today in Statler Auditorium at Cornell.
* Darwin's Birthday Party, 6:30 p.m. Friday at the museum, To register, call 273-6623 ext. 11.
* A reading from the play “Inherit the Wind,” 10 a.m. Saturday at the museum.
* A film, “Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus,” 5 p.m. Saturday and 7:15 p.m. Sunday at Willard Straight Hall Theatre at Cornell ($4).
* An evolution workshop for teachers will be on Monday, Feb. 12 at the museum. Advance registration is required and can be accessed on the Museum of the Earth's Web site, www.museumoftheearth.org.
* Family Day will be all day Saturday at the museum. Additionally, the Rosamond Gifford Zoo of Syracuse will give a presentation at 11 a.m., and paleoartist John Gurche will talk at noon. Both talks are at the museum.
For more information, visit www.priweb.org/dd2007/2007events.html.
Darwin was a flaming racist, based on the first editions of OoS.
Also, Lincoln was more interested in preserving the Union than he was in freeing black slaves.
As a Southerner, I'm no huge fan of Lincoln.
Having said that, slavery was wrong, but let's not deify Lincoln or Darwin.
Darwin doesn't even mention human races or human evolution in The Origin of Species.
Try making something else up.
That website is a Mohommedan one, but the Darwin quotes are still valid.
And, in biology generally the hard-left (which is of course the mainstream in Ithaca) spent over a hundred years rejecting Darwinian evolution in favor of Lamarkian varieties. Indeed Darwinists (proponents of Mendelian genetics and the "neo-Darwinian synthesis") were actually sent to the gulags by Stalin for rejecting "Lysenkoism" (a neo-Lamarkian pseudoscience).
Note that Darwin refers in those quotes to the "civilized" versus the "savage" races of mankind. IOW he was focusing on the cultural as opposed to the biological differences. So this is primarily a rejection of cultural relativism, something a FReeper should have no problem with.
At worst Darwin, at least in these quotes, fails to envision the savage races becoming civilized, and instead anticipates them being "replaced". That perspective is pretty easy to excuse, however, if you remember some of the things Darwin had seen for himself or heard of at close remove during his voyage on The Beagle.
Darwin had been in Argentina, traveling cross country extensively on horseback, at a time when whites were waging an explicit war of extermination against the indians. Likewise Darwin visited Australia not long after the aboriginies there and been decimated, and the Tasmanian natives fully exterminated save for a literal handful of individuals (who themselves would expire with no issue).
BTW, the governor of Tasmania literally organized hunts of the natives, ordering the settlers into long skirmish lines to traverse the country side shooting aboriginies on sight. Of course this man knew nothing of Darwin's yet-to-be-formulated evolutionary views. Indeed he was a pious, passionate and conservative Christian.
Darwin never approved the extermination of native peoples. He considered this odious and immoral. He was simply extrapolating from facts on the ground.
Elsewhere in the Descent of Man, where Darwin does address biological issues of races specifically, we learned that he considers the biological differences between human races to be trivial.
The full text of The Descent of Man is available many places online, for instance here. Read chapter seven "ON THE RACES OF MAN" for Darwin's actual view on the biological significance of race.
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